by Sue Margolis
“You could always stay at our house if that would be easier,” Abby says.
I remind her that their house—although bigger—is on four levels. Nana couldn’t begin to manage the stairs.
Abby looks at me, still unsure. “So you’re really up for this?”
“I’ll give it my best shot… . To be honest, I’m more worried about you. Are you sure you’re OK about leaving the kids?”
“Not really. Just thinking about leaving them makes me feel like a terrible mother. But if I don’t go—if I stay here and do nothing—I might feel worse. Not now maybe, but in years to come.”
Abby says they will speak to the children as soon as they get home. “If they give the OK, I’ll get on the phone to MediGlobal to confirm that I’ll be on the flight. If the kids object, I won’t go.”
I start gathering up empty mugs.
“Rosie’s the one I’m really worried about,” Abby says. “She’s barely out of kindergarten. I can’t leave her to pine for me and cry herself to sleep every night.”
Tom reminds her that this is the child who went camping for a week last summer with her best friend, Cybil, and Cybil’s parents. Tom proceeds to give a high-pitched impersonation of his daughter: “‘I had a whole new mummy and daddy. It was great. They let us stay up late every night and we could have Coke whenever we wanted.’”
We’re still laughing when, right on cue, Sam and Rosie come bursting in. “Gran’ma, we’re hungry,” Rosie says, climbing up to the table. “Is the ice cream ready yet?”
“I’m sure it is.”
“Er, excuse me,” Abby says. “What’s the magic word?”
“Abracadabra,” the kids bellow in unison. It’s an old family joke. Abby waits for the correct response. Having received the obligatory “please,” I cut them each a slice of cake while Abby fetches the ice cream.
“Tell you what,” she says. “You can have two scoops as a special treat.”
“Why are we having a special treat?” Rosie asks.
“I thought you deserved it.”
“Why?”
Sam tells his sister to be quiet. He’s clearly worried that Rosie is about to spill the beans about their fight over the TV remote. In which case, their mother might well rescind her ice-cream offer.
There’s the sound of a key in the door. Mum calls out to say she’s home. I ask if she fancies a cup of tea.
“Does the Pope do his business in the woods?”
“Nana’s got it wrong,” Sam says. “It’s either ‘Is the Pope Catholic?’ or ‘Does a bear shit in the woods?’”
His mother tells him off for swearing.
“But that’s the saying: Does a bear shit in the woods? And why can’t I say ‘shit’? You and Dad say it all the time.”
“That’s because we’re grown-ups,” Tom says. “We get special privileges. People don’t like to hear kids swear.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I agree. But do your mum and me a favor and suck it up. One day you’ll be allowed to swear.”
“OK, so can I say shit when I’m twelve?”
“Maybe.”
“What about fuck?” Rosie pipes up.
Abby looks wide-eyed at her daughter. “Shit, Rosie … I mean, good Lord. Where did you learn that?”
“Cybil’s mummy and daddy say it all the time.”
“Oh, great.”
“And so do you and Dad.”
“We do not.”
“Yes, you do. You whisper it, but me and Sam still hear.”
Mum comes shuffling and puffing into the kitchen. Sometimes when she goes out I stand at the window and watch her disappear down the street. She doesn’t stride out exactly, but she plods with attitude. Right now, though, she’s being her needy self and wants to emphasize her leg, back and bunion pain.
“My God, it’s bitter out there,” she says by way of a general greeting. “I can’t believe it. The sun was shining when I left. The only thing keeping me warm in town was my heartburn.”
Mum is minus carrier bags. I’m assuming she failed to find a new spring coat. She kisses Abby and Tom and tells them how well they’re looking. “Still, you’re young. Why wouldn’t you?” She moves round the table to Sam and Rosie. “And how are my favorite great-grandchildren?” She pinches Sam’s cheek and then Rosie’s. They both squirm. But they’ve come to appreciate that it’s the price they have to pay for the occasional five-pound note.
“So, you didn’t find a coat?” I say as the kettle starts boiling.
She waves a hand in front of her.
