Before I Die aka Now is Good

by Jenny Downham

  I hold my hands over my head like a child as he peels my jumper off me. My hair, my new short hair, gets caught in static and crackles in the dark. It makes me laugh. It makes me feel as if my body is plump and healthy.

  The backs of his fingers brush my breasts through my bra, and he knows, because we’re looking at each other, that this is OK. I’ve been touched by so many people, prodded and poked, examined and operated on. I thought my body was numb, immune to touch.

  We kiss again. For minutes. Tiny kisses where he bites my top lip gently, where my tongue edges his mouth. The room seems full of ghosts, of trees, the sky.

  Our kisses become deeper. We sink into each other. It’s like the first time we kissed – urgent, fierce.

  ‘I want you,’ he says.

  And I want him right back.

  I want to show him my breasts. I want to undo my bra and get them out. I pull him towards the bed. We’re still kissing – throats, necks, mouths. The room seems full of smoke, with something burning here between us.

  I lie on the bed and buck my hips. I need my jeans off. I want to display myself to him, want him to see me.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ he says.

  ‘Very.’

  It’s simple.

  He unbuckles my jeans. I undo his belt with one hand, like a magic trick. I circle his belly button with my finger, my thumb nudging at his boxers.

  The feel of his skin next to mine, the weight of him on top of me, his warmth pressing into me – I didn’t know it would feel like this. I didn’t understand that when you make love, you actually do make love. Stir things. Affect each other. The breath that escapes from me is dazzled. He breathes it in with a gasp.

  His hand slides under my hip, I meet it with mine, our fingers lock. I’m not sure whose hand belongs to who.

  I’m Tessa.

  I’m Adam.

  It’s utterly beautiful not to know my own edges.

  The feel of us under our fingers. The taste of us on our tongues.

  And always we watch each other, check with each other, like music, like a dance. Eye to eye.

  It builds, this ache between us, changing and swelling. I want him. I want him closer. I can’t get near enough. I wrap my legs round his, sweep his back with my hands, trying to pull him further into me.

  It’s as if my heart springs up and marries my soul, as my whole body implodes. Like a stone falling in a pond, circles and circles of love ripple through me.

  Adam shouts for joy.

  I gather him and hold him close. I’m amazed at him. At us. This gift.

  He strokes my head, my face, he kisses my tears.

  I’m alive, blessed to be with him on this earth, at this very moment.

  Twenty-nine

  Blood spills from my nose. I stand in front of the hall mirror and watch it pour down my chin and through my fingers until my hands are slippery with it. It drips onto the floor and spreads into the weave of the carpet.

  ‘Please,’ I whisper. ‘Not now. Not tonight.’

  But it doesn’t stop.

  Upstairs, I hear Mum say goodnight to Cal. She closes his bedroom door and goes into the bathroom. I wait, listening to her pee, then the flush of the toilet. I imagine her washing her hands at the sink, drying them on the towel. Perhaps she looks at herself in the mirror, just as I’m doing down here. I wonder if she feels as far away as I do, as dazed by her own reflection.

  She closes the bathroom door and comes down the stairs. I step into her path as she appears on the bottom step.

  ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘I’ve got a nosebleed.’

  ‘It’s pumping out of you!’ She flaps her arms at me. ‘In here, quick!’ She pushes me into the lounge. Heavy, dull drops splash the carpet as I walk. Poppies blooming at my feet.

  ‘Sit down,’ she commands. ‘Lean back and pinch your nose.’

  This is the opposite of what you’re supposed to do, so I ignore her. Adam’ll be here in ten minutes and we’re going dancing. Mum stands watching me for a moment, then rushes out of the room. I think maybe she’s gone to throw up, but she comes back with a tea towel and thrusts it at me.

  ‘Lean back. Press this against your nose.’

  Since my way’s not working, I do as she says. Blood leaks down my throat. I swallow as much as I can, but loads of it goes in my mouth and I can’t really breathe. I sit forward and spit onto the tea towel. A big clot glistens back at me, alien dark. It’s definitely not something that’s supposed to be outside my body.

  ‘Give that to me,’ Mum says.

