Friday Night With The Girls: A tale that will make you laugh, cry and call your best friend!

by Shari Low

  I just hoped that if I came across a suitable candidate, he didn’t baulk at the vetting questionnaire that I’d be asking him to complete.

  Are you single?

  Are you open minded?

  Are you solvent?

  Do you have addictions to drink, drugs or any other chemical stimuli?

  Do you have any outstanding restraining orders, criminal charges or legal actions?

  Can you provide excellent references from at least three former girlfriends?

  Have you ever considered a same-sex relationship or do you feel this is something you would like to experience in the future?

  Only on attaining a hundred per cent pass rate, (yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes, no) would he be allowed to proceed to coffee and a bun, perhaps lunch. He’d have to be patient and be prepared to take it easy at first. Lizzy’s heart had been so completely and utterly shattered first time around that I knew she was avoiding committing to anything more than temporary residence of her womb. However, she was still only thirty-nine – way too young to say goodbye to romance and the chance of another love. I was determined to find her a solid, intelligent, emotionally secure, dependable partner . . . and if that failed then maybe we could set her up with the one from Stud with the world-class abs for some rampant nocturnal activities.

  I realised that Caleb had nodded off again and gently placed him back in his crib, just as a cup of coffee materialised in front of me.

  ‘Any word from the parents of the year?’ Lizzy asked as she poured herself a cup of foul-smelling herbal tea.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Really?’ she asked incredulously. Lizzy was so ear-shatteringly close to her mother, Saint Carla of the Blessed Screech, that she was interminably optimistic that one day my parents would pull through.

  I nodded. ‘Spoke to my mother yesterday. They’re still in Paris. My dad won twenty grand on a horse-racing accumulator so they’ve decided to stay there for six months.’

  ‘And what did she say about . . . about the cancer?’

  ‘Are you ready for this?’ I asked, as I took a deep breath and did a quiet drum roll on the table so as not to wake the baby.

  Her groan was audible. ‘Oh no, what utter shit have they come out with now?’

  ‘My mother said that she’s still hurt that she wasn’t the first to hear about the skin cancer, that my dad said I’d completely undermined her and thank goodness she had him because he was the only person in the world who gave her her rightful place. Lizzy, close your mouth, love.’ I giggled, watching as, completely dumbfounded, she slid into the seat next to me.

  It took about twenty seconds before she finally regained her powers of speech. ‘They are fucking priceless. Oh my God, Lou, I’m so sorry. It’s a miracle that you’re not a messed-up, emotional cripple coming for those two. Doesn’t that hurt?’

  I shrugged. ‘It really doesn’t. Look, if this was a Lifetime movie or one of those family saga novels, then they’d realise the error of their ways and come riding in to the rescue, but, Liz, this is who they are. It’s the way they’ve always been and I don’t know that I’d want them to change now. It is what it is and I don’t need them. I really don’t.’

  It wasn’t false bravado or bluff. I’d long ago come to terms with who and what my parents were and replaced them with people who truly did care. The most important thing was that my idea of parenting was very different from Dave and Della Cairney’s. I’d never turn my back on my child, no matter what age she was. I’d defend her to the ends of the earth. I’d never choose anyone else above her. I would find a way to tell her every day of her life that she was loved and I’d mean it with all my heart – even when she was fifteen and sliding down a lamp post from her bedroom window so that she could do illicit things with the best-looking boy in the town. Although, I did reserve the right to ground her until she was thirty for anything involving subterfuge or physical contact with anyone of the male variety.

  I heard the muffled sound of the front door opening and closing. ‘If that’s Cilla Black coming to reunite me with Dave and Della I’ll never forgive you,’ I told Lizzy.

  Adam and Alex bounded in, a vision of un-camp, GQ chic. In torso-hugging T-shirts and jeans they were butch, chiselled, the kind of men that could induce a nipple erection at fifty paces. There was no doubt about it, when those two came out of the closet, that small step for mankind had definitely been a large loss for womankind.

