by Freya North
‘Isotope bone scan?’ Ben asked.
‘That’s the one,’ said Django benevolently, as if he’d been quizzing Ben on his med school revision. ‘It all sounds increasingly Ridley Scott to me.’
The sisters stared at Ben intently.
‘OK,’ said Ben, ‘OK. I’m the doctor so you can all listen to me. The bone is perhaps the most common place for prostate cancer to spread to. This scan can detect abnormal areas of bone. A mild radioactive liquid is injected into a vein in the arm and because abnormal bone absorbs more than normal bone, the radioactive stuff shows up as highlighted hot spots.’
‘I could bag myself a role on Doctor Who,’ Django said brightly, ‘or audition as the new ReadyBrek boy.’ But Fen had now begun to cry. The sudden sound of her distress rang out the truth about Django’s alarming situation. ‘Poppet,’ he tried to protest but when he looked over to Pip for assistance, he saw that she hid her face behind her hands and a glance at Cat showed her tears falling steadily if silently.
‘The scan is just diagnostic,’ Ben told them, his arm around Cat.
‘But what if it diagnoses horrible things?’ Fen sobbed. ‘We’ve only just got each other back. We want to rebuild our family, not have it taken away from us.’
‘I’ve always worried that the more they look for the more they find,’ Pip said, working hard not to let her voice crack.
‘Girls,’ said Django, ‘it’s probably just a spot of the lurgy. I have all my faculties. I just cannot take a pissing leak.’ No one laughed. No one said, Language, Django.
‘Did they warn you that after the injection you have to wait a good two or three hours before the scan can be taken?’ Ben asked Django.
‘No,’ said Django, a little unnerved. ‘I can’t remember. Perhaps they did.’
‘Nothing sinister,’ Ben assured him, ‘just a lengthy process – so take a book.’
‘I’ll stay,’ Cat announced suddenly, decisively. ‘I have a day off tomorrow. I’ll come with you, Django.’
With the car packed and ready to leave later that day, Fen and Pip shuffled around and loitered, having final drinks of water and double-checking the rooms upstairs.
‘I could stay too,’ Pip offered.
‘And me,’ Fen added quietly though she was now desperate to see her baby.
‘Thank you,’ Django said, his hand at his heart, ‘but much as I love the image of arriving at the hospital with my entourage, my bevy of beauties, I think you two should be back with your families tonight.’ Pip asked him over and again if he was sure, and then she asked the same of Cat. Fen didn’t want to ask if Cat and Django were sure because actually she was missing Cosima so much she felt sick.
‘I’ll call, as soon as there’s anything to call about,’ Cat told them, transformed into a capable nurse, currently in the arms of her doctor. ‘I’ll call you anyway.’ While she hugged her husband, Fen and Pip said goodbye to Django.
‘Oh Django,’ Fen whispered, letting him make her feel better in his arms.
‘Behave,’ Pip told him, giving him the tight hug and brisk kiss to each cheek she gave to Tom when she took him to school. ‘Do what the doctors say.’
‘She’s so bloody bossy,’ Django said to Fen.
Fen suddenly felt great affection for her sister. ‘And we love her for it,’ she said. Pip looked a little embarrassed. Fen linked arms with her. ‘Sit in the back with me?’ she asked. ‘Even though Cat won’t be in the front.’
‘I have dominoes tonight,’ Django tells Cat as they wave the others off.
‘Big Brother is on anyway,’ she tells him, ‘and you don’t have a video recorder. Anyway, I’m all talked out for today.’
‘Me too,’ says Django, ‘me too.’
They feel awkward but strangely excited to be in such close proximity, to have the opportunity to spend quality time, alone together. It is almost easy to forget the reason why Cat is staying on in Derbyshire.
When she first saw the hospital the next morning, Cat was pleased that Django was having the tests done there and not in London. In contrast to the vertical sprawl of the London hospitals, and the unfriendly busyness of Ben’s in particular, this place was welcoming. Set amidst dunes of neatly tended lawns, a series of low buildings constructed in the buff-coloured local stone sat peacefully and spaciously, a little like the sheep that grazed the hills just beyond the perimeter fence. Cat wanted to say how she hated hospitals, hated the smell, that they made her feel nervous, but wisely she changed her perspective and wittered on about the landscaping and the architecture instead.
