The Story of Our Life

by Shari Low

  ‘You’re going to work all night? You must be joking,’ Colm asked, horrified. ‘Darlin’, I love you, but count me out. I’m knackered.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m happy just to work away on my own. Couldn’t sleep anyway,’ I told him, climbing on the bed. ‘I’m totally buzzing. I can’t believe this is ours.’ I clinked my bottle against his. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers. Here’s to our new house. May the roof hold up and the mortgage rate never increase,’ Colm added, grinning.

  His hands were grimy, his hair was ruffled, he hadn’t shaved and he was wearing old jeans that wouldn’t look out of place in an eighties tribute act, yet I still thought he was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. My libido suddenly kicked my intention to carry on working into touch, and I reached over and slipped my hand under his T-shirt.

  ‘So I was thinking that before I go back downstairs, this house really needs to be christened.’

  He smiled, stretched up and gave me one of those dismissive kisses. The peck. The one that said, ‘Great idea babe, but can we do it some other time.’

  ‘Great idea babe, but…’

  I interrupted him, desperate to head off the rejection I knew was coming. ‘Come on, honey, it’s ovulation week and…’

  Wrong move. Over the last few months he’d been getting more and more indifferent to any conversation that included the words ovulation, pregnancy or fertility, while I’d been getting more and more stressed that I wasn’t getting pregnant.

  He reached up and kissed me again, more than a peck this time, but still dismissive. Like a resolute and very definite full stop on the end of a sentence.

  ‘I promise we’ll christen it in the morning, love.’

  I could have argued, but I wasn’t going to. What was the point? I was fairly sure that nagging a man to have sex didn’t count high on the turn-on scale of foreplay.

  Ouch. A complete knock-back. There was a confidence boost. Looked like I’d be going back to work after all.

  As I left him, eyes closed, to head back downstairs to work, I reflected on the irony to the situation. Lulu and Dan, on the brink of divorce, swept up in a torrent of destruction and despair, were probably having wild, crazy sex right now.

  Meanwhile over in what was supposed to be the land of the happy marriage, I was working on my own, moving house on my own, trying to have a baby on my own, running every aspect of our lives on my own, dealing with the problems on my own, while Colm sailed through, letting none of life’s little niggles so much as touch him.

  I loved Colm with every beat of my heart, but…

  For the first time, I realized, there was a ‘but’.

  23

  2015

  A Rubber Ring In A Stormy Sea

  Nobody was saying anything.

  We’d been friends for a million years, and we’d never had a speechless moment, yet now, no one could find words to say.

  My parents had come to pick up Beth for her first ever weekend at Granny and Grandad’s house. My mother had been horrified when I’d asked her. I’d used the excuse that Colm was still weary after the surgery, but even that didn’t dent her irritation at the inconvenience of having to cancel her planned spa break. Thankfully, they’d had a change of mind. I’ve no idea why or how. All I know is that my mother went off the phone, told my dad about our conversation, and then for the first time ever – and I mean ever – he had called me and said that they’d be happy to help out. In fact, he even offered to come collect Beth. After a lifetime of coming to terms with their general parental crappery, perhaps there was hope for them yet.

  I was about to go to shout Beth through from the living room when Colm spoke. ‘Look, for God’s sake, someone say something. Nobody’s died. At least not yet,’ he joked, pulling a couple of bottles of Bud out of the fridge and handing them to Dan and my dad.

  ‘So that’s it? There’s nothing they can do? I mean, come on, for fuck’s sake…’ Dan realized he’d just sworn in front of my mother. ‘Sorry Mrs Williams.’ He turned back to Colm. ‘But… man, there must be something?’

  ‘There is,’ Colm replied, still sounding like he was talking about the football, or the shopping, or anything else other than the fact he’d just been told he was dying. ‘Radiotherapy. Chemotherapy.’

  ‘But that won’t cure it?’ Rosie asked, her face stricken with horror and disbelief.

  ‘No, but it could give me years. Och, I’ll outlive all you lot yet.’

