by Lette, Kathy
‘What? That’s miles away! I’ll need a list of edible berries and a compass to find the place. Plus I have a cat hernia op scheduled this arvo.’
‘You still have to eat. Just for half an hour. Pleeeaaassseee.’
‘Is Amber going?’
‘I’m going to ask her, yes. It’s an SOS emergency. This is not a drill. Repeat: This is not a drill.’
It was a code we sisters only used for times of dire distress – like coming home from school to find our mother totally pissed, lying in a pool of her own vomit. Or our father being shot at with an air rifle by the husband of a woman he’d been seeing on the sly.
‘If Amber’s coming, then no. You know I’m not talking to that cow right now.’
‘Not even for my dying wish?’
There was a pause big enough to accommodate a fleet of semi-trailers. ‘Fudge,’ my older sister finally said.
Amber’s words were tumbling out of her mouth before I even had time to say hello.
‘I feel sick . . . sick with disgust at life’s cruel and haphazard nature. I just can’t believe that you’ve been crushed, so indiscriminately, under the black jackboot of fate.’ Amber let out a strangled sob. ‘I know we’ve had our differences, Ruby – well, only when you’ve taken Emerald’s side against mine – but you also know I’d do anything for you. You do know that, right?’
‘Great. What you can do for me is meet me for lunch. One pm. Convict Cafe.’
‘What? Why not meet at the International Space Station? It’s closer.’
‘I don’t want to run into anyone I know.’
‘Yes, well, you have a point. Though – wait. Is Emerald coming?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then no. You know I’m not talking to that bitch ever again.’
‘This is an SOS emergency. This is not a drill. Repeat: This is not a drill . . . Besides, it’s my dying wish.’
A pause. ‘Fudge, fudge and triple fudge with ice cream on fudging top.’
I vowed that, once I’d wrangled both sisters into the same room, I’d tell them right away that the diagnosis had been a mistake but how the shock was a wake-up call for us to bury the hatchet and be friends again, hopefully on the three-week spring cruise I’d drunkenly paid for in the belief that my life was nearly over.
I’d gone to the doctor for a simple blood test to check my hormone levels. When I’d received the consultant’s letter on the afternoon of my birthday and read that I had stage four terminal cancer, straight after discovering my husband’s infidelity, I’d sobbed, drunk the most expensive bottle of claret I had in the house, then searched online for the first available cruise sailing out of Sydney.
At least the sham diagnosis would get all three Ryan sisters sitting at the same table at the same time, which during our adult years had proven about as easy as brokering a peace deal in the Middle East. Driving to the cafe, I told myself I must come clean about the misdiagnosis straight away, without delay, come what may. I was dying to tell them that I wasn’t dying. Hooray!
4
‘I’m dying!’ were the first words past my lips as my estranged sisters arrived at the same time from opposite sides of the cafe. ‘So you cannot stay mad at me!’
Just moments earlier, while waiting for my siblings in the snack bar at the far end of the peninsula, way out past the sand dunes and the oil refinery, I’d read the small print on the ludicrously expensive cruise tickets I’d drunkenly purchased the previous day only to discover they were totally non-refundable, which is why the truth would have to wait. My life had just collapsed like a Chilean mine. My husband had moved out, my friends had disowned me and my kids were busy with their own lives. I had no one else in the world to take with me. And aside from all that, I really did want to reunite my estranged sisters, who were both so dear to me. Nope, there was nothing else for it. I would just have to pretend I was dying for a teensy bit longer – at least until the boat set sail. I’d fess up the moment we weighed anchor and just hope my furious siblings didn’t give me too severe a lashing with their cat-o’-nine-tongues, or keelhaul my sorry arse then hang me from a yardarm.
‘How are you holding up?’ Amber gushed before emitting a high-pitched gasp, swallowing a sob and grabbing me into a bear hug. I glanced over her shoulder at Emerald in astonishment. Amber was more of a pat-on-the-back type of person. Physical contact was usually so abhorrent to her that Emerald and I couldn’t imagine how she’d ever got pregnant.
‘What’s the exact diagnosis?’ Emerald demanded, heaving herself into a chair. She wanted details, dates, doctors’ names.
We continued like this for ten minutes, Emerald peppering me with practical questions while Amber just clutched me and cried.