‘Prince Charles opened it,’ she marvelled, reading from a brass plaque.
‘Well then!’ Django declared, implying the Royal Family wouldn’t waste their time opening hospitals not at the cutting edge of medical excellence.
It still smelt like a hospital, though. And the sights and sounds were indisputable too. The rubbery squelch of the staff’s sensible shoes against highly sheened linoleum; the rumble of trolleys and the clatter of wheelchairs; the whistle and cheeriness of the porters ferrying patients. The universally familiar typeface pointing out departments. Cat wondered whether an element of acting was an integral part of a nurse’s training. Like barristers. As if facts and procedures could be dressed up or played down through their performance. But the kindness of the matronly nurse who led Django through, delivered in broad Derbyshire vernacular replete with affectionate monikers, was genuine in its down-to-earthiness. She might as well have been serving him chips in a café in Matlock as preparing his arm for radioactive fluid. And whether Django had been seventy-five, seventeen or seven, she’d still have addressed him as ‘ducky’.
And Django was injected. And the wait began. Initially, Cat eyed him vigilantly, as if she’d be able to detect when the liquid came across something sinister, but soon enough the tedium kicked in and disparate topics of conversation were mused over in varying degrees of detail. After they had spent ages trying to remember the various teachers at the girls’ school, there was a lengthy and loaded silence.
‘Do you – did you ever – oh never mind,’ Cat mumbled but she dragged her eyes to Django.
‘Did I what?’ he asked her gently.
‘Doesn’t matter. Nothing. Feel differently towards me than Fen and Pip?’ Cat whispered. Django took a sharp intake of breath.
‘It’s just Fen says a parent’s love for their child should, by definition, be supreme,’ Cat explained in a small, guarded voice.
Django took time to answer. ‘Well, I must be an exception to the rule because I have never distinguished between the three of you.’ He paused. ‘Would you say that makes me a bad parent?’
Cat twisted her fingers and wished she’d not veered from their mild and mundane nattering.
‘Did I distinguish between you?’ Django rephrased it. ‘Do you think I should have?’
‘I’ve always felt an equal,’ Cat qualified, ‘but it’s difficult – it’s difficult to wonder whether I shouldn’t have. Whether I should have at least wondered.’
Django turned in his chair to face her head-on, wincing as he moved. ‘Blasted ancient bones. Sometimes I’ve wondered, if your mother hadn’t left, whether you’d have been told earlier.’
Cat thought about this. ‘Would you have told me later, then – would you have told me ever, if she hadn’t come back last month?’ Then she gestured around her. ‘With all of this now on the agenda?’
‘I,’ Django paused, ‘actually, no – I don’t suppose I would. I don’t know, Cat. With this cancer business, might I have told you?’ Django shook his head. ‘I don’t know. What’s important in all of this? I don’t know. I sway from thinking it matters not one jot, to it mattering a lot.’
Cat nodded but she didn’t understand.
‘I would hate Fen or Pip to think I ever loved them less,’ Django said, sounding weighed down and tired, ‘because the truth is, I simply couldn’t have loved any of you more.’
Cat waited for the information t
o reach her brain, though she knew it might take a while longer, weeks, months even, for it to settle comfortably in her soul.
‘I suppose you girls ought to think of it as you are my daughter and they are my adopted daughters.’ Django paused. ‘Take Tom – he’s about to have a baby brother or sister made by his mother and her new husband but I don’t think he’ll ever doubt that he’s loved equally. And if Zac and Pip ever have a child, I can’t imagine that Tom would feel they had more love for their offspring.’
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ said Cat, rubbing her forehead. Over the last month she found she could only spend limited time on the subject before a headache encroached. She felt like a soaked sponge; she’d absorbed so much that she was clogged; if she wasn’t careful much of the cherished information would start to leak because she did not have the capacity to hold so much, as yet. ‘So who was this Django Reinhardt?’ she asked, needing to veer off at a tangent.
Django sighed, partly with relief, partly with pleasure, partly with comfort that this topic was one he could happily and knowledgeably discourse on for the duration of this radioactive trip.
‘Django Reinhardt was the stuff of legend,’ he began as if starting a biopic, his voice animated in contrast to the hush with which he’d previously spoken.
