by Claire Allan
Maybe, I thought, I should phone Rose after all. She had offered to come and sit with me but I had shooed her away. She had been so good the night before, sitting with me while I had the mother of all tantrums and holding my hand until Cara arrived. I could have called Cara but she had promised her mother she would take her out to dinner and, while she had said she would cancel, I knew they didn’t get that much time together.
So I decided to sit in on my own. I flicked the TV on and stared numbly at Coronation Street and EastEnders. At least someone was getting it worse than me, I thought, as the drums beat their ominous tune at the end of the Albert Square soap. And then, because it seemed like the only thing I had the energy for, I took to my bed and cried at the empty space beside me.
We had been together a long time – just short of eleven years. We’d lived together for ten of those years. That’s a lot of time sleeping next to someone. While sometimes I’d craved the bed all to myself – to stretch out and luxuriate under the covers all on my own – I’d never wanted it like this. I’d wanted it to be when he went away for a stag weekend, or on business. I never wanted it to be when he just disappeared off the face of the planet leaving nothing but a note to let me know he was still living. I glanced at the clock. It was gone eleven. It would be a whole eight hours until my alarm clock would sound. Seven hours until we were in respectable-enough territory for me to get up and start my day. I was tired. I was bone-tired. I was couldn’t-see-straight-tired. But there was no chance I was going to sleep. I hauled my duvet around my shoulders and wandered like a giant marshmallow downstairs where I did some Grade A staring into space on the sofa. I even poured myself a drink – a vodka on the rocks with not even so much as a hint of a mixer. It caught in my throat, the harsh fumes making my eyes water. But it seemed like the perfect thing to do – the kind of thing heroines in movies would do. If I wasn’t careful I would find myself pulling out our wedding album and poring over the photos. I nodded, raising my glass in the direction of the oak sideboard which housed our very own book of dreams. No – that would send me over the edge and I needed to keep it together. My eye was drawn, once again, to my phone. There was no point in phoning him. I knew that.
But it was one of my very limited options. I didn’t know where he was. I didn’t know anyone who knew where he was. The only way I could conceivably get to him was through his phone. Maybe he wouldn’t be expecting me to call at this time. He knew what I was like – I was normally sound out to the world at ten thirty. If I withheld my number . . . maybe, just maybe . . .
I picked it up and changed my settings and then I dialled his number and crossed my fingers at the same time, just longing to hear his voice. If he heard mine, properly – not just in a voice mail – I knew he would talk to me. He might be going through a lot just now – but he wasn’t a bastard.I knew Mark and he wasn’t a bastard.
My heart thumped – right there in the middle of my chest – as his phone rang. It rang three times, my heart sinking (and thudding) with each shrill tone. Then, midway through the fourth ring he answered. His voice came at me, muffled over the din of a bar, confused and definitely drunk. “Hello?” he sing-songed like he was out having the time of his life and I found myself unable to speak. I wanted to say so much. I wanted to ask him where the hell he was. I wanted to beg him to come home – but there he was, sounding like he was out on the razz, thumping bass beats behind him and I couldn’t speak. I could barely breathe. I hung up, threw the phone away from me. Pouring another vodka shot from the bottle, I downed it as fast as I could, cuddled the bottle to me and pulled the duvet over my head.
My alarm didn’t wake me. The ringing of my phone didn’t wake me. The thumping on my front door didn’t wake me. It was the hauling off of the duvet and the rattle of the vodka bottle on the floor which did it. Ivy stood over me, slightly horrified, and I blinked to acclimatise to the light before trying to stand up and falling backwards onto the sofa with an unceremonious thud.
“Rose is worried sick,” Ivy started, shaking the duvet out and folding it. “And you know Rose, she never worries about anything. And yet you have her taking palpitations and needing a sit down.”
“Where is she?” I muttered, looking around Ivy for a glimpse of our stepmother.
“She’s at the shop,” she said, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world.
It wasn’t to me. In my mind it was still hitting midnight and I was still swigging from my vodka bottle running into my third chorus of ‘Need You Now’ by Lady Antebellum.
I looked at Ivy blankly.
“It’s gone half ten,” she said. “Rose opened up at nine. She was sure you’d be there soon. She’s been trying to ring. She couldn’t get an answer. Not on your landline or your mobile. She called me and asked me to come round and I’ve been standing for the last five minutes battering on your door to no avail until your next-door neighbour offered me your spare key.”
Arse.
So Rose was hyperventilating. And my neighbour now knew there was scandal in the making. I was hung-over – or indeed possibly still drunk – and Ivy was standing over me with her trademark pious and superior look.
“My husband has left me,” I said, as if it was news to Ivy and indeed to me.
She nodded. “I heard.” She carried on folding the duvet and tidying up the living room, even though it was relatively tidy anyway.
I started to bristle. “You could have called,” I said petulantly, standing up again and walking through to the kitchen for a Diet Coke.
Ivy followed me. “Kitty, you had Rose and Cara. You didn’t need me.” She didn’t say that in a melodramatic fashion, or in a self-pitying fashion – more in a dismissive way. I wasn’t on her radar most of the time. Not at all really, unless she got a distress call from Rose telling her I was missing in action. I pulled the ring-pull on the Diet Coke can and put it to my lips, only stopping drinking when I needed to breathe again.
