by Tina Seskis
Renée found Nashville freaky. It felt alien, larger than life to her, especially through the prism of jet lag. She was shattered – they had endured two flights, been treated like criminals at immigration, taken a bus to the hotel to dump their bags, and then headed straight downtown to meet up with Andy and the other students in a country-music bar. For Renée it was like stepping back thirty years, back into the movies that she’d watched with her dad as a kid, into a world where people still wore cowboy hats and the men were butch and rugged-looking, and the women’s boots were white and studded and their hair was golden and flowing under their Stetsons. The bar was warm and glowing, full of tangerine lights and orange wood, and its walls were plastered with publicity shots of handsome men with fantastic names like Chesney or Kenny or Bud.
Renée felt weird, aloof from life, as she drank bottles of beer and the music twanged with life-lived sadness – almost as if she wasn’t there at all. She wondered how Camilla was getting on living back at her mother’s in Holland Park (with both her boyfriend James and Natasha), whether Juliette was in Marbella yet, what Siobhan was getting up to; but mostly she questioned what on earth she was doing here. Had she made a huge mistake, she wondered. She found the other students nice enough but she was so tired she wasn’t really in the mood for talking, plus there was one girl called Melissa who never seemed to shut up, and from first impressions would give even Siobhan a run for her money in ditziness. Just as Renée was about to suggest to Sissy that they head back to the hotel, Stephen, who seemed already to have had one drink too many, leaned in from nowhere and licked her face, big-tongued and slurpy, like a dog, and she realised with revulsion that now Juliette had released him he was going to be after her and Sissy, either of them or both of them.
10
Bristol
Natasha shoved a coat on and popped downstairs to the local newsagents for a pack of ten Silk Cut, although she knew the others would give her a hard time about it. She didn’t know why she’d started smoking, maybe she had taken after her deadbeat fag-ashed parents after all, a thought that made her shudder. Despite being barely awake, as soon as she entered the shop the headlines smacked her in the face. Oh no, why did they have to dredge up all the same dreadful pictures all over again, just because it was the inquest? Poor Camilla. How could she, Natasha, stop her friend seeing them? Or would it be better to tell her about it, so she was prepared for the new round of whispers and innuendo she’d be subjected to on campus?
Natasha stood hesitantly, full of hatred for the unknown editors of the Sun and Daily Mirror, but in the end she picked up a copy of each (by the edges, she could hardly bear to touch them) and took them to the counter. She paid for them along with her cigarettes and rolled them tightly, sports pages outwards, rubber gimp masks firmly inwards, before tucking them under her arm. Even though Natasha was still in her pyjamas, originally having intended to go straight home with her nicotine fix, instead she sprinted (the occasional fag seemingly not having affected her fitness at all) to the local park, where she sat on a bench and smoked two in a row as she scoured the papers for any new information from the hearing – but there was none. Thank God, thought Natasha, and she tossed the papers into the bin. As she raced back to halls she decided that, yes, she would tell Camilla – forewarned is forearmed, after all. And anyway, Camilla seemed much more herself these days, meeting James had definitely helped, and although he’d seemed a bit insecure, jealous even, at first, he was a lovely guy, and seemed to really adore her. Natasha could even see them lasting the distance.
Oh well, here goes, thought Natasha. She ran up the path, entered through the big old communal front door, took the flea-pit stairs two at a time, stopped outside their door for half a second to brace herself, and then thrust her key into the lock.
11
Nashville
After that first evening, the trainee booksellers never saw Nashville again. For the rest of the week they didn’t even leave the hotel, the sales course was so utterly relentless, and on top of the jet lag the effort required to learn how to sell encyclopaedia sets to people who hadn’t known they wanted them meant they felt far too exhausted to go out for the evening. Renée still felt disengaged, odd somehow. She had always dreamed of travelling eastwards before, to faraway places like Nepal or India or some remote Thai island, full of spiritualism and culture – but here their hotel was just a modern block next to the highway that might as well have been anywhere. America did make an impression on her though, mainly through its scale, the extremity of things: the two beds in their double room that could comfortably sleep three people each; the throaty clunking of the machine down the corridor that ejected fat glinting ice cubes, tumbling like coins from a jackpotting fruit machine; the tooth-ache temperature of the Cokes from the mini bar (she had never known drinks to be so cold); the improbable proportions of the cars on the freeway; the sleek gleefulness of the morning TV presenters with drawls so sassy they sounded put on; the enormity of the breakfasts and the people who ate them. America seemed souped-up to Renée, as though it had to be bigger, better, colder, hotter, cheerier, louder, just all-round ‘er’ than everywhere else. She found that she was homesick: for her student flat in Bristol, for her life before graduation, for her group of best friends, but mostly for Juliette.