‘When are we talking?’ Cat asked.
‘Well, he was born in 1910,’ said Django, ‘to a gypsy family. He was a banjo prodigy by the age of nine, horribly burnt and partially paralysed by a fire in his caravan when he was eighteen.’ He checked to see that Cat looked suitably alarmed. ‘Because of his handicap, he had to invent a technique to play at all – he’d use a whalebone collar-stiffener as a plectrum and a two-fingered method with sudden explosions of strumming.’ Django gave a brief air-guitar demonstration, which made Cat laugh. ‘His discovery of jazz – and his friendship with Stephane Grappelli, the great violinist, resulted in a musical marriage which gave birth to a new sound. He wouldn’t play tunes straight. Gypsy music delights in improvisation and embellishment so Django and Stephane would take the melody of a dance or song as a starting point – “Sweet Georgia Brown”, or “Jeepers Creepers”, or “Ain’t Misbehavin”—’
‘I know those!’ Cat interrupted, feeling proud rather than embarrassed that other waiting patients appeared to be listening in now. ‘The house used to ring out with them.’
‘His guitar had a voice that was near-human,’ Django said dreamily. ‘Everyone wanted to play with him. From trumpeter Bill Coleman, to trombonist Dicky Wells, to harmonica player Larry Adler and, just before the war, the mighty Duke Ellington.’
‘I’ve heard of him!’ Cat said proudly, aware that an elderly man sitting opposite was nodding to himself.
‘Of course you have,’ said Django as if it was the most basic part of anyone’s education. ‘After the war, Dizzy Gillespie.’
‘I’ve heard of him too!’ Cat exclaimed.
‘I would jolly well hope so,’ said Django, sharing a raised eyebrow with the pensioner opposite. ‘During the war, in occupied France, American jazz records were banned but the musicians set up a Resistance of their own – putting out hundreds of jazz records but with camouflaged titles. Silly Huns never cottoned on. After the war, Django and Stephane reunited in London and reformed their old quintet – at the BBC’s request. Their apotheosis was to famously rerecord the Marseillaise – which had been banned from the airwaves for many years. Django Reinhardt’s ultimate triumph, in his final recording, was to reconcile jazz with the electric guitar. And then he died.’
‘When?’ Cat asked, shocked at the bluntness of the end of the story, horribly aware that they were sitting in a hospital, desperate to be distracted away again.
‘In 1953,’ Django told her, ‘on May 16th.’
‘That’s your birthday,’ Cat noted sadly.
‘He was only forty-three years old,’ said Django McCabe even more sadly.
‘Poor Django,’ said Cat. Quietly, she sat and thought to herself that if her Django hadn’t had his career cut short by the demands of three small girls, he’d probably still be living in Paris, a life as colourful and creative as his namesake. She glanced at him. She knew every whisker on his extravagant sideburns, every furl and kink of his pony-tail, every dint on his forehead. And she knew that Fen knew them too. As did Pip.
He gave himself to us, he did. Entirely. I don’t know anyone as well as I know him. Not even Ben, I suppose. I’ve had a lifetime of knowing Django.
She linked her arm through his. ‘Hum me your favourite Django Reinhardt tune,’ she asked him, laying her head against his arm; closing her eyes as the vibration of his humming ‘Georgia On My Mind’ travelled through to her heart.
I can’t believe you’re my father. My real father. My own dad. My very own daddy. The thing is, you’re so nice to share. Pip and Fen might never be able to say ‘my real father’ in connection with you – but they’ll always be able to say ‘our very own father’.
Say it out loud, Cat.
I can’t seem to.
‘All right petal, time for your photo shoot.’ The nurse had appeared, accompanied by a porter with an empty wheel-chair. Momentarily, Cat thought she spoke to her. It seemed very odd to refer to Django as ‘petal’.
‘Your limo awaits,’ said the porter, giving the wheelchair a twirl.
‘I can walk,’ Django objected.
‘We’d rather you didn’t, duck,’ the nurse chided amicably.
‘I pride myself on a smooth ride,’ the porter protested, with a wink to Cat. ‘You’ll not find finer in the whole of Derbyshire.’
‘Can I come?’ Cat asked urgently, not wanting to leave him, or be without him.
