Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

yet soft in places, rising up out of my skull. A mess, a mass of bone, flesh and blood, barely covered by my thin hair: a brain tumour, I was sure of it.

I read the big grey Reader’s Digest Medical Book with one hand and rubbed my probable tumour with the other. I checked the symptoms off one by one:

Headache (yes. Pretty sure)

Nausea/vomiting (I had felt sick the other day)

Fatigue (I was always tired)

Drowsiness (I was fairly sure I rolled on my heels in the dinner queue the other week)

Memory problems (had I?)

I touched it, rubbed it, kneaded it, a hundred times a day. I knew the shape and scale and slope of it. I knew that each morning it had grown just a little bit longer, larger, taller. Life was now split into two time frames: before and after I felt it, noticed its presence. I definitely remembered the former, even if I couldn’t feel how relatively carefree my life had been without the worry of impending death weighing heavily on my skull.

Alongside the tumour, I had AIDS. And the question wasn’t going to be if I died but when and who I took with me by spreading my sickness. I thought of the dark nights in my bedroom, my mouth around him and I knew that’s how you got it, how I’d got it.

I stopped drying my face on the towels in the bathroom and used my sleeve instead. I turned the head of my toothbrush away from the others. I thought of all of us using one toilet seat and added up the likelihood of me infecting everyone else in the family. They’d go out in the world and it would be stuck to them like acid rain. They’d touch the hands of others, it would stick to them and on it would go until I’d killed the world dead.

As I sat on the floor in the front room, the TV blared dire warnings of death punctuated by close shots of gravestones. Sombre-faced middle-aged TV presenters warned us about the modern plague. The thud of gravestones falling echoed around the chamber of my chest. Was now the right time to tell everyone about my sickness? To warn them? But I didn’t. I pulled my knees close to my chest and turned into myself. If I could get small enough, if I could become invisible then everyone would be safe.

Eventually part of me broke, it must have done, because I convinced Mum to take me to the doctor. There I sat across from the man who’d tended to my family’s health for decades and told him, face burning, that I had AIDS and was going to die and that I’d probably infected my entire family. He looked faintly bewildered, a small smile playing on his lips while the rest of his face remained a mask of composure.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s run through the ways you get it.’ He talked about drugs and sharing needles and dangerous sex and gay men and blood blending with blood. I wanted to tell him that I’d had oral sex. That was how and why I knew I had it. But I couldn’t. I didn’t. How could I? I knew he’d think I was a slut. So I looked down, allowed him to finish, didn’t say a word.

Seven years later, I was in my bedroom, the hi-fi was playing the news. The DJ said something about the world ending; attuned to catastrophe, my ears pricked up. He talked about Nostradamus, who predicted future events, many correctly, how he said the world would end in a nuclear war in the year 2000. It was 1993. Everything stopped. I’d just been given a death sentence; we all had. I found books in the library that told me what to expect, that painted the future for me in black. There would be no plants, no animals, no humans. The earth would be scorched and stripped of everything that made it what it was now. It was all I could think about. I cried for hours, wished that life could have been different. It seemed particularly cruel. I’d be twenty-one. I would finally be free and life would be something other than sadness and pain and then I’d die.

As we drove along in the car and I looked out of the window at the fields we passed, I looked at the cows, imagined their bones burned to dust and then blown away into the air, mixing with all the bone dust of everything and everyone else that had perished when the nuclear bombs landed. I imagined the life I could have had, should have had. It was the first thing I thought of when I woke up every morning, the last thing I thought of when I went to sleep. Everything seemed utterly pointless when death was so close. Every blue sky or toasty summer’s day seemed just to exist to demonstrate what we were set to lose.

The six-week holidays were the worst time of all. Six weeks without the distraction of school to occupy my mind; six weeks for my obsessions and anxiety to spiral; when I needed comfort more than ever. But Mum couldn’t bear kids under her always moving feet. She was irritated by the very sight of us, around so much, reminding her that we existed.

‘I’m going to change my name if you keep using it,’ she’d say as we called out ‘Mum’. I didn’t know much about mothering, or what a typical family looked like, sounded like, felt like, but I knew that a mother should nurture, protect and love their children. I wanted her to hold me, shelter me from the bombs when they fell, take the force of the nuclear blast for me, tell me she loved me as I died.

I don’t recall any touching in our house and I grew up desperate to feel skin on mine. To be hugged, swaddled, swept up in an embrace. To be kissed