“I’ll call Rose now,” I said. There was absolutely no point in entering into any kind of discussion with Ivy about our relationship. We just weren’t that close. We both understood and accepted that.
“Might be an idea,” she said, filling the kettle and switching it on. “I’ll make some tea.”
“I’m fine with the Diet Coke, thanks,” I said, lifting the phone and dialling the number of the shop. As I dialled the memory came back to me, of calling Mark, of hearing his jovial tones, of hearing the music thumping in the background and I felt sick to my stomach.
I thrust the phone atIvy, told her to tell Rose I was fine and then I ran to the bathroom and lay on the floor until the nausea subsided.
“You should take a shower,” Ivy said, walking in and handing me a couple of towels.
I made a noise which in my mind was a statement of agreement but which I fully accept may have sounded like a death groan to anyone else’s ears.
“Kitty, look, I know this is hard but you need to get up and get on with things. No point in lying down under what life throws at us.”
I looked at her and wondered what exactly life had thrown at her that was so awful? She had her husband (who had not run away). She had children (two of them, one of each). She had a nice part-time job in an office where they loved her and offered her full pay through each of her maternity leaves. She was a Size 12 on a bad day. Yes, she had lost her mother at a young age but, you know, we kind of shared that one. And at least she had got to know Mum more than I did. My memories of the woman who gave me life were fragmented – a vague hint of a perfume I’d never been able to locate, the vague notion of a mop of curly permed hair. A soft jumper and a smile. No. I shook my head. I could not think of my mother today as well. One big desertion was enough for anyone to cope with.
“You’re right,” I said to Ivy, standing up and switching on the shower full pelt to signal the end of the conversation.
By lunch-time I was in a fit enough state to go to work. Ivy had made breakfast and I had found myself touched by t
he fact she even buttered my toast for me. She had opened a second can of Diet Coke and poured it into a glass with ice. She had even set two hangover-cure paracetamol out for me.
The duvet had been replaced on top of my bed, with the cushions arranged neatly and in formation on top of it. The windows had been opened and she had even loaded the washing machine.
“He took his clothes but left the dirty ones?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
“I never thought about that . . .”
“I binned them,” she said matter of factly. “After cutting them up a little first.”
I looked at her and smiled, but found my eyes were watering.
“We might not always get along, sis,” she said, “but he shouldn’t have done this.”
“Rose thinks he is having some sort of breakdown.”
“Rose likes to see the good in people.”
“But he’s a good man,” I offered, knowing how weak my words sounded, especially given how I’d heard him on the phone living it up the night before.
“Good men don’t do things like this,” she said, folding a tea towel and taking my glass from me and rinsing it under the tap. “Now, do you want to go to work? Or will I just tell Rose you’re taking the day off?”
I contemplated it. I had thought about it while standing under the hot streams of the shower. No. I would go in. It was a Saturday. Saturdays were notoriously busy and the busyness would distract me, and exhaust me again. And I could just pretend the wedding dresses were ball gowns and not very special dresses which women would wear to get married, never really knowing if it would all work out or not.
Besides, it was my shop – my dream – I couldn’t give up on it just because shit was happening in my home life and my belief in happy-ever-afters was on the wane. And Rose freaked when she had to deal with brides all by herself. She wasn’t so much about the front of house stuff – she preferred to be sitting in the workroom upstairs, altering gowns, preparing them to be picked up and occasionally wandering downstairs to coo at a bride-to-be in her finery.
“I’ll drive you in,” Ivy said, lifting my car keys so they were out of my use. “You may have showered but there is still a faint whiff of vodka and I’d be happier to drive you than let you take any more risks.”
Ordinarily I’d have jotted this down as one more example of Ivy being a bit of a sanctimonious bitch but, given that she had cut the crotch out of Mark’s favourite jeans in an act of solidarity with me, I took it to be a gesture that showed maybe, just maybe, she cared.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
Chapter eight
Erin
An orchiectomy sounds so much nicer than it actually is. It sounds as if it involves orchids and petals and maybe angels gently stroking you. It does not sound as if someone is shelling one of your testicles from your scrotum like a pea from a pod.
The doctor spoke and I sat holding Paddy’s hand, gripping as tightly as I could. Paddy’s eyes were focused straight ahead and he was nodding – but his nodding was all off. There was no rhythm between the doctor finishing his sentences and Paddy’s responses. I knew it was up to me to take it all in. Cancer. Well, most likely cancer. They couldn’t be sure, you see, until they popped that bad boy out and looked at it under a microscope. The blood tests didn’t look good though. Or the ultrasound.
Paddy had tried to make jokes through it. As he lay on the table, with his tackle on display, he had told me he never thought he would be the one in our relationship to have ultrasounds. I’d laughed and said my turn would come to worry about ultrasounds. Which was ironic, given that they were talking about taking half of his baby-making equipment away. I felt my head swim a little and nipped at my leg to bring myself back into focus. I had to be the strong one.
