by Tracy Bloom
Six
‘You ask,’ I tell George.
He shakes his head vigorously at me.
I let out an exasperated gasp and look at my watch. I’m going to be late. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to arrive a picture of calm serenity with my supportive husband on my arm. But no, here I am in the Co-op, down the third aisle, desperately seeking some ingredient I can’t pronounce that George has failed to warn me he needs for his Food Technology class.
‘You ask,’ I demand, glaring at him. Come on, George, I think. I really don’t need this today. Surely today you can open your bloody mouth and ask someone a bloody question, I want to scream.
He shakes his head even more vigorously and looks terrified. His therapist has told me that losing my temper with him will have an adverse effect. I should try and be calm and patient. I look at him and I am almost envious. He has a label that allows him to behave this way. A lady in a white coat told us he suffers from anxiety. It’s official. The fact that I am unofficially anxious today is irrelevant. I do not have the label and therefore I will be the one embarrassing myself in front of a shop assistant, unable to pronounce whatever this ridiculous food substance is.
There’s a man lifting boxes of quick-cook rice off a trolley and onto a shelf. I dash over to him.
‘Do you have any quin-oh-ah?’ I ask as though I’m speaking in my second language. I can already hear the sound of George shaking his head vigorously behind me. I’ve said it wrong, I know I have, and embarrassed him and made him more anxious. Well, it’s his own fault. If he’d asked himself in the first place, or had the decency to point it out before I did the online shop, then we wouldn’t be in this predicament, would we?
‘Pardon?’ the man replied.
Oh God, I’m going to have to say it again.
‘Quin-oh-ah?’ I repeat. ‘It’s a grain apparently.’
He frowns. ‘I don’t think I’ve heard of that.’
George coughs. ‘Keen-wa,’ I think he says to the floor.
‘What did you say, George?’ I demand, dipping my ear closer to his mouth to try and hear.
‘Keen-wa,’ he repeats.
‘Keen-wa?’ I say to the man. There is a pause. I see a trip to Sainsbury’s looming, a late mark on George’s register and my date with Doctor Death cancelled.
‘Ah yes,’ he says. ‘Follow me.’
‘How do you say it again?’ I ask as I snatch the packet with ‘Quinoa’ written in large letters across the top.
‘Keen-wa,’ he replies.
‘Ridiculous,’ I tell him and turn and take a fast walk to the checkout.
I spot Ellie waiting by the door as I literally throw money at someone, anyone, just so we can get out of there. She’s with Phoebe, her so-called ‘bestie’. ‘Beastie’, as George and I refer to her when Ellie is not around. It makes him smile knowingly at me, which makes it so worthwhile. Phoebe is an evil piece of work, and it horrifies me to know Ellie has the poor judgement to hang around with her. She’s a viper in a stupid little black trilby hat that she thinks makes her look cool and edgy and above every other mortal on this planet as she casts her judgemental eye over all she surveys.
‘We’re gonna walk,’ announces Ellie as I approach, thrusting change into my wallet.
‘You’ll be late,’ I bark back. ‘I said I’d give you a lift, seeing as we had to go to the Co-op, so hurry up.’
‘That’s okay,’ shrugs Ellie.
‘What is?’
‘Being late.’
‘No, it isn’t!’
‘Chill, Mum,’ says Ellie, smirking at Beastie. ‘We’ll just put our watches back five minutes…’
‘…and say we had no idea we were late, Mr Barrowman,’ interrupts Phoebe in a sing-song voice, pushing her cleavage towards me, fluttering thick, perfectly mascaraed eyelashes and smiling from expertly lined lips. ‘Works every time,’ she continues, snapping her head back and staring at George until his chin disappears into his neck.
‘Suit yourself,’ I say to Ellie. I don’t have time for the teacher manipulation strategies of Year Twelve girls.
I grab George’s arm and depart at speed, praying the school-run traffic will have died down and there has been no major outbreak of disease overnight leading to a higher than normal demand for the pitiful number of car parking spaces at the hospital.
