by Shari Low
‘OK, I’ll just whisper sweet nothings to Lizzy instead then,’ I joked. I’d barely finished the sentence when I realised that something wasn’t quite right beside me. There was a weight, something heavy, something . . . There was a violent thud as Lizzy hit the floor.
The next few moments were bedlam as Adam and Alex spotted what had happened and swooped in. Adam quickly slid his arms under Lizzy and moved her the few feet back into the staffroom and laid her on the couch.
‘Call an ambulance! Call an ambulance!’ Adam yelled. I snatched my phone from the coffee table and dialled 999, while Adam and Alex frantically tried to revive her. Josie dashed into the kitchen area and returned with a glass of water, meanwhile Ginger and Red stood against the door, blocking it so that no one else could come in.
After what seemed like hours, I finally got through to the operator. I answered the woman’s questions about location, barely containing myself until she got to the bit where she asked why I’d called.
‘I need an ambulance please, really quickly! It’s my friend Lizzy Murphy - she’s fainted and we can’t get her to wake up. She’s got food poisoning and . . . and . . . what?’
Adam was signalling to me and saying stuff at the same time but in the confusion it took me a few moments to understand what he was trying to convey. I got it on his fourth or fifth attempt and almost choked on my words as I repeated what he’d said.
‘And she’s pregnant,’ I gasped. ‘Lizzy is pregnant.’
Forty-five
‘It’s here! I can hear it!’ We all stopped speaking and listened for the sound of the siren approaching the delivery bay at the back. Incredibly, right on the other side of the staffroom door, a hundred people were still partying away, completely oblivious to what was going on right next to them.
Red disappeared through to let the paramedics in and within seconds they were in front of Lizzy, forcing Adam and Alex to back off. They started firing questions at us as they took her pulse and attached an oxygen mask to her face.
‘Did she bang her head?’
‘No.’
‘Did she vomit?’
‘No.’
‘Has she come round at all?’
‘No.’
‘How long has she been pregnant?’
‘Almost three months.’ Adam answered that one, and I couldn’t help moving my eyes to meet Ginger’s.
I could see that she’d had no idea either.
The questions were shooting around my brain. Who was the father? Was she even seeing anyone? Why didn’t we know about him? And why, why, why had she not told us that she was pregnant?
I didn’t understand what was happening here at all.
The paramedics lifted her from the sofa onto a stretcher, and then suddenly one of them froze for a few seconds, then eased Lizzy up and looked underneath her, before looking around him, his face a picture of puzzlement.
‘You said she didn’t bang her head or anything else when she fell?’ It was more of a question than a statement.
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. She kind of fell against me and then slid downwards.’
He looked down at his gloves and then back at me again. ‘So where’s the blood coming from?’
The gasp when I spotted his hands was audible. They were streaked with thin stripes of crimson red. ‘I don’t . . . I don’t know.’
I looked around me and saw little spatters of blood every- where. But if it wasn’t coming from Lizzy then where . . .
As I spun around, suddenly Red spoke up. ‘Lou, it’s coming from you, your back . . . holy shit.’
I craned my neck to see what he was talking about and that’s when I saw it – a red stain about two inches in diameter, spreading right down one buttock of my dress.
The paramedic moved in for a closer inspection as his partner wheeled Lizzy out. ‘Let’s have a look, love. It’s maybe just a scratch where she rubbed against you.’
I could feel a wave of irritation rising. What did it matter? It was just a cut. I barely even felt a thing. It was Lizzy that he had to take care of. Why was he wasting time with me when he should be in that ambulance and rushing her to hospital right now?
‘Honestly, I’m fine,’ I tried to tell him, practically shooing him away from me.
‘Lou, let him look.’ Red’s voice, unusually firm and clearly not up for entering into discussion.
The paramedic crouched down and moved the fabric draped across my lower back over to one side, before reaching into his box and coming out with a gauze wipe.
