by Fiona Neill
The train stops in a tunnel. Signal failure at Earl’s Court. I resolve to tackle the letter line by line. There is a cat’s cradle of hidden meaning. Lisa has always been someone who conceals a precise nature beneath an apparently spontaneous surface. I remember once finding pages of revision notes in her curious looped handwriting for a history exam she claimed not to have revised for. So I understand that there will be a connection between her belated discovery of the importance of our friendship and the secret referred to in the final paragraph, and that the common denominator will almost certainly be Nick.
The memory of the lovely, lazy days breastfeeding Daisy and Ava at the house in Norfolk is meant to induce nostalgia, and it does. We had hatched a plan to get pregnant at the same time and amazingly, give or take a few months, it had worked, so we spent a lot of time together in Norfolk on maternity leave, waiting with a meal on the table like 1950s housewives for our husbands to arrive for the weekend on a Friday evening. Now I wonder if the way she lay in the sun, all warm breasts and curves, was intended to pique Nick’s interest. I was naive back then about the primitive nature of most men.
I have never asked Nick when he felt that first stirring. He used to grumble about the way Lisa’s relationship problems with Barney absorbed so much of my attention, and her sloppiness around the house when they stayed with us drove him crazy, but maybe he was trying to throw me off the scent.
I inwardly curse Lisa for forcing me back in time but I know from my patients that when you have no future, the urge to focus on the past becomes overwhelming. Lisa’s actions, I remind myself, are those of someone who assumes she is dying.
I also understand that the revelation about her illness in the middle section is designed to arouse both my sympathy and my professional interest because of course all she has to do is google me to realize there is perfect compatibility between her cancer and my specialist area of research. She wants to go on my trial. I knew that the first time I read it. I knew it when we were looking for prospective patients to fill the two remaining places today. And it was probably the reason Nick had come to my office, even though he couldn’t ask me outright to save the life of the woman who came close to destroying my own, not because of my feelings, but because he knew that if Daisy and Max discovered, it could prove a cataclysmic setback in his carefully resurrected relationship with them. Nick is shameless, apart from when it comes to his relationship with his children.
I struggle with the last part of the letter the most. It is typical of Lisa to ask for forgiveness. She was always attracted to drama and overblown epic themes: heroes and heroines, acts of courage, nostalgia for the past. With its absolutist agenda, in most respects, cancer is the perfect illness for her. The first few years after Nick moved in with her, I half expected a letter like this apologizing for what had happened. At the beginning I even rehearsed the conversations we might have in my head. But instead there were years of silence. When I finally confronted Nick, he described what had happened between them as a coup de foudre, as though this absolved him of all responsibility, and then blushed when I told him he sounded like a character from Gone with the Wind.
I expected more of Lisa. But as time went by, I realized there would be no day of reckoning. I talked to very few friends about how I felt because I didn’t want what had happened to define who I am and, in any case, for several years all my emotional energy was invested in trying to help Daisy. But I remember once explaining to Deborah, my closest friend at work, that I had come to accept Lisa’s position because words would change nothing anyway.
And now this, the desire to be forgiven. Lisa isn’t a religious person and, unlike honour and revenge, the concept of personal forgiveness is a relatively modern theme. I have little doubt that the idea of closure is something planted in her head by the therapist that Nick mentioned. I am a loose end that needs tying up. It has much more to do with how she feels than how I feel, and that perhaps reveals all too late the essential truth of our entire friendship.
The emotional cost will be much higher for me than it is for her, not least because I have to go back to the house that was once my home. But she won’t have thought of that. She is thinking only about everything she is about to lose, not everything that I lost.
I understand why she wants to keep Nick out of this. He loathes playing a leading role in any drama and will want to maintain the status quo at all costs. And in any case this is something between Lisa and me. I remind myself to resist the human urge to tend towards action. We fixate too much on the decisions we make without giving any value to those never taken, which in my book are often the best but are too quickly forgotten. Sometimes doing nothing is the best course of all. It’s a concept that cancer specialists understand better than anyone.
So before my trip to Atlanta, I might decide to take a couple of days off to go and see Lisa in Norfolk, which means I probably should take the key she mentions with me. But equally I might not go at all. It’s a decision of sorts.
When I tip the padded envelope upside down to retrieve the key, however, there is nothing inside. I rummage around my bag and the recently rearranged contents spew on to my lap but no key falls out. I must have lost it. The only thing in the envelope is the photograph. I don’t get it out, partly because the train has arrived at East Putney, but mostly because I don’t want to be reminded of the last time we were all happy together in case I find something in the picture that suggests we weren’t.
It’s almost half past nine by the time I get home. I close the front door behind me, stand completely still for a moment to collect my thoughts and massage my temples before noticing a couple of crumpled envelopes on the floor. There are footprints all over them. I bend down to pick them up, silently maligning Daisy and Kit for failing to execute even this minor domestic task. If they are going to live here full time I need to establish some ground rules.
I add the letters to the pile of unopened post on the hall table. One is a bill. The other is from the clinic Daisy used to attend but of course now that she is over eighteen it is addressed to her rather than me. It’s probably something routine, a newsletter or plea for donations. There is a vague sense of unease, a residue of the anxiety I once felt, but it dissolves as soon as I hear the sound of her laughing in the kitchen.
