Carry You

by Beth Thomas

  She shakes her head in disbelief. No doubt she’s wondering how someone like her could ever have got mixed up with someone like me in the first place.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Oh, Daisy, that’s not right at all.’

  I nod. ‘I’m sorry, Abs. I should have told you before but I couldn’t bear the idea of you thinking badly of me.’

  ‘Think badly of you? Of course I don’t think badly of you, why would I do that?’

  ‘Because of what I’ve just told you. I’m not worthy of being your friend and I feel like I’ve … I don’t know, duped you a bit by not being honest with you. I’m so sorry.’

  She stares at me wide eyed for a few moments and then, suddenly, bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, Daisy, you silly sausage!’ She gets up and walks round the table to me then bends down and wraps her arms round me. ‘Not worthy! Duped! You are such a dolt. Of course I don’t think badly of you.’

  ‘Well you haven’t heard the whole story yet.’

  ‘There’s more? Oh, yes, please, tell me everything.’ She goes back to her seat and sits down. ‘And please don’t leave out the part where Graham or Darren or Naomi made you think it was your fault.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t them, Abs. Honestly. I’ve read loads of articles in health magazines and stuff on the internet. Any cells in the body can be altered by stress, we’ve all seen it when someone breaks out in spots or, I don’t know, gets eczema or asthma or hives. Cancer cells are no different. It’s something to do with the raised adrenaline levels in someone under stress. It interferes with the process that leads to cell death.’

  She nods slowly. ‘OK, so you caused your mum stress. I believe that. In fact if you’d tried to tell me you’d been a perfect teenager and never brought your mum anything but joy and sunshine and bouquets of roses, I might have been a bit sceptical. Anyway, go on. You caused your mum stress. I’m all ears.’

  ‘This wasn’t the normal sort of teenage stress though. This wasn’t about tidying my room or doing my homework or not giving her so much lip or whatever. This was serious.

  ‘Did I ever tell you about my first boyfriend, Dougie?’ She shakes her head. Of course I haven’t told her – Dougie is so much a part of this story, I have done everything I could to keep Abby from finding out about him. ‘I met Dougie when I was fifteen. Only two or three months away from sixteen, but even so. He was eighteen, nearly nineteen I think. Worked in Tesco. I mean, he had finished his education, he was out there, working full time, a proper adult. He had a dream to move away from this town and go and do something somewhere else, somewhere exciting and vibrant and alive like …’

  ‘Vegas?’

  ‘Brighton. He was a bass guitarist with this band called Too Many Kooks. Oh my God, Abby, they were fantastic. And Dougie was so … gorgeous. So different from the fifteen-year-old boys I usually hung out with. He had stubble, and thick arms and a deep, man’s voice, and no Game Boy in his blazer pocket. I fell completely and utterly in love with him.’

  ‘Right. I imagine your mum was a bit worried …’

  ‘Worried? I haven’t even started yet. I was in the run-up to my GCSEs. Remember that time of your life, when everything you do, everything you say, everything you think, is about GCSEs? Revision and grades and options and coursework. At the dinner table, last thing at night, first thing in the morning. You can’t plan a holiday ’cause of Daisy’s exams. You can’t book theatre tickets ’cause of Daisy’s exams. You can’t go to the effing toilet ’cause of Daisy’s exams. There’s no let-up, it’s relentless.’

  ‘Yes, I remember.’

  ‘Well, Dougie was a very cute and very interesting distraction from all that. I drove Mum mad, going out all the time, drinking alcohol, staying up late. I started bunking off school.’

  ‘Mm-hmm.’

  I’m watching her face while I’m telling her this and she doesn’t seem to be disgusted with me. But I haven’t got to the worst part yet.

  ‘I started having sex with him.’

  ‘Dear God,’ she says in a monotone. ‘Teenagers having sex with each other. Whatever next?’

  ‘You’re not horrified? I was fifteen and he was nearly nineteen. Don’t you think that’s disgusting?’

  She considers. ‘Well, yeah, OK, not one of your best decisions, but it was obviously going to happen, and it’s not you that I’m disgusted with. Technically, he raped you.’

