Ruby Stark

I hadn’t seen her since she went to Belgium to live in a forest for a week.  I realised that, worryingly, I’ve been waiting to spend time alone with her since I died.  Before that happened, I felt suspended, the same way I feel when I am away from my laptop for more than a few days.  I felt like my life wasn’t going forwards.

She arrived at the railway station and we kissed.  The Moms gave us a lift back home and we hung out.  It was so good to share a bed with her again – that was what I wanted more than anything.  After a couple of days, I couldn’t handle the distance.  As we lay in bed on the third morning, arms around each other, I asked her what she meant in the letter she’d written while I was in hospital that said she felt she should take me more seriously.  I asked her whether me dying had been a temporary aphrodisiac.  Because the things she had said and the way she had acted while I was in hospital felt incongruent with the way she was being now. I said I felt like she wasn’t really here with me.  She agreed and said that Belgium had been a headfuck.  We talked later in the kitchen.  She said she was seriously considering moving into a permanent forest eco camp; probably the one in Brighton.  I went on a very rare tense and even-voiced rant.  I said that I felt like I didn’t know where I stood.  I said that if she moved to the forest, she must know that her and I would be finished and I did that two-handed, palms-down, lateral cutting gesture that Serpico does when he tells Inspector McClain that he’s done waiting for the justice department to contact him about the police corruption.

She said that her feelings for me hadn’t changed, but that everyone around had.  We talked things over and I proposed that maybe things could work if she came and saw me every few weeks and I went to stay with her in the forest occasionally.  Her face shone.

After all that, we got down to spending time together.  We went on a walk through the woods that left me completely fucked.  At the University Observatory, we fantasised about life as a Cambridge academic.  We went out for supper.  We looked at potential new pairs of glasses for me.  We sat on the sofa and read.  We had an awful lot of sex.

Since we started seeing each other again, our sex has been very different because I let her touch me, now.  I lie on my back as she holds me and fucks me with her hand and I buck my hips onto her fingers and moan and squeak and sigh like a slut.  This time, things were even more different.

First, I made her come five times in a row.  I fucked her with my hand and she came.  Then, I lay beside her because I haven’t recovered the strength in my shoulders and stroked her clit until she came.  Then, I did it again.  And again.  I stroked her again and asked if she wanted me to stop and she said no and came again.

Second, on Sunday night, she lay on the bed and I crouched alongside and made love to her with four fingers.  I stopped to adjust my angle and she said, “You could try putting your thumb in as well.” I felt like crying.  I pushed my thumb in a little to make that shape like you’re eating rice with your hands.  I very slowly eased inside, drew out a little, went further inside.  Finally, my fist was in up to the wrist.  I just twisted a little and she made sounds from her chest.  I stored the image of my handless arm in my brain like you’d take a photograph from the top of a mountain you’d just climbed.

She has now gone to Brighton to recce the forest.  She then has a bunch of volunteering to do and will visit me in London in mid August.  At the end of August, we’ll go for a week to Cornwall to stay in a cottage.

I spoke to Matte this evening.  She got back from Belgium today and was in a park in Brighton with some friends.  She said she will return to Bradford in a couple of days.

While she was away, I sent her a few texts and received no reply.  I assumed her phone was fucked or out of battery or Europetarded.  However, after four or five days, she sent me an off-hand text message that said, in essence: lots of fun, phone off to conserve battery, hope all well.  I felt very sad.  I felt neglected and abandoned, and also guilty because she has her life too.  I just missed her so much.  I’m pretty sure that snuggling up in bed with her will make me feel like life has finally come back.

She is coming to stay in Cambridge next week.

After seven weeks here, it looks like I might be getting out of hospital soon.  A couple more scans, one of which will, hopefully, confirm that I don’t need an ICD, then home on maybe Friday or Monday.

I’ve had a few bad days, recently.  On Sunday, the pain of my chest incision and in my back just would not go away.  And, yesterday, I went downstairs to the river to eat supper with Matte, my sisters, my Mum and cousin, waved them all off, came back upstairs and felt so tensely gripped by tiredness, I got into bed and went straight to sleep.  Nights are the worst.  Though it is a huge relief to be free of Monty the heart monitor and Johnny Drip – though not, of course, iPhone – my routine runs: take drugs at ten p.m., sleep, wake at two a.m. going ouch, take more drugs, sleep, wake about five or six a.m., sit up and feel the ouch dissolve from my torso, or take more drugs at eight a.m.

