Ruby Stark

Yesterday, I met my old Uni friend, Grain, for lunch. We ate steak and drank coffee and orange juice and talked about our friends and old times. Afterwards, we went back to mine and watched Der Baader-Meinhof Komplex.

That is my favourite film of the last two years. It blows my mind that there were left-wing fighters in a rich European country who wouldn’t hesitate to open fire on the police.

After the film, we talked about Matte, and Grain’s girlfriend. We talked about how relationships are so much more complicated than they appear when you are a child. We talked about the way that individual problems can be solved with a rational approach, but that whole relationships cannot be analysed logically: either it makes you happy enough, or it doesn’t.

We discussed marriage and children and watched the Hitler Doesn’t Get His MDMA Pizza video on YouTube.

I had been feeling intermittent chest pain under my arm all afternoon and, faced with the prospect of an evening alone, decided to ring NHS Direct just to be safe. I answered no to all the heart attack questions, but, upon hearing about my recent cardiac arrest, they sent an ambulance.

The paramedics arrived and did an ECG and took blood and asked me heart attack questions. They decided to take me to hospital – again, just to be safe. Grain instantly charmed the paramedics with his calm buoyancy and was excited that we were riding with blues and twos.

We arrived at A&E and the nurses put on a blood pressure cuff and oxygen saturation snapper. They took blood and I said Grain could stay while they put on dots and clips for an ECG. I desperately wanted him to see me with no top on. I think because I wanted him to be my boyfriend. He remarked later that my boobs are bigger than he remembered them.

Wave one of doctors decided that I wasn’t about to die. Wave two said that the only possible explanation for re pain was that my grafted bypass had come away. They would check that later with a blood test.

In the meantime, Grain sat on my bed and we held hands and he told me the story of his friend who lost his mind whilst tripping on mushrooms.

I realised that I didn’t want any of the girls I like: not Matte or Allure. I wanted nurture and strength: Grain and Dusk.

We saw a gurney go past with a covered body on it. We looked at each other in silence. I felt terribly upset that someone had died while we were there. I leant forward and Grain hugged me for a long time and said I was precious to him and that he loved me. For the hundredth time, I fell on love with him.

A little later, I was taken up to the cardiac ward. At two a.m., the nurse took some blood. I got about three hours’ sleep and then woke at six a.m. I’ve just heard that my blood test came back normal and that I should be discharged when the doctors do their rounds.

A few days ago, I watched a film called Lost and Delirious. It’s about two girls at a boarding school who are in a relationship. And whenever I think of the one who was more in love, or perhaps less cautious, the doomed one I get that same feeling of sadness and comfort that I get when I think of Aimee Argote from Des Ark.

Today, I have that strange, close feeling when I think of Grain. It’s like that feeling you have when you think of someone you dreamed intimately of the previous night. I know if he walked onto the ward, he would greet me with his usual enthusiastic, broad hello and a hug and a kiss on the mouth. But the closeness I feel is nearer to the thought that, last night, he saw me half undressed.