by Shari Low
Somewhere in amongst that pile of fact and fiction, I’d discovered ‘the happy place’ – a concept that I’d have dismissed as being psychobabble tosh only weeks before became my lifeline. When the situation got too much, the book said, imagine a place or event in your past, somewhere safe and warm, close your eyes and go there until you feel ready to deal with reality again.
Right now I was dealing with terror, dread, a hospital waiting room, green walls, orange chairs, a ninja warrior and a former pop star turned music mogul who was threatening to twang said ninja warrior’s bra until she squealed.
I wanted to be anywhere else but here.
Fifty-three
The clock on the wall clicked at the half-hour and I watched as this time a young, blonde-haired girl, perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two, exited one of the consultation rooms, her beaming smile and joyful demeanour telling the world that she’d had good news.
I wanted to hug her, to tell her to get out of there, slap on the factor fifty, and enjoy every minute of her life because . . .
‘You weren’t going to tell me?’
Red slipped into the seat next to me and nudged my knee with his. The playful gesture was at odds with the tension in his voice and the sweat on his frowning forehead. He’d obviously been running, rushing to get here.
I looked across to Josie and Ginger, both of them heads down, unwilling to meet my gaze. ‘Which one of them cracked?’ I asked him.
‘I can’t say. They said if I told you they’d have to kill me.’
A hand slipped into mine. ‘I’m just glad I got here in time. You don’t have to deal with this without me, Lou. I’m not some kid who needs to be protected.’
‘I know. But you were so adamant about refusing to accept that the results might not go our way that I didn’t want to burst that bubble. I get it, Red. I get the positive thinking and I know that’s how you deal with everything, but I deal with things differently. I need to know all the options and prepare myself for the bad stuff too. And I am. Prepared.’
I took a deep breath. Then out. I would not cry in the waiting room. I would keep it together. And when I got in there I would deal with whatever was dished out. Cancer in the lymph nodes wasn’t a death sentence. They could be removed; I could have radiation, possibly chemotherapy. And if today’s results suggested that it had spread further then there would be more scans, different treatments, further curable actions that could be taken. So even if we didn’t get the verdict that we wanted there was still a massive possibility that I’d be OK. Today wouldn’t come with a large signpost warning of the end of the road.
Surgery. Radiation. Chemo. Options. The worst thing about it all would be having to tell Cassie. Until now, all she knew was that Mum had a funny spot on her back that the doctors had to cut off. If things progressed then . . . we’d handle it. Last night after Red had fallen asleep I’d slipped into her bed and held her for the rest of the night, letting the calm rhythm of her breathing tick away the hours as I made bargain after bargain with God. I’d never been religious, but somehow I felt the urge to give it a shot, just in case.
Please God, let me be OK. I feel like I’ve finally found where I’m supposed to be so please don’t take that away from me yet. I want to cherish what I have – love my husband, watch my daughter grow up. And I’ll do anything, God, anything at all. Just name it and – as long as it isn’t illegal or involving heights – I’ll do it. Just let me get through this. I’ll stop and smell the coffee. I’ll quit sweating the small stuff. I’ll make the most of every day. I’ll conform to every single one of those life-enhancing proverbs and sayings. I’ll do voluntary work, become a missionary, wean Josie off the caramel logs – anything, God, I’ll give you anything at all if you will just get me through this.
Cassie’s calm, measured breathing didn’t provide a response from on high.
But I knew that’s what I had to do now – stay calm, just keep on breathing. Just keep on breathing.
‘Mrs. Jones?’
The nice nurse was back, clutching her clipboard, her tone apologetic.
‘So sorry you had to wait all this time. If you’d like to come through, Doctor Callaghan will see you now.’
Red stood up to come with me and I looked over at Josie and Ginger.
‘We’ll stay here,’ Josie said quietly. ‘Just shout if you need us.’
The nurse led us into a tiny room, with a desk and computer in one corner, and examination bed against the back wall. And sitting on a grey, wheeled chair, Doctor Callaghan studied the file in front of him. Oh shit. Was that the results? Why wasn’t he looking up? My heart thumped like a hyperactive drummer on speed.
After a couple of seconds that dragged on for at least a week, he finally acknowledged our presence and reached over to shake our hands. I’d researched him on the internet and the general consensus of opinion was that he was an expert in his field. Somewhere in his mid-forties, with dark wavy hair and little round glasses, he looked like that bloke from Grey’s Anatomy’s slightly less attractive but more intelligent brother. He was Dr McDreamy Lite.
‘OK, Lou,’ he started, his voice a low baritone of practised reassurance. ‘Let’s get straight to it.’
I tried to read his expression but got nothing. No relief, no joy, no disappointment, no sign that he was about to impart good news or bad. They must teach that in medical school.
Just keep breathing. I could deal with this. Whatever it was I could deal with it. I just had to stay strong, keep breathing.
‘As you know, we carried out two procedures a fortnight ago. We took another layer from the cancer site and we took a biopsy from the sentinel lymph node.’
I nodded. The sentinel lymph node. It sounded like another of those characters from Star Wars.
