Photos of You (ARC)

by Tammy Robinson

  “I’m still not thrilled that you did it,” I tell her. “But I know your intentions were good.”

  “Exactly. And look how many offers of help we’ve had.”

  I shake my head. “I still can’t accept any of this. It’s too generous. There are so many other people out there more deserving than me.”

  She sighs and picks up my hand. “Ava, sweetheart, I love you, but sometimes you can be a total pain in the arse.”

  “Hey,” I protest.

  “Sorry, but it’s true. These people want to do something for you.”

  “Only because I’m sick.”

  “Yes, only because you are sick. But what’s wrong with that?”

  I shrug. “It just feels weird.”

  “Look at it this way. You’d really be doing them a favor.”

  “Oh, really, and how do you figure that?”

  “It’s simple. People like to help other people. It makes them feel good about themselves. People like knowing that they’ve made a difference in someone’s life. It’s called being kind and it’s actually a worldwide movement right now.”

  I look at her doubtfully.

  “Seriously. Look it up if you don’t believe me. With so much awfulness in the world people like to show kindness to strangers. Why shouldn’t you reap some of that? Huh?”

  She can sense I am weakening.

  “And,” she carries on, “think of how amazing we could make this wedding for you if we let all these people help.” She picks up her phone off the bed and flicks her finger down the screen.

  “Offers of dresses, free hairstyling on the big day. Look, this old guy has even offered his beach house for your wedding night. Wait.” She frowns as she reads and then jabs at the screen. “OK, delete that one. Think he’s got the wrong idea. But, Ava, please. Let me let these people do this for you. Please? You’re my best friend—”

  “Ahem.”

  Kate shuffles into the room and I realize she’s been listening at the door. She sounds all choked up as if she has been crying.

  “OK, one of my best friends,” Amanda corrects herself, reaching out to take one of Kate’s hands as well.

  “I want this day to be everything you’ve dreamt of and more,” she says. “I want it to be amazing. Just like you.”

  I look at Kate. She smiles through her tears. “I don’t see any harm in it. Like she said, people like to help other people.”

  “OK.” I nod. “As long as I get to decide what we accept. No monetary donations. Just stuff that might help with the wedding.”

  “Deal.” Amanda squeals, bouncing up and down on the bed.

  There’s the ping of a new message and she picks up the phone and reads it. I see her eyebrows arch and she looks at me.

  “What?”

  “One of the largest magazines in the country has just messaged. They saw the page and want to do a story.”

  “No.” I shake my head. “No way. Not happening.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Before my initial diagnosis, back when I was blissfully wading through life confident in the belief I could do anything I wanted and had all the time in the world left to do it in, I fought my morning wake-ups with all the determined grit of a bare-knuckled streetfighter.

  The blaring alarm made me get up and face the day long before I was ever ready. I hated that thing with a passion, but it was a necessary evil. Without it I had no internal alarm to rely on. My love for sleep and the comfort of my bed were too strong, my pillow a siren call. The alarm’s raucous blaring made for a bad start to the day, and it often took a couple of hours, a few coffees, and a guiltily bought, instantly regretted, cream doughnut to awaken me to an acceptable level to deal with people and the world.

  Now I regret those lost hours. I sleep now because my body tells me I have to, but my thoughts and fears often wake me while the rest of the world slumbers peacefully on. At least, those on the same side of the curve as me.

  I had no idea how enchanting the pre-dawn world can be. How deliciously mischievous it feels to be up before anyone else. I don’t stay in bed anymore; it’s too easy to notice in the stillness every ache in my body, every twinge, and think, Is that more—? And then I picture it, the cancer a little malicious army of soldiers, identical in dress and appearance, marching in perfect unison through my bones and my blood, advancing to claim new territories.

  No, I get up when I wake now. Softly, so as not to disturb the other two. I make myself a green tea, and if it’s cold I open the curtains, curl up on the couch, and watch the world awaken from within my sanctuary. But if it is warm, or I am feeling particularly scared of what is coming and need reassurance that I am still alive, I go out, on to the deck, and let the morning chill steal my breath and tiptoe across my skin, springing goosebumps up in its wake.