There was a little prickle of pain as he cleaned off the area, but I didn’t react, embarrassingly aware that Josie, Red and Ginger were right there, waiting for some kind of comment. What the hell was taking him so long? Lizzy needed to go now.
‘How long have you had this mole on your back, love?’
The question took me by complete surprise. Sure, I was vaguely aware that there was a little mole down there but there was no way for me to see it without a mirror and I couldn’t remember the last time I noticed it.
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘All my life I think, since I was a child.’
‘Has it ever bled before?’
‘No,’ I replied, genuinely confused. ‘Never.’
Red moved forwards now for a closer look and I caught an expression on his face that I really didn’t like. ‘I’ve never seen it looking like that,’ he said. ‘It’s normally smaller and not so . . . dark.’
The paramedic held the gauze on with one hand and, with the other, reached over and took some tape from his case. One makeshift dressing later, he got to his feet.
‘Just get your doctor to have a wee look at that on Monday, love. Best to get these things checked.’
Leaving Josie to see to the end of the party, Red, Ginger, Adam, Alex and I followed the flashing blue light to the hospital, all of us struck silent with the shock of the last hour.
It was only later that I realised that night was certainly one to remember.
But for all the heartbreakingly wrong reasons.
Forty-six
Lou
The St Kentigern Hotel, Glasgow. Saturday, 2pm
‘They didn’t tell us that back then, did they?’ I whispered to Lizzy.
The concern and worry was in every tear that was dropping from her face. ‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t going to talk about it. It’s just that . . .’
Her arm came around me and she hugged me close.
‘It could have been any of us,’ she mused, truthfully. She was right. For most of the 80s, we were permanent shades of copper, our backless, frontless, mini-dresses exposing acres of brown flesh. It was the done thing. Aerobics class then a sunbed. A quick sunbed in the lunch hour. A course of sunbeds before any big occasion. Any excuse.
It absolutely could have been Lizzy or Ginger.
But it wasn’t.
I remember there being a vague rumour that they might cause wrinkles but no one ever mentioned cancer. Ever. Now that horrible truth is common knowledge. If there’s one lesson I hope Cassie learns when she’s old enough to understand all this it’s that she should stay away from sunbeds. Because if she doesn’t then she might wake up one morning and be faced with the most terrifying thought. I finally had it all. I had the gorgeous husband, the beautiful child, the successful business, great friends, and the sheer brilliance that was Auntie Josie. I was a woman of the new millennium who absolutely had it all . . . and I realised it might be too late.
At the bottom of the bed, there was a stirring and Ginger’s head popped up into view. The first thing she saw was Lizzy and me, cuddled up, both crying. For the second time in her life, I heard her murmur the same phrase.
‘So . . . what did I miss?’
Forty-seven
Lou
2008 – Aged 38
It’s strange, facing your own mortality. Perhaps ‘strange’ isn’t the best adjective to use there. I’m also particularly fond of ‘devastating’, ‘terrifying’ and ‘sh
ite’.
I think about it all the time now. As soon as I wake up in the morning. Before I go to bed at night. When Cassie smiles at me or refuses to eat her jam sandwich because I used a knife that had traces of butter on it and ‘you can absolutely tell’. When she cries. When she comes home and announces that someone was mean to her. When the headmistress calls to say she threw toilet roll bombs in the corridor. When she’s sad. When she can’t sleep. When . . . all the time.
And it makes me do strange things, like cry when I’m putting the washing out. Or stand for a long time staring at something completely random that has absolutely no significance. The ten minutes I spent yesterday perusing a road cone was particularly engaging. I’ve no idea why it happens. It’s like my brain freezes, locks in position and I’m stuck there until some kind of hope or optimism kick-starts the synapses again. But the strangest things are the conversations, with Cassie, in my head, like the one I’m having right now. Strange because she can’t hear them. Strange because she’ll never know that when I heard that diagnosis the first thing I thought of was her.
I’d planned to go to the hospital alone, perhaps just with Red, but the decision had been taken out of our hands.
