TWNS-2-6-Kindle Master

by Alexander, Nick

  When he gets downstairs, April is already up, eating the remains of last night’s pizza.

  “Oh, hi, Dad,” she says. “Ronan’s gone out for a run. So, what are we up to today?”

  Sean shrugs. “I don’t know what you’re up to,” he says. “But I think I’m buying a flat.”

  Snapshot #28

  Printed digital photo, colour. A man and a woman are sitting on an old grey sofa beneath a large, roofed porch. They are raising their glasses and smiling falsely. They are quite possibly mouthing the word, “Cheese.”

  It is Sunday evening and April and Ronan have just left.

  Sean has placed the printed photo on the table and is caressing it gently with one fingertip as he struggles to remember.

  His mind, though, isn’t playing ball. It keeps drifting to other things, to yesterday’s flat-purchase, or to April’s coming baby, or to Ronan’s cheeky Irish humour, or to Catherine’s affair. Anything in fact except this photo.

  He sits for almost half an hour trying to summon specific memories before he slips the cassette into the machine, but with the exception of a few facts, such as the town where they stayed – Fayence — and the fact that there had been a pool, it’s all gone. The house had probably been lovely, he thinks. There had been noisy cicadas by day and even noisier frogs by night. And he remembers the sofa in the picture and the rainstorm. But that’s it. It’s not a lot from a ten-day holiday. But then, this was no ordinary ten-day holiday.

  Cassette #28

  Hello Sean.

  It’s been three weeks since the last tape – at least three weeks – and to be honest, I can’t even remember what the last one was about. But I don’t suppose it matters much. They’re all just episodes, really.

  These have not, as you know, been good weeks for me. The trial I was in has been interrupted because I’m not the only one, it seems, who can’t take these doses of titty-bitty-marzipan, as we all call it around here.

  That was my invention, by the way. Are you proud of me?

  Anyway, three of the others in the trial have died already, so I suppose I’m lucky to still be here at all.

  I’ve been in and out like a yo-yo these last few weeks, which is why I haven’t been able to finish off my tapes.

  You’ve been so sweet, Sean. So sweet and so brave.

  We’re all still pretending that I’m going to get through this; we’re all saying that some miracle is going to happen. April, bless her, keeps bringing me printouts of the cancer curing properties of cannabis, and aspirin, and nettle tea, and God knows what else. And I keep promising to try them all when I get home.

  I think April is the only person who really still believes that might happen. In fact, I chatted to the psychologist about her this morning. I wanted to know whether I should ram the whole thing down her throat, so to speak. I wanted to know if I should sit her down and chant, “I’m dying, April, I’m dying, April; your mother is going to be dead soon.” Perhaps if I said it over and over again she’d get it in the end. But the psychologist said that denial is sometimes a kind of protection thing. Like a circuit breaker or something. “She’ll deal with it,” he said, “when she’s ready.”

  You’re saying the same things as April, too. You’re still talking about summer holidays and where we might go but I can see in your eyes that you don’t believe it. But thank you, my darling, for pretending. It’s so much more fun to look at those brochures of Lanzarote and imagine us all there. It’s so much less depressing than sitting in silence waiting for me to pop my clogs and, believe me, that really is the way most of the visiting families behave around here.

  So, back to today’s photo, which is of our last actual holiday and, by the time you listen to this, our last ever holiday, I suppose. And God, what a waste of a great holiday that was.

  I’ve been reading one of the self-help books from the hospital library; it’s about dealing with one’s own death, and there’s this huge chunk about living in the moment. Because, like the Buddhists apparently say, there is no future and there is no past. They’re both just things that happen in your mind. In reality, there is only ever the present moment. The problem, it seems, is that people with terminal diseases (and old people, apparently, facing old age and eventually their own deaths) lose their ability to live in the moment. They’re so worried about the end of the journey that they fail to enjoy themselves getting there. Which is pretty understandable, but still a terrible waste. A waste that is perfectly illustrated by our time in the south of France.

  Do you know, I hardly remember any of it? It’s as if the whole thing happened behind a big, frosty window.

  Because of my back pain, I had been going back and forth to the doctor, the clinic and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, but still nothing had been found. (Though I do sometimes wonder if the doctors weren’t looking through a frosty window, as well. They certainly didn’t seem to be very good at spotting anything on those scans).

  Anyway, the current theory we were working on was a slipped disc and it wasn’t until my normal doctor sent me (finally) for blood tests, that anyone even began to suspect anything at all.

  Because, ever since the car, my back pain had been, let’s say, a difficult subject, I told you as little as possible about what was going on. You seemed to have exhausted whatever sympathy you had for my back and any mention of it, or doctors, or tests, seemed to be met with a blank expression, or occasionally even an eye-roll.

  So I even used to hide the bus tickets so that you wouldn’t know I’d been out there again. I felt, I suppose, embarrassed about it all.

  The news came at the end of July. Because of something in the blood tests, too much Billy Rubin or something, they sent me for a fresh set of scans. I wasn’t expecting anything much to show up – I’d pretty much given up hope by then – but when they phoned me up to ask me to come back in to discuss the results, it was unusual enough that I knew something was wrong.