  ‘Is it wrong that I kinda fancy you?’ I asked Alex after he’d finally released me from a bear hug.

  ‘Nope, it’s compulsory,’ he said with a wink.

  The two of them cooed over their sleeping child for a few minutes, before realising, with obvious disappointment, that he wasn’t going to wake up to greet them. I remembered that stage. For me, it lasted until Cassie learned to walk and started tearing around the house from the minute she woke up until the minute she went back to bed. There was a whole three- or four-year period back then that I couldn’t remember my buttocks ever coming into contact with a chair.

  ‘Where’s Cassie?’ Adam asked, clearly put out that his favourite niece (although in fairness, since he and Lizzy were both only children, there wasn’t much competition) wasn’t there to greet him.

  ‘Out in the garden, playing tennis with Holly.’ Lizzy and Adam’s fourteen-year-old daughter showed patience far and above the call of duty when it came to entertaining a loud, opinionated six-year-old.

  Lizzy was back over at the Aga now, her head buried in the oven, rearranging something within it.

  ‘Are you sure you have enough for us to stay for dinner too?’ I asked, silently praying that the offer still stood.

  There was a loud mumbling from her crouched position that sounded like a confirmation of the affirmative, just as we heard more shuffling in the hall. This time it was Red who made an appearance. He’d spent the last three days touring the country’s football stadiums for a feature on . . . on . . . actually, I had no idea. None. Every week the newspaper emailed over his assignments, and I printed off the list, stapled it to the corkboard in the kitchen and then planned our lives around them. He’d decided to cut back on his time away when I first discovered the cancer, but I’d overruled him. I told him I wanted him to keep working full-time because we had a daughter to bring up, a mortgage to pay, holidays to save for, but I think he knew the truth: to change the way we lived would have meant admitting that something was wrong and I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Normality. We had to keep everything as normal as possible.

  ‘For the love of God, who’s that at the door now? Have you got an entertainment licence for this kitchen?’ Lizzy handed me a large glass of red wine, primarily, I suspected, to shut me up.

  Red plonked down on the chair next to me then pulled me onto his knee for a long, blissful snog.

  ‘Fucking stop that you two or I won’t be responsible for my actions.’

  My first thought was that the wine must be pretty damn strong because I was now hearing voices in my head. My second thought was that I’d be pretty damn unlucky to develop an alcohol- and stress-induced psychosis that involved hearing Ginger screech at me. Johnny Depp? Fine. Brad Pitt (before he left Jennifer and ran off with Angelina and appeared to stop washing)? Absolutely. Perhaps even Jon Bon Jovi serenading me as I slurred? All perfectly acceptable forms of drunken possession. Ginger’s demanding bossiness? It was enough to scare anyone sober.

  I un-puckered myself from my husband and turned to see Ginger, Ike, Josie and Avril, the former in a fake fur coat that reached to her ankles and was as wide as her hair. In a dim light she’d look like a very expensive designer yeti.

  My confused glance went from the yeti, to Lizzy, to the yeti, to Lizzy, who finally clarified the situation by saying, ‘I know you hate surprises but we thought we’d have a little get-together.’

  I was open-mouthed with shock.

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because we know you’re going to have a tough month ahead and there’s only
one way to really prepare for that, physically, mentally and spiritually.’

  Oh no, what now? If this involved meditation, chanting or any kind of nude cleansing ritual then – touching family gathering or not – I was out of there. But no, I was being uncharitable. They’d obviously put a lot of thought into this, researched the options, and then planned this whole night around an activity that would benefit me. How lucky was I to have friends like this? I braced myself to react favorably ably to whatever they sprung on me. I’d read somewhere that aromatherapy massages were beneficial. As was acupuncture (although Josie was getting nowhere near me with her knitting needles), hypnosis and some of the Eastern techniques like t’ai chi.