  I hand it over and she looks at it closely before wrapping it up. Her hands, like mine, are smeared with blood now.

  ‘What am I going to do, Mum? He’ll be here soon.’

  ‘It’ll stop in a minute.’

  ‘Look at my clothes!’

  She shakes her head at me in despair. ‘You better lie down.’

  This is also the wrong thing to do, but it’s not stopping, so everything’s ruined anyway. Mum sits on the edge of the sofa. I lie back and watch shapes brighten and dissolve. I imagine I’m on a sinking ship. A shadow flaps its wings at me.

  Mum says, ‘Does that feel any better?’

  ‘Much.’

  I don’t think she believes me, because she goes out to the kitchen and comes back with the ice-cube tray. She squats next to the sofa and empties it onto her lap. Ice cubes skate off her jeans and onto the carpet. She picks one up, wipes the fluff off and hands it to me.

  ‘Hold this on your nose.’

  ‘Frozen peas would be better, Mum.’

  She thinks about this for a second, then rushes off again, returning with a packet of sweetcorn.

  ‘Will this do? There weren’t any peas.’

  It makes me laugh, which I guess is something.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘What’s so funny?’

  Her mascara is smeared, her hair flyaway. I reach for her arm and she helps me sit up. I feel ancient. I swing my legs onto the floor and pinch the top of my nose between two fingers like they showed me at the hospital. My pulse is pounding against my head.

  ‘It’s not stopping, is it? I’m going to call Dad.’

  ‘He’ll think you can’t cope.’

  ‘Let him.’

  She dials his number quickly. She gets it wrong, re-dials.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ she says under her breath.

  The room is very pale. All the ornaments on the mantelpiece bleached as bones.

  ‘He’s not answering. Why isn’t he answering? How noisy can it be at a bowling alley?’

  ‘It’s his first night out for weeks, Mum. Leave him. We’ll manage.’

  Her face crashes. She hasn’t dealt with a single transfusion or lumbar puncture. She wasn’t allowed near me for the bone-marrow transplant, but she could have been there for any number of diagnoses, and wasn’t. Even her promises to visit more often have faded away with Christmas. It’s her turn to taste some reality.

  ‘You have to take me to hospital, Mum.’

  She looks horrified. ‘Dad’s got the car.’

  ‘Call a cab.’

  ‘What about Cal?’

  ‘He’s asleep, isn’t he?’

  She nods forlornly, the logistics beyond her.

  ‘Write him a note.’

  ‘We can’t leave him on his own!’

  ‘He’s eleven, Mum, practically a grown-up.’

  She hesitates only briefly, then scrolls through her address book to dial a cab. I watch her face, but my focus won’t really hold. All I get is an impression of fear and bewilderment. I close my eyes and think of a mother I saw in a film once. She lived on a mountain with a gun and lots of children. She was sure and certain. I stick this mother on top of mine, like plaster on a wound.

  When I open my eyes again, she’s clutching armfuls of towels and tugging at my coat. ‘You probably shouldn’t go to sleep,’ she says. ‘Come on, let’s get you up. That was the door.’

  I feel dazed and hot, as
if everything might be a dream. She hauls me up and we shuffle out to the hallway together. I can hear whispering coming from the wall.

  But it’s not the cab, it’s Adam, all dressed up for our date. I try and hide, try and stumble back into the lounge, but he sees me.

  ‘Tess,’ he says. ‘Oh my God! What’s happened?’

  ‘Nosebleed,’ Mum tells him. ‘We thought you were the cab.’

  ‘You’re going to the hospital? I’ll take you in my dad’s car.’

  He steps into the hallway and tries to put his arm around me as if we’re all just going to walk to his car and get in. As if he’s going to drive and I’m going to bleed all over the upholstery and none of it matters. I look like road kill. Doesn’t he understand that he really shouldn’t be seeing me like this?

  I shove him off. ‘Go home, Adam.’

  ‘I’m taking you to the hospital,’ he says again, as if perhaps I didn’t hear him the first time, or maybe the blood has made me stupid.

  Mum takes his arm and gently leads him back out of the door. ‘We’ll manage,’ she says. ‘It’s all right. Anyway, look, the cab’s here now.’