‘Budge up, Fatty, and give me a seat.’ Ginger, clutching two plastic cups of Starbucks skinny lattes, dished out the orders to Josie, who sat there, dressed head to toe in black – polo-neck jumper, wide-leg pants, patent boots. I had no idea why. She’d been dressing like this since she spent a rainy afternoon watching back-to-back 50s movies. I think she was going for the dark, classic style of Audrey Hepburn, but instead she looked like a ninja warrior from a Jackie Chan film.
‘Ginger, you’re not too old for me to slap the back of those legs,’ Josie warned her. ‘And the wobble of that cellulite could destabilise the Earth’s core.’
Ginger immediately flicked her gob to outraged. ‘I do not have cellulite!’
‘Do.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Do.’
I zoned them out, realising that I’d been getting more sense and maturity out of my imaginary conversation with a six-year-old. The clock made an extra-loud click as it hit the hour. Two o’clock. My appointment was running an hour late, but I didn’t mind. Over the months that I’d been coming here I’d realised that if the schedule had been pushed back, it often meant that bad news had been delivered to someone earlier on the conveyor belt, jamming up the finely tuned machine. Good news equals a happy patient who is swift to exit. Bad news means tears, strategies, plans and questions.
Questions.
Hundreds of questions.
The one that regularly comes at me from anyone involved in my case, the one that never fails to make me wince inside is, ‘How often did you use sunbeds?’
Several times a week, for about three years. In fact, I spent the years from eighteen to twenty-one looking like I’d just stepped off the plane after a week in Benidorm. It was the fashion, you see. White mini-dresses. White high heels. Pink lip gloss. Bloody huge hair.
At that age, I’d had absolutely no idea sunbeds could harm me. Back then, if I was to hazard a guess I’d have said the biggest risk of mortal danger came from inhaling the four cans of hairspray I went through every week trying to keep my coiffure on the right side of Cindy Crawford.
But sunbeds? Nope, they were all good. Healthy, even. Made you look like you were glowing with vitality. If having skin colour that resembled the deep mahogany hue of my garden hut was wrong, then I didn’t want to be right. Never gave it a second thought.
Twenty years later that casual nonchalance had come back and bit me on the non-tanned arse because since the moment the diagnosis had been delivered, it was all I thought about.
‘Mrs. Jones, we’ve had the results of the biopsy and I’m afraid our suspicions have been confirmed. It is a malignant melanoma.’
Skin cancer. And it was his educated guess that it had probably been caused by overuse of sunbeds almost two decades ago.
I remember watching a programme about the space shuttle Challenger, which blew up on take-off, killing all of the astronauts on board. The cause? The malfunction of a seal that had been fitted on the spaceship years before, just sitting there all that time, waiting to cause carnage.
The melanoma was my dodgy seal.
And I had no idea whether I was about to crash and burn.
Forty-eight
Lizzy’s sunflower-yellow kitchen was like a scene from one of those TV cookery shows that sought to recreate the perfect, traditional family environment: sumptuous aromas emanating from the impressively large Aga, a white wood, granite-topped centre island hosting two huge baskets of fruit, a Jamie Oliver book propped on a wire stand, copper pots dangling from the ceiling, a beautifully carved dresser that stored exquisite Wedgewood crockery in vertical plate racks. No one had to know that she kept a back-up supply in the cupboard under the stairs because fine china and Lizzy’s level of clumsiness did not make natural companions.
In the middle of the long, rustic pine dining table over by the wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, was a huge vase of daffodils picked from the garden that was accessed through the nearby French doors. In the corner, a flowery, chintz sofa sat behind a thick oak coffee table that was strewn with books and old copies of Good Housekeeping magazine. Lizzy could have come from the lifestyle pages. She’d aged beautifully, hardly a line on her porcelain face, her jet-black hair still tumbling in waves down her back, her figure still the size ten it had been since we were in high school.
Yes, it was the absolute picture of a traditional family home. With the exception of the baby that came courtesy of the housewife’s gay ex-husband, his partner, an egg donation from an anonymous source and a test tube.