‘Stop blubbing, Amber. That’s not going to help the situation,’ Emerald barked.
‘You have the warmth and compassion of a piece of granite, do you know that?’ Amber retaliated, between sobs.
‘Cease and desist, both of you. My dying wish is to have my meals brought to me by a naked Chris Hemsworth . . . But I’d settle for some sisterly love.’
I was making it up as I went along, but what the previous day had given me was a deep and overwhelming desire to carpe the hell out of the diem; I intended to carpe diem as if there were no tomorrow, even if I had to lie a little longer to do so.
‘But you still haven’t answered my question. Tell me exactly what the consultant said,’ Emerald probed, her tone as sharp as a scalpel.
I felt as if I’d been pushed on stage in a play where I didn’t know the lines. ‘I’m calling him Kev. The cancer, I mean. He’s squatting in my pancreas like an evil little toad. I could have surgery to try to evict him, which would mean weeks in hospital with tubes running in and out of me . . .’
‘What about chemo?’ Emerald persisted.
You’re lying to your sisters, I thought, with a savage burst of self-loathing. Who was I – Richard bloody Nixon? But then I just ploughed straight ahead and lied some more.
‘The point is, it’s terminal. I can either have loads of expensive, invasive, hideous, shit treatments and still end up dead, or I can enjoy my last moments.’ I handed the menus back to the passing waitress. ‘I’ve ordered for you both, by the way, as I know you’ve gotta get back to work,’ I said, buying time while working out what on earth to say next.
‘I bet your doctor wasn’t too happy about that frickin’ decision,’ Emerald said. ‘Shouldn’t we get a second opinion?’
Deceiving my sisters like this was making my cheeks flush so hotly I could have roasted marshmallows on my face. But I continued pushing the lies out of my mouth the way an instructor shoves first-time parachutists out of an aircraft.
‘Basically, Kev has spread so far that the doc understood my decision to avoid additional torture and just let Kev have his way with me with good grace,’ I ad-libbed. ‘At least I won’t lose my hair.’
I might be the runt of the Ryan litter, but I had been blessed with my father’s wild, curly, Celtic red hair, which makes it look as though I’m having a million brainwaves all at once. Which I suppose I am, most of the time, for short stories and poems and novels I start and never finish. Yes, I’m afraid I have literary leanings, which my mother has always discouraged. ‘You can barely write a cheque,’ she’d chide, or something along those sarcastic lines.
‘What about targeted gene therapy?’ Emerald persevered.
I know that liars look shifty – their eyes dart and their heart rates accelerate, so I tried hard to breathe evenly, to keep eye contact, my hand covering the jumpy pulse in my neck. ‘The doc reckons it’s insufficiently tested to be of any use to me.’ Liar, liar, pants on fire! ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll have, but I won’t be wasting any of it poisoning myself . . . because I’ll be on a cruise with my beloved sisters.’
‘Seriously? Your first reaction was to book a cruise with us? That’s nuts, but I do love you for that response,’ Amber said, tears trickling through her rouge.
; ‘Ditto,’ grumbled no-nonsense Emerald. ‘Nuts but nice.’ She squeezed my hand under the table.
I gave a grateful, inward smile. We three sisters did love each other, despite our mother’s spiteful manoeuvrings. Yes, we could quite happily drown each other under a wave on a regular basis, but we would also give each other a kidney if required. We were the Ryan sisters – the prettiest, wittiest girls at a school renowned for the fact that the girls were forward but the boys were backward, who nevertheless married the first guys we dated in high school just to get away from our unhappy home. As kids, we’d kicked and fought and bruised each other with Chinese burns, but had also huddled in the linen press together to avoid our mother’s drunken rages, cheered each other on at sports days and ball-kneed any bloke who dared to badmouth, grope or malign a sibling. We’d taken care of each other after break-ups, too, going en masse to an ex-boyfriend’s place to retrieve bikinis and David Bowie albums, and to secretly key his car. We were like Orion’s Belt: always there, lined up alongside each other.