  Whatever it was, I’d give it a go. Although I was still slightly dodgy on anything involving nudity and chanting.

  Lizzy spoke up. ‘So we decided to have a dinner and then move on to the more therapeutic activity of the night.’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I realised that Josie’s arm was slowly coming out from behind her back. Oh crap, the knitting needless. There was nothing else that she could be carrying that could possible had any effect on my physical, mental and spiritual well-being.

  I checked out the locations of the doors and prepared to make an emergency exit when Josie thrust the contents of her hand towards me. After a momentary confusion, I realised it was a large pink microphone with a diamanté grip.

  ‘Get those lungs warmed up, doll – you’re up first on the karaoke.’

  Forty-nine

  If Cassie was my first priority in all of this, Red was up there in second place.

  To say he was in denial would be the biggest understatement since Ginger told a magazine interviewer that she occasionally liked to have a wander round Harvey Nicks.

  While I’d become obsessed with practicalities and preparations, Red had taken the opposite stance. Big picture, ballpark, overall situation – details not required.

  We still laughed, we still acted completely normally and, despite hospital visit after hospital visit, we didn’t discuss the worst outcome. Not ever. It was all about staying positive and getting on with living, refusing to allow the disease to take control of our future. No, he didn’t want to know what high school I wanted Cassie to go to because I’d still be here to make that decision. No, he didn’t want to discuss future events and the preparations he would have to make if the very worst happened. But it was neither of those that caused him to get seriously furious with me for the first and only time in our lives.

  That moment had come the night after the last biopsy, when I was addled with fear, lying staring at the ceiling at 4 am, gripped with a wave of terror that was sending my imagination to places that it should never have gone. The results would tell me if the cancer had spread, and if it had… Was I going to live or die? Live or die? Live or die? My brain got stuck on that thought like a needle on a scratched record.

  ‘You still not sleeping?’ I heard him murmur.

  ‘No,’ I whispered.

  He rolled over towards me and nuzzled into my neck. ‘It’s going to be OK, babe.’

  Usually I’d accept his positivity and nod my head, take it on board and use his confidence to bolster my levels of optimism and hope.

  But not tonight.

  Tonight I was too far along the road to panic. There were things I was worrying about, questions that I need him to answer to set my mind at ease.

  ‘Red . . . ?’

  Still semi-sleeping, he murmured something unintelligible.

  ‘If I wasn’t here would you marry again? For Cassie? Red, she’ll need a mum and she’ll need someone to . . .’ He shot bolt upright and flicked on the bedside light, then turned to face me with an expression I could only describe as aghast.

  ‘Don’t. Ever. Say. That.’ His voice was low but there was no mistaking the fury and fear in his eyes. ‘Nothing is going to happen to you Lou, so I don’t even need to think about it.’

  I was too far gone for reason and consolation.

  ‘How do you know that? How? And what if it’s not? Are we just going to ignore it all and then it’s too late to prepare if it all goes wrong? Red, I lived with parents who didn’t give a fuck about me and I’m not having that for Cassie. She needs to know that I tried. That I cared about her, that I did everything I could to make sure that she was going to be OK. I need to know that if anything happens to me you’ll look for someone else. Maybe Lizzy. You and Lizzy would be amazing together and . . .’

  What the hell was I saying? On one level I knew it was insane and I could hear myself come out with this hysterical rant and yet I couldn’t stop. For months I’d been trying to keep thoughts like this under control and now they’d just burst into my brain and launched a full-out assault on my rationality.

  ‘Stop.’ He didn’t shout yet the sound was deafening. Low. Haunted. Pained. ‘Are you seriously trying to set me up with your best friend in case you die?’

  There was a long horrifying pause as some kind of reality started to sink in to my brain. Oh fuck. Oh fuck. What was I doing? Why was I saying these things?

  Why?