“Bloomin’ waste of time that was. There’s nothing to be had for love nor money. When you reach my age, you want something comfortable and serviceable. Do you think I could find it?”
These days my mother favors practicality over elegance: elasticized waists, sneakers with Velcro fasteners and polyester slacks that barely get wet when you wash them.
She tugs at the buttons on her long quilted parka. She bought it for the fur-lined hood. “All I want is a simple car coat. Is that too much to ask?” She sits down and starts rubbing the small of her back.
Tom suggests she might benefit from seeing an osteopath.
“I’ve seen dozens. Judy. Haven’t I seen dozens?”
“You have.” I place a mug of tea on the table in front of her.
“They know nothing. They click you here. They click you there. All they do is click. Waste of time.”
“What about taking some ibuprofen?”
“Upsets my stomach.” She winces before taking a hearty slurp of hot tea.
Tom is clearly at a loss. I decide to change the subject. “So, how’s Estelle Silverfish?”
Everybody—apart from her nearest and dearest and my mother—refers to Estelle as Estelle Silverfish. None of us seems to tire of the joke—that this Jewish-sounding surname is also a small bathroom parasite.
“Her granddaughter—you know, the one that’s gay—well, she’s getting married next year. I’ve been invited, which is kind of them. Not that I’ll go. I don’t have the energy these days. But it’s nice to be asked.”
Rosie, who has been quietly stuffing herself with ice cream, pauses between mouthfuls. “Gay is when womens love womens and men love men, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “And girls who are gay … they’re called lesbinans.”
Rosie nods. “So, if a woman is getting married to another woman, do they both get to wear bride dresses with veils, and crowns with jewels?”
“If they want to,” Abby says.
“Would they wear dresses that matched or different ones?”
“Probably different.”
“That means that after the wedding they can swap dresses and play princesses.” She takes a bite of chocolate cake and thinks for a bit. “Nana Frieda, are you in your dotage?”
“In my what?”
“Dotage. Grandma said you were.”
“And Grandma,” I whisper-shout, “also told you to keep quiet.”
“Sorry. I forgot,” Rosie says, scratching at the glitter sea horse tattoo on the back of her hand. She turns back to Nana Frieda. “So, are you in it?”
“What can I tell you? When you get to my age, you don’t make plans like you used to.”
Abby shoots me a pleading look. I turn to my mother.
“Mum, do you have to be so maudlin in front of the kids?”
“Well, they need to know that I’m not going to be around forever.” She pauses. “Oh, changing the subject, I’ve got something to show you.”
My mother reaches into her oversize handbag and pulls out a MacBook Air.
“Mum,” I say, “you appear to have bought a laptop.”
“Wow, Gran’ma … cool.”
Tom starts laughing. “Good for you, Nana.”
“I didn’t buy it. Estelle was given it by one of her rich nephews who’s upgrading. If you look you can see it’s a bit scratched.”
I ask her why Estelle Silverfish doesn’t want it
.
“She’s got nobody to show her how it works. She wants me to ask Tom to set it up. She’s obsessed with getting on the Web.” She pauses and lowers her voice. “Of course you know why. She wants to start dating… . At her age. I’ve told her she’s crazy wanting to meet strangers she’s never met.”
“As opposed to strangers she has met,” I say.
“You know what I mean. I’ve told her it’s not safe. What if she gets attacked—or worse?” She turns to Tom. “So if you could help, that would be wonderful. But only if you’ve got time.” She doesn’t know that Tom is leaving for Nicaragua.
“I can come over tomorrow,” he says.
“No, you can’t,” Abby says under her breath. “We’ve got way too much on.”
“I can multitask.”
Abby rolls her eyes. “No, you can’t. What you’ll do is delegate. To me.”
“The thing is,” Nana says, “I’m not sure that at my age I’m up to learning about computers.”
“It’s easy,” Sam says. “You wait. Soon you’ll be able to Google and Skype and I’ll help you download Minecraft.”
My mother is staring at Sam. “I didn’t understand a single word you just said.”
Rosie asks if she can have another piece of cake.
Before Abby can say “No, you won’t eat your supper,” Mum is sinking a knife into frosting.