‘Sentinel Lymph Node, would you prepare your troops and ready the ship for take off.’
Focus, Lou, focus.
He referred back to the file in front of him as if checking what it said there. Was that good? Bad? Please, please hurry up or I’ll need a transfer to the cardiac ward for resuscitation. Red’s grip on my hand was now cutting off the blood circulation to my fingers.
‘And it’s good news, Lou.’
‘Yes!’ That was Red, who jumped from his chair, sending it flying across the tiny room as he punched the air.
I didn’t move. I was still staring at the doctor’s face, trying to absorb what he was saying.
‘The lymph node is clear, the blood work was good, and we finally got a clear perimeter on the sample we removed from the mole. It looks like we got it all out, Lou.’
They got it all out.
No cancer.
No. More. Cancer.
Just life.
‘I want to keep an eye on you though. I’ll see you again in six months, just to check that there hasn’t been a recurrence. After that, at least once a year, just to be on the safe side. But for now, it’s all good.’
‘Lou?’ Red’s voice reached me and I slowly looked up to meet his quizzical stare. ‘It’s going to be OK.’
From somewhere deep inside, I finally found the strength to speak. ‘Are you going to say that you told me so?’ Nothing could stop the tears or the ecstatic smile that had suddenly taken possession of my face.
He nodded, reached down, pulled me up and swung me around the room, taking out two boxes of rubber gloves and a blood pressure monitor.
We were going to be fine. All of us. My whole family. Me, Red and Cassie, Josie, Ginger and Lizzy.
Lizzy.
A thought struck me and I knew that there was one more vital question that I had to ask Doctor Callaghan, right after I thoroughly mortified him by enveloping him in a very non-medical bear hug.
‘Doctor,’ I whispered, praying for the reply I was looking for, ‘are you single?’
Fifty-four
Lou
2010 – Aged 40
It had taken me ages to find my old key to my parents’ house, but I’d finally located it in th
e junk drawer in the kitchen in amongst old stamps, paper clips, miscellaneous instruction books, rolls of sticky tape, scissors and my passport from when I was twelve.
I let myself in and the first thing I noticed was the silence. The second was that everything was perfectly in place, every cushion at the right angle on the couch, every fold of the curtain perfectly straight. It must be exhausting keeping up this level of perfection.
Heading up the stairs, I got a flashback of Ginger, Lizzy and I when we were teenagers, sneaking in, sneaking out, crawling up step by step after too many drinks, falling back down them because we were wearing heels the size of a Mini Metro.
My wonder years may not have been perfect but they were interspersed with moments of brilliance.
This was no time for nostalgia though. Everything that had happened had made me realise that I wanted to preserve everything I had for Cassie. We’d had good news and it felt like a victory. But if I’d learned anything I realised that life is unpredictable. Who knew when something terrible could happen? I’d done everything I could to make sure that Cassie would be taken care of if anything happened to me, but I’d also realised that there was something else I could give her so that she would always have me there no matter what – my teenage diaries and notebooks. I knew exactly where they were. They were in . . .
I opened my bedroom door and stopped in my tracks.
Some supernatural force appeared to have beamed up my bedroom and left a gym in its place.
‘Your dad changed it into a gym and sports room years ago.’
Shit! The surprise of my mother’s arrival startled me. ‘Hey, Mum,’ I managed when I regained power over my vocal cords. ‘I didn’t think you were in.’
‘I was just having a sleep,’ she told me, gesturing down at her cream silk robe, wrapped around a caramel-coloured lace nightdress underneath. Perfectly painted toenails. Perfectly manicured nails. ‘Your dad and I are going out to dinner tonight, so I just wanted to get some rest so that I’d be looking my best later.’
Why did that comment raise the hackles on the back of my neck? It was great that she still took pride in the way that she looked. She was still an attractive woman, always impeccably dressed and as stick slim as she’d always been. Because that’s the way my dad liked her.
Maybe that was it. Maybe I just still couldn’t get my head around the fact that she still lived her life entirely for him, bending to his will, doing exactly what he wanted, believing everything he said and accepting that he always knew best. Allowing him to act like a spoiled, narcissistic brat who demanded one hundred per cent of her time and attention and had a tantrum when he didn’t get it, even if the source of the distraction was his own child. She deserved better. If she’d met another man, a more decent family guy then her life could have been so much richer.
Don’t say anything. Do not say anything. I’d managed to go almost forty years without a full-scale showdown and there was no point in starting now. Besides, this was what made her happy. She was as completely besotted by him as she had always been.
‘How did you get on at the check-up?’ she asked.
‘Fine. Still all clear. I go back again this time next year unless I notice any changes before then.’
‘Good.’
Awkward pause. That happened with us sometimes.
‘I was just, er, looking for all my old notebooks. Did you keep them?’
She nodded and I followed her to the big walk-in cupboard in the hall.
‘They’re in there.’ She pointed to a large box, one of about six, on the top shelf. ‘If you’re ever looking for any old documents or paperwork, bank stuff, anything like that, it’s all up there.’ There was another pause. ‘Or you could ask Josie. She always seemed to be able to get her hands on things when she needed them.’
Was that a hint?
