‘You look gorgeous,’ he said. He kissed her, firmly, edging her back against the wall. He had one hand on her shoulder; he pressed against her black shirt dress.
‘This thing you’re wearing is so sexy,’ he breathed, running his hands along her body. ‘Clingy. Thin.’
She could only kiss back. He pushed her into his bedroom, sat on his bed. She stood in front of him.
‘Take it off for me,’ he said. She smiled, and shook her head.
‘Bec,’ he said. His voice was business-like. ‘Take it off.’
Her hands moved to her belt. She unlaced it. Then she began to undo the buttons.
‘That’s it,’ he breathed. ‘Keep going.’
Another button. Bec swallowed. The dress fell open. She was wearing new underwear. Cheap, but nice. Pale-blue lace. She’d bought it the week before, on her lunch break. Unforgivable. But it was less unforgivable than wearing any of the underwear – the expensive, sexy-in-a-classy-way underwear – that Stuart tended to give her.
Ryan looked her up and down, slowly.
‘Really gorgeous,’ he said. ‘Take your dress off properly.’
Bec allowed her dress – freshly ironed! – to fall off her shoulders, to the floor.
‘Sexy,’ he said. He pulled her hip so that she was standing between his knees. He ran his fingertips over the straps of her bra, flipped them down, onto her upper arms.
‘Very pretty,’ he said. ‘Take it off now.’
She could hear her breath coming faster as she unhooked her bra, slipped it off. He immediately reached for her breasts, bounced them gently in his cupped hands. She whimpered.
‘Yeah,’ he said, in response. ‘Nice, aren’t they? You’ve got such beautiful tits.’
Tits! Who said that? It was really quite distasteful. But also, surprisingly nice. Sexy.
‘Turn around,’ he said. She did, wondering what was going to happen next. He stood up, behind her. In his little mirror, they could see their own faces. He started playing with her nipples. Pressing himself against her bottom. He was watching her.
‘Your pussy,’ he breathed, trailing a hand down, gentling his fingers under the blue lacy triangle. ‘Soft.’
It didn’t even occur to her to laugh, which is what she’d always thought she’d do if someone started using words like tits and pussy in real life. This was the kind of sex she’d always imagined Kate had. Overwhelming and practised. She sank back towards him, closed her eyes.
She heard his breath. It was fast and deep. Goodness. He wasn’t stopping. He was just playing with her, with her breasts and her . . . pussy, as if he was really, really enjoying it.
‘Ryan,’ she said. She opened her eyes, which met his in the mirror. ‘I think I’m going to come.’
‘I’d reckon,’ he said, giving her a slow grin. He did something else with his hand, pushing her a bit harder and then she did actually come, leaning back against him, half falling. After a moment he turned her around to him again and kissed her.
‘You feel amazing,’ he said. ‘Lie down, Bec.’
His bed was neatly made, like always. She lay on top of the doona cover, on her back, propped up on her elbows. Her body actually was quite nice, she thought, dreamily. He took off his shorts.
‘Take those off,’ he said. She slithered her underwear down her legs, and he made a little groaning sound. ‘I always forget just how beautiful you are,’ he said. Imagine if she had never done this. Never had this. What a tragedy that would have been.
‘I like . . . this,’ she said. It was becoming easier to say that kind of thing.
‘Yeah,’ he said, caressingly. ‘I know.’ He moved over her, one palm on each side of her head. He began to kiss her again. ‘This,’ he breathed, as he slid into her. ‘Is this what you like?’
She nodded against his neck.
‘Me too, Bec,’ he said. His voice was urgent, low. ‘Since the moment I woke up the only thing I’ve been wanting to do is to fuck you.’
Chapter Thirteen
Kate
I was eating muesli – contemporary-era grain; I’d run out of ancient – and reminding myself that today was simply another day of writing my thesis and living a Full and Independent Life. (Not full and independent in a differently-abled-look-at-me-go! way. Full and independent in a single-no-children-loving-life! way.)