  By the time I got home from the meeting, I knew. Oh, I didn’t know how advanced the whole thing was quite yet and we didn’t know it had spread, either, but my back pain finally had a cause, and it wasn’t a good one.

  I didn’t manage to tell you, though, did I? Even before I got home, you had sent me a text message saying something like, “Where are you? When are you home? I have a surprise for you!”

  I was on the bus when I read it. “Oh boy, and do I have one for you,” I thought, grimly.

  You were all excited when I got in. You’d found, and booked, a villa in France, and you were on a website busily booking plane tickets and a hire car. Should I have told you there and then? I don’t know. But I couldn’t. It honestly felt as if the space for me to tell you at that moment simply wasn’t there.

  I thought we’d have to cancel. I thought the hospital dates would make the whole French escapade an impossibility. But when I phoned them up on the following Monday morning, the dates, miraculously, all fitted. I had a meeting booked with the anaesthetist two days before we were due to go away and the surgery two days after we got back.

  Now, as you know, I have always been a sucker for a sign. And I took that as a sign. As big, pointy, unmissable sign. Is that silly of me? I expect you’ll think so.

  It’s strange because even then, even before we really knew anything, the idea of one last holiday together was on my mind. So perhaps, deep down, that’s why I kept it quiet. Perhaps, deep down, I knew.

  Whatever the reason, I decided to say nothing. You knew something was wrong, of course, and you kept on asking me if everything was all right. You even thought I had the hump about going to France at one point.

  There was only one moment when I nearly told you. We were in that pizzeria in that town on the hill – Mons, was it? Anyway, I almost told you there. The view was beautiful and the sky was so blue and I felt briefly happy and then overwhelmed with sadness – the way you can sometimes swing from one to the other – and it was on the tip of my tongue when that waiter tripped over with our wine. And again, I too
k it as a sign. I took his tipping wine over me as some kind of divine intervention.

  I was weird for the whole ten days, I know that. And because I was weird, you, in turn, were worried. We didn’t have much fun.

  Everything about that trip, the flight, the drive, that gorgeous villa, the pool, the meals, even your presence, it was all wasted. And it was wasted because, as the book so clearly explains, I had lost my ability to live in the moment. Perhaps if I’d read the damned book beforehand it might have helped us have a better holiday.

  On the last day there was that big summer storm.

  It was very dramatic, with thunder and lightning, and rain like I’d never seen before. But it was warm, all the same – warm enough in the morning for us to still swim in the pool. I think that moment, swimming with you, with those cool hard drops whacking us on the shoulders, was the only moment in the entire ten days I was actually present. The rest of the time I was lost inside my head, lost in my fears for the future, I suppose.

  The rain continued all day, and in the afternoon I put my jacket on and you that big blue jumper, and we sat on the tatty grey sofa they had on the porch and watched the raindrops hitting the surface of the pool. The outdoor sofa reminded me, bizarrely, of sitting in Mum’s garden in Margate.

  I’d pretty much avoided drink for the entire holiday for the simple reason that I was scared it would loosen my tongue. And that’s the exact reason I let myself drink that afternoon. I had an operation booked in three days’ time, after all. I had to tell you.

  We drank the best part of two bottles of champagne between us and for a moment the alcohol enabled me to forget. It let me connect with you again and we snuggled together on the sofa and stared out at the crazy rain. You had two French cigarettes left, so we had one each and felt dizzy.

  And then you said, as if from nowhere, “You know how we discussed moving to New Zealand?”

  I started to tear-up immediately, because I knew instantly what was coming – I could sense it.

  “Well, what about France?” you said. “What about somewhere like here? What if I took a year out or something? Maybe if we used our savings we could do it in a way that would allow us to…” Your voice, which had sounded manic, petered out halfway through. At first, you thought that I was laughing at you and you were hurt. “The idea’s not that stupid, for Christ’s sake,” you said. But then you realised that my convulsions weren’t laughter. You realised that I was sobbing.

  You held me for a while, just like you did when Mum died. You pressed your forehead to mine and cried with me. You didn’t even need to know what it was about to join with me in crying. You always had that amazing ability to empathise.

  When I was all cried out, or at least I thought I was, you said, gravely, “It’s that bad, huh?”

  I nodded. I couldn’t speak.

  “Are you leaving me?” you asked, “Is that it?”

  I exploded into fresh tears, because no thought could have been further from the truth. All I wanted, right then, was to stay with you forever.

  Eventually, I managed to whisper the word, but you didn’t hear me properly, or didn’t want to believe that you’d heard me properly, so you made me repeat it, twice.

  “Cancer,” I said again. And then the third time it came out in a sort of annoyed shouty voice. “Cancer!”

  We sat and stared at each other for a bit. It seems like it was ages, but that might be my mind playing tricks. And then your face crumpled again and you threw your arms around me and pulled me tight.

  I felt so safe, wrapped in your arms. It’s crazy, but momentarily, I felt happy – as happy as I have ever felt. I felt so cosy surrounded by you and that woolly jumper. It seemed impossible to me that I could feel that safe and yet still be in so much danger.