  I watch the stars fade out as the sky lightens, from black to inky denim to baby blue, the horizon hazy with the colors of a new dawn. And I smile, and I breathe, and I give thanks that I have made it through another night and been gifted with one more day. Because it is a gift. I know that now.

  Some of the people I have met through the cancer network, which stretches its tentacles far and wide, have referred to cancer itself as A Gift. For differing reasons; it truly made them appreciate their loved ones, their job, the very fact they have life. Being ill gave them the kick up the arse they needed to finish that book they started writing ten years ago/buy that motorcycle/jump out of that plane/end that dead-end relationship/mend those bridges. It has given them perspective.

  I don’t agree.

  My cancer has not been a gift. Yes, it has changed the way I view or interpret certain situations and circumstances, and it has caused me to physically slow down and focus on what is the most important thing to me, day to day, even sometimes hour by hour. But if I had a choice between being terminally ill and living the way I used to live, with blinkers on, I’d take living any day. Hands down.

  Perspective is good. But a fat lot of good it will do you when you’re lying in a hole in the ground.

  “Morning.” Kate emerges from the house, coffee in hand, blinking in the unadulterated pureness of the morning light.

  “Another stunning day in paradise,” Amanda says, joining us. She is wearing sunglasses, as if she is not ready to face the light of day. Last night her band played a gig as a favor to the publican of our local. A short, rotund guy named Gary, he has known us since we were fourteen and hiding in the bushes outside his pub balcony, ready to pilfer unconsumed alcohol from glasses and cigarette butts from ashtrays.

  “Ugh,” she groans, collapsing into one of the deckchairs. “You know the day-after recovery gets harder the older we get? I’d hate to see what we’ll be like when we’re forty.”

  There’s an uneasy silence while we digest her words.

  “Shit. Sorry, Ava. Shit.”

  She is stricken with her thoughtlessness but she needn’t be. I don’t expect everyone to filter every word before it comes out of their mouth on the off chance it might upset me.

  “Recovery wouldn’t be so bad if you didn’t get shitfaced every time you sing,” I tell her.

  She shrugs. “You know it helps.”

  Only a select few people in the world know how much Amanda struggles with stage fright.

  “I suppose I’d better shower,” I say reluctantly.

  “What time are they coming?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “Isn’t that rather early for journos to be out and about,” Kate comments.

  “Early bird catches the story, or something like that.”

  “I thought it was worm.”

  “Far too early for me, anyway,” Amanda grumbles.

  Standing in the shower and letting the hot water massage my body, I take a few deep breaths, trying to quell the nerves I feel at being interviewed for a major women’s magazine, one with a readership of roughly half a million women each week. Five hundred and ninety-four thousand, to be precise. I know this because I st
upidly googled it last night when I couldn’t sleep. Now I’m terrified about saying something stupid for all those women to read.

  The only reason I agreed to this interview in the end was to raise awareness. Specifically, that it can also be a young women’s disease. Free mammograms are only offered to women over the age of forty-five in this country, and while I’ve read the stats and agree that, yes, more women in that age group are affected, there is also a troubling trend of young women such as myself being diagnosed. Worse, we are often misdiagnosed, or diagnosed too late, once the cancer has metastasized and become harder or, as in my case, unable to be cured.

  Some doctors, such as the one I saw, don’t place enough seriousness on lumps or bumps or dimples or any other such symptoms of the disease when it presents in someone under the age of thirty-five.

  And that has to change.

  “You have the opportunity to make a difference here,” Amanda had said when she and Kate were trying to sell the idea to me. Cunningly, they’d roped my mother in on the cause. Her love of glossy printed pages is tremendous, and the thought of her only daughter being on the pages of one was enough to make her actually, physically, quiver.

  “Just think, darling,” Mum said. “They’d make you all glamorous for the photo shoot. They bring their own wardrobe and makeup people, you know. And hairstylists. You’d look amazing.”