Lots of people have visited.  This is like an injection of real life and is so reviving, so necessary.

Matte has been here since Saturday.  It has been heavenly.  We have held hands and she has given me massages and we have pashed next to the hospital bed and in the lift and she has read to me and she has gone to get us noodles and pizza and we have started planning a holiday in a cottage in Cornwall.  Today, she left London to return home to pack and she will then travel to Belgium for a protest camp.  She will spend a bit of time in Brighton on the way back [heart tug, tears], then go to her Mum’s civil partnership ceremony, then come to visit me in Cambridge.

On Monday, I had a coarctation repair and an arterial bypass.  The operation took ten hours.  I am in awe of the surgeons’ superhuman concentration.  Apparently, it took four hours just to get inside my chest without damaging my organs because of all the adhesions between my organs and chest wall.

I woke up on Tuesday swimming in morphine, ate four yoghurts, and was then transferred to the High Dependency Ward.  I was there for a painful and slow night, then had my drains removed the next day and was transferred to the general cardiac ward.  Today, I had my dressings removed and a delicious shower.

Matte is coming tomorrow.  I am sore, and keep on nodding off in my chair, but I am so shocked and grateful to be here.  I get to have some more life! I get to hang out with my little sisters at home.  I get to play the guitar again.  I get to make love with Matte.  I get to have evenings laughing with friends around a supper table.  I get to go on tour in the US.

Last Saturday, I went downstairs to meet her by the piano in the main hall of the hospital.  Apparently, one of the amateur pianists had been coming for years; then, one day, he started singing.

We cuddled together on a bench and she gave me a copy of her latest zine.  We cuddled on another bench in the park outside under the very hottening sun.  She said that I was wearing my white t-shirt again and I said I was.  The stickers on my chest and Monty the heart monitor’s wires showed through.  I also had on my blue stockings and Ariel Schrag shoes and had my loose Levi’s hanging off my ass.

I told her about what the surgeon is going to do on Monday and she sat silent and then said it was going to be OK.  I curled myself around and snuggled my face into her neck.

We went to the posh new cafe in the hospital and ate yoghurt-covered apricots that tasted like warm ice-cream and Sweet Chilli crisps.  We sat on the wall looking over the Thames and watched the couples and children walk by.  I had my hand tucked up inside the back of Matte’s t-shirt and my hand on her thigh with her hand over mine.  A group of young lads approached, taunting the people they passed.  But, all they gave us was a few high-pitched shouts of, ‘It must be love,” and blew us a few kisses.  A large family went past and the daughter smiled at us and said they should take a picture.

On the way back into the hospital, I suggested we go into the toilets and fuck.  We went in, but both became shy.  Then, unexpectedly, we were alone and I walked to a cubicle that was down a little corridor and she followed.  She closed the door and we pashed.  Each time someone came in, we’d grind to a halt.  However, after a while, we got hotter and hotter and cared less and less.  I put my hand around and under her breast and stroked her with my thumb and kissed her neck and she squirmed.  I undid the zip of her trousers and put my hand inside her pants and spread around her wetness and pushed one and then two fingers inside her.

The rest of the world went away.  All I felt was my fingers inside her and her open-mouthed kisses that muffled the sounds she made and the pressure of her thigh between my legs.  After a while, I grabbed her hand and put it against my cunt to tell her it was OK to touch me and she slid her fingers into my pants and stroked me round and round.  I put my mouth to her ear and said, I want you inside me, and she sort of shuddered and then fucked me with her hand.  She came and her knees bent and I faked it and we stood smoothing each other.

There was a break in the crowds of people in the toilets and we snuck out and then stood side by side and washed our hands.  We came back upstairs to the ward and sat very close holding hands, her in the chair and me at the head of the bed.

We started talking about Monday and she said I would be fine because she had sprinkled fairy dust on me and I melted and loved her even more.  Throughout the rest of the day, whenever I looked panicked, she just said, Remember the fairy dust.

We talked about old people.  She had told me in a letter that she thought they are stores of wisdom, even though this wisdom comes from the past.  She told me that they keep themselves alive by telling stories, and maybe keep us alive, too.  Yesterday, she elaborated by saying she thought that old people’s stories are like those memories of childhood that you sometimes take out and look at.  I thought that was quite convicing.  However, to me, telling stories fucking kills people because they are using the past to fulfil the present.

Matte went and bought us some noodles from Ned’s.  We guzzled them and then had syrupy banana fritters for afters.  And, then, she had to go and get her train back to Bradford.

