Warm Honey

by Dave Cornford

Mum looked stunned, so stunned she said nothing.

  “Oh my God!” groaned Vicki. My first thought was that she was going to make this about herself. She could do that.

  “Shit,” said Bevan quietly, summing up for us all. Even Mum seemed too shocked to reproach him.

  Charis closed her eyes and I could her muttering, but couldn’t make anything out.

  “It’s good that we’ve picked it up this early. Basically we need to hit it fast and hard, so treatment starts pretty much right away.”

  “What sort of treatment,” asked Mum.

  “Chemotherapy.”

  “Chemotherapy!” Vicki groaned it several times like a mantra. “Poor baby,” she said, stroking Bevan’s arm, “Poor baby.”

  “We’ve got to kill off those white cells that are making you feel so bad. After the first round you’ll feel a lot better, but your immune system will be down. You’ll be open to infections, coughs and colds.”

  “How many rounds?” asked Bevan.

  “Four.”

  Mum looked blank. Vicki was groaning again, like she was auditioning for Wailers’R’Us. She’d be on her shiny little Nokia to her friends in no time.

  “And after that?”

  “Well let’s just see how this goes first. We’ll get you moved to the Immunio-deficiency ward. You need a sterile environment.”

  I figured Bevan’d be used to that after three years living with Vicki.

  “What’s the diagnosis?” asked Vicki, meaning “prognosis.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty resistant disease, but we’ll be working hard to ensure success.” That meant nothing of course, like a politician weaselling out of an answer.

  The rest of the conversation was peppered with words we didn’t know - yet. Teflon medical words that once slid right off us, like “blasts” and “platelets” and “bone marrow aspiration”. Soon they’d become so velcroed into our minds, that even now, several years later, they grip tight whenever a cancer segment comes on whatever the ABC science program is called these days.

  Eventually we left Bevan with Vicki and the doctor.

  “Lunch?” asked Mum on the way down in the lift.

  “I’m starving,” said Charis.

  “All that nervous energy.”

  The doors opened and the public hospital ground floor buzz pushed in.

  “How about the hospital cafe?” asked Mum, heading off in that direction.

  “How about somewhere else Mrs McEvoy,” said Charis. “Somewhere nice.”

  “Yes, somewhere nice would be nice.”

  “Besides,” said Charis, as we walked through the sliding doors and into the real air and sunshine, “We’re going to get sick of eating in there over the next few months.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I was going to have to tell Dad about Bevan. I hadn’t thought about that until Mum said someone was going to have to phone Stuart in England and let him know.

  “He’ll have to come home of course.”

  “No he won’t Mum, let’s just wait and see how things go.”

  “He’ll want to come home, it’s his brother.”

  “Mum, he’s not going to drop everything and rush back. Let’s just see how things go!”

  “That’s for him to decide, not you” she shot back.

  “Or you,” I said, getting Mum’s affronted face.

  Mum’s affronted face was reserved for important stuff, like double-booking on a family birthday. And not just twenty-firsts, but nineteenths, twenty-thirds, or fifty-fourths. All were treated with the same holy regard. By the time we’d all be married and have kids we’d be missing more family birthdays than we could make and Mum’s affronted face would be set like a gargoyle’s.

  “Plenty of people have no family to share birthdays with,” she’d say whenever we threw a sickie.

  “Invite them then!”

  There’s a king in the Bible who invites heaps of important guests to a party, but they all make excuses. There was a song about it at the Presbyterian Sunday School Stuart and I went to, only we’d change the words. “I’ve married a cow and bought me a wife,” we’d bawl, and Mrs Jansen would give us her harassed Sunday-School teacher look. One day she lost it and gave Stuart a clip across the ear.

  “The nerve of the woman!” said Mum, after we’d run the whole way home with the news, “Look at this will you Phil?” Stuart had rubbed his ear hard at the front door to give the crime some imminence.

  Dad was hiding behind the thicket of The Sunday Times, feigning disinterest like a gazelle feeding near a lion.

  “The nerve of the woman!”

  “Do you want me to go and see her?” Dad asked in a tone that said there was no way he was going to go and see her.

