Shadow in Tiger Country - Louise Arthur

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I may be weird but I love ironing and hate watching sport on telly.’ After half an hour or so, Weeze looked across at me and said, ‘Should we just go upstairs now?’

      I was convinced this transparent ploy would fail miserably but it worked a treat. Perhaps because most of the things were true – nearly every book I had ever read and loved so did she, nearly all the films that formed my early mind had had a similar effect on Weeze. OK, the ironing and sports stuff was rubbish, but you’ve got to go with what you feel. Just after two in the morning I thought it was time I should be going and I made a move for the door. Weeze said she’d walk me out and as we stood – corny as it was – in the moonlight of the front path, I leant forward to kiss her goodnight. What should have been a quick peck on the cheek became one of those embarrassing missed kisses where both thought the other was going for the other cheek and end up actually kissing on the lips. Now, what should have been the briefest of kisses lasted possibly only a millisecond longer than would have been decent, but it was enough. It was enough to make us both pull back in surprise. I started to stutter and stammer and Louise just smiled. I ran all the way home and jumped into bed and spent a restless night wondering what on earth to do.

      Next morning I got up early, as I was meant to be leaving for a male bonding trip with one of my best friends, Ben, around Britain. Before I went, though, I thought it was only right and proper to go round and apologize for the previous night’s indiscretion. On the off-chance I might get a similar indiscretion. I found a CD we’d both mentioned the night before, Thank You World by World Party, and thought this would be a good excuse. As I knocked on her front door I could see her bounding her way downstairs in a pair of leggings and a very small tight white t-shirt. I would later find out that she’d put this on specifically on the off-chance that I might turn up, as the night before I mentioned something about liking tight t-shirts on women with great breasts. Well, who doesn’t? She opened the door and I started jabbering on.

      ‘About last night, I’m really sorry, I mean I’m just, you know, I’m not sure what happened, I’m just, I shouldn’t have done it. Well, I mean I’m not sorry it happened, it was very nice and everything, it’s just, I mean, I’m sorry if you didn’t like it.’

      If I’d been two feet taller, a lot better looking and had an upper class accent I could have been Hugh Grant, such was my fumbling incoherence. She leant forward and kissed me, I think as much to shut me up as anything, and we kissed and we kissed. Quite unbelievably, we kissed for three hours in her corridor and in her kitchen. Halfway through she told me she had a friend upstairs who she’d been doing T’ai Chi with when the doorbell rang. ‘Do you think it would be rude if we went upstairs and had sex, while he’s in the next room?’ she asked. We agreed it probably was and, besides, I really had to go. I gave her my bracelet as a keepsake and I left.

      ‘I can’t believe I only just found you, and now I’ve got to leave,’ came out of my mouth from absolutely nowhere and I think that was the line that finally did it. She would repeat that line to me over our whole marriage as being one of the sweetest things anyone had ever said to her. Well, it’s nice to know that out of the million and one crap things that came out of my mouth over our relationship, at least I said something right.

      When I got back from my week-long voyage of discovery around the British Isles I headed over to see Louise. She opened the door, dragged me in, straight upstairs and I emerged three days later in a state of ecstatic bliss and engaged.

      Basically for those three days we did nothing but drink champagne, make love and massage each other. In fact, it was during one of these massage sessions that we had our magic experience. Now, I am fully prepared to accept that whatever happened could have been due to lack of sleep, exhaustion and alcohol, but I should say that I believe it to be one of the only true experiences that has ever happened to me. I’ll describe it for you and those of you with a New Age spiritual bent can read all sorts of things into it. Those of you with a more objective point of view may see it in a different way. Anyway, what happened was this: we entered Louise’s massage room – she was an aromatherapist at the time – and as we got naked we slowly massaged each other, until it felt as if touching each other was too much to take and we began to massage each other’s auras. Then it happened. I felt my heart chakra open, as did Louise, and something left my chest and passed into her and something from her came and joined with me. We sat there in silence for the longest time, unable to talk or verbalize the experience. It was the middle of the night before we managed to leave the room and went and lay holding each other in bed. I can remember saying, ‘Wow, if this isn’t love then I don’t know what is. And I don’t think I could take it if there’s anything more intense than this. I think that’s it. I think we’ve found each other. I think we should get married.’

      This didn’t phase Weeze at all. She just nodded and said, ‘Yes, I think you’re right. Maybe we should just check it with the I Ching.’

      For anyone who doesn’t know, the I Ching is a Chinese form of divination, which helps you to look into the future. Basically, you flip a coin six times and depending which way it lands each time will help you build up a hexagram, which you then look up in a book for some words of wisdom. We did this and it came up as the I Ching H’sien, which our book simply said was ‘beautiful marriage’. Considering none of the other hexagrams mention marriage and a lot of them are downright depressing, this was enough of a sign. I got out of bed and knelt on one knee, naked, and proposed. She giggled and simply said, ‘Let’s.’ We kissed and made love again and that was it, the deal was done, and three months later we were married.

      As I read through all that, it seems like a ridiculous dream. Why on earth we were so certain it would work, I’ve no idea. It was just right, and that was it. I remember talking to Louise’s father about the wedding – this being the first time he’d met me – and he wasn’t at all phased but simply asked us whether or not we would mind waiting just a few more months so that he could get some money together to help us. At the time I thought he was mad, didn’t he get it, this was love, this was real passion, of course we couldn’t wait, we had to get married straight away. Now, though, I look back on it and wonder how he didn’t just look at me and say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding. You’ve only really known each other three or four days and you want to get married in three months. Are you crazy?’ But he didn’t say that and when we said we couldn’t wait he accepted it and I was one of the family, a family I’m very privileged to be in.

      The wedding was a blast (but more of that later) and the honeymoon in Egypt was a fiasco on near biblical scale (but again more of that later). Over the next couple of years we packed a lot in. I managed to have a nervous breakdown after we lost a baby very early in the pregnancy, then Louise found out she had endometriosis and went through a series of operations and we were told we might never have children. But after all that was behind us we got pregnant, or rather, Louise got pregnant with some help from me. A thousand and one things went through my mind over the first few months of the pregnancy. Will I be a good father? Should I be strict or soppy? Do I want a boy or a girl? Boys can play rugby, but girls are cuter. That sort of thing. The one thing that didn’t occur to me was what if my wife discovers she has cancer just a month after our daughter is born?

      Louise was incredibly sick all through the pregnancy, throwing up eight or nine times a day, and very nearly got taken into hospital several times because of dehydration. For the first five months or so, she was more or less bedridden. Far from gaining weight, she lost it, and as her little belly filled out the rest of her got thinner and thinner. I had a play at the Edinburgh Festival in August of that year and miraculously she got better for the week we were up there, but almost as soon as we were home again she was back to the sick bucket, which in our house was a silver champagne cooler. As Louise said, ‘If you’ve got to be sick into something, it might as well be nice.’

      The sickness gradually subsided, though, as we entered the third trimester and it was about that time that Louise got her drooping eyelid. It started off as a slight thing that only happened when she was particularly tired and I think at the time all of us presumed it was something to do with the traumatic times she’d had over the last few months. We went to see our doctor and he referred us to a specialist. We sat there and he looked Louise over and told her she had this thing called Horner’s

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