  ‘I want to be with her.’

  ‘I know,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry.’

  He touches my hand as I walk past him up the path. ‘Tess,’ he says.

  I don’t answer. I don’t even look at him, because his voice is so clear that if I look I might change my mind. To find love just as I go and have to give it up – it’s such a bad joke. But I have to. For him and for me. Before it starts hurting even more than this.

  Mum spreads towels across the back seat of the cab, makes sure we’re belted up, then encourages the driver to do a very dramatic U-turn outside the gate.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mum tells him. ‘Put your foot down.’ She sounds as if she’s in a movie.

  Adam watches from the gate. He waves. He gets smaller and smaller as we drive away.

  Mum says, ‘That was kind of him.’

  I close my eyes. I feel as if I’m falling even though I’m sitting down.

  Mum nudges me with her elbow. ‘Stay awake.’

  The moon bounces through the window. In the headlights – mist.

  We were going dancing. I wanted to try alcohol again. I wanted to stand on tables and sing cheering songs. I wanted to climb over the fence in the park, steal a boat and circle the lake. I wanted to go back to Adam’s house and creep up to his room and make love.

  ‘Adam,’ I say under my breath. But it gets covered in blood like everything else.

  At the hospital, they find me a wheelchair and make me sit in it. I’m an emergency, they tell me as they rush me away from the reception area. We leave behind the ordinary victims of pub brawls, bad drugs and late-night domestics and we speed down the corridor to somewhere more important.

  I find the layers of a hospital strangely reassuring. This is a duplicate world with its own rules and everyone has their place. In the emergency rooms will be the young men with fast cars and crap brakes. The motorcyclists who took a bend too sharply.

  In the operating theatres are the people who mucked around with air rifles, or who got followed home by a psychopath. Also, the victims of random accident – the child whose hair got caught in an escalator, the woman wearing an underwired bra in a lightning storm.

  And in bed, deep inside the building, are all the headaches that won’t go away. The failed kidneys, the rashes, the ragged-edged moles, the lumps on the breast, the coughs that have turned nasty. In the Marie Curie Ward on the fourth floor are the kids with cancer. Their bodies secretly and slowly being consumed.

  And then there’s the mortuary, where the dead lie in refrigerated drawers with name tags on their feet.

  The room I end up in is bright and sterile. There’s a bed, a sink, a doctor and a nurse.

  ‘I think she’s thirsty,’ Mum says. ‘She’s lost so much blood. Shouldn’t she have a drink?’

  The doctor dismisses this with a wave of his hand. ‘We need to pack her nose.’

  ‘Pack it?’

  The nurse ushers Mum to a chair and sits down next to her. ‘The doctor will put strips of gauze in her nose to stop the blood,’ she says. ‘You’re welcome to stay.’

  I’m shivering. The nurse gets up to give me a blanket and pulls it up to my chin. I shiver again.

  ‘Someone’s dreaming about you,’ Mum says. ‘That’s what that means.’

  I always thought it meant that, in another life, someone was standing on my grave.

  The doctor pinches my nose, peers in my mouth, feels my throat and the back of my neck.

  ‘Mum?’ he says.

  She looks startled, sits upright in her chair. ‘Me?’

  ‘Any signs of thrombocytopenia before today?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Has she complained of a headache? Have you noticed any pinprick bruising?’

  ‘I didn’t look.’

  The doctor sighs, clocks in a moment that this is a whole new language for her, yet, strangely, persists.

  ‘When was the last platelet transfusion?’

  Mum looks increasingly bewildered. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Has she used aspirin products recently?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know any of this.’

  I decide to save her. She’s not strong enough, and she might just walk out if it gets too difficult.

  ‘December the twenty-first was the last platelet transfusion,’ I say. My voice sounds raspy. Blood bubbles in my throat.

  The doctor frowns at me. ‘Don’t talk. Mum, get yourself over here and take your daughter’s hand.’

  She obediently comes to sit on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Squeeze your mum’s hand once for yes,’ the doctor tells me. ‘Twice for no. Understand?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shush,’ he says. ‘Squeeze. Don’t talk.’

  We go through the same routine – the bruising, the headaches, the aspirin, but this time Mum knows the answers.