“When I’m big and I’ve got my ears pierced and I’m allowed to say fuck,” Rosie says, “I’m going to get married to a girl. How do you know if you’re a lesbinan?”
CHAPTER
two
That morning—the morning it occurred to me that Brian might be seriously ill—I’d brought him tea in bed. Of the two of us, I was the lark. Once I was awake I had to be up and doing. Brian would remain horizontal until the last possible minute. I brought him tea most days.
I placed the mug on the nightstand and opened the bedroom curtains. The sky was blue and cloudless. Sunlight streamed into the bedroom.
Brian grumbled about it being too bright and pulled the duvet over his head like a teenager. “What time is it?”
“Late.”
“How late?”
“Gone seven.”
“Shit. I’ve got a staff meeting before school.” Brian was head of Parsoles Academy in Peckham. Known universally as Arseholes Academy, it was one of the toughest inner-city schools in the country. Brian had been there three years. He didn’t think he’d achieved much in that time. But he had. By then none of the kids came to school with knives, they stood up when a member of staff came into a room and most of them referred to Brian—to his face, at least—as Mr. Devlin rather than Number One Arsehole.
As he chugged down his hot tea—Brian had been blessed with kishkes hewn from cast iron—I noticed that his face looked a bit yellow. Lately he’d also been complaining of backache and stomach pains. When I remarked on his skin color, he said he’d noticed it last night when he was in the shower. “I thought it was just the bad light.”
He took my advice and made an appointment with the doctor. She sent him for tests. I suspected and dreaded what the results might be. As a nurse I knew too much. I said nothing to Brian. Instead I prayed that I’d got it wrong.
One night while we were still waiting for the test results, I discovered him Googling his symptoms. He was on the NHS Web site, reading about pancreatic cancer.
“For Chrissake, Brian, that’s the worst thing you could be doing. You’re just scaring yourself. It could be nothing.”
He told me to stop patronizing him and said he wasn’t one of my dimwit patients who were happy to have the wool pulled over their eyes.
Brian and I decided not to say anything to Abby and Tom until we had the test results. We knew that being doctors, they would be angry with us for holding back. But Abby was also our daughter. We didn’t have the heart to tell her until it was necessary.
The oncologist sat us down and said he wished he had better news. As we suspected, it was pancreatic cancer. What was more, it had spread to the liver. It was inoperable. Brian may have winced as he received his death sentence, but apart from that he showed no emotion. He didn’t even look at me. I suspect he couldn’t bear to see the anguish on my face. When I reached out and touched him, he flinched and batted me away. For the next few minutes he sat there listening to the oncologist talking to him about palliative care. He nodded and interrupted to ask the odd question. Once or twice he even smiled. He could have been in a meeting with his accountant. “How long?”
“We try not to talk about time frames. People vary so much.”
“I won’t hold you to it. Are we talking years or months?”
“Months.”
“I see.” Again not a shred of emotion. “How many?”
“It’s hard to say, but probably less than a year.”
“And you’re absolutely sure there’s nothing to be done?”
“I’m sorry… .”
“Please don’t be. It’s hardly your fault.” Only then did Brian turn to me. “Well, at least we know where we stand.”
I couldn’t bear his stoicism, his resignation. He wasn’t even sixty. He couldn’t go without a fight. I demanded a second opinion, insisted that there had to be something medical science could do.
“Mrs. Devlin … I know this is hard… .”
“What about medical trials? … New drugs?”
“I’m sorry. At the moment there’s nothing.”
I wanted to get a taxi home, but Brian insisted we take the tube because it felt more normal. As we set off toward the station, I asked him if he was all right—which was stupid. The man had just been told he was dying. Despite the stoicism, there was no way he was all right.
“Do you mind if we don’t talk for a bit?” he said. So I left him alone. He picked up an Evening Standard at the entrance to Regent’s Park Station and spent the journey with his head behind it. I had no idea if he was actually reading it. The moment we got home he said he needed to go to his study and check his e-mail.