What does occur to me is that I have no similar recollection of finding Lisa’s letter on the doormat and still less idea of how it found its way into my bag. Nor can I be sure that I had ever actually seen the key she mentions in her letter. I frown as I try to remember the first time I saw the manila envelope. I know that Nick later described this as a classic case of short-term memory malfunction because picking up the post is one of those subconscious actions we repeat hundreds of times a day. In contrast, I think that finding a letter from Lisa on the doormat after seven years of silence is something I would remember forever. But I am too distracted by the noise coming from the kitchen to chase down this thought to its logical conclusion. And if I had, would it have made any difference to what happened later anyway?
I go into the kitchen to grab something to eat because one of the best things about having Kit live with us is that he compensates for the extra time I spend trying to pair odd socks and sort laundry into three different colours by cooking almost every evening. It’s a fair trade even though the kitchen is a total mess. Kit tries to keep order but puts back everything in a totally illogical place. Daisy is just plain messy.
I find her perched on the edge of a stool by the kitchen island, expertly shredding the skin off a big purple grape. She’s wearing my dressing gown over an oversized T-shirt belonging to Max and a pair of jeans that belong to Kit. When she has finished peeling the grape, she throws the fleshy globule high in the air and catches it in her mouth to loud applause. I join in until I notice there is a third person in the room who gets up with such force when he sees me that he tips over his half-drunk bottle of beer. He ignores the spillage and heads purposefully towards me, brandishing a handful of document
s that he has rescued from the pool of beer.
‘Rosie,’ says Ed Gilmour. ‘I’ve brought you the missing research papers. I thought you might need them.’
‘Hi, Mum,’ says Daisy through a mouthful of grapes as she and Kit try to stem the flow of beer on to the kitchen floor by damming it with my dressing gown.
Daisy and Kit are too busy sorting out the mess to notice the expression on my face, and I am too busy trying to reassemble my features to notice the expression on Ed’s. So when we finally face each other we stare blankly for a beat too long, each waiting for the other to react. He’s so close that I can feel the thick heat of his breath on my skin. He smells of beer and hospital and sweat mingled with hastily applied deodorant. I realize to my surprise that he smells familiar and that this is a good feeling.
He presses a pile of papers into my arms and for a brief moment his hands rest on top of mine. His left thumb trails slowly across my knuckles and I feel almost nauseous with desire. I stare at his hand touching mine to avoid catching his eye and when it pulls away I flick through the documents to disguise the sense of loss. They consist of a couple of copies of The Lancet from earlier in the year, a black-bound notebook that belongs to him, a Guardian and some other papers that he must have dug out of his bag to make it look as though this was a work-related visit when Daisy and Kit had startled him by opening the door. I had told him I lived alone.
‘Thanks,’ I say, putting down the papers on the kitchen worktop and finally meeting his eye. ‘That’s very considerate of you, but couldn’t they have waited until tomorrow?’
‘I found them on your desk when you left and thought you might need them tonight. But you obviously had other plans.’
‘I had a meeting at the Royal Free,’ I explain. ‘About the clinical trial.’
He shakes his head, shrugs his shoulders and smiles to indicate that he doesn’t believe me but isn’t going to make a fuss.
‘I was just leaving,’ he says.
‘There’s still some beer in the bottle,’ Daisy intervenes. ‘Ed was telling us what kind of boss you are, Mum. How everyone finds you terrifyingly brilliant and longs for your approval.’
She turns towards me with an expression of shocked disbelief and the oversized T-shirt that she is wearing slides down to reveal a small red welt below her clavicle. She’s laughing as she speaks, which makes the revelation even more bitter-sweet. I know from experience that I can’t judge anything from the size of the walnut-sized stain across her skin. All that I can be certain of is that there will be an identical one of equal proportions and intensity on her opposite shoulder. She catches me looking and quickly pulls up the T-shirt.
‘I need to go,’ says Ed. ‘I’ve got an early start tomorrow.’
‘I’ll show you out,’ I say, leading him into the hall and closing the kitchen door behind me.
‘I’m sorry, Rosie, I didn’t mean to intrude.’
‘How did you get my address?’ I ask him.
He pulls out a ball of paper from his pocket and irons it out on the palm of his hand. I recognize Lisa’s handwriting: it is the missing address label.
‘I took it as insurance policy in case I felt a sudden overwhelming desire to see you.’
‘Did you look in the envelope?’
‘No. I’m not that nosy. But when your daughter answered the door and said you were about to come home, I couldn’t resist the chance to observe you in your natural habitat.’
‘I like to keep my private life private,’ I hear myself say, although actually I would like to tell him everything. About the welt on Daisy’s shoulder and what that might mean, the cock-up with Laura S., and my thwarted Tinder date. The sort of chat I used to share with Nick. Of all that was lost, that part is the most difficult to bear. Ed moves towards me and tilts my chin towards his face.
‘I love your dark eyes, Rosie. They’re so contemplative. But you move so quickly and impatiently that I never get to look at them for long enough.’
