No Reason To Die

by Hilary Bonner

  Moira was terminally ill with cancer of the liver. And although the disease had only been diagnosed four months earlier, this notoriously fast-developing form of cancer had already brought her close to the end.

  Kelly and Moira had never quite shared a home together, but they had none the less shared each other’s lives for more than ten years. Throughout that time Moira had spent only limited periods in her own house, until the last few weeks in fact. By then Kelly had found himself quite unable to cope with his partner’s illness. Almost before it began to really take a hold of her, he had realised that he could not possibly nurse her. Moira, who had been a nursing sister at Torbay Hospital, had, Kelly later realised, been aware of that from the beginning and had made it easy for him by telling him there was absolutely no way she was going to let him attempt to care for her and, in doing so, doubtless botch up whatever life she had left to live.

  That had actually made Kelly feel even more of a worm. But Moira’s daughters had promptly volunteered to share between them the task of caring for their mother in her own home until the end, and Kelly remained deeply grateful to them.

  Paula, the eldest, drove down from London every week or so to spend several days with her mother, sometimes bringing her four-year-old son Dominic with her, and sometimes leaving him either with his dad, Ben, or with her mother-in-law. Lynne, the middle girl, came home each weekend from Bristol, where she was at university. And Jennifer, at barely nineteen the youngest of them, carried the biggest burden of all. She had returned to England after a gap year of travelling, following sixth form college, to find her mother in the grips of this terrible disease. Without appearing to pause for thought at all, she had promptly deferred a planned university course for another year and moved back into her mother’s home announcing that she was going to take charge of caring for Moira, which she had continued to do uncomplainingly, helped as much as possible by her sisters. Kelly thought young Jennifer was a miracle on legs. Indeed, he thought all the girls were. And they really did put him to shame.

  As he pulled up outside Moira’s house, a three-bedroomed terraced job uncannily similar to his own home, even down to the angular style of the bay window at the front, Kelly leaned back in his seat and tried to prepare himself for the right sort of approach to a sick visit. He knew he had never got over the shock of Moira’s diagnosis and the speed of her decline. Almost every day he intended to spend at least part of the evening with Moira, but one way and another, he actually seemed to be visiting her less and less. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. John Kelly cared about Moira probably as much as it was possible for him to care about anyone. It was just that he did not want to confront the grim reality of Moira’s condition, so he refused to think about it. All too often that was Kelly’s way. And it had probably been one of the main reasons why many years ago he had so casually embarked along the road that had led him to near-terminal drug and alcohol abuse. Kelly had spent far too much of his life looking for ways to obliterate reality.

  He took a big, deep, long breath, stepped out of the car and made himself approach the front door, first walking through a little front garden, which was also pretty much like his own except that he knew there was not a single weed to be seen in the pristine-neat flowerbeds surrounding a rectangular patch of stone paving. On the doorstep he stood for a few seconds more, taking another deep breath, before ringing the bell. Kelly had his own key, of course, but since Moira had become ill and the girls had been there looking after her, he had stopped using it. He couldn’t explain why exactly.

  Jennifer opened the door. She was a slim, pretty girl with a shock of fair hair like her mother’s, kind hazel-brown eyes, a big bright smile and long athletic limbs, who had absolutely no idea at all that she was attractive. John Kelly didn’t really notice that any more either. All he saw was one of the bravest, strongest human beings he had ever met. She was so young and yet she was coping so well with her mother’s illness. Certainly, she had taken it upon herself to ensure that her mother’s last days were made as comfortable as was humanly possible.

  She flashed her brightest smile when she saw Kelly on the doorstep. He didn’t know how she could do it. He could see the strain around those hazel eyes, and he was sure her mother could too, but Jennifer was still putting on a front.

  ‘I-I’m sorry,’ he muttered in greeting.

  Jennifer reached up and kissed him lightly on one cheek. She was quite tall, considerably taller than her petite mother, that was for sure, but Kelly, a good six foot two in his stockinged feet, still towered over her.