  Our gaze met across the table and I smiled, knowing he could read what my eyes were telling him. I love you. I’ll always love you. My heart is breaking. And I can’t even think about a time when you won’t be sitting there, pulling out beers and bad jokes. That one caught in my throat and I stifled a gasp, determined not to let him down. I would not buckle. I couldn’t. He needed a wife who was strong and positive. If I caved to my deep, desperate wish to buckle over and sob until dawn, then I was making it about me. It didn’t matter whether I wanted to scream or cry or howl at the moon, I was going to be whatever he needed me to be.

  Two big fat tears rolled down Rosie’s face and I wished that Jack was there to support her. He was life coaching for a company up north. Or was it down south? I couldn’t remember, but she said he’d be gone for a while. Crap timing. Rosie was an emotional soul and his love would have been a comfort.

  As if he sensed this, my dad leaned over and hugged her. It was a spontaneous, kind gesture that took me by surprise. Displays of empathy weren’t usually his thing, so it was touching that he was making an effort. My mother, not so much.

  ‘Well, we’ll hear how you get on, dear,’ she told Colm, standing up and reaching for her bag. She was obviously desperate to leave. Maybe she had highly important plans. Like lunch. Or a manicure.

  We’ll hear how you get on? Seriously? I felt a lifetime of fury bubble up from my gut. Not ‘what can we do to help?’ Not ‘what do you need us to do?’ Not ‘we’re here for you no matter what’.

  Christ, Colm wasn’t applying for a job. Or going on a sponsored fucking walk. Her son-in-law of ten years had just been handed a death sentence and her reaction was, We’ll hear how you get on!

  I wanted to scream, but Beth chose that moment to burst in the door, all crazy blonde curls and gorgeous in her bright blue fairy dress, fizzing with excitement at the prospect of a weekend away. ‘Are you ready, gran? Are you? Are you?’ She was big on repetition when she was excited.

  I scooped her up, gave her a huge sloppy kiss, tickled under her chin, making her chuckle, and made her pinky-promise to have a great time. It was only two nights, but I’d miss her so much. She’d become my solace. Every night, I’d read her a story, then cling to her as she slept, desperate to protect her from the pain of what was ahead. We still hadn’t told her how sick her dad was. And until we had absolutely no choice, until the time came to prepare her for the worst, I never would. I wasn’t putting that kind of sadness and worry on my daughter until I absolutely had to.

  In the meantime, I truly hoped my parents would make this fun for her. Despite everything, I wanted her to develop a relationship with her grandparents, especially now. They weren’t much, but they were all she had as family in the UK. We went over to visit Colm’s mum a couple of times a year, now that she was too frail to travel here, and he wasn’t particularly close to his brother, the age gap too wide for them to have built a relationship in their youth. Colm still hadn’t told them and they deserved to know. I’d raise it with him again soon, but not now.

  As the door closed behind my parents, Lulu shook her head. ‘They are un-bloody-believable. Colm, just as well you’re not relying on them to be bastions of support and encouragement because you’d be well and truly fucked. Not that you’re not already fucked.’ From anyone else it would be harsh or unfeeling, from Lulu, said with eye-rolling irreverence and brilliant comic timing, it was perfect. Colm dissolved into laughter and took the rest of us with him, Rosie’s giggles punctuated with so many tears, it wasn’t entirely clear
whether she was laughing or crying.

  ‘Don’t you sugar-coat it there, Lu,’ he chortled, sending everyone off again. It was bizarre. Surreal. Almost hysterical, in every sense of the word. A horrific moment in our lives, yet we were clinging on to laughter like a rubber ring in a stormy sea.

  Lulu had exactly the kind of no-nonsense, straight-down-the-line candour that Colm needed right now. This was what he wanted to hear – not sobs and platitudes and clichés, accompanied by pitying looks and hand-wringing.

  I felt a wave of gratitude to Lu for saying and doing the right thing. Who knew that being devoid of a sentimentality gene would make her great in a health crisis?

  ‘Right,’ Lu went on. ‘So what can we do then? When are your radiotherapy sessions?’

  ‘Daily, starting week after next,’ Colm replied. ‘I’ve to go get some kind of mask fitted on Monday. It’ll keep my head steady while they’re zapping me. Then the sessions start the following week, every afternoon, Monday – Friday, two o’clock.’

