16 hours ago
8
I wake up with a headache. Not a headache, really – more of a head pain, and not exactly that either. I am sitting in the kitchen opposite the middle one, who is staring at his computer. My wife is wandering in and out, not really listening to the symptoms I’m trying to describe.
“It’s like I walked through a low doorway and cracked my skull on the frame,” I say.
“Ow,” my wife says.
“Except I haven’t done that,” I say. “Or it feels more like an invisible hand is holding me up by the hair.”
“Look it up,” my wife says.
“Don’t tell him to look it up!” says the middle one.
“Why not?” my wife says.
“Because he’ll look it up!” he says.
“Anyway, it’s slowly migrating across my head,” I say, “from back left to right front.”
“So go to the doctor,” my wife says, wandering out before I answer.
“I’m not telling a GP that ghosts are pulling my hair,” I say. “That’s worse than hot hand, or phantom phone.”
These are two of my previous embarrassing ailments. Hot hand was slightly misnamed, because the hand itself – my right one – did not get hot; it just made things seem hot to the touch, when they clearly weren’t. Fortunately it went away before I was obliged to describe its symptoms to a professional. Phantom phone – in which a creaking hip joint creates the false impression that the phone in my pocket is receiving a text – is just something I’ve learned to live with.
“I can’t help you if you won’t help yourself,” my wife says.
“Anyway, I think it might be a spasm of the tiny muscles above my forehead,” I say.
“What, from raising your eyebrows too much?” she says.
“Could be,” I say. “It’s been one of those weeks.”
“Muscle tension leading to pains to the scalp,” says the middle one. “Caused by trapped nerve, stress, or poor posture.”
“Did you just look that up?” I say.
Over the course of the afternoon the scalp pain abates a little, but my mood does not improve. By evening I’m looking for things to complain about. I find myself rifling through kitchen drawers, incensed.
“How have we gone from being a family rich in scissors,” I say, “to a family with no scissors at all?” The oldest one, watching football on his laptop, snorts derisively.
“It’s ridiculous!” I say, yanking open the dishwasher. “Oh, wait, they’re all in here.”
By bedtime my scalp problem has also become a neck problem, which is in its own way reassuring: I’ve had neck problems before.
But the pain makes it difficult to get to sleep. When I finally do, I dream I’m visiting a doctor in a vast crowded room filled with desks and snaking queues. When the doctor asks me what the problem is, I say I have a sore throat.
“You were too embarrassed to tell the truth, even in a dream?” my wife says the next morning.
“In the dream I had a sore throat,” I say. “But it does feel like a squandered opportunity.”
“To take advice from a doctor in a dream?” she says.
“It’s better than asking AI,” I say.
Actually, it’s almost exactly the same as asking AI, which suggests my condition is either fatal or a shampoo allergy. When I look from my computer to the window I see my wife gardening. Reluctantly, I stand up and step outside. My wife is on her knees clearing weeds from the beds.
“Staring?” she says, without turning around.
“I was just coming to see if you needed any …”
“You could get the hedge trimmer and cut all those bushes into ball shapes,” she says.
I can tell after finishing the first bush that the effort is not helping my neck, but when it comes to this sort of thing my wife knows I harbour a perfectionist streak – I can’t stop. By the time all the bushes are spherical, my neck problem has become a lower back problem.
An hour later my wife finds me lying on the sofa.
“I did a whole morning out there,” she says. “You did 35 minutes.”
“And now I can’t move,” I say. Only after she leaves do I realise I should have asked her to pass the TV remote. I lie there in the gathering darkness thinking about simpler days, when I had no problems at all, except that my hand made things feel hot sometimes.