The unexpected tenderness of his words takes me unawares. I close my eyes and rest my head on his shoulder for a moment. The street light shines through the window and everything is hot and red like the sore on Daisy’s shoulder.
‘You need to go,’ I say.
When I go back in the kitchen, Daisy and Kit have disappeared. I pick up the dressing gown and see that there are three knots in the cord.
8
Nick
I’m in the middle of a meeting at work when Lisa messages to remind me about our appointment with the alternative health practitioner. Or the alternative death practitioner, as I prefer to call Gregorio. How can anyone honestly believe that shooting a double espresso up your arse and drinking litres of watermelon juice stops cancer cells from replicating? Mind you, if I was paid £150 an hour to peddle tripe like that, I might believe in miracles. We no longer live in an evidence-based culture so I’m not that surprised. All that counts is how you feel about things. And although I’ve got much better at that since Lisa came into my life, it’s still not always my strong suit.
Gregorio passionately believes chemotherapy is part of a pharmaceutical conspiracy to earn big money for drug companies. He also talks a lot of bollocks about cancer being caused by the stress of modern living when a) Ancient Egyptian mummies had tumours, and b) it’s stressful living in Darfur but the cancer rates aren’t any higher. It’s a measure of my self-restraint that I haven’t pointed out any of this to him over the past couple of months. If I did he’d probably accuse me of being out of touch with my spiritual side. Unlike Lisa, who is apparently so spiritual that Gregorio has offered to take her on as his sorcerer’s apprentice once she recovers. I can’t work out if he is criminal or delusional.
‘Sorry, team. I’ve got to go to a meeting,’ I tell everyone gathered around the pockmarked table in our meeting room. I am grateful they know nothing about Lisa’s illness because at least for some of the day it feels as though life continues as normal. But also because I don’t want them to discover how she has elected to be treated, which I think reflects badly on me. ‘And thank you again for all your hard work. This is a big moment for our department.’
As I load papers into my briefcase, I congratulate them again on the publication of our ground-breaking research into false memory. It has generated a lot of interest because we have proved that it is possible to distort memory by planting misinformation in the human mind, a discovery that has implications for anything from the judicial system, with its emphasis on witness accounts, to memories of sexual abuse.
Our work shows that with the right technique you can convince innocent people they are guilty, or random bystanders they have committed a crime and the unharmed that they have been victims. Basically we have discovered that if you can get someone to imagine what something could be like, you can get them to imagine what it would be like and then these elements turn into what something was like.
Interestingly, so-called pseudo memory is more common in people who suffer from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In fact, one of my PhD students is researching memory impairments in OCD patients, which is of course personally very interesting because of what happened to Daisy. My student has discovered that people suffering from OCD have difficulty recalling a complex geometric shape they have just been shown as well as exhibiting a deficit in spatial memory, such as remembering places on a map.
When Daisy was ill, for example, she was very good at remembering how to do things, because her striatum brain structure was constantly over-stimulated. But her visual and episodic memory was totally crap. That’s why she had to keep checking things over and over again.
With all this swirling around my head, I head out into the street. As well as forgetting the appointment I realize I have also failed to get today’s supply of organic fruit and vegetables for Lisa’s juicing regime. Sometimes I think the reason Gregorio came up with this diet is so that I don’t have the time or energy to research any alternatives. It’s like having another part-time job on
top of what I’m already doing. So I duck into a Lebanese corner shop and stock up on melons and broccoli and put them in the Planet Organic bag that I keep in my briefcase for such emergencies. I admit it’s a short cut but I also hope that if Lisa continues to refuse to have chemotherapy then perhaps the residue from pesticides will kill off a few of the bad cells. Also, if I’m being completely honest, it feels good to get one over on Gregorio.
Just before I turn into Harley Street something catches my eye in the window of a second-hand shop on the corner of the road. It’s a gold pendant on a chunky chain with a large ruby in the centre surrounded by seven arms each with a different inlaid stone. It’s not my sort of thing but Lisa would love it. The man behind the counter explains that it is a Navaratna, which apparently translates from the Sanskrit as ‘nine gems’. It comes with a piece of paper also written in Sanskrit, which names each gem and describes what it represents. Ruby for the Sun, which is at the centre of the solar system, pearl for the moon, emerald for Mercury, and so on.
The vendor is the type of person who requires a lot of interaction before he does a deal so I’m forced to listen to a lot of guff about how pure, flawless gems can protect from demons, snakes, poisons and diseases. Thanks to Gregorio I have developed a good line in looking interested while completely ignoring what someone is saying. Lisa jokes that I have finally discovered my inner Zen when in reality I’m imagining interesting ways of inflicting pain on him.
So after all these diversions it’s no surprise that by the time I reach Harley Street I have missed almost the entire first hour of Lisa’s appointment. I’m directed straight into the treatment room by the receptionist and find Gregorio finishing up a ritual that involves flicking something that looks suspiciously like a feather duster all over Lisa’s body, while making clicking noises with his tongue. I put the bags of fruit in the corner and theatrically pull a pen from my pocket.