  Because before I got the results I needed to know that they – Red and Cassie – would be OK, because I needed to get ready to handle whatever was thrown at me. That was my way of coping. Over-think the issues. Analyse options. Consider all the possibilities. Have solutions ready and waiting to go. That was how I dealt with problems in life. But I had no right to make him face this before he was ready. These were my worries, my fears and I was transposing them on to him, making him confront the possibility that he could lose his wife, and the family he loved would be ripped apart. What right did I have to do that?

  At exactly the same moment, we both reached for each other and clung on, silently, until our pulses returned to something like normal. He pulled back, kissed me slowly, with such tenderness that my heart ached.

  ‘I love you, Lou. And you’re not going anywhere, so no more.’

  I knew exactly what he meant.

  Whatever conversations I wanted to have, whatever solutions I needed to prepare, I knew I was going to have to do them on my own.

  Lizzy, my husband’s potential future wife knew immediately what I was going to say when I arrived on her doorstep the following morning, but she followed through with the pretence of believing that I’d just popped in for a casual coffee.

  I picked my moment, right in between her latching a breast pump on to one of her boobs (she had offered to express milk for Caleb for as long as his dads wanted her to) and taking a sip out of a cup of tea (therefore avoiding the potential for a reactive, furious response from the Red Jones School of Coping With Illness).

  ‘Lizzy, if the results are not good . . .’

  She swallowed. ‘They will be.’

  ‘But if they’re not, then . . .’

  ‘Then I’ll look after Cassie like she was my own and do everything and anything that I need to make sure that she grows up into a healthy, confident, incredible young woman that she’s destined to be. Now don’t dare ask me again, because it’s not going to happen.’

  She pressed the button on the battery-operated expresser and the noise ensured any chance of continuing the conversation was cut dead. Probably not the best time to ask her if she’d consider marrying my husband then. I picked up a copy of Good Housekeeping and started to flick through it . . . and I pretended not to see the tear that slid down her face and landed in her tea.

  Fifty

  Josie was sitting at the Formica table in the kitchen when I opened the back door.

  ‘Thought that was you,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘How did you know?’

  A sixth sense? An inherent feel for the proximity of those she loved? An oversensitivity to the vibrations of the Earth’s crust that allowed her to tune into movements around her?

  ‘Because you’re like a bloody elephant coming up that path.’

  A cackle of laughter was out before I could stop it. ‘Don’t you
sugarcoat it there, Aunt Josie. Just give it to me straight.’

  She laughed too, but I didn’t kid myself for a minute. Her mouth said she was amused, but her eyes were scrutinising me from head to toe and they missed nothing. It was a skill that pre-dated her initiation into the realms of the ninja.

  ‘You’ve had a rough night,’ she said, calmly. ‘What’s wrong?’

  I sighed. ‘I’m just having a bit of a meltdown.’ Grabbing a cup from the draining board, I sat down and lifted the teapot with the chicken-themed tea cosy and poured myself a cup.

  ‘I don’t know if this makes any sense, but it’s almost like I have to plan for the worst eventuality. Like I have to know I’ve got the things that matter covered and that way I can deal with whatever happens.’

  ‘Cassie?’ This time it was that inherent instinct that was providing the insight.

  ‘And Red,’ I answered. ‘I asked him last night if he would please agree to marry Lizzy if anything happened to me.’

  ‘Oh dear Lord,’ was my guru’s exasperated response. ‘That poor girl. The love of her life turned out to be gay, he lives next door with his boyfriend, she’s just had their baby, she’s terminally single and now she’s in line to marry her dead pal’s husband. Does she know that this magical future awaits her?’

  Only Josie could get away with making fun of me at a time like this.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then probably best leave it that way. Leave the poor soul some hope of a normal life. What about Red? Furious?’

  ‘Like I’d just ran over his favourite Nikon with a tank.’

  After a few moments her grin morphed into something a little more thoughtful. ‘Love, dealing with this in the way that you are is completely understandable.’