The training course was attended by hundreds of students, mainly American: eager youths with springs in their steps and dollar signs in their eyes. On the first morning Renée sat near the front of the auditorium, slouched next to Sissy, unable to concentrate, surprisingly close to tears. She watched incredulously as a short puppyish man (hair neatly side-parted, dapper in handmade loafers and an Italian suit) bounced around the stage, drunk on life, telling his impressionable audience how after five wonderful summers with Tyler’s Books he was a paper millionaire, already, at just twenty-five. Greed wafted through the room, all-pervading, like cooking smells. As the presenter went on to explain to his audience that the volume of books they’d sell that summer would be directly proportional to their future life happiness, Renée wondered what on earth poor Sissy was making of it all – if she felt this bad then surely it was Sissy’s worst nightmare – but Sissy just seemed dazed by everything, almost as if she were trying to transport herself back to England, like if she let her eyes glaze over enough then she could pretend she wasn’t even there. Most of the other students seemed to love it though, hanging on the presenter’s every word, cheering in all the right places, loudly chanting mantras such as ‘I feel happy, healthy and terrific’ or ‘Hey there, beautiful, don’t you ever die’, which made Renée want to throw up. As the day wore on she even began to feel like maybe she’d landed in some crazy religious sect rather than onto a bookselling course – and when they did finally get a break she barely ate any lunch, which was unlike her.
Renée’s mood wasn’t helped by the presence of Stephen either. Although he’d apologised for his lecherous behaviour of the first night, and to give him his due had behaved like a perfect gentleman ever since, she still found him grating. In the afternoon session especially he seemed to lap everything up, appearing to love both the role plays (which he performed with sickening gusto with Melissa) and the motivational jingles, generally being loud and annoying. Surely he couldn’t really be into this stuff, Renée thought in disgust, as she watched him yelling, ‘I’m a fighter, not a quitter’ (the truth of which the students might need to remind themselves, if things ever got ‘a little tough’), but then she decided he must simply be thinking of the pay cheque at the end of the summer. That was far more likely, knowing Stephen.
Over the course of five torturous days the students were trained like monkeys, as they learned their scripts verbatim, developed their frighteningly positive mental attitude, practised religiously what they would say and how they would say it, with no word changed, no careless deviation, no single opportunity to let the customer off the hook. And the more they went over the knock, the wave, the cheery introduction, all delivered with impeccably
fake sincerity, the more Sissy felt sick with nerves, and the more Renée wished she could have gone to Kerala instead.
12
Tooting, South London
Sissy loitered outside in the corridor (long, sky-blue, seemingly endless, as though it were the route to heaven itself), peering through the small square window, steeling herself to go in. It was as if every time she saw Nigel the shock returned, but worse than before. She couldn’t believe how quickly things had changed for them – one minute they’d been enjoying the tail-end of their honeymoon, the next they were on the plane, not stopping over in Hong Kong after all, but heading straight back to London and directly into hospital. That had been nearly seven months ago now, she realised with a jolt. Nigel had been in and out of hospital ever since, enduring huge poisonous doses of chemotherapy that seemed to be sapping his soul, making him appear like a shadow-person, a shrunken ghoul from her worst nightmares. His hair, so thick and sandy before, had fallen out almost immediately the chemo started, along with his eyelashes and eyebrows, and although she still loved him she found it hard to look at him now, or at the bag full of sickly brown fluid that lay hanging from his bed, or at his thin, frail hand that could still just about hold hers, gently, as if he were reassuring her instead of how it should be, the other way round.
At the beginning Sissy had had no idea that one tiny mole could be responsible for such devastation. When she’d popped into Waterstones in her lunch hour on her first day back at work, when she’d still been trying to act like a normal newly-wed woman – one who’s excited at the life ahead of her, instead of terrified – she had picked out a reference book to read up on his cancer, as she’d known so little about it back then. And after she’d read about the symptoms and treatment for a disease called malignant melanoma, she had turned the page to the outcome statistics without even thinking of the implications, of what it might say. Sissy had stared hard at the ‘five-year survival rates’, which appeared to range from eleven per cent to ninety per cent, and had felt faint, as though she were leaking every last breath in her body, as if air was seeping out through her pores, not just from her mouth and nose. She had sat down heavily on the floor, not caring what people thought, and had rung him there and then on his brand-new mobile to ask him what grade of cancer he had.
Nigel had been evasive. ‘You have to tell me,’ she’d shrieked. ‘I’m your wife!’ She’d become almost hysterical by the time he finally confessed over the phone to having something called a Stage 2C, and when Sissy checked in the book on her lap it informed her that a 2C gave him a forty-five per cent chance of surviving five years. Or put another way, it gave him a fifty-five per cent chance of dying. Sissy had remained slumped on the carpet in the corner of the bookshop as the statistics loomed at her wherever she looked, as if they were stamped on her eyeballs, she couldn’t shake them away. Eventually a member of staff had come over to ask her if she was OK, and he had looked at the closed book beside her and the misery in her eyes and realised that she wasn’t OK at all, in fact was far from OK, and had gone to get his manager.
Standing here now, staring at Nigel through the tiny window, as if he were an exhibit in a freak show rather than her husband, Sissy reflected on how that had been before she’d even known she was pregnant, before she’d had to contemplate life as a young widow-mother-to-be. What was the name for that, she thought idly, is there a name for that? She looked again, saw he was still sleeping, and then she tightened something inside herself, as if she were forcing a dripping tap to stop, pulled her face into a small smile, and entered the death fug inside the room.