  ‘You’re here,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s all that matters.’

  ‘I did mean to come earlier, Jens …’

  ‘I know.’

  She did know too. Kelly and Jennifer had been friends from the start, from the moment he had first dated her mother. He supposed that even he was something of an improvement on her real father, a middle-class, middle England thug of a man who had systematically beaten his wife throughout their unhappy marriage. According to Moira none of the girls knew about their father’s brutality, but Kelly had never been too sure about that. One way and another, he had come to treasure his relationship with all three of them every bit as much as his relationship with their mother. Perhaps more, if he was honest. Kelly had one son, Nick, now a grown man almost thirty years old, but he had somehow contrived to miss virtually all of Nick’s childhood. Nick had been brought up almost entirely by his mother, not only after she and Kelly had separated but also before, because Kelly had spent so much time away on stories and in the pubs and clubs of Fleet Street that he had only rarely seemed to be at home. More recently, after Nick had actively sought out his father following years of estrangement, the two men had begun to build what Kelly regarded as a very special relationship. But ironically he had seen far more of the growing up of Moira’s girls, as they moved from childhood into young womanhood, particularly Jennifer who had been only nine when her mother and Kelly had got together, than he had of his own son. And over the years they really had become like daughters to him. They had already forgiven him one hell of a lot, too.

  Recently, however, he had become slightly embarrassed to be in the company of these girls he adored. He supposed that was just one manifestation of the guilt which seemed to consume his entire being throughout most of his waking hours, right now. The girls accepted him, warts and all, always had done, and had never questioned his congenital inability to deal with their mother’s illness.

  Kelly followed Jennifer upstairs to Moira’s bedroom, the pair of them moving almost soundlessly on the thick pile red carpet. He knew that Moira had not been downstairs for more than a week now, although she did still manage, with some difficulty he had been told, to struggle out of bed in order to use the bathroom next to her bedroom.

  Moira’s eldest daughter Paula, also a pretty, fair-haired young woman, but a little plumper than either of her sisters, was sitting by her bed. The two women were watching TV. Kelly found himself glancing towards the screen as he entered the room. Anything other than look at Moira. An old episode of The Vicar of Dibley, a programme which had always been one of Moira’s favourites, flickered away on Plus. Kelly had once bought Moira the entire video set of the comedy featuring Dawn French as a village’s first woman vicar as a birthday present, and the two of them had sat up in bed one night and watched virtually the whole lot straight through – something Kelly had, rather to his surprise, found that he had enjoyed every bit as much as Moira. It had been dawn before they had finally fallen asleep, his arm around her shoulders, her head resting on his chest, with the video still running. The memory hurt. Kelly concentrated hard on the flickering screen. In her bed by the window, Moira laughed weakly. She always had had a ready laugh, but it used to be a deep rip-roaring rumble of a laugh, which had always come as something of a surprise from such a small woman. A great hip-shaking eye-watering belter of a laugh. Kelly had teased her that she had the filthiest laugh in Devon, and that had always set her off al
l the more.

  His eyes filled at the thought.

  ‘Hello, John.’ Moira’s voice was even weaker than her laugh.

  Shit, thought Kelly. How could anyone cope with this? What were they all supposed to do? Just sit around and wait for her to die?

  Aloud he said: ‘Hello, sweetheart.’

  He made himself smile and walked over to the bed where he perched on the edge and took her hand. Moira had always been pretty and all three of her daughters had inherited their mother’s looks. Her fluffy blonde hair still retained its original colour in spite of her age and illness, and she continued to look surprisingly good even though there were dark circles beneath her eyes and her skin was pale to the point of near translucence. In fact, she looked almost beautiful. Her face was drawn, thin skin taut over exposed cheekbones, while previously Moira’s face had been quite plump, and although pretty, never beautiful. Not really. Her illness had added a sculpted look, and in the low light of the bedroom the yellowish tinge, which Kelly knew had been acquired due to liver deficiency, appeared only to give her skin a cream hue. Yes, she really had become quite tragically beautiful.

