Pier Pressure 
Pier Pressure
by Alexandra Fox
There's a little old man who walks the streets of Stainton. He dresses like Benny Hill, beret, round bottle-glasses, that gormless, drooping lower lip. His beige mackintosh is bright with show-badges and he'll tell you, if you're foolish enough to stop and listen, how he was left a fortune by the man himself, if he'd carry on the legacy.
He has a wife, a little old woman with no legs.
He pushes her in a wheelchair stuck with labels like a transatlantic suitcase, and where her lap would be, if she had a lap, is a lapdog, a balding, yapping Yorkie in a tartan waistcoat.
(On the first of December he puts on a Santa suit, dresses her in green with pointed elven cap, ties tinkling bells around the neck of her spitting dog. One year he switched on the town's Christmas lights. Those tawdry lights have been condemned now, with their fizzling wires, missing bulbs. An unknown doe-eyed soap-star from an unknown Northern soap pressed the button last year, and a single laser-column swept the sky, dipped to the littered streets, cold, searchlight-hard.)
But he loves his wife. They walk through the town all day. If it rains he drapes her in an orange cyclist's poncho, and when they stop at a Pelican crossing, waiting for the beep-beeping and the green man walk-don't-walking, he'll look down into her screwed-up nutmeg face and talk to her, drop a kiss on that cross forehead, ruffle sparse hair, rest a hand on her shoulder, fondle her cantankerous mangy dog. He loves her.
And I wonder, looking at her, if she were once an agile leggy blonde with model cheekbones, who chased her Benny round the park, and he ran from her courtship, mock-scared, half-pleased, until she wooed, caught him, and that's how he sees her even now. Did she lose her legs in an accident with a speeding bus, some cancerous growth that started at her feet until they cut it off, stopped it?
Or maybe she was born legless, incomplete, and her needs, yearnings, were met by what was lacking in this extraordinary little man (who thinks he's Benny, dresses as Santa, remember). So is it truly love, or merely gratitude and needs-meeting? And what's the difference?
I need to know.
I was at the hospital this week, waiting a long wait in a department with a long frightening name, people-watching to fill the awkward silent spaces of our not-talking, not-listening life.
There was a couple seated opposite us, must have been in their eighties, nineties. Her face was fanned with wrinkles like the soft underside of a skate's wing; there was a concavity in the side of his head where his cheekbone and most of his nose had been, his mouth twisted, toothless. But he brought her a cup of tea, and gloved her fingers gently before he put them around the heat of the thin plastic cup lest she burn herself. Then he cradled her gloved hands in his, lifted them to her mouth, and I saw his crooked lips sip unconsciously with hers as she drank, tasting from his mind to hers if the drink were too hot.
And she looked up at him, fisted her hand and mock-pummelled it in the space where his cheek had been, like a mother love-roughing her son, and the look in her palest blue eyes was the look of silk-drawn peace and concentrated contentment that I've only felt in the tug of a suckling baby. I envied her.
Is it generational, a case of expectations met? Does this deep geriatric love come as a reward to the survivors, those who didn't give up? Or was it good for them all along, and where have we gone wrong?
If you buy a radio now and it stops working, you take it back to the shop and they say, "It's not worth repairing, love. Be cheaper to buy another one." It's like that for marriage too.
I know so many couples, see so little happiness. I don't mean the talking-in-the-pub griping, the half-proud complaints about unhelpful husbands, bad sex, a drunken shove or two, men who've never learnt what to touch, where, when. It's the silent couples, those who appeared content, who shock me with their sudden break-ups - the small, neat accountant and his matched auditor wife, their three clean children with sticking-out ears, and you find that he's been having a ten-year affair in London, she's in love with the woman who makes up the organic veggie boxes, and you think maybe that's why they seemed as happy as they did for so long.
We're not enough for one another. We're all missing a piece. Our sparks don't keep firing.
So we split, and come together as another pair, that's split and come together, and the dance goes on.
Speed dating ... take that. Paying to sit in a room and throw rapid vapid words and over-made-up glances at each other, as the basis for a life relationship. How different is that from the little old man pushing his wife up forty years of dusking Stainton hills, talking to her under the fading yellow-white-yellow glow of a Beleisha beacon, talking and still finding words to say.
So in that hospital waiting room, I sit on a royal blue chair with a hard-edged stain on its seat, waiting for a husband of thirty years (who doesn't love me). He comes out of the inconvenient room full of incomprehensible machinery, mystical masons in lead aprons, shakes hands with the consultant with the unpronounceable name, picks me up like a left umbrella.
I drive him home. He speaks straight ahead at the windscreen, tells me the tests weren't great, that we're meeting the oncology team together next week, talks of surgery, of procedures, of getting back home quick so he can look it up on the Internet. Then he asks me a question.
It's about completeness, you see, and things missing, needs, what we'll give up for another person, what they see as complete and love despite a lack, about things that are and aren't there.
So what do you do when your loved/unloved husband is having bits cut out of him, not bits you can see, but the bad bits, the eyes of the potato, the grub-holed soft patches of the shiny apple, and they might have to dig deeper, damage the core?
What do you say when he asks you, if the prognosis is bad (and it might not be but there again it might), if you'll cut something away too, even up the scales, so to speak; when he says, if the news isn't good, will I give up what I love (my music, writing, perhaps), and concentrate on him, entirely, instead. Until the end.
A true wife would say, immediately, unquestionably, "Yes, darling, of course." So why can't I?
Jesus, we've been through plenty together - toddler and teenage tantrums, grandchildren, poverty clawed up to affluence sinking to just-below-the-comfort level, fire, sickness, miscarriage, drinking, fighting, parents dying, sex-no-sex, talk-no-talk, love-no-love.
God-no-God, perhaps.
When I believed in God, life was simpler, before the advent of the part-time-vicar-cum-VAT-inspector who hanged himself in a French hotel bedroom after phoning his wife and saying she wouldn't be able to stop him; before the priest who used to be a gay traffic policeman, who reads insipid sermons about God being the speed-camera of sin. When I believed, I had rules - faith, hope, love, all three. Now I feel them falling away, drop-dropping like cake-mix from a wooden spoon.
So what do I say?
Our woman with the crumpled tissue cheeks, she knows the secret, as she lovingly touches empty spaces where her husband's face used to be.
Benny's still pushing his legless wife up the hill in dirty rain. If she said, "Stop, Benny. Today it's cold. I want to sit inside by the electric fire and eat muffins," do you think he wouldn't give up his daily exercise, sit beside her, spread the butter?
It's life; it's decency, long-custom, giving of yourself back for what they've given you, or tried to give, even when they've got it wrong. It's one partner digging a hole in himself with pickaxe or ice-cream scoop, and the other doing the same to match. It hurts.
And when that question's asked again, about the giving up of such a little thing for maybe such a short time, of course I'll say yes, darling, I'll stop doing what I love to do, to care for one I say I love.
What else can I do?
But there's been that hesitation, yawning chasm, and I've seen it. So has he.
I'll feel like Benny's little legless wife, if he were to take her to the top of Coppice Hill, and let go of the over-labelled handle, uncontrolled, sick, alone, waiting to crash in a crumpled heap at the bottom.