This Is Not a Pity Memoir

Abi Morgan, Morgan, Abi

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780358682950
  9780358682950
• eBook ISBN:
  9780358699156
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

What happens when your partner of twenty years suddenly believes you’re nothing but a stranger? 

What do you do when your history together is gone?

How do you prove you’re not an imposter in your own life? 

When the partner of Emmy Award–winning screenwriter Abi Morgan abruptly collapsed from a mysterious illness, doctors were concerned that he would not survive. Then, six months later, Jacob woke from his coma, to the delight and relief of his family and friends—except this proved to be anything but a Hollywood ending. Because to Jacob, the woman standing at his bedside, who had cared for him all these months, was not his partner. Not his children’s mother. Not the woman he loved. Sure, she looked like his Abi, but this was an imposter, living someone else’s life.

Finding herself dropped into a real-life night-mare seemingly ripped from the pages of a thriller, Abi must find a way to hang on to not only their past but also their future together, before it slips away from them both. With grace, an irresistible sense of humor and refreshingly raw honesty, This Is Not a Pity Memoir grapples with a journey through fear and redemption few should have to face.

What do you do when you are losing your love? 

You don’t write a pity memoir. 

You write a love story. 

One

It’s dark and I’m pissed off. I’ve slept in the spare room again, so I am in no mood for chat. When I go in, I do my usual.

“Is it your head again? Have you taken paracetamol?”

But not in a nice way. In a way that he and I know will communicate my fatigue and frustration. The spare room is also his office. With an expensive pull-down bed. Meant for the occasional guest or my mother. Not for a week now. A week I’ve slept in the spare room because I snore. I keep him awake with my snoring. Or to be frank, he keeps me awake with his snoring. Louder than mine. Though this is a point of dispute. A continual point of dispute. But for now, he’s the one with the headache.

“I don’t feel great.”

It’s 7 a.m. and I want to drop our kids at school and get my coffee and go to work. The coffee that is the very expensive kind that I buy every day from the same, very expensive coffee shop. Only today you have your hand on your forehead and you tell me it feels like there is a knife running from the top of your scalp into the back of your neck. So, I’ll get steroids, from your doctor. Something I can do. Something I’m good at. And it’s not that we’re not used to this. It’s not that this is not par for the course. I’ll get a few hours’ work in, this morning, and then drive and pick up your medication and get sushi for our son to celebrate his last GCSE, which is today, and then bring them back at lunchtime.

“Can you cope until then, Jacob?”

There’s silence.

“You’re a terrible nurse,” you reply.

And I think—you’re right. I am a terrible nurse. I’m not built for this. A decade of rifling around for paracetamol and cold packs, and nights in the spare room. And then I lean in to kiss you and you say—

“What’s it like to have everything?”

And I say—

“I don’t have everything. Because you’re not well.”

Buying sushi is a complicated business. I am nervous to stray from the path. No eel or anything that looks too like a sliver of cold egg custard perched atop a small boat of rice. But still, I buy too much. And wasabi peas, which I detest but which I know Jacob likes to flick into his mouth, lying on the sofa watching The Simpsons when I am working somewhere, elsewhere in the house.

“How can he live with such an unbearable lightness of being?”

I like The Simpsons, but it never makes me laugh. My days are spent constructing story, manipulating truths, assimilating life into fiction. To be performed, acted in, filmed, shot. I watch movies and comedies with the precise and earnest eye of a surgeon. Not because I believe I am anything special. I am a writer. Although that would denote a certain level of expertise. But in truth I feel a fraud. Uneducated. Unbrilliant. At times, frankly, illiterate. I lie about the books I’ve read. I am always trying not to be found out. If I am going to see a film, I prefer to have read all the reviews and to know the plot, beforehand. The joy I get is in piecing together the narrative. I like being one step ahead of the audience, with my insider knowledge, like some secondhand moonlighting cop, sifting over the pieces, working out how it is done. How it is being crafted.

“Because she’s actually a ghost,” I want to scream.

Or—

“He’s in the boot of the car.”

Of course he’s in the boot of the car.

I like to know how my story is going to end. And when I don’t know there is a kind of blind panic, which unsettles, unnerves, terrifies me. Like a wet finger run around the rim of the glass. I have to wait until the sound of this reverberating hum dissolves. Settles into silence again. And only then can I begin to breathe.

The chef rolls and slices and arranges sushi in flowered plastic trays with such grace. A master at his craft. I watch, waiting in front of the counter. I appreciate this. Afterwards I’ll run to my office, as I have missed my deadline. It’s Friday and on Friday I am usually writing an email of apology that will fly into the arms of some small production company, where they will read it and sink a little, knowing they have to wait another weekend for that script that is already several weeks too late.