  She had lost a lot of weight, of course, but she exhibited none of the usual signs of a body ravaged by cancer. That was because Moira, an experienced nurse who knew all about the illness she was bearing so gallantly, had, when she had been told the degree and extent of her cancer, opted to decline conventional treatment. Moira had believed that with her kind of cancer and the extent to which it had already destroyed her liver, her life expectancy would be much the same whether she put herself through the rigours of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, or whether she didn’t.

  And both Kelly and her daughters had accepted her decision that she would rather live out her last few months without having to cope with the cruelties she knew those treatments could inflict, instead choosing to allow her illness to take its course while striving to enjoy whatever of life was left to her. Her courage so far had been extraordinary, although Kelly was bewildered sometimes by the form it took. It was Moira’s way to barely discuss her illness, and if she did ever mention it, to do so in such a manner that she gave no indication at all that it was terminal. She knew, though. Better than any of them, she knew.

  ‘How are you doing, darling?’ he muttered, cursing himself as he became aware of what he had said. How was she doing? What a stupid fucking question. Whether she chose to talk about it or not, the woman was dying. His woman was dying. How did he think she was doing, for fuck’s sake. He glanced away, blinking rapidly.

  ‘Oh, not so bad,’ said Moira.

  ‘Yes, we thought you were a little better today, Mum, didn’t we?’ interjected Paula.

  ‘You know, I do believe I was,’ continued Moira. ‘I’ve not had a bad day at all, not at all.’

  ‘You ate nearly all of that chicken broth I made you this evening, didn’t you, Mum?’

  ‘I did, dear. And, do you know, I really enjoyed it.’

  Kelly felt his shoulders tensing. He wasn’t sure how much of this he could listen to. It was the same every time. The imminence of Moira’s death was never mentioned, and to Kelly the scene around her bed all too often resembled a cross between a Brian Rix farce and something out of Alan Bennett. If it weren’t so fucking tragic, it really would be funny, he thought.

  It was as if they all had parts in a play and were acting out their specific roles. Only Kelly wasn’t very good at his. He sometimes thought he might do better if he were allowed to talk properly to Moira about her illness, about the death which was not far away and about how she felt, knowing that she would not be around for much longer. That was what he wanted to do, deep inside, but Moira had made it quite clear that was not her way. And in any case, if she suddenly did start to talk to him in that manner, he suspected he wouldn’t be able to cope with that either. After all, Kelly was just as much of an ostrich as all of them. Worse really, he supposed. He did not even want to be in the same room as poor sick Moira, let alone make inconsequential small talk.

  Moira squeezed his hand.

  ‘So, come on, John, tell us how the book’s going. What sort of day have you had?’

  Kelly looked at her blankly. Once again, the truth did not seem quite the reply to make. What sort of day had he had? As seemed to be his habit, he had failed to write a single word. He had then gone to a pub, even though he dared not even have a beer, ostensibly to think, and more likely in a deliberate subconscious ploy both to avoid attempting to write and to evade seeing Moira. In the pub, he had met a frightened young man who had told him that he feared for his life. The young man had, however, been very drunk. None the less, a little later Kelly had watched his dead body being loaded into an ambulance, and his veteran reporter’s brain had promptly begun to jerk into gear to such an extent that he had been able to shift his promised visit to Moira from the back of his mind straight out of his head altogether.

  That was the sort of day he’d had.

  ‘Pretty good, really,’ he said. ‘Another couple of thousand words done and dusted.’

  Four

  The next morning Kelly felt absolutely terrible. The alarm clock woke him at six and he managed to force himself out of bed within half an hour of being disturbed by its insistent shrill bleeping, which was pretty good for Kelly, who was not a man who had ever enjoyed mornings.