My whole life I’d felt I could never live up to my big sisters’ competence and achievements. Even now, aged fifty, I was still the little sister, always running along behind, trying to keep up, calling out for their attention, attempting to make them laugh, ingratiating myself by offering to do too much. I was also the fixer in the family, constantly trying to bridge the yawning chasm of contempt between my two warring siblings, layering on the psychological salve to soothe the emotional wounds inflicted by our manipulative mother. Ruth Ryan had wanted a son but got three daughters, which was another disappointment she hardly bothered to conceal.
‘What about alternative treatments? Surely there’s something you can do diet-wise?’ Amber was doing her concerned head tilt and moist-eyed look, as though already preparing to dash into intensive care with kale cakes and tofu shakes.
‘Oh, Christ, don’t start with your frickin’ fish oil tablets and fruit enemas.’ Emerald rolled her eyes. ‘Ruby does not want to waste any time at a vegan healing festival, urinating in her yurt because a mudslide has barred her exit flap. And, do you know what? No woman should ever be urinating in a yurt next to her own bed.’
Amber bristled. ‘I just couldn’t get the flap open in time. And, anyway, I’m only trying to help. Something you’re too selfish to know about, Emerald.’
‘I’m very unselfishly choosing to ignore that bitchy comment, because we have bigger things to worry about. The point is not to give up, Rubes,’ Emerald pep-talked. ‘A Kev-ectomy could be possible with surgery and chemo. Almost any abdominal operation can be performed laparoscopically—’
‘Which is just Greek for “much, much slower”. I don’t want keyhole surgery. I just want to go on a cruise with my sisters. That’s a much better cure than chemo.’
‘And I just want Death to Kevin!’ Emerald appealed. ‘Statistically, with chemo, one in three pancreatic cancer sufferers live another six years after diagnosis . . . You just have to beat the other two losers.’
‘Oh, there goes that warmth and compassion again,’ Amber said, with a sucked-on-lemon expression, throwing her hands in the air.
I looked at my two sisters. They were opposite in every way. To observe the Ryan girls from a distance, you wouldn’t think we were related. Whereas Emerald announces herself in a confident, full-volume boom, Amber speaks softly and breathlessly, as if always telling secrets.
While Amber is as glossy and nervy and stylish as a first-placed thoroughbred at Ascot, Emerald is more of a plodding draught horse. Her face is heavy and world-weary, without any delicacy, but her big eyes, strong mouth and defined eyebrows give her a handsome aspect, in contrast with Amber’s dainty features, which are as supple as her deft and slender fingers.
Their hair is also completely different. Amber’s is light as spun gold and usually piled up onto her head in a cloud, whereas Emerald’s chocolate-brown locks are cut short into a sensible bob – a helmet of hair she was now shaking at every one of Amber’s suggestions.
‘Let me book you in to my Korean health retreat. They do the most amazing deep-tissue detox.’
While Emerald maintains that the secret to good skin care is to be, well, Mediterranean, and the secret to beauty is to have Nordic parents who are prone to height, hair and Viking ice-blue eyes, Amber went in for exotic facials with obscure ingredients. Her most recent fad was discarded foreskins collected from South Korean circumcisions.
‘Maybe those bloody foreskin facials you so adore explain why you’re such a complete dickhead,’ Emerald deduced, violently ripping apart a bread roll and stuffing it into her mouth.
Where Amber was immaculately made-up at all times, waxed, tanned, trimmed and eyebrow-tinted, Emerald’s beauty routine took two to three seconds a day, during which time she used her car’s rear-view mirror to whack on some lipstick on the way to work. On special occasions, birthdays or New Year’s Eve, she would occasionally go all-out and add a dab of blusher.
Amber believed that most things in life could be cured by a mix of Pilates, chakra yoga, yogalates, acupuncture, angel channelling, astrological charting, craniosacral therapy, meditation, mindfulness, reiki, swearing off carbs and giving half your annual salary to a self-styled Intuitive Heart Healer who would awaken your inner Warrior; Emerald, on the other hand, felt most things could be cured with a Xanax tablet and a vodka bottle.
Their approach to food was also at odds. Amber had been through every food fad, feasting on bone broth, fasting, following the scripture of Paleo or Atkins or only nibbling organic, non-irradiated, biodynamic, fair-trade tofu, and was currently incredibly keen on quinoa. Emerald preferred food that was cooked in fat, drenched in salt and coated in chocolate, preferably simultaneously.