  ‘Bonjela or Teejel?’ the doctor asks.

  Two squeezes. ‘No,’ Mum tells him. ‘She hasn’t used them.’

  ‘Anti-inflammatories?’

  ‘No,’ Mum says. She looks me in the eyes. She speaks my language at last.

  ‘Good,’ the doctor says. ‘I’m going to pack the front of your nose with gauze. If that doesn’t do it, we’ll pack the back, and if the bleeding still persists, we’ll have to cauterize. Have you had your nose cauterized before?’

  I squeeze Mum’s hand so hard that she winces. ‘Yes, she has.’

  It hurts like hell. I could smell my own flesh burning for days.

  ‘We’ll need to check your platelets,’ he goes on. ‘I’d be surprised if you weren’t below twenty.’ He touches my knee through the blanket. ‘I’m sorry. It’s a rotten night for you.’

  ‘Below twenty?’ Mum echoes.

  ‘She’ll probably need a couple of units,’ he explains. ‘Don’t worry, it shouldn’t take more than an hour.’

  As he packs sterile cotton into my nose, I try and concentrate on simple things – a chair, the twin silver birch trees in Adam’s garden and the way their leaves shiver in sunlight.

  But I can’t hold onto it.

  I feel as if I’ve eaten a sanitary towel; my mouth is dry and it’s hard to breathe. I look at Mum, but all I see is that she’s feeling squeamish and has turned her face away. How can I feel older than my own mother? I close my eyes so I don’t have to see her fail.

  ‘Uncomfortable?’ the doctor asks. ‘Mum, any chance of distracting her?’

  I wish he hadn’t said that. What’s she going to do? Dance for us? Sing? Perhaps she’ll do her famous disappearing act and walk out of the door.

  The silence goes on a long time. Then, ‘Do you remember the day we all tried oysters, and how your dad was sick in the bin at the end of the pier?’

  I open my eyes. Whatever shadows are in the room disappear with the brightness of her words. Even the nurse smiles.


  ‘They tasted exactly of the sea,’ she says. ‘Do you remember?’

  I do. We bought four, one for each of us. Mum tipped her head right back and swallowed hers whole. I did the same. But Dad chewed his and it got stuck in his teeth. He ran down the pier clutching his stomach, and when he came back, he drank a whole can of lemonade without pausing for breath. Cal didn’t like them either. ‘Perhaps they’re a female thing,’ Mum said, and she bought us both another one.

  She goes on to describe a seaside town and a hotel, a short walk to the beach and days when the sun shone bright and warm.

  ‘You loved it there,’ she says. ‘You’d collect shells and pebbles for hours. Once you tied some rope to a lump of driftwood and spent an entire day dragging it up and down the beach pretending you had a dog.’

  The nurse laughs at this and Mum smiles. ‘You were a wonderfully imaginative little girl,’ she tells me. ‘Such an easy child.’

  And if I could talk, I’d ask her why, then, did she leave me? And maybe she’d speak at last of the man she left Dad for. She might tell me of a love so big that I’d begin to understand.

  But I can’t talk. My throat feels small and feverish. So instead, I listen as Mum explores an old sun, faded days, past beauty. It’s good. She’s very inventive. Even the doctor looks as if he’s enjoying himself. In her story, the sky shimmers, and day after day we see dolphins playing in the sea.

  ‘Supplementary oxygen,’ the doctor says. And he winks at me as if he’s offering me dope. ‘No need to cauterize. Well done.’ He has a word with the nurse, then turns in the doorway to wave goodbye. ‘Best customer tonight so far,’ he tells me, then he gives Mum a little bow. ‘And you weren’t so bad either.’

  ‘Well, what a night that was!’ Mum says as we finally climb into a cab to take us home.

  ‘I liked you being with me.’

  She looks surprised, pleased even. ‘I’m not sure how much use I was.’

  Early-morning light spills from the sky onto the road. It’s cold in the taxi, the air rarefied, like inside a church.

  ‘Here,’ Mum says, and she unbuttons her coat and wraps it round my shoulders.

  ‘Step on it,’ she tells the driver, and we both chuckle.