  Whenever he had writing of any kind to do, he found that making an early start, before his brain became clogged up with other things, was the best and most efficient way to undertake the task. But lately, his enforced early rising had been a waste of energy and the pain inflicted had led absolutely nowhere, because Kelly seemed incapable of putting words onto paper whatever time he hauled himself out of bed, and early starts just made him feel tired and irritable throughout the day, more often than not.

  Resolutely, he made his way downstairs to the kitchen and brewed himself a strong pot of English Breakfast tea. The steaming, hot, dark brown liquid, into which he ladled his customary three spoonfuls of sugar, hit the back of his throat like a blast of pure adrenaline. By God, sweet tea was the best reviver invented by mankind, he thought. Although, of course, it would never again taste quite so good to Kelly as it had during the many years when he had relied on it to cope with his regular morning hangovers. There was among certain people, nondrinkers, Kelly suspected, a theory that alcoholics didn’t have hangovers. From extensive personal experience, Kelly did not agree with that. In fact, looking back, his drinking days had been more or less one long hangover, punctuated only by moments of total oblivion.

  He put pot, milk bottle and sugar bowl, along with the mug of tea he had already poured and a packet of chocolate digestive biscuits, onto a tray and carried the lot upstairs to his third and smallest bedroom, which he used as an office. Sitting down on his swivel-action black leather chair, he tried to make his body and mind relax as he switched on his computer. Perhaps this would be the morning, the morning when he would finally get it all together, when he would start to write at once and the words would continue to flow effortlessly and smoothly throughout the day.

  Kelly took another long drink of the sweet, dark brown tea and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Writing, of course, was never like that. Not for John Kelly, anyway. It was instead a long drawn-out torture of inactivity. Kelly continued to find that his biggest problem in attempting to write a book was that he found the task ahead of him so overwhelmingly daunting that he barely saw the point in beginning it.

  The screen before him shimmered into life and Kelly reached for his mouse, darting the cursor between the various icons before him. The documents containing the little of his book he had so far managed to compile were each called ‘Untitled’. Kelly had never been very good at titles.

  He moved the cursor until it settled neatly pointing at ‘Untitled Chapter Three’, and allowed it to rest there for a while. Kelly had written ‘Untitled Chapter One’ in one big glorious rush, within days of quitting his job on the Argus four months
previously. Filled with enthusiasm for his chosen new career, he’d found that the words had really flowed.

  But that seemed like a lifetime ago. His flow had quickly slowed to a dribble. He had struggled through a rough draft of chapter two and then stopped altogether, although only he knew that was as far as he had got. ‘Untitled Chapter Three’ had remained a totally blank new document in his computer for almost three months now. And this was seriously bad news, not least because his bank balance was beginning to look extremely thin.

  Kelly had been able to take advantage of a voluntary redundancy scheme operated by the Argus, when he had decided he had had enough of journalism. And he had calculated that the money, quite a generous amount for a local paper to offer, could, if he was careful, last him the best part of a year, and that that would, of course, be plenty of time in which to complete his first novel. Which would be an instant best seller. Well, Kelly was too realistic about writing to have ever thought that, but he had been confident enough of his own ability as a professional scribe to believe that he would eventually acquire a publisher for almost any sort of writing that he put his hand to.

  Kelly was, however, not naturally careful with money. And although he did not consider himself in any way extravagant, and he probably wasn’t, he seemed to be getting through his pay-off at an alarming rate. Certainly, much faster than he had anticipated. Unfortunately, the speed of his writing achievement was not keeping pace at all with his spending. Indeed, not only did it look as if his money was not going to last a year, neither did it look as if a year was going to be nearly long enough for him to complete even the first draft of his novel.

  ‘Fuck it,’ muttered Kelly.

  He flicked the cursor from ‘Untitled Chapter Three’ onto games, selected backgammon, his favourite, and began to play. Situation normal. He dreaded to think how many days of his life he’d totally wasted during these last four months playing computer games.