A Calculated Faith

Shelley’s Saturday Morning

“Are you nearly ready we’re going to miss the group” he sighs angrily, complete incomprehension at how this happens every Saturday, every Sunday, he’s just glad he isn’t with her during the week when he’s sure the same routine rolls out and it’s other people sat waiting instead.

“I’m sorry I'm sorry I told Rita I’d bring the old lady she goes to see some nice biscuits but I can’t find them have you eaten the cookies I got from waitrose? The ones with raisins in?”

“I don’t know yes maybe I can’t remember we have to go Shelley everyone will be leaving!”

Shelly grabs her leather bag, already loaded up from weeks, months, years of this routine, only topical monthly pamphlets changing out for the latest version, sometimes old ones handed out along with the new. Did it matter? She wasn’t keeping records particularly, it was fun meeting people and standing chatting with her friends. The content all lead back to the same source. One arm in her coat she ran down their dark corridor, up out of the basement flat along the Georgian terraced road they called home and into the cute little car filled with the nomenclature of their life. Books, sandwich wrappers, discarded empty plastic diet coke bottles, a teddy bear buckled in to the middle seat, Karen’s from when they’d taken the car payments over from her. Teddy never moved.

They drove all of the four minutes winding over the mediaeval cobbles this old old town was a postcard for and up the ramp into a car park full of winter coats hugging, woollen hats nodding love and greetings across the way, hands going back into gloves, groups peering into boots for the updated print version of the book they were advised to be the most up to date version of the dream they were promoting. There was only half a heart in the task at hand, spreading the love to the neighbourhood around them, they were in reality perturbed by and underprepared for ay real interest shown but the exercise of organising the outreach provided a vehicle to contentment - they were simply too busy to question the likelihood of any truth in what they were sent out to say and wasn’t it lovely being altogether again for coffee at 11AM at the home of the biggest family among them? A delightful constant community of avoidance and hope. Shelley loved them all and her heart swelled at the thought of the morning ahead in the biting low winter sunshine.

Karen’s Saturday Evening

Karen woke up alone. The other beds in the room empty, she guessed the rest of the gang must have gone out to the bbq earlier than they’d said they would but she hadn’t heard a thing. She’d always been known for her afternoon naps and woe betide anyone who disturbed her it’s true so she silently approved of their decision to leave her be. A memory flashed in her mind of her sister once trying to wake her to go play as a kid and instead of refusing, a fist belonging to Karen came shooting out of the quilt and met Shelley’s nose with an impact so abrupt all she could hear was squealing for the next half hour. It was recounted at home afterwards every time the subject Karen’s love of her bed came up in conversation, which was as frequent as her love was enduring.

It was hot, and she couldn't entirely remember which territory she was in. Fruit picking had meant her stay in Australia could be extended but it was gruelling and transitory work and she was tired of new people every few weeks. After a slog of a day with a early start the last thing she felt like doing was drinking tonight. But it was soon going to be over, 80 long days on farms moving to where the work was and she only had just over a week to go.

“Karen are you coming?” a long arm reached through the hole in the door to unlatch it and in came her giraffe like companion, a budding chef and the most charming cockny, it had been so comforting to find a voice like home here. “We’re going to be really late how does this happen every day you’re such a duvet-monster”

“I’m cominggggggg” Karen slowly rubbed her eyes while her friend let in the light from a gauzed window at her feet, the pink curtain had bathed the room in a dream like haze but he was determined she was coming it seemed.

She swung her legs out from under the thin cotton sheet, days old and smelling like it might get up and walk out with her, and rubbed her arm. There was a dull ache on the inside of her right forearm she’d only half been aware of until now and when she looked down there it was a red lump with two small dark dots at the centre. Fuck.

“Karen come on the gang said they’ll hang on for five minutes but that was like five minutes ago, I dont want to get stuck talking to that racist twat from last week he’s in the truck already are you coming”

Karen was careful to avoid the bite on her arm as she pulled her shirt over her head. It could just be a mozzy it’s teeming with them here, a bad reaction, maybe. She pulled down the cracked a4 sized mirror from above her headboard and fished around under her pillow case for her favourite lipstick, can’t be too careful with the constant stream of strangers coming in and out of this place she always hid her most precious things. She’d had this lipstick since she was 18, bought in Paris in a Sephora she’d happened across with her sister. Two french policemen on motorbikes had been beeping at them and asking them out cruising along in the twilight following their route so the girls had dived in to their favourite makeup shop and both bought the same shade of beige. It set Karen’s tan off to perfection, people always asked her if she was Spanish when she wore it. She might feel like death warmed up right now but she’d be damned if she was going to look like it.