They wouldn’t waste much time, the doctor said. They would book him in straight away. They would whip that bad boy out as soon as they could. And they would poke at it and dissect it like it was the main course in a Bushtucker Trial. I glanced at Paddy and he had gone quite pale. I didn’t blame him.
“What are my chances?” he said and I wanted to block my ears.
I didn’t want to hear about chances – I wanted certainties. I wanted ‘It will be all rights’.
“Testicular cancer is one of the most treatable cancers,” the doctor said solemnly. “If you’re going to get cancer this is the kind that you’d want to get, in most cases. Hopefully we have caught this early but the only way to really know is to get in there and look at what we are facing.”
“And you have to remove it?” Paddy asked. “You can’t just do a biopsy or whatever?”
“I’m afraid not. The only way to be really sure is to look at it all. We can insert a prosthetic testicle into your scrotum during surgery if you want.”
“And sperm. Should I freeze my, erm, sperm?”
“You may want to consider that, yes. As a precaution. If you need chemotherapy it will probably halt your sperm production – though in most cases the sperm count increases eventually and may even return to normal.”
Paddy nodded – a nod that went on a little too long.
“Try not to worry too much,” the doctor added as if cancer was something you could just shake off like the common cold. “Until we know what we are facing, try to remember the odds are in your favour.”
I didn’t want to hear about odds.
We walked out of the office holding hands but Paddy soon let go.
“Don’t tell anyone about this,” he said, facing straight ahead. “Not until we know. Not until we know everything.”
I reached out to him but he shrugged away.
“Erin, this isn’t personal. But I can’t just now. I just can’t.”
“Erin!” Paddy called from the car as I glanced one last time in the mirror to check on my hair and whether or not it was behaving itself.It was mildly frizzy but maintaining a degree of restraint with the help of some heavy-duty clips. I smoothed it again and looked myself up and down. A crisp white V-neck figuredT-shirt. Some nicely pressed cargo pants. A pair of new mules with toenails freshly painted.I looked nice and neat and tidy as if I wouldn’t stand for anyone messing with me. I didn’t know why but I was slightly nervous about meeting our wedding co-ordinator at the hotel. I knew that technically she was on my side but whenever she started talking about corkage charges, room hire and buffets I got uncomfortable. Mental maths was so not my thing. Weddings were not my thing – and even though she was perfectly lovely, I couldn’t help but worry that she was trying to rip us off. Therefore, rule one of any meeting with the very bubbly and excitable Fiona was that we went looking our best, in nice clothes with an air of importance about us. This was easier for me admittedly than it was for Paddy who was looking a little frail these days but, still, the effort was worth making.
“Erin!” he called again, as I heard his key turn in the ignition. I grabbed my bag and my keys and clattered down the hallway at lightning speed.
“Are you okay to drive?” I asked him as I clambered in beside him.
“Erin, yes, I’m okay to drive. How many times?” He winked at me and smiled but there was a hint of irritation in his voice which didn’t go unnoticed.
I tried to let it wash over me – and I tried to remind myself even more not to fuss.
“So,” I said, “we are going for a choice of main course. Prosecco and strawberries on arrival for our guests – a fruit punch for the lightweights. A buffet at ten, just a small one, and chair covers and white linen tablecloths.” I said all this with a feigned enthusiasm for his benefit.
“It will be a brilliant day,” he said. “I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Me too,” I lied, as we headed in the direction of mad Fiona and the very expensive hotel where I would be handing over even more of my money for the sake of a great day out for our family and friends.
Jules had said I needed to start getting excited about it. Yes, she said, she knew I was a wedding-phobe and that, given what had happened
with my one previous serious but ultimately doomed relationship, she could understand why. But this was different, she argued. This was Paddy. Paddy was a babe. He was the love of my life.
She was right. I had known, quite quickly, that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I had known that entirely before the horrible cancer diagnosis. So this commitment thing – the worry and icky feeling that came with it – was nothing to do with feeling sorry for him. I did want to be with him. I did want to marry him. But the big wedding? The big standing in front of everyone and declaring our smugness at finding each other? Knowing that a great deal of them would be there – like mawkish peasants at the steps of the guillotine – wondering if we were going to do the whole “till death do us part” bit so they could sob into their hankies. The fuckers.
“Why don’t you just see it as a big party?” Jules had offered.
“A big party isn’t likely to set me back the best part of a year’s salary. A big party in my book is a rake of dips from Tesco, some bags of tortilla chips and a strict bring-your-own-bottle etiquette code. I might even spring for some balloons or a few banners – but mirrors and tea lights? A cake that costs the same as a weekend away in Dublin? No, I wouldn’t factor that in.”
Jules laughed and I had found myself laughing too. “You’re right, of course,” I said. “This is just a big party. This is not about our marriage – not really. Our marriage will be between us and us alone and hopefully last a very long time indeed.”
“And the party, and the marriage, mean a lot to Paddy. It’s giving him a positive focus.”
“I know, I know,” I nodded. “I just have to get myself in the right celebratory mindset. It’s hard, though, trying to stay measured and realistic about everything else but then trying to get all gung-ho and excited about this.”