  “And you could make a difference to someone’s life. By increasing awareness,” Amanda said again with a pointed look at Mum.

  “Oh, yes. And that,” Mum said.

  She had a point. If I could save just one person from going through what I’ve been through and am now facing, by catching their own cancer in the early, highly treatable stages, it’d be worth any misgivings on my part.

  I don’t know what exactly I’d been expecting, but the reporter, when she arrives, isn’t it. She blows into the house like a southern wind, all purple hair and sweeping kaftan, the bracelets on her wrists jangling like wind chimes. She stops in the center of the lounge and does a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree turn, and then nods to herself. “Yes. This will do.”

  “You must be Ava,” she says to me, tilting her head to the left and adopting the same sympathetic expression most people who know my plight wear.

  “What gave it away? The deathly pallor?” I joke, but she thinks I’m serious and freezes like a possum caught in a spotlight.

  “Er, well…”

  “Relax, I’m joking.”

  She throws back her head and laughs too loud and for too long.

  “I’m Nadia,” she says when she recovers, a hand pressed against her chest. “And these are Sophie and Kelly. They’re here to do your makeup and hair and wardrobe for the photos. Don’t worry, they’re very good at what they do. When they’ve finished working their magic no one would even guess that you’re…”

  “Dying?” I supply helpfully. “I think that’s kind of the point of the story, isn’t it?”

  “Coffee, anyone?” Kate interrupts to break the awkward silence that follows. “Or tea? I have herbal.”

  “Are they…here…yet? Am I too…late?” Mum’s voice arrives first, then her body follows. She bustles inside and collapses against the back of the couch, out of breath. When she sees Nadia she flushes. “I know you,” she says, straightening up and pointing. “I’ve seen your picture in the magazine.”

  Nadia smiles regally.

  “You’re my favorite journalist,” Mum gushes. “I read all your human-interest stories, every week. First page I flick to. Well, after the gossip pages, of course. That Dominique Taylor sure can sniff out a good story. Is he still with that guy off the telly? That dancing show?”

  “Mum.”

  “What?”

  Nadia steps forward and holds out a hand so covered in heavy rings I’m surprised she can manage to lift it. “Nadia Hepburn. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Green. I can’t even begin to imagine what you’re going through.”

  “Oh, I’m not going through it. Ava is.”

  “Well, I know that, I just meant…” Nadia looks at me helplessly. I smile back. She’s on her own.

  I almost say no to Sophie and Kelly and their magical, talented fingers, but when they finish their work and I look in the mirror I am so glad I didn’t. I don’t look like me. Well, I do, but a better, much nicer version.

  My blond hair, curly and untameable since it grew back after the chemo, has been gently coaxed and styled, pinned back on one side with a pretty diamanté clip. It flows sweetly over the top of my head and down the other side in sleek finger waves, a nod to the hairstyles of eras gone by. My makeup is subtle but effective, and Nadia was right: if you didn’t know I was sick you would probably never guess. I have smoky eyes and plump, outlined lips. They have elected not to camouflage the tiny freckles that scatter across the tops of my cheeks, and I’m glad. Fairy footsteps, my mother called them when I was growing up. Back when they were the biggest thing I had to complain about.

  Although she has produced a small rack from her van with an assortment of outfits, Sophie cups her chin in her hand and looks me up and down shrewdly for a good two minutes before declaring she has “just the thing.”

  That thing is a dress I would never have bought in a million years, or even tried on, for that matter. Long, flowy, and coral pink in color, it is in a style that Sophie refers to as “Bohemian Chic.”

  When I look in the mirror after their efforts are exhausted, I actually gasp a little, and my mouth forms a wondrous O. My reflection is beautiful. I am beautiful. I see someone who looks in the throes of their youth.

  I see life.

  Mum takes one look and promptly bursts into theatrical tears.