Shelley’s Saturday Evening

Stan Finlay had not looked good today. The war veteran who was pruning his award winning roses at any time of the day or night with a ready smile, a definite fascination for Shelley’s chinese friend Jocelyn (a flash back to his youth stationed out in Singapore she had surmised) and a diamond glint in his eye had taken a very long time to answer his front door. Instead of his usual booming greeting and insistence Shelley enter for tea, or freshly baked scones his sister had brought around, he only answered “how are you” with a watery slow smile and a knowing nod. Shelley was worried.

She’d been calling in on Stan for years, giving him the pamphlets she was obliged to offer but in all sincerity they’d struck up a delicate friendship over Stan’s passion for photography - Shelley’s profession - and his images of war time India, Myanmar and Singapore had blown her away. She knew about his children, how he’d met his wife (after war time), his card counting tricks at black jack. He knew about Shelley’s husband, her move down to London in a desire to burst out of her small village life, and she somehow felt he also sensed her constant unrest in the dissatisfied gaps when she described anything about her future.

She’d call in on him again this week, she wasn’t supposed to spend so much time talking to people not really interested in the mission but the reasons she had for visiting him were so far removed from the why of what she was supposed to go for anyway it seemed immaterial.

It was salsa night in St Albans and everyone was going. Everyone. Her best friends, their sisters and brother, her friends from up north were coming down en masse maybe two dozen of them, the Norwich lot, even her husband's mouth-wateringly curvaceous ex-girlfriend who she had to admit she mainly dressed for - the whole crew.

“Babe will you put the wannnadies on I wana get in the mood for a dance!”

Babe obliged and “You and Me” shook the walls of the basement flat from the living room through the sound system he’d painstakingly assembled from scratch as Shelley caked on her favourite Sephora lipstick, a thick beige giving her the illusion she looked more tan then she was when in reality it was the same shade as her irish freckles.

The only thing left was to choose outfits. No small feat this. Shelley lifted her jumper slowly over her head and flinched at the pinch she felt in her left breast. There was no escaping the progress now, she’d had perfect breasts since the surgery ten years before but she was gradually allowing the certainty of another surgery to settle in her mind as a real possibility. The firm layer of scar tissue around her implant had grown more and more tender over the last year to the point of pain now. She couldn't let her partner see her topless let alone touch her chest and she’d stopped swimming altogether, a morning routine she’d clung to through every change in her life and circumstance. Extending beyond that the hen party she’d been invited to seemed impossible now, there’s no way she could hide how painful getting changed could be and as there was no way she could let anyone in her circle know she’s had breast augmentation in the first place, it was just easier to say no. There’s no way they wouldn’t tell the leaders of their community and she couldn’t face another tribunal of older men sat across from her asking excruciatingly personal questions about her bodily experience.

She looked into the mirror of the vintage dressing table her nan had passed down to her mum. Ivory and elaborate with carvings around the edge she used to trace with her fingers as her mum had sat brushing her eighties perm, she traced them now and wished her nan was still alive. She had been fearless. She needed that energy. She missed Karen suddenly.

The phone buzzed in her dressing gown pocket, had her mum heard her thoughts across the miles?

“Mum hi I can’t talk I’m late we’ve got to get to a salsa night how are you when does your plane land? Did the congregation throw you a leaving party?”

Shelley could see her partner’s shadow pass the window of the bedroom in the passageway at the front of their flat, she heard a key in the door, he was going to be pissed if she made them late again.

“OK mum yep ahhhhh sounds lovellyyyy listen do you wana call me tomorrow when you’re home and unpacked, we don’t have to be at the meeting until 10 so anytime before then. Ok, yeah, yep, no I know bad wasn’t it, ok yeah need to go ma ok love you byyyyeee byeeeee bye -bye-bye-bye bye” “NEARLY READY BAAAAAAAABE”

A lie, but she was hoping he understood that by now, in that particular decibel “nearly ready” translated to “give me roughly 30 minutes”. She heard a sigh as her partner jangled pots and pans down from their hanging position in the kitchen and started to make himself food. Tacit acceptance, he understood.