  ‘It wasn’t rape.’

  ‘No, I know, but in the eyes of the law, you weren’t old enough to give your consent, so it’s statutory rape.’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘This Dougie committed an offence, and you were a child. You were not to blame, Daisy.’

  ‘Well, OK, I kind of knew that, but it didn’t help my mum when she found out.’

  ‘Shit. How did she find out?’

  ‘Read my diary.’

  She widens her eyes. ‘Daze, seriously? You’re not telling me that you were having underage sex with an adult, drinking alcohol, probably illegally?’ I nod. ‘Smoking? Taking drugs?’ I nod again. ‘And you wrote all this stuff down in your diary? Where anyone could see it? Barlow’s bum, Daisy, what were you thinking?’

  ‘I guess I wasn’t thinking that anyone would go snooping in my room, least of all my mum. I trusted her.’

  ‘But did you trust everyone else? Naomi? Darren and Lee? Graham?’

  I shrug. ‘Yeah, I did. Back then I still didn’t know what they were really like.’

  ‘Do you think one of them could have gone snooping and found the diary? Then showed your mum?’

  It’s something I’ve wondered for years. ‘I don’t know. I’ll probably never know. I suppose so. Anyway, Mum found out about everything. Went spare. You can imagine. Tears, tantrums, slammed doors and sobbing. And that was just her. She grounded me for a hundred and fifty years. Banned me from seeing him. Threatened to go to the police about him if I did. Timed me from the moment I left school to the moment I got home, and if it took me as much as five minutes longer than it should, she wanted to know why. It was hell.’

  ‘No less than you deserved, though, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yeah, I can see that now. Back then I was straining at the lead to get away. I hated being confined, always had. I used to say I wanted to be a discoverer when I grew up. Until I did grow up and discovered there was nothing left to discover.’

  ‘So that was your mum’s massive and prolonged stress?’

  I shake my head. ‘No no, the worst is yet to come.’

  ‘Hit me,’ she says gamely. ‘I can take it.’

  I’m sure she can. The question is, can I?

  ‘Obviously I carried on seeing him.’

  ‘Ah. Didn’t see that coming.’ She smiles knowingly.

  ‘Yeah. Sneaking around, lying. It was like I was having an affair. I suppose I was.’ When I say those words, she jerks a bit and pain flashes across her face briefly. Or did I just imagine that, because I know what I know? But what do I know? I don’t even know whether what I think I know is what Abby knows. I carry on. ‘I stopped going to school pretty much. It was the only chance I got to see him as all my other time was monitored so closely. I was in a complete daze.’ She smiles fondly at me, as if to say, ‘Yes, I know all about that.’ ‘Eventually, he decided the time was right to branch out into the world and make his big move to Brighton. And I went with him.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh yeah. I didn’t tell anyone what I was planning, we just left one evening. I had a couple of changes of clothes in a rucksack, and a few weeks’ pocket money saved up, and we just got on a train and went.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘Yeah. We got a room in a house pretty easily. It’s all very bohemian and studenty down there, so there are loads of house shares advertised all over the place. Ours was pretty basic but clean at least. One double bedroom, furnished …’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘Yeah. But it had a sink in the room, which was a bonus. Dougie got a job in a bar, I eventually got a job part time in a café.’


  ‘Eventually? Jesus, Daze, how long were you there for?’

  I look at her looking at me, then drop my gaze. ‘About five months in the end. Four of them were miserable.’ I pause. ‘No, four and a half. I turned sixteen while we were there.’

  ‘Fuck. Five months? Fuck. So why didn’t you go home?’

  ‘Exactly! That’s exactly what I’ve been wondering all this time. Why didn’t I just go home? But …’

  ‘You couldn’t, could you? Didn’t want to lose face, admit you were wrong, that your mum and family were right?’

  ‘Yeah, that was part of it. But also I was totally in love with Dougie. It was like an addiction. Even though I suspected he didn’t really feel the same. Even though I found evidence that he didn’t. But I didn’t want to leave him and go back to being a school child. Obviously I knew that Mum and Graham would be beside themselves with worry, but I couldn’t see it so it didn’t bother me. Not much, anyway. I didn’t tell them where I was, but I did let them know I was OK so at least they didn’t think I’d been abducted or killed or something. I thought that was enough to make them feel better. I was wrong about that, but I didn’t know that until much later, after I’d gone back.’