As if on cue, a huge plate of pasta arrived to interrupt my ruminations. Emerald grabbed her fork and started shovelling carbonara into her mouth with gusto. Still hungover, I’d ordered only soup, as everything else was too noisy. Kale-nosher Amber picked at her super salad while eyeing Emerald’s meal as though it were some long-lost childhood sweetheart.
As she forked in another huge mouthful, curvaceous, big-boned Emerald looked at Amber’s lithe limbs and dexterous movements. I could see that she was assailed by a consciousness of her own heavy clumsiness, which is why she snapped, ‘Eat a goddamn carb, why don’t you, Amber? It won’t hurt you.’
Amber shook her expensively highlighted blonde hair and swallowed the lettuce frond she’d been chewing. ‘It most definitely could. Have you girls had your cholesterol levels checked?’
‘Cholesterol?’ Emerald repeated. ‘Jesus, who cares? Yes, Ruby, why don’t you just get your cancer doctor to check your cholesterol. You must be very frickin’ worried about that.’
Amber started to retaliate but I raised my hand, in traffic cop mode, before placing the three cruise tickets on the table. ‘This is the remedy I want.’
My sisters greeted the tickets with the same enthusiasm you might welcome a syphilitic ulcer on your wedding night.
Amber was the first to speak. ‘Ruby, darling, I so appreciate the gesture, but I can’t leave the kids at such short notice. Bella has an exam. And Justin’s soccer final is on Saturday.’
‘You’ll only be away for three weeks,’ I persisted. ‘What’s the worst that could happen? Bella gets a bellybutton piercing and Justin a tattoo that says Love the Universe in Sanskrit?’
Amber shuddered theatrically, a strand of hair falling into her pretty face. ‘That’s what the tattooist says. In reality it probably reads khichdi and curry chicken.’
‘You forget, Ruby, that everything rates high on Amber’s parental anxiety meter,’ Emerald added disapprovingly.
I contemplated our middle sister. ‘Emerald’s right, you know, Amber. Stop letting your kids walk all over you. I love you so much, but you might as well get your own tattoo, right on your forehead, reading Doormat.’
Amber’s determination to be the perfect mother our own mother most definitely was not meant she spe
nt her life spraying tiny pine cones silver for homemade potpourri and never ever letting the sun set on an empty slow cooker in her spotless kitchen. She was constantly in full nail-me-to-the-cross mother–martyr mode. Over the years she had passed on to me a barrage of ‘how-to’ books and advice columns listing ways to be a better parent/book-week-costume-maker/cake-baker/gardener/hubby-pleasing fellatrix, while also being thinner, prettier and less cellulite-riddled. I’d endured conversation after conversation about whether she should be a helicopter mum or a tiger mum or a snowplough parent, a domestic goddess or a sex goddess, or possibly all at once. Now it was my turn to offer Amber a ‘how-to’ manual, as in ‘How to enjoy whatever goddamned years you have left, starting today’.
‘It’s pointless even trying to be a perfect mother, Amber, because you know what will happen?’ I counselled. ‘Your kids will grow up and then start whining “Why didn’t you screw me up more when I was young? I’ve got nobody to blame now!”’
‘Too bloody right,’ Emerald decreed, mid-mouthful. ‘Bottom line? If you’ve steered your kids safely into adulthood without them developing a drug addiction or a penchant for collecting Nazi memorabilia, you deserve a motherhood medal.’
‘I’m sorry, Ruby.’ Amber bridled. ‘But I am not taking mothering advice from a woman whose son is doing drugs.’
‘For god’s sake, the kid smoked one joint. He’s not exactly Pablo Escobar.’
As I watched my sisters furiously try to justify why they didn’t deserve an all-expenses-paid break in the lap of luxury, I convinced myself that I might actually be able to do them a favour. Amber was running herself ragged trying to create some kind of Von Trapp happy-family mirage, and unhappy Emerald was comfort eating her way into being prematurely old; I’d recently heard her actually groan when getting up out of a bean bag. The wake-up call I’d had from my cancer scare could be the catalyst to snap us all out of our collective coma. Yes, this trip away together would be good for all the Ryan girls, I decided. It wasn’t just a cruise, but a life-raft.