I walked her outside and put my hands around her ribs and kissed her.  I was terrified that I would never see her again.

I hung out with my girl again today.

When we talk, it’s not like it is with Dusk where we can’t get the words out fast enough. Our conversations happen at the pace of her mind. So, there are lots of discussions that we’ve been having for months: the one about her sexuality, the one about non-monogamy, the one about the way to stop climate change, the one about direct action. When we see each other, she might have done some more thinking and we might take a few steps further.

Just before she left to get on the train to go back to Bradford, we sat on the edge of the hospital bed and I put my head on her shoulder and my face against her neck and curled my arm around her tummy and her ribs. It was as close as we were going to get to being in bed together and it felt like heaven. She is so soft and womanly and she swells in just the right places.

I said to her that being in the ward with all these eighty-year-old women made me want to kill myself and she asked why and I said because they are at the end of their lives.

Matte visited from Bradford today. We hung out on my bed. We snuck sneaky kisses in the lift and on benches and in my bedside chair. We talked and talked. We had an abortive game of chess and I thrashed her at Connect-4. I read her the beginning of Sarah Waters’s latest book. We went to the noodle bar around the corner and ate delicious veggie yaki soba and banana fritters and on the way back, Drippy the drip got a bit agitated with all the walking and decided to have a freak-out so we returned to base and the nurse switched him off and on again and we went back downstairs and sat in the park.

I got hooked up to Monty the heart monitor, a little box with wires running to my chest that I carry around with me. I resisted the urge to pull Matte into the bathroom and push her up against the wall and put my hand in her underwear and fuck her until she sighed in my ear.

I have been in hospital for almost four weeks. The doctors are still deciding what my treatment should be. I feel desperate.

So, more visitors today: my sister, Frost (stopped fancying her again), Dusk and Heather (an old, old friend).  We talked about how I refer to the day of my cardiac arrest as the day I died.  Reputedly, there was some confusion amongst my Twitter acquaintances about whether the death I tweeted about was a permanent one.

This was the first time my sister had met Dusk, thought she has heard a lot about him over the years.  I have yet to find out what she thought of him.  Presently, she and Heather left and Dusk and Frost and I went for noodles around the corner from the hospital.

I take a drug called Warfarin which thins my blood so it doesn’t clot on my artificial heart valve.  However, in periods just before operations, I get put on Heparin.  This does the same thing, but is delivered intravenously.  So, Dusk, Frost and I set off from the main hospital entrance.  However, we weren’t alone.  I was dragging along Johnny Drip, an electronic pump mounted on a wheeled drip stand.  The pump very slowly pushes in the plunger of a large syringe which delivers Heparin into my arm via a plastic tube and canulla.

Drippy doesn’t really have off-road wheels, poor chap, so I had to carry him over the cobblestones.  Our party got a few odd looks as we crossed Westminster Bridge, but the noodle bar staff didn’t seem to notice anything odd.

We sat and ate, JD occasionally interjecting with a beep to remind us that he was unplugged from the mains.  Dusk went into full raconteur mode.  He told the story of how he nearly died of food poisoning in the middle of the African rainforest.  He told the story of how he was interrogated at gunpoint by the security detail for a Landless Peasant Movement camp when they mistook him for an intruder.

I fell in love with him, yet again.  He is just gorgeous: his smile looks like the low, sharp sun on a winter’s day; his mouth tastes like malt and his face is handsome and brown and he gives me the same feeling as hugging my teddy.  I could listen to him talk forever.  I make him laugh.  He says interesting things, unlike most people.  He knows way more than I do.

I met Dusk maybe six months after I moved to Leeds. We were hauling furniture from the house of someone who was leaving on a trip around the world and taking it to a social centre we were both involved with.  I didn’t fancy him, but I went on a date with him, anyway.

We became close, he became the first boy I slept with, and I fell into love that lasted two or three years.  He is the most wonderful person I’ve ever met.  Now, we are close friends.  I know he never loved me.  I think he might still fancy me a little bit, but mainly just really likes me.

Tonight, when Dusk came to visit me in hospital, I was allowed to leave for a short while to go and eat noodles at a bar around the corner.  We talked about Fooled By Randomness, his Glastonbury experience last year and about how the scientific method needs to be used by laymen in like art and literature (this flower is beautiful, but why?)

I told him about the operations I’m lined up for and he asked me how I’m feeling and I said, Terrified, and he sighed and covered my hands with his and I said more about how scared I am and he covered my hands with his again and I saw a second of love in his smile.