At that time of day, the thing I missed most was the morning messaging. We’d been in the habit of sending each other one or two morning texts, even on mornings when we’d woken up together. Just sweet little messages, like an observation about something we saw on the way to work (Adam, why are there ads for milk? Isn’t it well known enough already?) (K8! I just saw INCWINC on an Alfa Romeo Spider. Not too bad, eh?) or a song to listen to or a recipe to try or a movie to see. He thought I didn’t know enough about Australian music. He thought we should cook dinner together more often. He thought Good Will Hunting was one of the best movies Hollywood ever made.
Except, of course, the man who thought all those things didn’t really exist.
I put my forehead on the nice cold bench. Isn’t it funny, how when someone has hurt you, you still yearn to see them? Isn’t it hard, to accept that in real life when a man seems not to like a woman very much, it’s probably because he doesn’t like her very much? Why didn’t he like me enough? I kept asking myself. As if that was the main and most important consideration. As if, had I been just a bit better, then the Adam I loved would have been real.
After a while, I lifted my forehead up and realised that I hadn’t finished my muesli. I’d been there for ages, doing nothing, except thinking. I blinked at my bowl. I stared at my phone. I remembered another message. In a different flat, in a different city, in a different decade, in a different life.
In London. More than fourteen years before.
*
‘This is a message for Kate Leicester.’
The voice on my answering machine had been plummy and well-educated, like a butler out of a film. (Although butlers, surely, would not have been particularly well-educated.) ‘Kate, this is Mr Michael Cartwright. Please call my rooms as soon as you’re able.’
Maybe if I’d listened more carefully, I might have noticed Mr Cartwright sounded slightly less pompous than usual. Maybe if I’d been savvier, I would have been surprised that the great man had picked up a telephone himself.
I’d been away for a few days for British Vogue, shooting something that was about how – even though it was the new millennium – traditional tartan was timeless and therefore still a goer. We’d been in stony Edinburgh: lots of thin, beautiful men in kilts blurring up the background, and me in the foreground wearing a succession of tartan-accessorised evening dresses and many, many pearls. Anyway, I had a lot of messages, so I didn’t call Mr Cartwright back straight away.
‘Is that Kate Leicester?’ he said, the following day, when he got through. ‘Mr Cartwright, your surgeon, here. I’ve been leaving you messages.’
One message, actually, I thought. Peremptory git. I said nothing.
‘Now, Miss Leicester, I have some unfortunate news.’ He was speaking in a slow, interested voice, the sort you’d use to draw children into a story. ‘The histology – the laboratory report – is back on your right arm procedure. And it appears the lump we removed is, most unusually, not a benign lesion.’
‘Right?’
‘It’s important I see you as soon as possible to arrange further surgery.’ His tone definitely did not sound as if he was giving me life-changing news.
‘Well, I could come in towards the end of next week?’
‘Sooner is better in this case. I’ve popped you in at the end of my clinic today. Half past five or so.’
It was a day off; I’d been planning to eat my monthly Mars bar and start the new Harry Potter.
‘All right,’ I said.
I wore jeans and trainers and a tight lemon singlet top with shoe-string straps. Even though my right elbow was a bit painful and stiff, it took me les
s than a minute to twist my hair into a loose bun at the nape of my neck. I wore fuchsia lipstick. As I was running down the stairs, I tied a filmy pale-pink cardigan around my waist, because although it was August it was late August, and it was London. I can’t remember what underwear I wore. I caught the Tube.
Mr Cartwright – who I’d met the week before, for my first ever ‘procedure’ – looked like someone who’d grown up in a house that had grandfather clocks and more than one staircase. I imagined that he’d turned to his receptionist after I’d left and said, ‘Pretty thing, isn’t she?’ or else, ‘Good Lord, what an accent!’
I sat down opposite him, his desk between us.
‘As I said on the telephone, we are no longer dealing with a benign lesion. Last week, as you know, we took that little lump off your right arm. It seems we resected a rare malignant tumour called a leiomyosarcoma. It is possible not all of it has been removed, so we will need to go back and operate again.’ He looked at me, then frowned at his computer as if it was an impertinent medical student.
‘All right,’ I said. I touched the healing wound on the inside of my right arm. It was still swollen. With commendable presence of mind, I said, ‘Do you mean I’ve got cancer?’