  Lulu nodded. ‘Okay, so Shauna, I take it you’ll struggle to drive him there and back every day with work and the school run?’

  It was something I’d already thought about but hadn’t discussed with Colm yet. Of course I wanted to be with him every day, but that came with consequences. I had standing lunch bookings every day of the week and if I didn’t do them, I’d need to hire someone else in. At some point I’d have to work out how I was going to make it work when Colm… I gulped… wasn’t here. But not yet. One day at a time.

  ‘No, it’s fine. I’ll get someone else in to help. Maybe I’ll take someone on full-time.’

  There were a couple of uncomfortable looks around the table and I knew what they were thinking, their minds going back to a past time and a person who was no longer part of our lives. My stare told them not to go there. Vincent was a closed chapter now, no matter how much I wished he wasn’t, how much I regretted what happened to us, how much I wished I could go back and change…

  That was for another time.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense, though.’ Lulu argued. ‘You’ll just be losing income that way. I’m not doing anything anyway, so I’ll come and take you there and back every day, Colm. I can bring my laptop with me and work while you’re getting your treatment. It honestly doesn’t matter to me whether I’m working in the office or in the waiting room at the hospital. Besides, the hospital probably has better coffee. That stuff in our place is atrocious.’

  I could see Colm thinking about it and he was about to agree when Dan stepped in for him. ‘Good idea, Lu. That’s… kind of you.’

  She barely registered that he’d spoke. They were keeping things civil and had called a cease fire for Colm’s sake, but things didn’t seem to be improving there. I hadn’t even had a chance to ask her what was going on with them now, but as Dan was still resident in our garage, I assumed there hadn’t been a windswept reunion. I wanted to wring both their necks and tell them to stop being so bloody stupid. Hadn’t life just doled out a killer demonstration of why it was too short to waste on destructive crap?

  Colm was speaking now. ‘Magic, Lu – that would be great. I mean, you’ll drive me insane, but at least you’ll be cheaper than a taxi.’

  ‘Sometimes I feel so special,’ Lulu bit back. I loved their relationship. Sparky, sarcastic, but there was fifteen years of history there and much as Colm was definitely in Dan’s corner, he loved Lu too.

  He turned to me, ‘That okay with you, love? Seems like the easiest thing all round.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s great. Thanks Lu.’ I blew her a kiss. An unreliable, disaster of a friend she may be, but I loved her and she was pitching in when it counted.

  I was devastated that I wasn’t going to be by his side through every appointment and session, but a tiny knot of tension, one of the many, unravelled in my stomach as that was resolved. The last thing I wanted to be right now was pragmatic, but the truth was, we had a mortgage to pay and we were barely making it every month. If my earnings dipped we’d soon be in trouble – and right now we didn’t need more stress.

  We hadn’t even talked about the consequences for Colm’s work. Did he even have a job any more? He and Dan had no back-up plan for this scenario, never thinking for a moment that this could happen. It was as if Dan read my mind.

  ‘And you know, Colm, we’ll keep everything going at our end. I’ll take on your jobs and make it all work somehow. Don’t worry about a thing, mate, I’ve got it covered.’ I could see he meant it and I knew he would do everything he could to keep that promise. But there was a reality here, and that was that if Colm wasn’t out drumming up business and taking his share of the workload, revenue would fall, and there were no reserves to take an income from. We had no savings. The house was in negative equity. We could potentially have to live on my earnings alone and that wasn’t enough to support us. That little knot of tension that had slackened, snapped back like an elastic band, taking several layers of my stomach lining with it. I ordered my cardiovascular system to breathe. Just breathe. One problem at a time. The Bracal Tech contract would come in and all would be fine. It would give us a guaranteed income and that breathing space Colm was always talking about. Right now, that was all I wanted him to be thinking about – one breath after another, just keep breathing.

  This time, it was Colm who was on my wavelength. ‘Thanks, Dan,’ he said, his words showing a wobble of emotion for the first time tonight. ‘And when the Bracal Tech contract comes in we’ll bring a couple of guys on board on an ad-hoc basis to get us up and running.’

