Tick tock – She cut off their tails with a carving knife

Day One

They say – though I have no idea who they are – that every story is supposed to have a beginning, a middle and an end. This story starts today and I don’t know where today is. Could be in the middle, because the beginning took place about nine years ago. Maybe. Or it could be somewhere near the end. That’s what I like to think on a good day.

But today I am beginning something that is new to this story. I am making a story out of this story. I will give it a middle, a beginning, and most importantly, an end.

It starts with a tick. A tick that bites. I like to think it was a she-tick, don’t ask me why, I just do. She was Swedish and lived on the island of Øland, on a day when neither me nor my husband were particularly satisfied with our holiday, because a Swedish guy had told us off for riding our bikes in a nature reserve. Of course, he was right, but I was pregnant and had a trapped nerve in my leg and so I could only get to the place we wanted to go by riding our bicycles, as walking was too painful. After I had explained my predicament he stopped blocking our path, but it left a strange aftertaste with us. A feeling that the Swedish didn’t like foreigners in their forests, on their paths. That the so-called allemansrätten was not for every man (or woman). Especially not Germans. Perhaps the fact that when I spoke to him, when he heard that I was patently not German, made him move out of our way. But my husband – who is German – was furious. I could feel the blistering heat of his anger coming off him all the rest of the day.

And as we rested later on the ridiculous verandah of our wooden cabin in an overcrowded campsite, drunken Swedes singing around us, I felt her move beneath my breast. A tick-ling sensation. I touched her and felt a small lump. My breast, already swollen with milk, was too large to see underneath, so I had to ask my husband to look.

“You’ve got a Zecke” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you know? A tick. They’re all over Europe. Quite harmless. I’ll take it out.” And he did.

Little did we know.

In hindsight, nine years later, the tracks of the minute squiggly borrelia bugs that that tick was carrying could be found all through my body, in my joints, my blood, my spine. But not my eyes, not my brain, oh no. Not yet, I would say on a bad day. Never ever, on a good one.

Not the tick’s fault. She was just as infected as I became after she bit me. But how did she get them? Where do they come from? On a bad day of Borrelia-neurosis and internet research I could convince myself that they are a product of biological warfare, and I find myself immediately in good company. The evidence is there, plain as your face, that Eightball – experiments in the fifties on children with biological weapons – is to blame. Look at the movie. Only thing that’s missing is the connection to 9/11. Maybe.

Yeah. Paranoia. I could write a book about that. Perhaps I’ll start it tomorrow.