Karen’s Sunday Morning

Everything hurt. Every sound was amplified in her skull and her tongue felt like a dry ski slope. The relentless sauna heat of western Australia sizzled up through the floor boards and the pink hue through the curtains made Karen feel like she was cooking in her mothers womb. Not that she thought of her if she could help it. Something was throbbing extra specially hard though, like another heart beat pulsing through her body.

Karen moved gently so as not to wake anyone else suffering a hangover and looked down at her arm. The red area had spread so as to almost cover the whole of the inside of her forearm and the entire area was raised and puffy like an angry cherry. The biro shape her friends had drawn around the edge of the area last night was pitifully vague now and inches inside the engrossed raw space. The dark spots at the centre were bigger too and concave now, spreading towards each other.

Three years in this country taking barely any precautions and nothing. She’d not seen a snake, a scorpion, a spider - she’d not made it out to the country to even glimpse any of the less toxic and more ubiquitous wildlife not a koala not a kangaroo nothing. She’d been mainly in the city, working and extending her effervescent circle of friends…and now this. Eight days shy of completing the fruit picking assignment to extend her visa, she couldn’t afford to go to the hospital now she had no insurance and had been working under a false name for the last six months. She didn’t even know who she could call. She wanted Shelley.

She hadn’t spoken to her sister in years. How many this time maybe 3, before that it had been about 5, including the year Shelley had gotten married, the year Karen decided it was easier to go to the other side of the world and feel like that was the reason she wasn’t with her on that day. Better far away then be somewhere nearby knowing it was happening and knowing she’d not been invited.

She poked a delicate finger on to the swell of red on her arm and sensed a raging heat coming from the infected area. She had to get to the hospital, and she had to go now. It had already been maybe 18 hours and with a bite that leaves a mark ……Feeling under the pillow for her phone she called the only person she’d known for more than a couple of weeks in this newly assigned farm land.

“Hello?” Thank God he answered.

“Hiiiii I know I’m so sorry it’s so early I couldn’t sleep could you……no yeah such a great night…..I knowww that girl is outrageous I donn’t think she was wearing any…Yeah no. listen no I know right listen it’s my arm. Yeah no way worse…..are you sure…oh my god you’re my hero. No I don’t know yet my mate in Melbourne told me there’s a way she sent me a link to an insurance site….yeah I’ll try on the way… thanks half an hour fine,...fine…great thanks oh my GOD thanks ok yeeah byyyye byebye bye bye byebye bye”

By the time the truck pulled up Karen was close to tears. The fake insurance site she’d tried had taken her money but no email to confirm any cover yet. She had no way of paying for this treatment and she’d be fucked if she called her parents. But her arm was throbbing. She opened the door and clambered up hoisting herself feet in the air into the buoyant heights of her friend’s land cruiser, feeling relief but the knot in her stomach growing in size. Had she left this too late to be treated, she’d heard terrible tales of animal incidents when she first decided to come out here but had put that all down to her friends in England’s jealousy that she wasn’t staying put in the village and shacking up with her teenage boyfriend like they all had. Rural England can be a judgemental place and their idea of Australia was limited almost entirely to a list of dangerous animals.

“OK let’s get you to a doctor” her lanky lovely friend looked down at her arm. “Jeeeezus Karen you look like a cabbage patch kid” he switched off the radio and started up the engine.

“Put that back on will you” Karen had tears in her eyes. She felt far away all of a sudden. “I used to love this song” The Wannadies “You and Me” blasted out through open windows as they skid along the dirt track out of the living quatre area of the farm towards the long barren road and on into town.

Shelley’s Sunday Morning

Entwined with her husbands soft skin and limbs, warm and still inhabiting a strange dream where she’d been on some sort of mission under the water….there was a princess…she’d found a magical kingdom…. She was a water baby……coming too and recounting her favourite childhood programme was a strange start to the day. Shelley was aware of a faint persistent buzzing under her right ear and was jolted into the day reluctantly.

“Mum hiiii” She’d forgotten her mum had intended to call this morning but was aware she’d cut her off quite abruptly last night so shuffled into her slippers and fluffy dressing gown - which she’d actually stole on her last visit to her mum - giggled about that fact and whispered down the phone walking into the kitchen. Coffee time.