* * *
‘Mr Randall is running a little late,’ the receptionist at the Oncology Unit tells me as I pant out my name, having run down what feels like twelve miles of identical corridors. ‘He was called on to a ward early this morning. I’m so sorry.’
She smiles ever so kindly at me. She knows, I thought. She’s seen the notes already; she knows it’s bad. That’s why she’s so apologetic. I resist the urge to grab her round the neck and shriek, ‘Just tell me!’
‘That’s okay,’ I smile sweetly back. ‘Roughly how long do you think he will be?’
‘He’s about forty minutes behind at the moment, I’m afraid.’
‘Okay,’ I nod, although it isn’t. It’s far from. I turn and find a seat and sit down, smoothing out my suede skirt. I brush my hand across it; this way and that, making it switch from dark brown to light tan in an instant. It calms me, like stroking a dog. It had been the right thing to wear, and I’m glad I dug it out. I knew I’d kept it somewhere as I pulled all sorts of memorabilia out of the fitted wardrobes in the spare room.
I would never have thrown it away, even when my waist expanded as a result of two pregnancies and too much Nutella. I’d bought it with my first paycheck after I moved back to the UK and in with Mark. I’d felt so mature. For the very first time I had money in the bank, I lived in a real house, I had a boyfriend who had a real job where he had to wear a suit, not just shorts and a suntan, and I could walk into Miss Selfridge and buy whatever I wanted. On learning I had blown most of my earnings on a skirt, Mark didn’t entirely agree that I had matured, but he soon saw the benefit when I invited him to feel the quality, especially around the posterior area.
I smiled to myself. The skirt hadn’t stayed on long. Whenever I wore it after that he’d raise his eyebrows and we would exchange a knowing glance. We both knew that soon enough he would be ‘feeling the quality’ again.
This morning I’d known it would fit me, even though I hadn’t been able to wear it for a very long time. I’d lost weight recently. As a cover I’d told Mark I was on a diet but, then again, I’d been on a diet ever since 1996, when I returned to the land of pastry, decent chocolate and Chinese takeaways. He hadn’t actually noticed that for the first time in twenty years the diet was apparently working.
Maybe that would have been the opportunity to tell him that it was the ‘you may have a terminal illness’ diet that was finally doing the trick. That I stood in fear on the scales every morning, not from potential weight gain but from seeing the numbers fall steadily and slowly in a way I had dreamed they would for so many years.
But no, he never commented. Not even when I stood in front of him this morning in the brown suede skirt that I last wore in my twenties. The skirt he couldn’t get off me quickly enough then. I’d stood there as he gulped down coffee at the breakfast bar, wringing my hands and building up to saying, ‘I need you. I need you to come with me.’ But George had come hurtling in and stuffed a book under my nose, pointing vigorously at the word ‘quinoa’.
‘Got to go,’ said Mark, brushing past me into the hall. ‘Bye.’
The front door slammed and he was gone.
I’d blown it. Missed my chance. Missed my chances. The hundred or so times when I’d been on the verge of sharing with him but either couldn’t bear to say the words out loud, or the moment was interrupted by the ring of a phone or the arrival of a message or the demand of a child.
You must think this is a sorry state of a marriage if I couldn’t share with my husband that I had been having tests for cancer. Perhaps you are right. Maybe you are thinking that, if you were me, you would have to tell him. Y
ou would make him listen. He’s your husband, for Christ’s sake. He should be sitting there right now next to you, gripping your hand ever so tightly so you know you’re facing this together. You are not alone.
Well, that’s how we would like to think all people facing terrible news would be. That’s what we assume. We’d never expect a married mother with two children to be sitting there being asked to wait another excruciating forty minutes to see how long she is going to live – alone. But it happens. I know this because it is happening to me.
I get through the next fifty minutes (as it turns out) by making up stories about the other people in the waiting room with me. It’s something I used to do to distract myself at the airport whenever there was a severe delay on an incoming flight.