‘Only room for one,’ the porter said, ‘and I don’t do pillion.’
‘I meant—’
‘I know,’ the nurse said.
‘Can she come?’ Django asked.
‘Of course she can,’ said the nurse, ‘as far as any of us can go. Come along ducky. How are you feeling, Mr McCabe?’
‘Please,’ he said, easing himself down into the wheelchair, ‘call me Django.’
Cat insisted that she drove the 2CV back to Farleymoor though Django was a notoriously annoying passenger, stamping on imaginary brake pedals and gasping when corners were not taken at the angle he would have chosen.
‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre,’ he muttered under his breath at regular intervals.
‘It’s a beautiful afternoon,’ Cat said, when they arrived back in Farleymoor, ‘shall we go for a walk?’
‘I’m a little tired,’ Django said.
‘Are you feeling all right?’ Cat asked. ‘You look a little pale – not the Chernobyl glow we were expecting.’
‘Just a little tired.’
‘Sit in the garden,’ Cat told him, repositioning the ancient Lloyd Loom chair. ‘I’ll make a pot of tea.’
By the time she came out, Django was fast asleep. She sat on the grass, listening to him breathing, the occasional extravagant, gruffled snore that always made the sisters laugh. Pip tape-recorded him once.
Cat looked at him. His mouth was slightly open, the deep laughter lines around his eyes a map of his life. ‘Dad,’ she said quietly.
‘Daddy.
Dadda.
Pops.
Da.
Papa.
Pa.’
None of them actually suited him. Tellingly, nor did he awaken.
‘Derek,’ she said softly. Certainly not. On he slept.
‘Django,’ she all but whispered.
‘Yes?’
He could only ever be Django, really.
‘Sorry – did I wake you?’
‘Heavens, what’s the time? How long have I been asleep?’
‘About an hour,’ Cat told him. ‘I can make this into iced tea,’ she said, tapping the teapot. ‘My train leaves in a couple of hours.’
So iced tea it was.
‘I’ve ordered a cab – I don’t want you driving,’ she said, ‘but I can
stay, Django, if you like. I’m sure work will give me dispensation.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Django said. ‘What’s a bit of radioactivity? I can drive you.’
‘No,’ Cat insisted. ‘You can – but you won’t.’
He shrugged.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, shyly.
‘Of course,’ Django said, clenching his jaw on a yawn.
‘Maybe when you’re not tired,’ Cat wavered, thinking better of it.
‘Ask now,’ he told her.
‘Do you think it’s a bit ominous,’ she asked, ‘that I wasn’t really born of Love? That actually, I was the result of Adultery? A brief fling?’
Django sipped his tea silently. ‘Don’t be overly biblical and sanctimonious, Catriona,’ he said crossly.
She plucked at the grass and thought about it. ‘Sorry,’ she said after a while.
‘Let me ask you something,’ Django said. He was feeling supremely tired now, a little nauseous too. ‘Should I not expect you to love me more than Fen or Pip love me?’ He let the concept hang. ‘You’re my daughter after all, aren’t you? You’re my real daughter, my proper daughter,’ he tapped her quite briskly on the shoulder. ‘Don’t you think you ought to love me the most?’
Cat was simultaneously taken aback by his challenge and humbled by the astuteness of the remark. She felt immediate remorse. She’d so rarely been chastised by Django and neither had Pip or Fen. Their family dynamic had hardly ever necessitated it.
‘None of us could love you more,’ she proclaimed, relishing the new sense of clarity. Her smile grew from her soul and she could see the positive effect it had on Django. ‘I’m ashamed to admit that we tried to love you less – last month,’ she revealed, ‘but we couldn’t do that either.’
VT 05154
An early symptom of Django’s cancer was to effectively kill off the anger and hurt that Fen and Pip had each experienced towards him since his birthday. It was as if the diagnosis packed up the past and placed life gently on new ground with a firmer footing. Cancer would define them, all of them. They would become nicer people for it. In the meantime Fen and Pip decreed that whatever had happened BC – before cancer – was largely irrelevant. They would pull together; life was too short, family was everything. Cat did so want to flow with their energy but unconditional love and trust were still in a holding bay, guarded by a self-protective wariness. She found herself both chipping away at it but building it back up too.