A slow dark cloud had been forming in her head about this phone call. Shelly had been saving most of her wage for the last year in readiness for a seccond operation on her breasts, her mum had been worried endlessly about it but was desperately upset for her reliving the trauma of the body dysmorphia which had led her to the first surgery so was finally on board. She needed to confirm she was going through with it, the pain wasn’t unbearable but it was only going to get worse and any progress of the calcification of her tissue would mean there would be barely anything left to rebuild her left breast with.

“Shelley are you sat down?” Her Mum’s voice unusually low and strained

“I’m just making coffee Mum what is it what’s wrong” her Mum’s health had been poor these last years since Karen had left, with a history of early deaths in their family Shelley waited almost daily for news of her Mum contracting some awful disease. “Are you ok did you catch something in Costa Rica? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine I’m fine, it’s not me it’s Karen.”

“What. what is it. Where is she” A surge of conflict rose in Shelley. Karen was the lynch pin in their lives as distant and unconnected as it might have seemed to other people. Karen leaving the family when she was so young was the thing keeping Shelley close to her Mum, she really felt she might die of pain losing both of her daughters, and it was also the reason she couldn’t share her real feelings about anything with her Mum, because it was her fault Karen left. It was her fault she’d been forced to stay away. It was her fault. An invisible magnetic force which both attracted and repelled the two women, the absence of that third piece to conduct and harmonise the forces creating balance was painful when it wasn’t spoken about and explosive when it was.

“Dad had a call from Karen’s friend in the night. She’s in hospital, she’s had a really awful bite on her arm from they think a spider over the last few days and she didn’t get to the hospital quick enough so it’s become infected and they’re looking at ….a potential amputation.”

Shelley was facing the window looking out at the late winter dawn on her small basement garden. She’d convinced her husband they would be happy here by selling in all the plants she'd be able to grow if she could have that garden, particularly the herbs, particularly the Rosemary she now saw blossom, still, defying the frost, which she’d been relieved to realise needed hardly any tending to. A hardy Roman herb braving all climates it was introduced to, would she were so resilient.

“Which arm?” she managed to gulp out. The moment she’d waited for, imagining a ccall on which she learned of her Mum’s early demise had in fact turned out to be that of her sister, injured, wandering, completely alone, in a world Shelley could only imagine and google pictures of.

“Her left arm Shels, she wouldn’t be able to write…” her mum broke off, the indignation in Shelley's internal response was violent but she’d learned to pause in these moments. Yes her Mum could choose to cut her daughter off should she choose, and yes she still gets to be sad about it, both things are true but Shelley had never learned how to respond. A wave of guilt then was the usual second course as she herself was doing nothing different, neither brave enough to take an independent stance defying the community who felt they had the right to condone or condemn her every choice - and to do anything other than abstain from her sisters’ company they would not condone - nor quietly taking her own route and privately finding some kind of balance between what her mum thought was right and what she ultimately wanted, which was for them to be close again.

“Why did her friend call you mum, why didn’t Karen call you?”

“She had her phone and laptop stolen from her bedside table in the hospital while she was sleeping Shels. She’s not got anyone there other than this guy, I forget his name, and he has to go back to the fruit picking farm today. She’s not even there under her own name she got some kind of fake insurance under some other persons name so the hospital didn’t charge to take her in oh it’s horrible”

Shelley took a breathe. She was cosy here in her small dark living room. All the books she loved were next to her on the shelves which had been in her bedroom for years before moving down here. She’d found dozens of cushions in thrift stores all over this beautiful city she loved, as if she’d been cocooning her physical reality like a patient in a hospice while her insides slowly dried up and rotted. Shelley had made a life here, she was very good at that. But the business pouring into every moment she realised had been necessary to stop her thinking about what she really thought was important. No crime maybe. Understandable some might say. But something felt clearer now.

“I’m going.” she said, simply. “I’m going to go”

“Shelley wait let;s think about this, we should stand together on this decision now dad has decided it’s not really right for us to go at this point until it’s absolutely necessary. I think we should wait until….”