There’s a sweet little elderly lady, virtually bent double in her chair next to her evil plotting daughter who has taken charge of all her mother’s medical appointments, much to the delight of her busy but clueless siblings. They’ll be sorry when it comes to the reading of the will and the solicitor hands over the keys to the family home and a red savings book with over a hundred grand stashed away to the daughter who successfully managed to infiltrate her mother’s dying wishes.
Then there’s a couple, in their early sixties. They are the male and female version of each other. They’ve been married so long that they even look like each other: similar haircut, same dress sense, similar glasses perched on the ends of noses. They are a match. It wouldn’t surprise me if, when they met, they’d both said, ‘Snap,’ knowing they had found their pair and that the rest of their lives would proceed in perfect partnership. Until now. It’s her that’s ill, I think. He has his hand over hers and is looking around in dignified yet defiant silence. He will protect her. He will stop this dreadful thing happening. He has her. She calmly looks far into the distance, knowing she is not alone.
My phone buzzes in my bag. I instantly start to scrabble around in it whilst deflecting the disapproving glances of my fellow loiterers. Eventually I find it after chasing blindly after a packet of tissues, a lipstick and a room card key from a hotel in the Lake District from two years ago. It’s one of my favourite possessions. A reminder of a wonderful night away with my husband. I need that right now.
I glance at the screen whilst trying to find the silencer button. It’s a text from Mark.
Will be late tonight – more numbers needed – don’t wait up
I stare at it. I switch my phone off and throw it back in my bag.
Such a bummer that I might have cancer just as my husband is approaching everything he has planned and dreamed about. The company he works for is about to be bought by a private equity firm. Whatever that means. Well, I know exactly what it means actually. It means that Mark’s ‘design for life’ has gone perfectly to plan. He passed all his accountancy exams then got a job with a medium-sized engineering firm, where he worked his way up to Finance Director. He relentlessly negotiated share options into his package and now an investment company is buying them out, and apparently Mark gets a huge wedge of money.
How much, I don’t know. He won’t tell me. He says he doesn’t want to jinx it but I’ve seen on our home computer that he’s been browsing the Porsche website so I think we are talking some serious cash. He doesn’t really seem excited though. He’s tense and distant, but then he has been working all hours. I’ve hardly seen him in six months. I’ve hardly even had a conversation with him in six months. I don’t ask him about work because I don’t understand it. He starts talking and my eyes just glaze over. It’s like he’s speaking in a foreign language. The only time work is discussed is in the context of why it is keeping him away from home for such ridiculously long hours, leaving me to take most of the strain of parenting two teenagers. I try and talk to him about the kids and he seems to think they are fine, that right now his focus has to be on crossing the line with this damn deal.
‘Jenny Sutton,’ a nurse calls out. She is holding a folder of notes and she looks harassed. Overworked. I scrabble around to pick up my bag and walk towards her. She heads left towards a corridor and I fall into step beside her. She says nothing. Clearly she doesn’t know what to say to me because it’s bad news. She knows. Of course she knows. She looks harassed because she knows what is about to happen to me.
I’m about to mention the weather as I normally would when thrown into the awkward company of a complete stranger but I stop myself. She won’t be expecting small talk from me. No need for the usual pleasantries.
She turns a corner and opens a door into a small office. There’s a desk with a chair behind it and two in front. A computer. Some shelves. A window with a blue blind. And that is it. Nothing else. This room belongs to no one. It’s faceless and lacking in any human touch whatsoever.
‘Mr Randall will be with you shortly,’ announces the nurse and shuts me in the magnolia box.
I look at the back of the door and weirdly there is an eye test chart hanging on it. I can hear my breathing. I wish I were having an eye test. I sit down and look back at the chart. I start reading the letters, seeing how far down I can get. All but the last line. I put a hand over my left eye and try again. Same result.
I put my hand over my right eye to see how that one fares and that is how Mr Randall finds me when he enters the room. Mouthing a ‘W’ with one hand over an eye like a dyslexic pirate.