I picked Caleb up out of his bassinet and snuggled him, loving that intoxicating scent of new baby. At four weeks old he had the most adorable big eyes, honey-coloured skin, cherub mouth and a shock of light-brown hair that could have belong to either of his fathers. They’d chosen not to find out which swimmers in the fertilisation race had crossed the finish line first, so Caleb was either Adam’s or Alex’s biological son. It would probably come to light later depending on whether he excelled at counting or arguing in the name of justice.
‘What time are the guys picking him up?’ I asked, hoping that it wouldn’t be anytime soon.
‘Soon,’ she replied.
Right then.
‘But they might stay for dinner so Caleb will be here for a while yet.’
Right on cue, he gurgled and wrapped his whole hand around my little finger, making my hormones slide up another notch on the broody scale. I adored my girl and I’d been thinking more and more lately that it was time for a brother and sister. But of course that would only happen if . . . if .. .
‘When’s the next biopsy?’ Lizzy asked.
‘Next week. It’s the big one. Lymph nodes.’
Two arms came from behind me and snaked around my neck, followed by a loud smacker on the cheek.
‘It’s going to be fine, Lou. The tests will be negative and then you can forget about it, have more babies and we’ll train them young how to pour cocktails so we can put our feet up and have a life of leisure and indulgence.’
‘If we did that we’d never get rid of Ginger. She’d just move in and put them on a fifteen-minute schedule,’ I said, laughing at the thought. ‘Anyway, I’d better get home. Red is coming back tonight and the house is so untidy it looks like it’s been ransacked. I know it’s probably psychosomatic, but I feel permanently exhausted these days.’
‘Sex. You’re having too much sex – it’s obviously wearing you out. Anyway, Red called when you were in the loo and I told him just to come over and have dinner here. There’s a lasagne in the oven that could feed the street.’
This was why I loved my friends. They didn’t let me wallow, they kept me on an even keel, they subtly helped without being overbearing and this one could cook like she was the love child of Delia Smith and Gordon Ramsay. Wh
ich, if it were true, would explain why she liked football and swore a lot. I wanted to stay in the warm comfort of Lizzy’s kitchen forever, drinking tea, chatting and plotting ways to kidnap Caleb and make him my own.
I turned my attention back to playing with the handsome little bundle in my arms. ‘Still no regrets?’
It was out before tact and diplomacy could slap some gaffer tape on my gob.
Lizzy shook her head. ‘Not one. OK, well, maybe not telling you lot before hand. If you’d known then you’d probably have reminded me to eat and drink and I wouldn’t have keeled over at the salon launch. I felt like such a tit when I woke up in A&E. But anyway, you know I didn’t want to tell you in case you tried to talk me out of it.’
‘Which I would probably have tried to do,’ I said. She was so right. I’ve yet to find the manual that deals with dissuading your best friend from having her gay ex-husband’s baby but if I’m being completely honest I would probably have tried – not because I was in any way opposed to it on moral grounds, but because I feared for her heart. Yet, it had worked out perfectly for all of them. After seven years together, Alex and Adam had married in a civil ceremony and now they had the child they’d always dreamed of. They’d originally planned to use a surrogate, but Lizzy had offered her services and her womb, and on the second implant attempt at an Edinburgh fertility clinic, they’d hit the baby-making jackpot.
Lizzy was their childminder, best friend and the third person in their marriage, and that was exactly the way they all liked it. I just worried that Lizzy was so enmeshed in her alternative family that she left no time for meeting anyone new or moving on with her life. Could someone really be happy spending their whole life taking care of other people? Didn’t she need to find love again, to explore new things, new interests, have her own goals and ambitions, to have someone who adored her and wanted to grow old with her? Looking at the picture of homely contentment in front of me I could see she was fulfilled, but still. Objective number one of the year: get rid of cancer. Objective number two: find brooding big hunky sexy single doctor for Lizzy.