  Until what? I wanted to say. Or rather, I wanted to avoid saying. Would he ever go back to work? Would he want to? Was his professional life over? Should we make up a huge and completely unreasonable bucket list and go off bloody surfing in Hawaii and bungee jumping off buildings? What were we going to do? How were we going to live? And… I struggled to breathe again as the rest of the sentence formed in my mind… How long was he going to live for? His prognosis was terminal, but the doctors had explained that he could feel well for some time, that many people felt going back to work, carrying on with normal life, helped them to cope by keeping them focussed on living instead of dying.

  ‘You okay, Shauna?’ Rosie asked, taking my hand under the table.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ I whispered, zoning back into the conversation and immediately realizing that there was a weird vibe going on between Colm and Dan.

  ‘Yeah, that’s what we’ll do,’ Dan was saying, but there was an underlying uncertainty in his words. Colm had spotted it too. ‘Dan?’ he questioned, not really sure what he was asking.

  I mentally backtracked in the conversation. They’d been talking about the Bracal Tech contract. Taking on extra help. Making it work.

  ‘Dan…’ Lulu repeated, her tone completely different from Colm’s. It carried a warning, a rebuke, emphasized by her raised eyebrow and her steady stare. She looked like a mother shooting a knowing warning across the bows of a teenager who wasn’t telling the truth.

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked, a chilling sense of foreboding taking grip.

  ‘Nothing, it’s… nothing.’ Dan started.

  ‘Dan!’ Lulu’s eyebrow was up again, ordering him to spill whatever secret he was determined keeping to himself.

  Dan looked at Colm, then me, helplessness and dread written in every line of his devastated expression. ‘The Bracal Tech contact – we heard from them yesterday. We didn’t get it.’

  Colm closed his eyes, steadying himself before reacting. My gorgeous man, his head covered with dressings, his face pale, dark circles of exhaustion under his eyes, the man who had dealt with more this month than anyone should ever have to deal with, and now there was this.

  Since the very first day he’d felt unwell, we’d been living from one cliché to another. It’ll all turn out fine in the end. Let’s not worry until there’s something to worry about. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Try to look on the bright side. Every cloud
has a silver lining. Don’t let the bugger get you down. You’ll get through it, just hang on in there. Nothing’s ever as bad as it seems.

  And now the one that seemed to have become the story of our lives – just when you think things can’t get any worse, they do.

  24

  2009

  Rewind To The Early Days for Colm and Dan

  ‘Jesus, man, remind me why we thought this was a good idea in the first place?’ I asked Dan, putting my feet up on the desk and stretching in the hope that my spine would forgive me for sitting in the same position for the whole day.

  He answered by taking a bottle out of the mini-fridge in the corner of the office and tossing it over to me. ‘Because you can drink beer and you won’t get a bollocking off the boss.’

  ‘Good point. It was all worth it,’ I admitted as I cracked the top off on the corner of the desk. If I did say so myself, the first official office of our newly formed company wasn’t too shabby. We’d managed to get a deal on two rooms on the ground floor of a converted townhouse just off Richmond Green, about a hundred yards from Dan and Lulu’s house. After we quit our jobs, we’d worked from his kitchen for the first couple of months, but it wasn’t viable long-term. We needed somewhere we could bring clients for meetings and host training sessions, so an office space was essential. These rooms were ideal. White walls, grey carpets, and we’d managed to get a great deal on a couple of desks, a boardroom table and some filing cabinets at an auction. Knowing there was a rent payment coming off at the end of every month was an extra motivation for hitting the phones and drumming up business. Lulu was usually there to help us do that, but she’d headed off early to go see our accountant and get some advice on extending the start-up loan.

  In all honesty, business had been slower than we’d expected. A few of our old clients had come with us, but we were just getting to the closing stage with new ones we were pitching for. Without a track record, and with long, drawn-out tender processes involved with any companies connected to the government, we hadn’t hit our projections yet, but I was confident we’d turn it around, despite the fecking bastard that was the global financial crash. It wasn’t killing us, but it definitely made it tougher out there.