  “She needs to know who she’s dealing with.”

  Dad muttered something like: “Then maybe you should go.” I don’t think either of them did, but she never sent us to Sunday School again.

  I put off phoning Dad with the excuse that like with Stuart I’d wait and see how things go. Bevan had gotten sick too early for us. I’d dug Dad up during a time of low seismic activity in the family, not knowing a magnitude eight was round the corner. A man who leaves his family stone-cold won’t know how to be with all this debris. Then again, Dad never knew how to be.

  “Dad’s a real Ulsterman,” I said to Charis.

  We were lying on the unruly grass in her front garden a week or so into Bevan’s treatment. The Norfolk pine was swishing in the early summer sea-breeze, REM’s Automatic for the People on in the background.

  “Ulsterman?”

  “It’s hard to explain, like repressed emotions or something. All this stuff inside and no way of it getting out. It was everywhere in Northern Ireland when I was over there. There was a slogan that said ‘Ulster says No!’ That sort of summed it up.”

  “’Ulster says No!’?” She rolled over onto her stomach, her face upside down to mine.

  “They called it the Anglo-Irish agreement, it was about power-sharing to get some peace happening. But no one was prepared to take the risk.”

  “And Ulster said no?”

  “The Loyalists did anyway.”

  “Did Ulster ever say ‘Yes!’?”

  “You kidding? Ulster never says ‘Maybe’!” Charis laughed and pulled me round to her, her bare arms pale and cool in the deep green grass.

  “You’re no Ulsterman,” she said.

  “You mean I never say no?”

  “I mean you took a risk.”

  “Don’t get it.”

  “You’re going out with me aren’t you?”

  “You’re a piece of cake!”

  “Yeah fruit-cake! She jumped up and held out her hand. “I’m the biggest risk you’re ever gonna take Rob, believe me!”

  For once in his life Dad had risked a lot moving to Australia, so he must have been desperate to break free from something. He’d always tried his best out here, but the graft never really took like it did with younger people: Perth sap never coursed his veins like it did mine and Stuart’s. While Mum cried with homesickness, Dad looked awkward among loud Aussies, straight out of a XXXX ad with their blue singlets and even bluer jokes. I remember the first time he wore thongs.

  “You’re not wearing those?” said Mum, as we left for the factory’s Christmas family barbecue. “What about your walk-socks and sneakers?”

  Dad held his ground, and I remember his white feet, naked and lonely, in a sea of grubby cracked heels and thick yellow toenails.

  But Ulster had nearly gotten hold of me too. I’d bought a one way ticket to London after leaving my journalism stint. With the price of everything, and not finding any decent work, I’d gone to Belfast because it was cheaper on the back of the Troubles.

  “Sure you can stay with us for a while, so you can,” said Uncle Ronnie, Mum’s brother, when I went to visit he and Aunt Lillian, “Discover your roots.”

  Fast forward six months and I’m living in the spare room of their terrace, cycling t
o work in sleety rain past windows with fake flowers, red-white-and-blue bunting, and posters of King Billy. I’m trapped as a storeman earning just enough to live on with none left over for an airfare. It’s Pongo-world all over again, only this time I can’t get in the car and drive away. Uncle Ronnie and Aunt Lillian were the only saving graces. Their house remained pointedly fake-flower, bunting, and King Billy free.

  “Ulstermen die of fried-food and anger,” said Uncle Ronnie, one breakfast-time as we sat listening to BBC Northern Ireland. The “talks” were bogged down again. Verbal shots during the day: literal ones at night. But after twenty years the killings weren’t news anymore. Each morning the newsreaders tried to give the overnight incidents their gravest voices, but their hearts weren’t in it.

  “Shots were fired at the Springfield Road police station last night,” they’d say, settling in like James Alexander Gordon reading the English Premier League results. “Police returned fire, but no one was injured.”

  Aunt Lillian shovelled potato bread and eggs onto Uncle Ronnie’s plate. “Hold with the tattie-bread woman, I’m watching my waist-line!”

  “We’re all watching your waist-line!”