  “Oh, love,” she wails through sobs. I get the impression that if she had a handkerchief she’d be sobbing into it. Once a person has a taste for amateur dramatics it’s hard to let that go. “You’re absolutely stunning.”

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  “Seriously,” Amanda says. “You look like a model or something. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you look this good. Did you guys use paint or something?” She peers at my heavily contoured right cheek.

  Sophie snorts.

  Kate rolls her eyes. “Don’t listen to her.”

  “She gets her looks from me, you know,” Mum says, nudging Nadia with an elbow. “And her smarts. And her even temperament. In fact, I’m not sure what her father contributed, really. Well, I know what he contributed, if you know what I mean.” She nudges Nadia again. “Shouldn’t you be writing all this down?”

  “Oh, I record most of my interviews these days,” Nadia says. “Much easier and less likely to miss something. Then I can type it up later at my own leisure.” She looks at her watch. “Where on earth is that photographer?”

  I notice a look pass between Kelly and Sophie but think nothing of it because my stomach has gone all queasy at the thought of posing for photos.

  “I don’t think I can do this.”

  “You can’t back out now,” Nadia says, a little too sharply. “This is our lead story for next week’s issue.”

  “I’m not backing out.” I feel Amanda bristle protectively beside me. “I just need some air.”

  “Oh, of course.” Nadia nods sympathetically. “Off you go. I need to speak to your mother and friends, anyway. Get their side of the story.”

  Mum follows me out to the balcony. “Are you sure you’re OK? Are you in pain?”

  “I’m fine,” I reassure her. “The pain is OK, nothing I can’t handle. I really do just need some air. Too many people in one small room. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “Do you want me to come with you?”

  I give her an arched-eyebrows look. “Are you kidding? And miss out on being interviewed by your second favorite journalist?”

  She winces. “I said that, didn’t I. I was star-struck. Didn’t think before I opened my mouth.”

  Nadia’s voice calls out. “Mrs. Green? If you don’t mind I have some questions?
”

  Mum looks at me questioningly.

  “Go,” I reassure her. “I’ll be back soon.”

  She kisses me on the forehead and ducks back into the house. I wait until she’s gone, slip off my flat shoes, and head quietly for the stairs that lead down to the lawn.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The grass is still damp from this morning’s dew under my bare feet. A month ago it was crunchy with frost, and in another month or two it will be dry and brown from the heat of high summer. That thought is immediately followed by another: Will I still be alive to see it?

  I hate that it is becoming my norm. To question how many seasons I still have. How many days, how many hours and minutes. Sometimes, when I am alone, I can hear seconds tick by in my head. Loud and relentless, a reminder that time stops for no one.

  Under the trees the air is damp and humid, but it’s a short walk of twenty meters and then I am clear, perched on the top of a small dune only a meter high. Spread out before me, in all its breathtaking beauty, is the beach.

  I close my eyes and breathe in a deep breath of salty air and when I exhale it back out a giddy little laugh escapes with it. The scent is delicious. It smells of my childhood and hot days punctuated with sweaty adventure, of teenage kisses with spotty boys in the tussock grasses of the sand dunes. Of flip-flops carelessly stolen by the tide, driftwood statues, sandcastles, and jellyfish stings. Floating idly on my back in the clear water like a starfish, before gleefully riding the breakers to shore on a body board gifted by Santa. Picking through rock pools with a plastic bucket clenched in hand. My mother’s voice, warm ham sandwiches, and lime cordial, sand in my hair and zinc on my nose.

  Memories, thick and fast, like a slideshow. Both painful and joyful. I have lived a life. I have lost a life. It was never mine to begin with. On loan, temporary, subject to recall.

  I jump down on to the sand and walk down toward the water. The ocean is calm today, a kind of moody turquoise color like one of those three-dollar rings from gypsy fairs that change color depending on whether you’re happy or sad. Supposedly. Kate, a believer in science rather than the occult, said it was more to do with the temperature of your skin. I remember feeling secretly proud when mine would turn black, like I was a rebel of sorts. A misunderstood soul.