I peered at her quizzically and I could see by the glimmer of a smile around her lips that the implication was deliberate.
‘You knew? All those years ago, you knew about the bank books?’
‘The bank sent me a letter, acknowledging that I’d guaranteed your business loan.’
I couldn’t conceal my shock. ‘But why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Because your father wouldn’t have approved and sometimes it’s better not to rock the boat.’
That statement said everything. That my dad was the kind of guy who wouldn’t cross the street, never mind put his name to a piece of paper to help his kid. That my mother knew that. That, as always, she hadn’t wanted to go against his wishes. It absolutely astounded me that on this one occasion, she’d done it anyway.
I just didn’t understand . . . ‘Why?’
Another awkward silence, before she started a sentence with a sigh. ‘I know you don’t understand my relationship with your dad, but it works for us. That doesn’t mean that I don’t love you, Lou, because even although I might not have shown it, I always have.’
‘Just not as much as you love him.’ The words were out before I could stop them. She didn’t argue. We both knew it was true and that was the choice she had made before I even had a say in the matter.
I thought about arguing, about shouting, telling her how outraged I was, but really, what was the point?
They were happy together, in their own little co-dependent, intense, obsessive bubble and they didn’t need or care for anyone else. It was their choice.
Despite a tug of sadness that she would never know what she was missing, I kept quiet, took my box and left. One day, the sad reality was that one of them would die and the other would be left with absolutely no one in their life. But that was up to them.
Another thing I’d learned over the last couple of years was that there was no point worrying about tomorrow, because the only way to get the most out of life was to live for today.
And today I was late for a very important occasion.
Fifty-five
‘Have I missed anything? Have I? Have they started?’
Everyone in the green room spun around to face me as I stormed in and, in true Lizzy style, wobbled on my ankle, staggered, and crashed into a table of savoury snacks. I knew borrowing Ginger’s eight-inch high Louboutin heels had been a bad idea.
There was a second of stunned silence before a wave of hysterics descended.
‘That was some entrance, Lou. I might try that when I walk on stage.’ Ginger laughed, before Lizzy interrupted her with, ‘I taught her everything she knows.’
Cassie just slapped her hand to her forehead in mortification.
She looked so beautiful, my girl, although not dressed in the most traditional contents of a young girl’s wardrobe. Yes, I would have loved her to be sitting there in a pretty pink taffeta skirt, a little white cardi and red patent shoes, but as she’d announced when I was attempting to shop for her outfit for tonight (in full volume, in the middle of Marks & Spencer’s changing rooms), she was eight now, not ‘four and planning to visit the Wizard of Oz.’
OK then. Sometimes she slugged right in there with a forceful reminder that she was Ginger’s niece.
Instead of being dressed for the evening in the style of Judy Garland, she was wearing black leather biker boots (brought back from New York courtesy of Ginger’s last business trip), a vintage Motley Crue T-shirt (also Ginger), white skinny jeans and a long silver cardigan that looked like it had been spun from a spider’s web. It was either a prodigious sign of a flair for edgy fashion or a really scary warning sign that her teenage years were going to be interesting. I blew her a kiss and she rolled her eyes while the two little friends who sat next to her giggled. Since the day she’d started school, they’d been an inseparable little band. Tilly was sweet and shy, always making house and baking, when she wasn’t up at A&E with a bump/breakage/cut that she’d managed to obtain while running/swinging on a rope/roller-skating/ falling in a puddle. On the other side of Cassie, best friend number two, Roxy, was busy nodding her head to the beat of a song on her iPod and trying to look
as grown up as possible. I made a mental note to check all the local pubs on a nightly basis as soon as they looked old enough to pass for eighteen.
I grabbed a glass of something with bubbles from the hospitality table and kissed Red, before plonking myself down on the edge of his chair, loving the fact that his arm automatically snaked around my hips.
‘What time are you on at?’ I asked my sister-in-law.
‘Six o’clock.’
Tonight they were taping an episode of the Music Biz show for Channel 4 and Ginger was one of the guests. The request had come after an unusual event even by her standards. Yes, she’d achieved semi-major fame as a singer in the 90s. And of course, she had gone on to be a regular face in the music mags and showbiz sections of the newspapers due to her flamboyant character and the fact that she managed a variety of successful acts, culminating in her present role as chief honcho for one of the biggest boy bands in the country.
However, she’d only become a truly household name when she’d been caught on camera in the first-class lounge of an airport, telling a very famous diva singing star to ‘get the stick out of your arse and stop being so fucking rude to everyone, you jumped-up cow. I remember when you were a waitress and you’d let punters grope your arse for tips.’
The exchange had been caught on a nearby teenager’s mobile phone, posted on YouTube and Ginger had become an overnight sensation. Said diva was last seen stomping off in outrage in the direction of her lawyer’s office.
Meanwhile, the offers had come flooding in to Ginger’s company. Journalists wanted to interview her, TV shows wanted her on board, and she’d even been tentatively approached about becoming a judge on a new talent show that was all about finding the next big rock god.
The most bizarre thing about it all? She’d done the whole lot sober.
Completely sober.