  “Don’t get chicky Lil! You want to careful of her Robert, she’ll kill you with kindness.”

  “I haven’t killed you yet Ronald McCartney,” she retorted in mock anger, re-filling our teas. She thumped the sugar and the HP sauce onto the blue gingham in a deft pincer move. “Anyway if I do, it won’t be with kindness.”

  Uncle Ronnie and Aunt Lillian had been ostracised by their neighbours, after making the mistake of handing out leaflets for a peace march one year.

  “Fenian-lovers” they’d been called. “Provos” had been daubed on their front door once.

  “Look at them standing there as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths,” said Uncle Ronnie as we drove past the local Free Presbyterian church.

  A group of suited men stood on marble steps: lined up grey and silent like racked guns.

  “They’re going in, not coming out. You can tell by their faces!” he laughed. “They’ll be singing ‘Bread of Heaven’ to the same tune as ‘Where the Fuck is Your Support?’ at the match yesterday.”

  Wives, mothers and girl-friends bustled around like chickens, an image enhanced by hat plumage.

  “Wonder if they’ll curse the Pope this morning?” said Aunt Lillian

  “Once it got into politics we were out of that place,” explained Uncle Ronnie, “Now we’re lapsed Protestants.”

  In Northern Ireland everyone has to be something. I’d found that out early so I minded myself working at the factory. You could tell what people were by their names.

  We’d been sitting have smoko one afternoon watching the mizzle drift in over the shiny slate roof-tops on the other side of the yard-fence. A couple of the younger blokes were playing darts with the girlie promotional calendar. It was the last day of July, so according to custom Miss July’s large breasts were up for grabs. She was more top heavy than most of the other girls so it had been decided that a bull’s-eye was only worth twenty pence this month, not fifty. They’d all put a fiver in the pot and there were groans and moans, arguments and laughter as they aimed for double-top. The radio blared in the background. A woman was phoning in for a promotional prize.

  I didn’t catch the question, but she got it right anyway.

  The announcer did the small-talk thing.

  “Have you got any children?”

  “Aye, twins.”

  “And what are they?”

  “Thar both Pradesdands so they are.”

  I laughed out loud and sharp as the presenter cut straight to Billy Joel. The forklift driver, Kevin, pinged his dart way left and it bounced off the metal pillar. He gave me a glare like Tiger Woods does a photographer.

  “Feckin’ eejit! I want that shot back – it was going centre!”

  The horn sounded for back-to-work.

  “Forget it Kev, you can give the missus’s an extra squeeze tonight to make up!’

  “Who? My missus’s or your missus’s?”

  Hooting laughter.

  “It’ll have to do,” he said mournfully, pocketing his winnings from the table. “Feckin eejit” he muttered again, walking past me and flicking his fag-end at my leg as I got up from the table, “You owe me twenty p.”

  * * *

  I phoned Dad on Gracie’s shopping day. I’d been called into work, but the office was quiet. Everyone was out or at a meeting, and Benny had gone over to the Italian deli to get us a continental roll for lunch.

  “Hello?” Gracie’s voice.

  “Hi Gracie, it’s Rob here.” I could feel my neck heating up.

  “Rob who?”

  “Dad’s Rob. I was just phoning to see...to say a quick hello to him.”

  “Oh hi Rob, he’s at the doctor’s, I’ve just got in with the shopping.” She sounded normal.

  “Thursday’s your day isn’t it?” I said it without thinking. Now she’d be suspicious. Even if she wasn’t, I felt guilty anyway. Our little shopping-day phone-tryst had been sprung. I’d split up with a girl in my late teens once, so I could go out with another girl. Not long after, we bumped into my ex’s mum at the shops, and without thinking my arm shot down from round the new girl’s shoulder. It’d been too late for the ex’s mum, who gave us an icy look, and too much for the new girl, who dumped me soon after with the words “Go back to your ex.” But of course it was too late for that too.

  “You want me to leave a message?” asked Gracie.

  “Ah, no, just let him know I called.”

  “How’s Charis?”

  “Good, good,” I said, “Working hard,” which wasn’t true.

