He came down the little hall and into our front room and stopped mid-sentence.
I watched my father’s face do something I have never seen it do.
He said, “This can’t be real.”
And he was not looking at me.
PART 2 — EIGHTEEN MONTHS
I need to describe those eighteen months, because the phrase “I dropped out to care for my boyfriend” does an enormous amount of hiding and because my father built a whole story on top of that hiding.
Kes came home in April in a wheelchair he could not propel.
Our flat was on the second floor with no lift. We moved, in eleven days, to a ground-floor place in Pellingham that we could not afford, and I did the entire move myself with two friends and a hired van.
For the first four months he needed help with everything and I mean everything, and I am not going to itemize it because it is his body and not my anecdote.
I learned to do a two-person transfer alone. I learned to recognise the difference between the pain of nerve regeneration and the pain of something being wrong, which took me about nine weeks and two unnecessary emergency department trips.
