A to Z of You and Me by James Hannah

to—just want to heave a sigh.
    Is it too much to ask? To heave a great and heavy sigh?
    Mini, now. Mini, mini, mini breaths.
    Is it—is it bad enough to—?
    To push the button? Call Sheila in?
    No visitors. I should have no visitors. All just fucking complication.
    You’d think, wouldn’t you, that all this shit would stop at some point. You’d think that there would be a point when the fucking past would leave you alone.
    I don’t have to forgive anyone anything anymore.
    This is me.
    I can’t believe they thought it would be OK. I can’t believe Kelvin thought it would be fine to swan in here and ask me if I’d meet up with her. What does he know about it? He knows nothing. He’s just trying to get in Laura’s knickers like he always did, and he never will.
    They don’t know me at all, do they? They don’t know me at all. I could tell, the way Kelvin was saying it. None of them understand what I’ve been through. Every day I’ve had to live with this. Every day. Ten years. Putting my life back together. Losing Mum too, dealing with all that on my own. Fucking dialysis three times a week. That’s something, isn’t it, calling a dialysis machine your best friend, old buddy.
    No one can just waltz up and suddenly fix all that. And it’s not me they want to fix, is it? It’s not me they care about. It’s themselves.
    Creatinine
    That’s it—if I’m going to do a real A to Z, then I’ll need to include all the things I’ve got but I don’t even know about. The things I never paid attention to in biology at school.
    That must mean pretty much everything in my entire body.
    My body is not my own. I don’t understand it.
    I don’t know how the fucking thing works.
    When Dr. Sood turned around and started talking to me about creatinine levels and dialysis and—
    I didn’t know what a dialysis machine was. I mean, I’d collected for a dialysis machine they had an appeal for on some children’s TV show. Probably 1984. I got it into my head that a dialysis machine had flashing lights and numbers, but I think I was mixing up the dialysis machine with the totalizer they had on the show. Every time they reached a new landmark, a whole load of bulbs would light up, and the number would get higher.
    My dialysis machine was dreary off-white. Perhaps I was given exactly the one I collected for, thirty years before. It looked like it was made in 1984.
    What’s the shelf life of a dialysis machine? How many different people’s blood had chugged through mine? Now mine was chugging through, and it was cleaning out the creatinine.
    I think it was, anyway.
    Cleaning out all the bad, the buildups.
    I imagined it like the buildups of acid in my calves when I’d been running around.
    Ahhh—ah, my God. There it is.
    I nearly made myself cry.
    I haven’t cried for—
    There are some things that you can’t… They’re unexpected. I haven’t thought about this for years. One of the clearest memories I have of my dad.
    Acid cramps in the calves.
    That’s it:
    Calves
    I’m lying, crying on the floor in the lounge of our house, on that horrible old white-and-brown swirly carpet. I’m on my back, and my dad has a hold of my leg, and he’s kneading the calf between his thumbs and rubbing it gently with his palm.
    Up, down, up.
    Rub it better, little man. They’re just growing pains.
    The agony of it. The worst ache I’d felt to date. And I could not get away from it. It was inside me, and I didn’t know what was causing it.
    It’ll pass, don’t worry. It’ll pass.
    I never wanted him to let go.
    I kept the crying up for as long as I could, but I think he could tell when the pain had subsided. But he didn’t send me away. He patted the sofa beside him, and I hopped up.
    â€¢ • •
    Ha; ha; ha.
    Fucking hell, this is…this is my heart. Is