The Devil's Joke

I've said before that I feel as though I'm living in Hell. I still have the creeping feeling that my flight back from India last October was actually shot down by a Taliban ground-to-air missile over Afghanistan, that I died at 36,000 feet and that since then I have been living in Hell.

And what a perfect sort of Hell is it, one that Dante could not and did not imagine in his Inferno. This Hell is not about Fire and Brimstone. This Hell is about subtlety, confusion, disorientation and plucking my deepest, most painful heartstrings. In this Hell everything is just like my previous life, only twisted in some Machiavellian way. My daughter is being tortured for no reason that I can discern, there's nothing I can do to stop it, there is no price that I have been asked to pay to stop it, the torture is just going on and on and is seemingly endless. I'd rather be roasted over glowing coals. But the even more confusing and disorienting thing is that I can still talk to other people who are not living in Hell. The perfection is complete!

But the twist in the story is that Hell offers you an the opportunity for an evening off. Last week various members of the professional staff at the hospital told Marion and I that it was essential that we spent time looking after ourselves. Whether or not this was a concerted effort to get us to think abouts ourselves or whether it was just coincidence, I don't know. But the end result was that on Monday evening Marion suggested that she & I had dinner together on Tuesday evening, followed up by a shared night in a hotel. The moment that Kay heard about this idea she started putting up roadblocks. So we arranged for Lauren to babysit her for the night and we assured her that we would be close by, etc.

Tuesday evening, Marion arrived in Kay's room around 6pm together with Lauren. The idea was that we would leave at 7pm to eat and find out if we still had a relationship or whether we were back to our blind date origins (Yes, Marion & I met on a blind date). Kay more or less immediately started kicking up a, medically justified, fuss. Marion gave her her medication too fast, as a result of this gross mistake Kay was now feeling sick, it was all Marion's fault, what a god-awful mother she is, now she needed to sit with Daddy, etc, etc.

The duty nurse was absolutely adamant that we were going to go out. I think that she would have bodily thrown us out if we had shown any sign of weakness. This nurse is very involved with us and is an absolute wonder and promised to make sure that Kay was Ok, etc. So off we went, all full of the idea that we could have a normal evening and enjoy ourselves, full of the idea that we'd been given an evening off from Hell.

We checked into the hotel and rapidly did what any married couple who'd not slept in the same room for six weeks would have done, we headed for the bar and the resturant. Once seated and equipped with double-gin-and-tonics, we rapidly discovered that, apart from Kay, we had nothing to talk about. Worse than a blind date, thus. I was too tired to talk about the business and, frankly, everything else seemed irrelevant. But fortunately the problem was solved for us by Marion's phone, which kept on ringing. It turns out that Marion, having better social skills than me, is constantly being phoned by her circle of friends. I didn't know this so it came as quite a surprise to discover that I wasn't even offered the opportunity not to have a conversation with my wife, other people filled in the gap for me.

In the end I retaliated by making calls of my own. So you can imagine the scene before you: a couple married for 10 years sharing a table with each other for the first time in months, talking to anyone else but each other. Shame this principle didn't extend to the bedroom, I would have been rather curious to end up sharing it with a bunch of Marion's friends... (but probably too tired to do anything other than watch)

Anyway, this pretty picture didn't last. Shortly after we'd finished our starters, my phone rang. Obviously it wasn't any of my friends, so the only alternative I could think of was Kay. And I wasn't wrong. She phoned me, screaming that she was feeling sick and that she felt that she was going to throw up and that she needed us there with her, etc. I tried to calm her down, I said that Lauren would look after her and that the nurse would give her a big hug. But while I was spouting these homilies, Kay threw up. I ended up with Lauren on the line who told me that Kay had thrown up her NG tube. I told Lauren that I'd leave them to it.

About an hour later Kay phoned Marion. This time she was upset and angry that she had phoned home to talk to Natasha but that there was no answer and how could Natasha possibly not be waiting to talk to her? Marion had a hard time talking her out of her tree but eventually got her quieted. A little while later Kay phone Marion again. (Now at this point you may wonder why we were answering the phone at all. Thing is that Kay was phoning using Skype which reports a "Blocked" caller-id. Since a blocked caller-id could be anyone, eg our security company, we felt that we had to answer). This time she was upset and angry that we had dared to leave her and that she was feeling terrible and when were we going to be back, etc, etc.

By this time Marion and I were ringing like bells with guilt. We were both sat at the table fighting back tears and feeling like very neglectful parents. I mean, how could we possibly put an evening of not communicating with each other and not engaging in any other sort of (social) intercourse in front of dutifully looking after Kay? Just what sort of people are we?

The whole thing was a huge disaster. We retired to bed, tired, miserable and feeling very guilty, with Kay's accusations of parental neglect burning our souls. We agreed that the next time that we wanted to eat together we should just get an Indian take-away and eat it in Kay's room, the path of least resistance.

So the Devil's Joke is this: A night away from Hell is worse than Hell itself.