But today I have an excuse.

I have errands to run, steroids to pick up, a mission to accomplish.

I drive to Queen Square. A scrubby square of grass and rose beds marked out in black railings where the drunks and the dogs and the visitors and patients in wheelchairs and staring, nervous parents walk, two steps behind their sick children, let out for the afternoon from Great Ormond Street for air and sun. Today office workers are flopped on the grass, cheek by jowl with dust-covered builders from a nearby construction site, swigging Cokes and laughing in the heat.

It’s June.

Did I say the month was June?

I walk to the pharmacy inside the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, a warren of doors and grubby plastic and disoriented old ladies gripping outpatient letters and nurses wheeling oxygen tanks. At the pharmacy I wait for the small white paper box of steroids that I hope will bring relief for the symptoms that Jacob has had for the last seven years, the MS that we try not to name, but which hovers dark and damp, like fret on a cold day, threatening to disrupt another evening, another holiday.

And then I’m out, weaving my way back to the car.

Yes, it’s June.

So, I must have picked up the steroids and after, after, that’s when I drive to get sushi. For our son. To celebrate. Yes, I bought sushi after. Otherwise it would have sat in a warm car. And I don’t do that. I know I wouldn’t have done that.

In the car, I slide the box of pills onto the dashboard. And suddenly I am crying.

Not crying. Sobbing.

Not sobbing.

Bawling.

Because I am tired of the years of steroids. And nights on the spare bed. And the passive aggression that accompanies every exchange as we tread around, over, and under this illness.

And I’m tired of pretending that any of this is OK.

It is not OK.

It is not OK.

The roar of a crowd and football commentary filters up from the living room TV before I have even opened the front door. The dog helicopters like some crazed fan until I put down my bags. I placate him with a pat and a scratch. He loves me more than anyone, because I feed him and walk him, mainly.

I call out to Jesse, lost to FIFA, mid-match.

“Did you go up to see Dad?” I say.

Silence.

I take this to mean no.

I put the sushi in the fridge, and then head upstairs to our bedroom. Four flights of stairs, and when I open the bedroom door, I am already congratulating myself on all I have achieved.

It is now 2 p.m., and I am incredible.

I am invincible.

I’ve got this nailed.

Did I say congratulations to my son?

The bed is empty, illuminated by the light from the bathroom.

Or was the bathroom door closed?

I turn and that is when I see you.

“Jacob?”

You are lying on the bathroom floor. A narrow tiled white space that I complained reminded me of a sanatorium when it was finished. And which I got locked in only a week ago and had to shout down to you, banging the door with such violence that, two days later, I see I have left a dent in the wood. You rescued me.

The door is open.

“Jacob?”

I tell myself, “You are cooling down. The day is hot, and though the blinds are down, the room is always stifling. You must have come into the bathroom to cool down on the cold tiled floor. And have fallen asleep.”

I lean over and try to rouse you. For a minute I can’t decide if your lips are blue. Or, are you wearing lipstick? And then I see that you have dried blood caked around your mouth.

“Jacob?”

Your eyes open. You stare at me.

“What?”

“Jacob—are you all right?”

“What? What? What? What? What?” you reply.

You are stuck. Your needle is stuck.

“Do you know what’s happened, Jacob?”

“What?”

“Jacob, do you know who you are?”

“What?”

You raise a hand. I am sure you raise a hand, squinting a little, like a sunbather whose sleep has been disturbed by the shadow of looming clouds.

“Can you move?”

“What?” you reply.

I see now, you have bitten your tongue.

Standing on our landing, I realize I don’t know who to call. Is it 999 or 911? Is 911 American? I call my friend Jacqui. Later I will tell people I called the ambulance first. But I didn’t. I don’t. I call Jacqui first.

I say, “Jacob’s collapsed. Jesse is downstairs. What do I do?”

“Call an ambulance,” she replies.

It’s 999. I call 999. I sit on the stairs, and turn my head, my eyeline now level with our bed. There is a large damp patch on the mattress. Is it blood or sweat? I think of the children when they were small. The nights we fumbled around in the dark together, stripping sheets after they’d wet the bed.

You’ve pissed yourself.

You’ve pissed yourself.

“Hello. Emergency. Which service do you need?”

I am not sure if this is what the woman on the other end of the line says. But it is what people say, isn’t it? To be marked down, as I do with anythin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Five
• Six
• Seven
• Eight
• Nine
• Ten
• Eleven
• Twelve
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher