by John Marrs
I couldn’t allow myself to shed a tear or feel an ounce of self-pity until Luciana surrendered to the inevitable. It would be our cancer, not just hers – we would both take ownership of it.
By the time my bus appeared, I was already half the way home. I didn’t hear the car pull up next to me until its rear door opened. Inside sat Luciana. She looked at my sweating brow and my rucksack and she knew instantly what I had planned. She saw the coward in me. But her eyes softened when she understood I was walking towards our life and not from it.
She stepped out of the car, closed the door, entwined her arm through mine and we climbed the rest of the steep hill together.
CATHERINE
Northampton
1 March
All of my children were sitting around my hospital bed when I came round from my operation. Even though they were normally scattered far and wide across the country and beyond, they’d always remained a close-knit bunch, phoning and texting each other to keep up to speed. I wondered if they’d have been like that had we not been forced to close ranks after their father deserted them.
Emily and Daniel’s wedding four months earlier had been the last time we’d all been together in the same room. Giving my daughter away was one of the proudest moments of my life, and I pitied Simon for throwing away his chance to be in my place.
Emily had broken my news to the boys earlier that week despite my pleas not to worry them. Robbie drove up from his flat in London, and James flew back from Los Angeles where he’d been recording with his band.
I kept my eyes closed at first just to listen to their chatter. Then the urge to vomit took hold as my anaesthetic wore off. The first words they heard their post-op mother mumbling were ‘I’m going to be sick’ followed by the act itself, all over the bedsheets. Charming.
The morphine either knocked me out or left me barely conscious for two days. Even in sleep, my headaches were constant – but because of the operation, not the tumour, Dr Lewis explained. A few days later, he was back to remove my bandages and check on my healing.
‘Can I take a look, please?’ I asked tentatively.
I held my breath as he passed me my mirror from the bedside table and I slowly examined from all angles what looked like a machete wound. The hair had been shaved on the left side of my still swollen head, leaving me with a three-inch, crescent-shaped wound, pinned together with large black staples.
There was also a prominent concave dip in my head, and I wondered for a moment if it was deep enough to catch rainwater. I tried really hard to take it on the chin, but my emotions were as raw as the cut. When I was alone I couldn’t help but pick up the mirror and stare at my grotesque self. All I needed was a bolt though my neck and Dr Frankenstein could have claimed me as his own creation.
Dr Lewis came to see me a few days later. But my brain, in its own infinite but damaged wisdom, decided to filter out what he was explaining. Once he’d confirmed the remains of my tumour were indeed cancerous, there was very little else I wanted to hear.
I saw him almost every morning during my hospital stay. His skilled hands had tinkered around inside my brain like it was the engine of an old jalopy. But I still didn’t know a thing about the man who’d seen a part of me that no one else ever had. So instead of listening to his words – which I knew early on were going to make me unhappy – I focused on the man delivering them.
I placed him in his mid-fifties. He was blessed with a thick head of greying hair. His teeth had been capped but the wrinkles etched on his forehead from years of puzzling over cases like mine showed he wasn’t vain enough to use Botox. He reminded me of a slightly less swarthy Antonio Banderas.
He didn’t wear a wedding ring, so he was either eligible or just one of those men who wasn’t comfortable with jewellery. And when he spoke, I couldn’t decide if I was attracted to him because every girl loves a doctor, or because he was the only man I’d ever met who could really see inside a woman’s head.
‘Catherine?’
Suddenly I was back in the room.
‘Do you need a minute, Catherine?’
‘No, I’m fine, please carry on,’ I replied in an exaggerated, cheerful way.
‘On a positive note, we know it’s not a secondary tumour, so there’s no cancer elsewhere in your body. We managed to scrape much of it out, but because of its awkward positioning, we couldn’t remove it all. So the next course of action will be radiotherapy to try and prevent it from destroying any other parts of the brain.’
‘Okay then, well, thank you very much,’ I chirped.
I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to shake his hand like we’d just completed a business deal.
SIMON
Montefalco
18 March
Breaking the news to Luca and Sofia that their mother wasn’t immortal was the hardest illusion I’d ever shattered. I took them to lunch at a restaurant near Lake Trasimeno, a place where I’d occasionally brought them as children, to hike and to pretend to fish.
Luca at fourteen and Sofia at almost sixteen responded to the news with tears, disbelief and denial. They were angry with their father for failing to protect their mother, at her doctors for not repairing her, and at Luciana for instilling a time limit on their relationship.
But I made them promise to take their distress out on me and not her. Instead they gave her cuddles, picked her flowers from the gardens and filled her iPhone with music to listen to during her first hospital stay.
It’s difficult to reconcile the knowledge there’s something feeding on your body when you can’t see it or swipe it away. Only when the physicality of its damage becomes visible does it make it real. In Luciana’s case, the gravity of the situation hit home when she had her double mastectomy. While it wouldn’t cure her, it might give us more time.
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped on a conveyor belt but if I try and get off it, I’ll die,’ Luciana muttered.
