"Pretend I'm one of the kids. You're nice if they're sick"
I’ve followed instructions meticulously; pushed lightly on the brackets, and turned the knobs clockwise until the threads engaged. I’ve placed the new seat onto the toilet bowl and now I’m tightening both brackets until they are snug and secure.
It’s the moment of truth, which, judging by the sound of my husband’s crutches on the stairs, he’s come to witness.
He stands in the doorway in silence. His silence seems to bear the mark of something grave. I suspect strongly it’s the terrible fear that he might dislocate his new hip by falling off a lopsided toilet seat, thereby scuppering his dreams of climbing Mont Blanc next summer.
My youngest daughter arrives from across the landing. “I need to use the bathroom,” she says, breaking the silence with a tone so peremptory, it’s quite as if she cannot see me at all centre stage, down on the floor wearing my old blue boiler-suit and a pair of bright yellow Marigolds.
“What. The hell. Is that?” she says, pointing at the raised toilet seat.
“It is a piece of hip-replacement equipment from the medical supplies shop,” I say, talking clearly, like needs must, as if to the blind.
“Well I’m not sitting on that,” she says.
Disappearing and reappearing with a basket, she squeezes past my husband and sweeps everything off the shelves into it. “I’m moving my stuff to the other bathroom until that thing’s gone,” she says, and leaves us reeling in her princessy wake, to stare at a bathroom now denuded of every item essential to the business of performing our nightly ablutions.
“Sorry — but while you’re on the floor,” my husband says, “could you just pull my sock up? Christ I hate these bloody socks. Six weeks I have to wear them.
“Six weeks,” he repeats, for all the world as if there needed to be any greater emphasis.
I scuttle across the floor in silence, thinking, as I scuttle, that some things — such as how six weeks is a long time for me to keep looking on his recovery as an exercise in empathy, rather than an exercise in wifely subjection — are better left unsaid.
“What are you thinking?” he says nervously, looking down at me tugging up his sock with both Marigolds.
I look up at him from where I am bowed at his feet in Mary Magdalene pose of abasement.
“Nothing,” I say with what I consider to be truly admirable restraint.
“Pretend I’m one of the kids,” he says, giving me a very historical look, “you’re nice to them when they’re sick.”
I park my boiler-suited bottom on the new raised toilet seat in order to test out its stability while attempting not to feel as if I might be trying out the shape of our future. The toilet seat shifts backwards suddenly, giving me a proper fright.
“Let me have a look at the instructions,” he says.
“I think the brackets just need tightening,” I say, passing him the instructions.
“Oh shit, I need my glasses,” he says, “they’re downstairs.”
He hobbles towards the stairs on his crutches, instructions clamped between his teeth.
“I’ll get them,” I say, “you sit down.”
“Thanks,” he says gratefully, walking towards the bed and easing up his legs onto the mattress, “I think they’re in the kitchen.”
“Where in the kitchen?” I shout from downstairs.
“Maybe on the kitchen table” he shouts, “or in the conservatory. But try the study and the big sitting room too.”
“They’re nowhere,” I shout from the bottom of the stairs.
“Never mind,” he shouts wearily. There is a pause and then he says, “while you’re down there, would you mind bringing up my phone? Oh — and my laptop and the Breaking Bad DVDs. Also, we need to get the toothbrushes back from the other bathroom. And the soap.”
I return with phone, laptop, Breaking Bad, toothbrushes and soap.
“Now, have you got everything you want?” I say, striding into the bathroom to tighten brackets.
Hunching over the raised toilet seat, I hear him mutter something under his breath. I can’t be sure but it sounded like, “well let’s just say I’ll never want for resentment as long as I live.”
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