  “I’ll get him to phone you back then.”

  “Thanks Gracie, yeah. It’d be good to catch up again too.”

  “See you Rob,” she said, hanging up halfway through my “Seeya.”

  Benny walked in, his mouth full of continental roll. He dumped mine on my desk, with a Coke and a napkin.

  “No change,” he slurped, wiping dressing from his chin with the back of his hand, “They’ve gone up.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I’d been having a recurring nightmare. Bevan was literally tied inside the black sack that Tolstoy uses to describe Ivan Ilyich when he’s dying. Charis and I are struggling to undo it, but the knot is Gordian: fibrous and stubborn. We can hear Bevan gasping for air. My fingers won’t work, they’re panicky and unco-operative, and every movement takes an age.

  “It’s your fault for getting him into this in the first place,” I’m saying to Charis. Her mum’s in her chair in the background, muttering like she does.

  Suddenly Mum and Dad are there, together.

  “You shouldn’t have let him in there,” Mum says.

  “But I only turned my back for five minutes!” protests Dad.

  “Not you, Robert.”

  I wake up after that.

  “You were yelling out in your sleep last night,” said Jude, hunched over a bowl at the breakfast bar one morning, “You woke us up.”

  “Nightmare.”

  “What was it about?”

  “Can’t remember,” I said, in no mood for her dream analysis. She’d read a few books on dreams and done a psych unit one semester as an elective. Now it was her dinner-party trick if things got boring. If she’d been there when Martin Luther King announced: “I have a dream,” she would have shouted: “Really? Tell me about it.”

  Jude and Benny had joined a social bowls club, and, after buying the latest Jamie Oliver together, were throwing dinner parties for their new-found friends.

  “Bowls and dinner parties, a good combination for making friends,” Benny said, caressing the dark bakelite orbs as if they were exotic breasts. “Friends, and useful contacts.” Soon a high turnover of financial types was parking Beamers in our drive and well-toned backsides on Benny’s brown suede dining chairs. I’d come home, and there they’d be: talking work and d
ropping names like tabs.

  “Gav and Anthea have rain-checked,” Benny announced one Sunday afternoon, hanging up the phone and getting back to the scallops and monk-fish. “You two up for some seafood tonight?”

  “I wish I’d said no.” I was sitting on Charis’s dresser as she dried her hair upside down in front of the mirror. I’d just dropped Bevan off at home. His immune system was up a bit so they’d let him out before the next round. We’d spent half an hour shaving his head together, laughing as we’d lathered it up. It felt close and rare, like brothers should be.

  “If it’s gonna go, it’s gonna go on my terms,” he’d crowed, checking out our handiwork in the mirror. He looked healthy enough, just Bevan with a shaved head. That universal cancer look, with its give-away hollow face and wasted arms was some way off. He looked strong and vital standing there with no hair. Vicki had walked in from her mum’s just after. She screamed when she saw him, which made the two of us laugh even more.

  “Stay for dinner,” Bevan said, peering at himself and rubbing his hand over his smooth head. For once it had been me, not Vicki who’d come out with some excuse.

  “Don’t you want to go?” shouted Charis above the dryer’s drone.

  “I’m not up to the chattering classes tonight.”

  “You can hardly just sit in your room. Besides it’s seafood, your favourite.”

  “Great! It’ll be like sharks at a feeding frenzy.”

  She switched the dryer off and stood up straight. The room smelt of shampoo and warm hair. “Cool, so I’ll be your shark patrol,” she said, taking a Charlie’s Angels stance with the dryer across her chest like a gun. “Feeling lucky punk?”

  “Only when I’m around you.”

  “Aww, sweet.”

  “Don’t laugh, I mean it!”

  “I know you mean it, but it’s still sweet.”

  “Maybe you could hang around Bevan a bit more, let some of that luck rub off on him.”

  For the first time in going out with her I saw something dark flit across her eyes, like clouds skidding past a pale moon.

  “It’s not luck Bevan needs,” she said turning serious and letting her hands drop to her sides. “Not luck, just chemo, a good rest, and a lot of praying.”