‘It’s possible there might be some malignant cells left, yes.’ He looked down at my arm, reached out, pressed at the swollen bit, and then frown-nodded. ‘After re-excision I’m going to refer you to an oncologist for an opinion.’
His tone was so reassuring. He made it sound as if this was a natural, if inconvenient, course of events, something that happened from time to time that he knew how to deal with. Like when a pilot announces there’s too much fog to take off, so everyone back to the terminal, please.
A few months before, a girl I’d known through work (Hortense Maloney) had been told she had cancerous cells on her cervix. The way she carried on (wailing about how she was being cut down in her prime, wondering aloud about why) it had seemed very serious, as if she (literally) would die. But then she had a (much wailed-about) day procedure, a dose of laser or something, and it turned out she was as good as gold. Well. Certainly I was not going to be like Hortense Maloney.
‘What’s an oncologist?’ I would be assertive and rational.
‘A cancer specialist. I propose I operate again on Friday.’
‘Friday. So . . . how serious is this?’
‘Very serious if left untreated. I realise this might come as a shock.’
I remember thinking that if Mr Cartwright wasn’t worried, then there mustn’t be anything to worry about. Naïve, yes, appallingly so. The thing is – quite apart from Hortense Maloney’s cervix – I was used to fashion editors. They were often young and terrified and would completely drop their bundles if someone’s hair wasn’t going right or the shoes were the wrong type of burgundy. Grown adults would pant things like, ‘That absolutely is not bronze, that is 90 per cent fucking MUSTARD!’
Mr Cartwright was not panting or running, no one was shouting, ‘Clear!’: there was obviously no emergency.
‘I am a bit shocked,’ I said. ‘But I’ll re-arrange my schedule. I suppose I’ll need a few weeks off work?’
‘Yes. Start with that,’ Mr Cartwright said, approvingly.
Then he added, ‘At this stage we’re very hopeful that a limb salvage procedure will be possible.’
*
For reasons hardly anyone understands, I told no one.
I went home, rang Alison (my agent) and told her I had to have an operation – I’m sure she thought it was an abortion; she didn’t sound anywhere near sympathetic enough. I spent long periods of time looking at my beautiful right arm, pressing along various bits of it, reassuring myself that it looked virtually back to normal and was not even all that sore. I went running further than usual in Kensington Gardens, all the time thinking that surely if I had proper cancer then I wouldn’t be feeling anywhere near so energetic.
Only the two-inch long, almost-healed, whitish-pink line just below my elbow – where Mr Cartwright had done the first procedure – showed that anything at all was amiss. He’d removed the little lump that had started off like a grape, and then grown almost to the size of a golf ball, in his office. I’d been wide awake, wincing at the sting of the local anaesthetic and hoping he wasn’t going to try to make conversation. I needn’t have worried. ‘Bound to be a lipoma,’ was all he’d said. ‘Very common. Completely harmless.’
On the Wednesday, I had a (pretty much compulsory) lunch with Alison. ‘There’s some problem with the muscles of my arm,’ I told her, entirely truthfully. She narrowed her eyes, and recommended glucosamine and Nurofen. I thanked her and said I’d probably be OK for Fashion Week, a whole month away. ‘Gracious, Kate, we’d certainly hope so,’ she said.
I went to a shoot about age-defying face cream on the Thursday. That night I went out for upmarket hamburgers with a few work friends. I told them I was going away for a week or two. Maybe they thought it was to do with an eating disorder or a cosmetic procedure or (perhaps if they’d talked to Alison) an abortion. In any case they didn’t ask even a single question. Not one.
On Friday I got up very early and took a black taxi to Fulham and Kings Road Hospital. A thin young man in a dressing gown was loitering out the front, holding a metal wheelie stand with a bag of liquid attached to it. I thought he probably had AIDS, and I’m ashamed to say that that comforted me. Made me feel less alone.
The hospital was pretty new then. There was lots of glass and metal and natural light and a foyer like a department store’s, except that the signs said things like SPINAL UNIT instead of HOMEWARES. Also, the staff were not well-groomed enough to be working in a shop in that part of London. (It’s a very fancy part. Hugh Grant had a place nearby.)