  ‘So you did go back?’

  ‘Well yes, Abs. I’m not still in Brighton to this day. I came back.’

  She grins. ‘Oh, yeah, course. There you are. I was so caught up for a minute, it was like it was happening to someone else. Not you.’ She narrows her eyes, as if just remembering that it is me, I am the one, it is down to me that my mum suffered that stress. ‘I can’t believe it was you.’ She shakes her head, a look of wonderment on her face. ‘So you came back. How did that come about?’

  I think back to that hideous day when I was sitting on the bed in our room, crying. Dougie was either at work or lying, and yet again I was stuck ‘at home’ on my own with nothing but Channel 4 for company (none of the other channels worked). Then someone knocked on the door. Really hard. I should have known who it was from those strident tones.

  ‘Naomi found me. It seemed incredible at the time, like she was some kind of super sleuth. But in the end it turned out that Dougie had kept in touch with a few of his friends from round here, and one of them knew the brother of Naomi’s boyfriend at the time. Very mundane. They went to the same school, I think. Anyway, as soon as she realised the person her boyfriend’s brother was talking about was her own sister, she got on a train to Brighton to get me. I was horrified to see her, but … Well, it gave me the excuse I needed to go home.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And when I got home, I found …’ My throat starts aching again and I swallow the tears. For a few moments I can’t speak, but Abby’s worked it out.

  ‘Ohhhh. I get it. When you got home, you found that your mum had been diagnosed with cancer and started undergoing treatment while you were away.’

  I nod.

  ‘And this is after, what, a year or so of you being unbelievably difficult and selfish?’

  Nod, eyes closed.

  ‘So she does the treatment, goes to hell and back, and then eventually gets the all clear, right? But because it comes back nine years later, naturally Graham or Naomi or probably everyone around you all turn round and look at you? In their desperate need to find someone to blame and make some sense out of it all, they put two and two together and decide that because the doctor or Wikipedia or someone on a bus once said that stress could possibly be a factor or affect the drugs or make it worse or something, it must be your fault that she was ill again. Right?’

  I nod again, tears now running down my cheeks. ‘It is my fault, Abs. Everything that’s happened, with Mum and Graham, his will, Naomi, everything. It’s all down to me. I deserve it all. If I’d never run away to Brighton, she would never have …’ My throat closes up and I can’t finish the sentence.

  Abby gets up from her seat and comes round the table to sit next to me. She takes hold of my arms and makes me look her in the eye. ‘Listen to me. I totally get why you would feel guilty that you were away being a vile, selfish teenager while your mum had that news and started horrific treatment. It’s awful and you will regret that forever. But it’s not your fault. No, don’t interrupt. Your huge guilt does not mean you’re to blame. Cancer is cancer. It’s like a spotlight on an audience that lands on a random person. It’s got nothing to do with the fact that you ran away to Brighton when you were sixteen. Christ, we were all stupid at that age. That’s why you have to go through your teenage years immediately before adulthood – to make you ready. It’s a massive learning experience. We screw up so that we can grow up.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘Plus there’s the very simple fact you’ve apparently completely overlooked, that the stress you caused her was during her first illness. Which she recovered from. So if she got the all clear when she was under that stress, the stress didn’t damage her.’

  ‘It doesn’t–’

  ‘You know what I think? I think that your immature sixteen-year-old brain mistook the guilt at being away while she was diagnosed for guilt for making it come back. I bet that’s what happened. You felt horrifically guilty for those years between her getting the all clear and the cancer coming back because you weren’t there for her when she was diagnosed the first time. But if you’d thought about it clearly for a bit, you’d have realised that you can’t affect cancer by being a selfish bitch.’

  ‘No, it was–’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. Whatever you’re going to say. Whatever the doctor said about stress and all that. The two things – you running away and your mum getting ill – happened at the same time, so your brain has made a connection. But they weren’t connected, it was just coincidence. And it wasn’t your fault.’