“Can’t you leave it?” I said, taking off my coat. But he was already halfway down the hall. I went after him. “We’ve both had a terrible shock. Let’s sit down and have a cup of tea.”
“I can’t. There might be something urgent. Why don’t you bring me a cup?”
“Brian, please don’t shut me out. Stay and talk to me.”
“What about?” he barked, striding back toward me. His emotions had finally caught up with him and he was scaring me. “The fact that I’m dying? That I’m petrified? That I’m so fucking angry I want to punch somebody in the face?”
“Yes.”
His features contorted. I opened my arms and he came to me. He let me wrap him up and rock him as he sobbed and railed against the world and told me again and again that he didn’t want to die.
That night neither of us slept. We stayed up talking. “Why you? You of all people? You’re such a good man.”
“I don’t think goodness has much to do with it. Pol Pot lived into his seventies.”
The next day was Saturday. Brian spent most of it wandering around the house in his pajamas. I made cups of tea that we forgot to drink. On Sunday night he announced that he was going back to work. I begged him not to. “You’re still in shock. You need some time to adjust, to take it all in.”
But he insisted he needed to get back to normal and that burying himself in his job was the only way to take his mind off the cancer.
Abby and Tom started e-mailing medical colleagues in the US and Europe to double-check that there weren’t any drug trials that Brian could take part in. But the oncologist had been right. There was nothing.
Meanwhile I spent hours on the Internet, searching for new treatments. All I found was page after page of cancer quackery. Brian was deteriorating so fast that sometimes I found myself suggesting to Abby that we give some of it a try. “It says here that sharks don’t get cancer. What’s the harm in giving your dad some shark’s fin preparation?”<
br />
Abby would give me a look. “Mum, you did graduate from nursing college, didn’t you?”
After weeks of my nonsense, Brian got cross. He said I was turning into an obsessed crazy woman. “Step away from the Internet and let’s just make the best of whatever time we have left.”
There was one last family Christmas. What do you give a dying man? Answer: box sets. I bought Fawlty Towers. Amy and Tom got him Blackadder and The Office.
On Christmas Day, the kids tore through the house, high on sugar and excitement. I cooked lunch with Abby as my sous-chef. Afterward we watched the Queen’s Speech and made fun of it. What did the royals know about anything? Brian said—as he said every year—that the whole lot of them should be made to live in the projects. Later on we played charades and Jenga. It was a perfect family day and it practically ripped Brian’s heart from his chest. “I can’t believe I’m not going to see Sam and Rosie grow up.”
By New Year’s the weight was starting to fall off him. We weren’t expecting him to last more than a few weeks. But somehow he hung on for eight months. During that time, he even made plans. “Sod it. Let’s have a few days in the South of France. I’m buggered if I’m about to go gentle into that good night.” The South of France never happened. He tried to kid himself that he was up to it. But he was too weak. Brian took to his bed in late summer, just as the leaves were starting to turn brown and fall. The symbolism wasn’t lost on him.
I took time off from hospital nursing to nurse my husband. Our family doctor had suggested he go into a hospice. Brian’s response was unambiguous. “Death among the dying? Fuck that for a game of soldiers!”
In those final weeks, I spent hours lying next to him—even when he slept. I didn’t want to miss a second of the time I had left with him. When he was awake, we watched episodes from one of his box sets, looked through photograph albums, maybe with Paul Simon or Dire Straits playing in the background. Mainly we lay in each other’s arms and talked. By now we’d stopped crying and the anger was gone. Time was too precious. By the time Brian died, we’d said everything there was to say.
Abby stopped by most evenings. She would sit with him for a few hours—whole days on the weekend—to give me a break. I was exhausted—particularly as Brian got restless at night and found it hard to sleep. He wasn’t in pain—the morphine saw to that. I think he was simply terrified of dying and the darkness made it worse. But after a while the strain started to show on Abby, too. She had her job and the children to look after. She needed a break as much as I did. I called her the night that would turn out to be Brian’s last. I told her that she was wearing herself out and that she needed some downtime with Tom and the kids. “Have an early night. Maybe pop in tomorrow on your way to work.”