  And as if you were reading my mind, you said, through tears, “We’ll beat this. Whatever it is, we’ll beat this together. You’ll see. You can’t… you know… You just can’t. Not when I love you this much. I won’t let you.”

  • • •

  Sean does not listen to a tape the following weekend. He tells himself that it’s because he’s too busy; he tells himself that it’s because he’s too tired. And these things are true. He is tired. He is busy.

  Between working and food-shopping and laundry, between repeated appointments at the bank and getting the flat tyre on the car fixed, and three separate surveyors’ appointments at the house, Sean finds that for the first time in ages he is quite literally overbooked.

  Even the weekend, generally so empty, turns out to be something of a rush. Sean has to visit his mother on Saturday lunchtime (Perry has had to rush off to Hong Kong for some reason) and Maggie phones repeatedly until Sean caves in and meets her for the promised celebration drink. But the real reason, he admits to himself, is that there’s only one envelope left. And as much as Sean instructs his mind to make itself ready, he doesn’t seem able to convince himself that he truly is.

  He’s scared of what Catherine will say to him in her final message, he realises. And he’s afraid, above all, of reaching the end of this process – afraid of finding himself truly alone, once again. Because yes, for all the shocks and for all the misery, this has been a dialogue. Catherine has continued to make him happy and angry, and sad, almost as if she was still alive. And he has loved her and cried with her and, yes, raged against her, here in the confines of his own head. Of course he’s scared of letting her go.

  On Sunday evening – his usual listening slot – the fear reaches a crescendo, leaving him nervous and shaky and unable to settle, a state which only partly abates during his working week.

  Amidst the sudden and surprising emptiness of the following weekend – the phone does not ring once, there are no visits – his fear of that final envelope becomes acute – a terror almost – and he finds himself unable to eat or sleep or even think about anything else.

  By Sunday evening he’s feeling trembly and shattered and, realising that he simply can’t face another week of anticipation, he steels himself, downs a dram of whisky, and carries the box to the lounge. “Time to get this over with,” he says, quietly. “Time to be brave.”

  He glances at the box and then looks nervously around the room, scanning for potential distractions before he starts.

  Outside, beyond the window, a neighbour’s child is learning to ride a bicycle with her father. He remembers trying to teach April – she had fallen off and scraped her knee and had cried for hours. She had finally managed it for the first time with Catherine while Sean had been out at work. He’d felt unreasonably jealous about that, he remembers.

  He crosses the room and pulls the curtains closed. He doesn’t want to see the little girl cycling past. He doesn’t want any potential visitors peering in on him, either.

  And then, finally, he returns to the sofa, lifts the lid and pulls the final envelope from the box.

  He senses, immediately, that this one is different from the others, both heavier and more bulky.

  He swallows with difficulty. His breath is laboured – it feels as if someone is sitting on his chest. He wonders briefly if he’s having a heart attack. Wouldn’t that be ironic? To die before he even reached the end of his late wife’s messages? He rips open the flap. He tips the contents onto his lap.

  A single photo, once again, but this time, not one, but two of the little cassettes. They are marked “A” and “B”.

  Snapshot #29

  Polaroid, colour. A woman lies in a hospital bed. Sitting either side of her, their arms linked around her shoulders, are a man and a woman. The young woman is touching a necklace with her free hand, and a screwed up ball of discarded wrapping paper rests on the bed. All three people in the photo are smiling unconvincingly.

  Tears well up in Sean’s eyes the second they focus on the photo. For it’s the last family snapshot ever taken.

  It had been the Saturday before April’s birthday and she had travelled up to Cambridge to collect her gift beforehand because, as she exp
lained it, the following Friday, when her birthday actually fell, she’d be working. But they had all known the truth. They had all feared that the following Saturday might be too late. And tragically, they’d been right.

  Though Catherine had picked out the necklace some months before, she had been so dosed up on morphine that day that she’d barely been present to hand it over.

  Once April had left for London, her watery eyes belying her emotions, Sean had returned, for a while, to lie next to his sleeping wife. She had murmured something that sounded like “dream” a few times in her sleep. And Sean had prayed that she was having good dreams.

  Cassette #29-A

  Hello Sean.

  I’m awake early this morning, and I’m just about with-it. I haven’t had to hit the morphine much yet, and the pain, unusually, is bearable. That seems unfair, really. I’d so much rather have been awake like this when you and April were here yesterday – was it yesterday? Time stretches and shrinks these days, so it’s hard to tell.

  Still, my mind is clearer today so at least I can crack on with these damned tapes. I must say, I think I’ve had enough of them. I’ve had enough of it all.

  I’m nearing the end, now. There are shadows closing in on me from the edges. I’ll tell you about them maybe if I find the time and the energy, but both of those things are becoming precious and rare, so I’d better just get on with the things I need to say.

  I’ve been dreaming about the day I met you, you know. I’ve been dreaming about Dreamland. Isn’t that funny?

  You know how people always say that your life flashes before your eyes? Well, perhaps that’s what this is. Perhaps that’s why I’m dreaming of the very beginning. Whatever the reason, it’s a lovely dream.