Nigel didn’t stir. He was on so many drugs that Sissy sometimes wondered if he knew she was even there any more, even when he appeared to be awake, had his eyes open. Nigel hadn’t responded well to his treatment, and Sissy hadn’t responded well to his illness. She wasn’t able to tell anyone (apart from Siobhan, who funnily enough was the only one who’d seemed to realise), but she felt desperate sorrow that her life had been plunged into misery and sickness so soon after the wedding, just when she and Nigel were meant to be unwrapping their presents from John Lewis and looking forward to the rest of their lives together. She’d assumed she would be better at all this, and obviously so had everyone else, but she hid it well. People even kept telling her how stoic she was being.
Sissy had never dared hope for anything amazing in her life before – she’d always been the unremarkable middle child, the plain one with no special qualities, the average student, the nice but boring friend, the girl who made up the numbers; but not to Nigel. He had made something in her sparkle, given her life, courage to be herself, live a little – and when he’d finally asked her out it had all been so phenomenally fantastic she’d felt like the most special girl in the world.
And now he was going to die on her.
What was hardest to cope with was the depth of her anger – at her husband, at the hospital, at the world. She loved him too much to let him leave her, yet she hated him too, for his selfishness, for his failure to get checked out earlier. He had finally admitted after the diagnosis that he’d been quietly worried about the mole for weeks, but had never quite got around to going to the doctor, there had seemed so much else to do before the wedding; and besides, he hadn’t wanted to risk spoiling everything. And so in Australia when the mole had started to weep and change shape, more quickly than ever, that’s when he’d known he needed to do something – and still he hadn’t told Sissy the truth, had claimed at the time that he’d only just noticed it. Sissy felt overwhelmed with loathing – of her own self-pity; of Nigel for lying to her, for letting her down; of her friends and family, the majority of whom didn’t seem to know remotely what to say or how to help; but mostly she was filled with loathing of the cancer itself, the creeping malevolent death-force, those multiplying cells so devilishly smart they couldn’t be outwitted.
Sissy plonked herself heavily onto the bed, hoping that might wake him, but she was uncomfortable there – her bump was massive these days, and she was so high up she had to dangle her feet, which was making her ankles swell. She put her palm on his forehead, and it felt odd, lifeless. She took his hand and it lay cold and limp, like it was already dead. She waited five minutes for something to happen, but nothing did. She felt like she would go mad. She lumbered herself off the bed again and sank into the blue vinyl armchair next to it, and found she preferred it there. The table that was meant to go over the bed was next to the chair, in her way, and it was cluttered with hospital stalwarts: a box of tissues, a cardboard vomit tray (unused), a plastic jug of water and half-empty plastic cup, a Tupperware container full of grapes that looked soft and over-ripe, an untouched box of After Eight mints (she wondered briefly who’d brought those, she thought people only had them at dinner parties). She scrabbled in her bag and pulled out the review section from Saturday’s Times, reading the words without taking in any of the meaning, wondering yet again whether Nigel would live long enough to see their unborn child; and as she felt the baby kick, crossly, vibrantly, she was certain it felt the misery in the room and was trying to say, ‘Oi, you both, cheer up, don’t you forget about me.’
Sissy was about to stand up, go and get another wretched excuse for a coffee from the machine down the corridor, when Nigel opened his eyes and smiled weakly at her. Her heart lifted. She’d always liked his eyes, they’d been easily his best feature, but without his hair and eyelashes they looked googly, and today they were faded and watery and he looked even less alive with them open than when he’d been asleep, if that could be possible. She got up to kiss him, to show him that she loved him still, no matter how he looked, and as she did so she tripped against the leg of the swivel table, and her baby bump brushed against the flimsy plastic cup, and it toppled over, water spilling everywhere, careering crazily across the table and down onto the sheets.
‘Oh, sorry, darling,’ she said, furious with herself as she took a handful of tissues and dabbed it up ineffectually. Nigel tried to shift upwar
ds in the bed to help her, but the effort made him gag suddenly, so she grabbed the cardboard tray and got there just in time to catch the green-coloured bile that poured out of him, shocking in its vividness, its intensity, his gut the most alive part of him now.
13
Hyde Park
Sissy filled her plate with food, not any of the fancy salads, just the scotch eggs and crisps, it was all she was able to face. She ate without noticing what she was even putting in her mouth, and she sometimes wondered if her taste buds had died along with her husband. People were chatting about their summer holiday plans, but when Juliette asked Natasha what she was up to Natasha seemed angry, accusatory somehow, and instead of looking at Juliette she kept picking at her bunions, which was a revolting habit she’d never grown out of. Sissy felt sad that she wouldn’t be going anywhere this year, but she just couldn’t cope with the thought of taking the children away on her own, and although she thought it was a little insensitive for everyone else to talk about their trips, she knew that people couldn’t keep pussy-footing around her, just because her husband had died. It wasn’t any of their faults.