I didn’t see Mr Cartwright that morning. In a cubicle with green curtains and a sign that said KATHERINE JANE LEICESTER – CARTWRIGHT – NIL BY MOUTH, I got changed into a white paper gown. A nice young woman called Nicola Devitt came in, carrying a blue plastic folder with my name on it.
‘I’ll be your anaesthetist, Kate,’ she said.
I answered no to her every question (Regular medications? Allergies? Smoker? Recreational drugs? Other medical conditions? Pregnant?)
‘Well, you’ll be nice and easy, then,’ she said, shutting my folder with a casual clap. I thought that she meant my operation was bound to be a success.
*
Later that day I woke up feeling very happy. There were no beeping machines or worried faces or bright lights or choke-y tubes down my throat.
A nurse with a number of silver studs in both his ears said, ‘Ah! Kate Leicester! You’re back with us! Welcome. Now, you’re in Recovery, darl. Just let me pop this back on your finger. Got to make sure you’re breathing for me. Terrible look if you stop. Ruins my day, the paperwork. Your oxygen’s on ninety-eight. Bonus. Now, how are you?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Great, actually.’
‘Good drugs, aren’t they, darl?’ He winked, but in a reasonably enjoyable way. ‘So, no pain?’
‘No.’
He put a little plastic thing on a cord into my left hand, like an electric blanket control except smaller. ‘Press this when it starts to hurt, Kate, darl,’ he said.
Only after he’d walked off did I look over at my arm. It was still there (bonus) and it had its own little table thing that it rested on, so it was up a bit higher than my shoulder. Not at all like last time, when I’d just had a modest little bandage below my elbow. This time white crêpe was wound from my shoulder to below my wrist, and there must have been a lot of padding underneath it because my arm was much wider than usual. Like a python. Also there were two plastic tubes poking out from inside the bandages, disappearing down towards the floor. Some sort of reddish fluid was inside them.
The tips of all five of my fingers were visible though. I wiggled them a tiny bit. The little finger didn’t move at all, and the ring finger was a bit numb, which was disconcerting but not unbearable.
&
nbsp; And the drugs really were making me feel very happy.
Is there anything more annoying than false hope?
No. There is nothing more annoying.
Nothing.
*
Mr Cartwright turned up a bit later, after I’d been moved to the ward. I was groggier then and in no mood for him. I wanted Nicola Devitt, with her cheery blue folder. I really, really wanted Mum.
I wished that I’d told someone where I was. My friends, who could have crowded around my bed and brought flowers and magazines and made jokes about putting vodka into my drip or stealing my morphine. Or Bec. She would have arrived straight from Heathrow, with just-brushed, terrible hair, a shiny nose and a backpack full of medical textbooks with Post-it notes sticking out of them, as if knowledge about cancer would give us power over it. I wanted my dad. He would have turned up, sat next to my bed for hours, said almost nothing and then, when it was time to go, pulled on one of his enormous ears and murmured, ‘And as if that Cartwright character’s not bad enough, they expect you to drink that tea, Kate-o.’
‘Kate,’ said Mr Cartwright. His nose that day reminded me of a big earplug. ‘Things went well. The tissues came together beautifully. The lab is checking the specimen. Making sure we’ve got it all. We’ll get you to have some scans before you go home. As a precaution.’ He said things about a physiotherapist, the elbow joint, the ulnar nerve, the flexor muscles. Someone who looked and sounded exactly like a 25-year-old Prince William stood next to him, scribbling in my cheery blue folder and then bending down to inspect the tubes that poked out of my arm. ‘Thirty mills,’ he said, as if that was a compliment.
I felt very hopeful. Not even hopeful. I assumed that everything was as fine as everyone seemed to think.
My scans were all clear. I had a spectacularly normal torso, apparently. My little finger started moving, first of all when I tried really hard, then when I tried only a bit hard. The antibiotics were stopped. A nurse took out my drip. Another one took out my ‘drains’. I was allowed to walk to the toilet. The new bruises on my arm shrank, so that they looked like a purple archipelago instead of the whole of Europe.
The Mistake Page 18