“I’m going to go mum.” she sounded cold, dead in fact and that’s what this conversation was to her now. They’d had many iterations of it over the years and finally the confusion it left inside her for months wasn’t worth the initial peace which blanketed over her interactions with her Mum in the immediate aftermath. She didn’t expect her partner to agree to send her to Australia or support her reasons for going but she’d saved up the money for her ow operation and that would be enough, it wasn’t urgent and there was no way she was willing to allow another decade of her life to go by living in a parallel universe to the person she was closer to than anyone in the world. They were more the sisters they’d breathed each others air when they were young. Not a sentence unfinished by the other, not a subtle joke thrown uncaught, not a a flash of the eyes when something strange happened unresponded to, they thought with the same mind and she was somewhere alone, hurting and it was enough.

“I need to be with her” Shelley hung up. Feeling traitorous and angry, was she being dramatic and wild as she’d so often been accused. Something felt different here. It felt simple. Let it be labelled if they want, not being allowed a relationship with her sister had ruined her life for long enough and there was nothing she knew with more clarity than that there was no argument to this rooted knowing that they needed each other,

Karen’s Sunday Night

Karen supped the hospital food with grateful , chemical filled, caution, tasting the anesthetic in every swallow. She’d cried a lot today. She’d finally been convinced to call her parents as there seemed to be a chance the insurance she’d bought under the name Misty Anderson - a tentative acquaintance who had generously provided her own Individual Healthcare Identifier number for Karen to use - may fall through. She was about 5 inches taller and 10 KG lighter then Misty…and looked nothing like her but the nurses hadn’t probed just yet.

Karen wasn’t a reader and wasn’t sure how she was supposed to pass the time sat here post surgery with no phone and no laptop. Still incredulous someone could rob a sleeping patient in hospital she’d let herself melt into how huge this situation felt. The surgery to remove most of her infected tissue had apparently gone well but she’d been warned she was left with quite a hole in her arm which needed to be monitored over the course of a week at least. Her writing arm too. Karen’s sister had been so jealous of her being left handed when they were kids, she seemed to think it was mysterious and denoted creativity in all of the “brain-types” tests but in reality Karen had been the awkward student requesting special guitars for music lessons, her own special scissors and countless other inconveniences the right handed majority were utterly ignorant to their advantage on. Shelley had apparently taken some comfort from the revelation that the word for left in latin had evoked “Sinister” behaviour so she got to be the golden girl again and relinquished her spite over the one thing Karen got to call her own. Her leftness. But her writing….how was she supposed to write with one arm if it came to that. She hated computers and had always drafted manuscripts by hand. The only actual creative outlet she really had embodied, maybe Shelley would finally stop being jealous at all.

God she missed her now. Probably the only person she could stand to be around when she felt this vulnerable, which was never, she started to allow a gentle yearning in her heart which she usually buried in ferocious refusal. I need you. Was she preying, unlikely but she wasn’t sure. Another old habit which came back to her at the beginning of meals or when she was really moved by a sunset, sometimes even when she was writing her gratitude journal she felt like she was talking to a something higher until the flood of trauma from what an upbringing speaking to that something higher had done to her life as an adult.

Shelley I need you. She let herself think it. And think it again. And know it to be true. Two hearts in parallel like theirs wouldn’t always be separated surely. Whatever it was she couldn't have faith in, she wanted to have faith in that.

A nurse had been letting Karen usee her phone to check facebook messages every time she did her round on the ward and she appeared now, hot, flustered, busy and kind she winked at Karen and tossed the phone on to her bed, already logged in to Karen’s facebook account. OK so she at least knew Misty Anderson wasn’t her real name.

She opened her messages looking for a response from her friend back in Melbourne to see if she was able to come and visit and there sat in her inbox was something else.

Shelley: “I’m coming Karen, flight leaves tonight I’m still sorting out accommodation but should be there in about a day and a half. I’m coming Karen.”

I need you Shelley. I’m coming Karen.

Karen let out all the air in her lungs. A calculated faith, the assured expectation of what is hoped for, the evident demonstration of realities that are not seen. Some things on this earth, here and now, are worth believing in afterall.

The nurse returned “Would you like to keep the phone for a bit love? I’m so busy anyway and get off in an hour you can watch a programme or something?”

Karen’s head had been hanging low, feeling childlike and small she nodded. “There was a programme we used to watch as kids when we were ill, The Water Babies, I’ll see if i can find it on You Tube”