I pull my hand down sharply and cough. He closes the door quickly but then it seems to take about three years for him to walk past me and take the seat behind the desk, where at last I can get the full view of his face and watch his lips start to move.
I feel like Sherlock Holmes as I watch him take this epic journey before my eyes. My heart is now pounding at a phenomenal rate and I have clocked that he is wearing a suit, a navy suit that he has had for some time for the hem of the trousers is slightly frayed. His black shoes are extremely shiny, military shiny. Perhaps he was a soldier at some point but he smells nice. I can smell aftershave, which strikes me as not what an ex-serviceman would wear for work somehow. Maybe he just has a wife who likes to clean his shoes or maybe, when you are a consultant, you just get the junior doctors to lick your shoes clean.
He’s sitting now and looking at me. He has a kind face. Is it kindness or is it pity? He’s running his hand through his hair and now his lips are moving. Now he is speaking and I must listen: the moment has come to listen to the impossible words.
‘Do you have someone with you?’ he asks.
I shake my head. I’m doomed.
‘In the waiting room?’ he prompts hopefully.
‘No,’ I reply. ‘I came alone.’
I watch a look of panic flicker across his face and then he coughs to cover up the fact his mind is thinking rapidly about what he should do next. It isn’t the sort of news he’s used to giving to someone alone, clearly. My heart starts to beat even faster.
‘Well, I’m afraid it’s not good news.’
‘Right, right,’ I say, nodding my head rapidly to reassure him that it’s perfectly all right to tell me this without someone gripping my hand to keep me upright. I can stay upright all on my own. Look at me, Doc, I can do this.
‘The scans show that, as suspected, you do have a tumour in your cervix, but there are also signs that it has spread to your bowel.’
I cannot speak but my head is now nodding so determinedly that I must look like one of those stupid Churchill’s dogs you see in the back of cars. The doc is still speaking but I cannot take in what he is saying. It’s as if I’m on a plane and my ears are popping. All sounds are muffled and incoherent and time has been suspended whilst my insides adjust to a new air pressure. But I’m not adjusting to a new air pressure, I’m adjusting to a whole different dimension.
The doc’s lips have stopped moving. He’s looking at me expectantly. I realise I’ve stopped nodding like a dog and now I’m shaking my head rapidly. The quick change in direction is making me feel dizzy.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’ h
e asks.
My head never pauses, just carries on shaking. I’m aware my hands have joined in too. The doc puts his fingers through his hair and I can see rapid thoughts flicking across his eyes again. He gets up and walks round the desk to take the chair next to me and takes my hands in his. I stare down at these strange hands holding mine. Clean smooth hands. Safe hands. It will all be all right now, I think.
‘You have some decisions to make,’ he says slowly, making sure that I am looking at him.
I nod. Churchill is back.
‘I would recommend chemotherapy, in your case.’
He didn’t say surgery. Why didn’t he say surgery? I want it out, I just want it out. I want surgery. I need to ask him why he’s not sending me straight to surgery to cut it out but I can’t speak. I think I’m going to be sick. He’s wrong, I think. He meant to say surgery. He’s missed the fact that he can cut it out. I need to tell him he’s wrong. That he needs to send me down to surgery now to cut it out as quickly as they can. But if I ask him about surgery and he says no, then what does that mean? I don’t want to ask him in case he does say no. No wouldn’t be a good answer would it?
‘What about surgery?’ I manage to whisper.
‘No,’ he says.
I’m on that plane again and my ears are popping. I’m about to enter another dimension.
‘The way in which it has spread would make surgery very difficult…’
Difficult, you are saying, but not impossible. That’s what he said, wasn’t it? I look around for back-up to confirm that I heard him right but I have no back-up. My back-up is staring at a spreadsheet somewhere in a glass building on a business park. He can’t hear from there.
‘Chemotherapy is probably your best option at this point in time.’
‘But will it get rid of it?’ I ask, searching his face for the right answer. The hint of a smile, a lack of concern, anything.
He looks down at our hands for a moment so I can’t see the look in his eyes and presumably so he can’t see the look in mine. He looks back up.