I stroked her arm as she floated on a glorious cloud of morphine above her sterile hospital bed. ‘I know, darling,’ I whispered, ‘but if it means the kids and I get to share more time with you, then it’s worth it.’
‘Remind me of that after the chemotherapy begins,’ she replied, before closing her eyes and setting sail for the skies again.
CATHERINE
Northampton
18 March
Telling the children my tumour was cancerous was almost as hard as when I explained their daddy wasn’t coming home and was likely dead.
Even though they were adults, I still reassured them everything was going to be okay, like mothers do, although I couldn’t be sure it would. Emily responded practically, by planning care rotas and making sure I never went for treatment alone.
Robbie drove home every Friday night to stay for weekends and help out where he could around the house, and James promised to call every day no matter where in the world he was.
Shirley, Baishali, and Tom’s new bride Amanda filled my freezer drawers with a never-ending supply of hot pots, pastries and casseroles. Selena was already responsible for area-managing my boutiques, so it made sense for her to take the reins and oversee the rest of the business too.
It was only when the fuss died down and I was home alone that the seriousness of my situation hit me. I wrote a card for Olivia’s fourth birthday and wondered if I’d be around to see her next one, then couldn’t stop myself from crying my eyes out.
I hadn’t sobbed that hard since we’d found Oscar’s lifeless body in his basket a decade earlier. I remembered how each one of us took it in turns to hold him, stroke him and brush his ginger and black wiry coat and tell him how much we’d miss him. Then I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to the bottom of the garden, where Robbie had dug a hole under the crab-apple tree as deep as his arms could stretch.
We gently placed Oscar into the ground and lay Simon’s running shoes by his side, before heaping soil and tears on his final resting place. I smiled when I wondered if that’s what the ki
ds would do to me, too.
At an age where I should have been thinking about taking my foot off the accelerator, I was desperately trying to stay in the car.
SIMON
Montefalco
17 April
Luciana had shied away from examining her altered appearance in the hospital room, preferring to do it in the cosiness of our home.
She stood before our bedroom mirror, unbuttoned her loose-fitting blouse and carefully unravelled the zigzag of bandages that covered her torso like an Egyptian mummy. A six-inch horizontal scar lay beneath, lip-red and raised. At a glance you’d be mistaken for thinking it had been clumsily hacked off with pinking shears.
‘I once kept a roof over my mother’s and my head with these,’ she lamented. ‘Now I’m a monstrosity.’
I wrapped my arms around her waist but she tried to edge away. So I held on tighter. And looking her reflection in the eye, I tenderly traced her scar from right to left as she steadied her shaking hands on my arm.
‘I hate it,’ she continued.
‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘Your loss is my gain. It’s a beautiful scar because it means I get to keep you for longer.’
CATHERINE
Northampton
18 April
Information and a positive mental attitude were the most powerful weapons I could have in my armoury. At least that’s what the Internet told me.
I began my fight by taking the laptop to my bedroom, placing it on my knees and learning about the enemy within from the comfort of my own duvet. I searched on Google for survival statistics, then message boards and forums, asking questions and weeping at stories written in memoriam about those who’d lost the fight.
No matter how many positive things I read, it was always the negative ones that stuck in my head. And sometimes I’d have rock-bottom moments where I thought ‘sod it’ and wondered how much easier it’d be if I gave in and let nature take its course. But there was still so much of life I wanted to experience, so many places I hadn’t travelled to and business opportunities I wanted to explore. I wasn’t ready to give up.
I drank cup after cup of herbal tea and munched on snacks high in antioxidants while researching complementary treatments and holistic remedies.
When I next found myself at the hospital, with my face covered in wet plaster bandages, my scar was healing and my hair was gradually growing back from when it had been shaved for the operation. Staff at the radiotherapy unit had to make a mould of my head to create a Perspex mask before my treatment began.
Once it was complete, I sat with my mask in my lap, tracing the impression of the curves, crevices, lumps and bumps of my head. It was then attached to a table and, with my head slotted inside it, I was kept perfectly still while, five days a week for seven weeks, a machine blasted my dent with a ten-minute burst of radiation.
The sessions often left me nauseous, so I was never more than a few feet away from a bucket. But mostly I was just exhausted. And as a result, I lost interest in anything that didn’t involve me.
I couldn’t be bothered to read newspapers, listen to the news or Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs. Instead I dipped in and out of OK! Magazine and watched This Morning on breakfast TV for my fix of world events.
The seventeen types of tablets I took each day controlled when I ate, what I drank, when I woke up, what time I napped and how far away I could be from the nearest toilet. I hated them, but by controlling my life, they were saving it.
But nothing I read on the Internet had warned me of how much cancer treatment could drain your femininity. Lack of regular exercise and steroids gave me a moon-face and made my weight balloon. Make-up only highlighted how ugly I’d become and made me look like a cheap drag act, so even the basics like lipstick and mascara were left to gather dust on the dressing table. In fact, my entire beauty regime was given the heave-ho.
I hadn’t coloured my hair for so long, it looked like I’d taken to wearing a silver skullcap. My legs resembled the Forest of Dean, and the skin on my left cheek near the radiotherapy zone was corrugated and sore.