  I’ve wanted so much to believe this over the years, but my guilt has always won. The paralysing horror I felt at the sight of her when I came back from Brighton – pale, thin and hairless – has never left me, and I’ve always felt like I’d caused it. She was fine when I left; something had happened while I was gone. The fact that she recovered didn’t really do much to assuage that guilt. And then when she got ill again, it was obvious that the cancer had never really left her.

  I shake my head. ‘Even if that were the case, it doesn’t explain why everyone else thinks it was my fault, does it? It’s not as if they were overwhelmed by guilt by me not being there.’

  She looks at me steadily. ‘Like I said, everyone needs someone to blame when something bad happens, don’t they? Think about it. Sickness and death are so senseless, everyone always looks for a reason, an explanation. So one minute your mum’s doing her nut at the way you’re behaving; next minute she’s in hospital having chemotherapy.’ She shrugs. ‘Bingo. Light blue touchpaper and stand well back.’

  I’m still shaking my head, but more slowly. ‘I don’t know, Abs. It’s been so long …’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly why it has become ingrained in you that it was your fault. It’s like one of those massive lies in history that’s been around for so long that everyone believes it now. Like Santa Claus.’ She pauses. ‘All right, bad example. But you know what I mean. Either way, your guilt is faulty. People don’t die from cancer just because their teenage kids misbehave. Christ, I shagged my teacher when I was at school.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Oh yeah. Mr Martin. Science.’

  ‘Oh my God, Abby.’

  ‘Got pregnant, Daisy. Yes. It happened. In the science lab. My head next to a Bunsen burner. His wife left him. He lost his job. I was sixteen so no criminal proceedings but … I had my picture in the paper and an abortion, all in the same week.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Did my mum get cancer because of it? No she did not. Did Mrs Martin get cancer? Did her mum? No. Even Mr Martin himself didn’t get it. Alcoholism, last I heard, but not cancer.’

  ‘But–’

  She puts a hand up. ‘My friend Scarlet got pregnant by her dad’s oldest friend. The wife kicked him o
ut, blamed Scarlet’s parents, ended the friendship and never spoke to either of them again. Got her mum kicked out of their badminton club. Scarlet kept the baby and is now living with this forty-eight year old dude. Her mum – alive and well. If a little bit pissed off.’

  ‘That’s–’

  ‘Wait, wait. I’ve got more.’ She thinks for a moment. ‘Another friend of mine from school. We’re not friends any more, I just want to point that out. He did a ram raid of a Pets at Home when he was seventeen. Drove a car through the front window one night. Loaded it up with tins of dog food, cat beds, flea treatment, whatever he could get his hands on. Stupid fuck, didn’t even think about grabbing the tills. CCTV saw the whole thing, including his licence plate. Got time inside for it. His mum? Living it up with her boyfriend in Spain somewhere.’

  I start smiling, and rub the wetness off my cheeks.

  ‘Girl I used to go to Guides with. Yes, I used to be a Girl Guide, don’t laugh. She starts writing to someone in prison. Armed robbery, I think it was. Eventually gets persuaded to go and meet him, on a visit. Doesn’t tell her mum. Shags him somehow under the table. Christ alone knows how they achieved that. Now she’s pregnant with the baby of a violent offender. That man will be in their lives forever. Forever. Her mum? Changed her name and wearing a fake moustache everywhere, but no cancer.’

  I start grinning broadly while Abby gently rubs my arms. I feel a huge rush of affection for her as she does this, and something else, difficult to identify. It’s a surging feeling inside me, like the sun coming out, or Christmas morning when you’re eight, and I feel fidgety, restless and suddenly very bouncy. My body leaps to its feet almost without me realising it as suddenly I feel a kind of euphoria. Abby knows everything, and it doesn’t matter. I want to jump up and down where I’m standing, and it’s such a strong feeling I just have to go with it. Sod it, who cares what the people at the next table will think? It doesn’t matter, nothing matters. I’m grinning widely as I start to bounce and before I know it Abs is up and bouncing with me and we’re laughing and hugging and the sun is shining inside and out and I feel fantastic.