Claire's Head by Catherine Bush Page B

saw her, or as if there were something about her that baffled him. And how, even when she had a headache, could she dare make a bid for his attention and sympathy? Her headaches went away. They came back but they did go away. He nagged Sylvia to set up an appointment for Claire with a neurologist, who prescribed her pills (a beta blocker called Propanolol), but these did nothing to help.
    Rachel was no longer living at home by then but in a shared house on Huron Street, downtown near the university. She came home occasionally for dinner and would regale Claire with stories: of how once, in the thick of a migraine, she’d lurched out of a subway car and thrown up over the edge of the subway platform. Once, when no medication worked, she’d ended up in the emergency room at Toronto Western, brought by a frantic boyfriend convinced she’d had a stroke. When she went into the hospital for a knee operation to repair cartilage torn at the end of her high-school track career, she got shot up on Demerol, which, she claimed, deadened all pain from the knee but didn’t touch the headache keening through her as she was wheeled into the operating room. Claire did not know if her parents heard these stories. Rachel swore that none of the pain was affecting her studies – she was fine, she was doing fine.
    And they coped, they did. Most days when she came home from high school, Claire would down a couple of 222s, before collapsing on the sofa for an hour. She was not a malingerer. She didn’t believe her life would go on like this, although so far it had.
    The summer after Grade Twelve, she found work in an antiquarian bookshop on Bathurst Street, south of Dupont, whose owner, elegant Irene Tate – tall and boyish, her silvering hair held back in a ponytail – also got migraines, as Claire discovered a week after starting the job. Once, Irene said, she’d had a headache that had lasted ten years – no joke, it waxed and waned but never entirely disappeared until in the end it gradually faded away. These were the years when she was raising her two sons, which might have had something to do with it. Irene, too, carried pills on her at all times, always something in her purse or wadded into a Kleenex in her pocket, as she showed Claire. On some afternoons, she left Claire on her own under the shop’s rickety ceiling fan while she retreated to her upstairs apartment. What Claire felt in Irene’s presence was not only horror at the thought of the ten-year headache but also relief and comfort: there were others outside her family, others with migraines even worse than hers.
    Time ran along two parallel tracks: pain time and ordinary time. You slid from one to the other, one as familiar as the other. Pain time did not progress: you fell into it as into a ditch, you followed it like a fractal shoreline that, at any scale, repeats and repeats itself.
    Was it the Christmas after Grade Twelve that Claire and Rachel and Sylvia all came down with migraines at once? No, it was later. Looking back, it was impossible to remember the pain. It was retrievable only through context. Propped against the counter, Sylvia basted the goose, brown bruises beneath her eyes, nearly oblivious to the fat spitting at her from the roasting pan. Rachel busied herself silently setting crystal and silverware on the dining room table, swearing under her breath. Claire tried to slice root vegetables without cutting her fingers off. Meanwhile, Allison, taller and skinnier than any of them and the only one without a headache, would look at them balefully now and again as she carved open chestnut shells for a chestnut purée, ripping at the skins with such vigour and without cease that the tips of her fingers bled.
    For dinner, Hugh opened a bottle of fine Alsatian wine, lamenting that there was hardly any point in doing so, although in the end he and Allison largely polished off the bottle between them, in addition to making