The pricey moisturisers I’d bought on my trips to Paris were boxed up and put into a cupboard, and replaced with E45 cream and aloe vera. I avoided my beautiful wardrobe of Gucci and Versace outfits and asked Selena to order me a selection of brightly coloured, elasticated leisure suits. I went from couture to velour.
And I all but ignored my own reflection. I wouldn’t give that bloody bathroom mirror the satisfaction of seeing me in such a state.
SIMON
Montefalco
27 July
Our family crammed so many memories into the time we’d been allowed.
A former colleague of Luciana’s father with a shady reputation secured me a forged British passport of my own. So the four of us flew from city to city across Europe for weekend breaks and explorations.
And when the short bursts of chemotherapy on Luciana’s kidney and stomach weakened her resolve, we hid indoors and watched old Jimmy Stewart and Audrey Hepburn films with subtitles instead.
A large proportion of her hospital appointments involved tests and scans. They could be fraught affairs not only because many were invasive, but because each time, her disease had advanced that little bit further.
The shame I felt over my earlier plan to abandon her and teach God a lesson pushed me to double my efforts to be there for her. I became more than just Luciana’s chauffeur and helper; I was also part of her treatment team.
I never missed a single appointment again, and even when her doctors and specialists probably didn’t welcome my presence, I sat by her side and irritated them with questions and suggested drug trials and treatments I’d read about on the Internet. I didn’t care what they thought of my silly ideas. She was my soulmate, not theirs.
The side effects of Luciana’s treatment were undignified when occasionally she’d soil herself. Sometimes the palms of her hands felt like ice blocks, and I’d rub them hard between mine to make her feel human again. Or she could spend days in bed poleaxed by crippling stomach pains. All I could do was fill her plastic beaker with water or rub her arm as she vomited. It was heartbreaking to witness and feel so useless.
Madame Lola frequently flew from Mexico to stay with us. Sometimes Luciana wanted both of us around her, and other times, it was just one of us. And occasionally she took herself down to the vineyards to sit alone on a blanket her sister had crocheted and watch the grape pickers come and go.
Whatever made her happy made me happy.
CATHERINE
Northampton
8 October
‘It’s looking good, Catherine, it’s looking good,’ said Dr Lewis, nodding as he examined my latest X-ray against a light box.
I didn’t feel it, I thought, but I kept quiet for fear of sounding like an old whingebag. My check-ups with him were the only highlight of my miserable weeks. Sometimes, the dishy doctor dropped by on treatment days to say hello and offer words of encouragement. He’d pat me on the shoulder each time he left and I’d always get goosebumps.
I’d had no significant other in my life since Tom. I holidayed alone; I shopped alone; I went to parties alone; to Selena’s wedding and Olivia’s christening alone; to Emily and Robbie’s graduations alone. I’d been on dinner dates with several men over the years, sometimes set up by friends and others who I’d met through the boutique. But there was nobody who’d reacquainted me with romance. Or maybe I just hadn’t given them much of a chance.
I’d spent so long throwing myself into my business and my children’s lives that it hadn’t given me time to think about what I might be lacking. Now I was spending time at home recovering, and I began to realise what I’d been missing out on. I was lonely, and fed up with being everybody’s single friend.
Dr Lewis was the first man who’d turned my head in some time. Albeit a bulbous and, in places, dented head. So I made a deal with myself: if I could make it through my treatment and get a second shot at life, I’d throw
my hat in the ring, open myself up and take a gamble on love.
SIMON
Montefalco
18 November
Luciana insisted on taking care of all the details of her birthday party herself. Despite my protestations, nothing was going to prevent her from leading the team of caterers and planners she’d hired to throw a lavish fortieth birthday party.
‘I am bored, Simon – I need to do this,’ she explained with a passion I thought her disease had extinguished. ‘I need to have one day where we’re all thinking about the present, not the future.’
I decided against arguing with her. Friends, our children’s friends, our staff and their families, the doctors and nurses who treated her, and villagers joined us as we threw open the doors to our home.
Waiters served drinks as ice sculptures slowly melted into lawns; a casino in the dining room made temporary millionaires out of some, while others danced to a twenty-five-piece swing band playing Rat Pack classics on the terrace. It had been many months since I’d last heard laughter echoing through the corridors.
Mid-evening, I searched high and low for Luciana until I found her perched on a stone wall, her bare feet resting in the infinity pool that overlooked the valley. I placed my arm around her shoulder and she rested her head on it as we stared into a distance we could never reach.
‘It’s not working,’ she whispered.
‘Of course it is. There are two hundred people behind us having the time of their lives.’
‘No. The treatment. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to sleep, I can feel the disease finding new bones to dine on.’
I shivered. ‘No, it’s your imagination. I’ve read about it, plenty of people with cancer think they can hear the cells growing but—’
She gave me a gentle look that asked me not to doubt her. ‘You know this party isn’t just to celebrate my birthday, don’t you? It’s my way of saying—’
‘Please don’t,’ I interrupted, my throat tightening.