‘Fucking hell. Cancer of what?’
‘The testicles. He found out a few months ago or something, and he’s had treatment but they’re not sure yet if it’s spread. He hasn’t told anyone about it – not even his parents. He knew he had to tell someone but of course all the guys David knows are insensitive apes, and he doesn’t know any women apart from his ex, who hates him, and his sister, who’s in the middle of a divorce and stuff – oh, and Leanne, and it’s not like you’d tell her anything confidential – so when he found out I was weird he decided to tell me.’
‘What, just because you’re weird? I don’t get it.’
‘He probably thought someone else might laugh, or tease him.’
‘They wouldn’t, though, would they?’
‘Of course they would. People around here are pigs. I think he wanted to find someone who was similarly afflicted, and then when he couldn’t find anyone who was actually dying or terminally ill, he chose me, because I’m weird, and around here that’s almost the same as being terminally ill, and I suppose because I don’t have anyone to tell and because he probably thinks I’m extra sensitive because I’m a loner and, well, just weird.’
‘What does cancer of the testicles involve?’ Luke asks.
‘I don’t know. Let’s look it up on the Internet.’
Dawn’s not there when Julie goes home. She sometimes is around late at night, because she’s got some sort of insomnia. Dawn says it’s stress but what’s stressful about making sandwiches for a living?
Julie’s father has been married to Dawn for about five years now but Julie still feels funny around her. Maybe it’s to do with not growing up with someone, never seeing them naked, never having them read you bedtime stories . . . And then having to pretend, as an adult, that you are related. When Julie’s mother still lived here, the house had a bohemian edge; purple walls and second-hand furniture. Dawn got rid of all that when she moved in. Now the sitting room looks like something out of a mid-nineties Argos catalogue, with display cases, massproduced ornaments and those chairs that go up, down, backwards and forwards, like the ones Joey and Chandler have on Friends. The whole room’s designed for optimum TV viewing: comfortable chairs all facing the TV, footrests, occasional tables and about three different universal remote controls.
Julie picks up one of the remote controls and presses the number 3. There’s a chat show on. The host is talking to a man who is in a relationship with his ex-wife’s sister’s child, who is sixteen. The man is about forty. He left his wife for her sister’s daughter. He is sitting there holding hands with the girl, and her mother is sitting next to them.
‘How could you do this to the family?’ the girl’s mother asks her.
‘You can’t choose who you fall in love with,’ she replies.
They bring on the man’s daughter, who is about seventeen.
‘Why did you take my dad away?’ she asks forlornly.
‘You can’t choose who you fall in love with,’ repeats the girl.
Everyone hates her. Julie can’t help feeling sorry for her. She’s never met the girl – an art student, apparently – who helped break up her own family. She could never hate her, either; it’s not like it would be fair to hate the girl. This hasn’t stopped Julie wondering about her, though. She went to Ireland, apparently.
‘He’ll beat you like he beat me,’ says the ex-wife.
It’s time for bed but Julie’s not tired, and this chair’s too comfortable. She sits here every day after coming home from Luke’s, like déjà vu or a recurring dream. Every night it’s hard to get up from the chair. Every night Julie gets sucked into late-night TV and thinks she may as well have stayed at Luke’s for an extra hour. But even if she did stay for longer, she’d still sit here for an hour after getting home. It’s her routine.
Chapter 11
When Julie wakes up on Saturday, something weird happens. One day, she thinks, I’m not going to wake up. The world will go on and I won’t be here.
Her body does something peculiar in response to this thought. It seems to shrink from the inside, and with a little fizz and a little pop in her stomach, Julie immediately wants to cry. She feels like a little girl again.
She can’t even sit up; she just lies there in bed feeling disorientated. All her life, Julie’s seen death as failure: failure to be careful; failure to eat the right things; failure to notice that fishbone or that strange man following you or the car coming too fast down the road you’re about to cross. It’s always been as though life was an equation you could solve, or a multiple-choice test that, if you got all the answers right, would go on forever.
Is life a test? That’s what Julie was taught at school. She remembers her RE teacher, a little lady with white hair, explaining how God tests people – how bad things might happen to you but they’re just a test and if you pass you can go to Heaven. Somewhere during her childhood, Julie stopped believing in Heaven and God, but she still retained the idea that life was somehow a test that would just carry on until you failed. On some level Julie thought that if you just kept making the right decisions, you could live forever. This wasn’t conscious thought. But in any case, it’s a thought she suddenly doesn’t have any more. She could do with something comforting in her unconscious but it’s too late. She’s just realised that there’s no such thing as immortality.
Julie thought she had death under control but she doesn’t. She thought that, if she drove slowly, avoided motorways, didn’t eat food with bones, never went down dark alleyways and never took risks, she could live forever. But now she understands: she’s going to die whatever she does. She’s an organism, like a worm or an aphid, and organisms die. One day she’s not going to be able to control her existence because she literally will not exist any more.
When Julie was about twelve her mother’s friend Rosa was diagnosed with a terminal disease. Julie picked up that much from overhearing her mother on the phone to various friends from the poly but she never worked out what disease Rosa actually had. A few weeks later Rosa left her husband. Then she moved in with Julie’s family.
Helen and Rosa decided between them that the disease could be cured with herbs used by tribal cultures, and meditation and cannabis. Keeping Rosa alive became a twenty-four-hour occupation and it seemed like every time Julie went into the kitchen her mother was blending yet another high-potency drink. Either that or Rosa was lying on the table smoking a joint while Julie’s mother stood there giggling and trying to remember how to balance Rosa’s chakras. The one thing Julie could never understand was the way they seemed to be having so much fun all the time. Weren’t you supposed to be sad when someone was dying?
In the end Julie’s dad got pissed off with having Rosa around and said that although he felt sorry for her his house wasn’t a hospice or a tribal meditation centre. He took Julie to stay with his parents for a few days, and when they got back Rosa was gone. Julie never found out what happened to her, or if all the herbs and potions worked.
Now she thinks about it she realises she’d always assumed that they had worked. The whole process had seemed so scientific at the time (although obviously, now Julie looks at it with grown-up eyes, it wasn’t). But mainly it seemed that you couldn’t try that hard at something and fail. It wouldn’t be fair. Julie’s RE teacher taught her that God rewards hard work. Even though Julie stopped believing in God ages ago she still felt that hard work should be rewarded – not by a made-up man in a beard, but at least by the results. You couldn’t work hard and have no results, could you? That’s science: fuel in, energy out. Energy doesn’t just disappear; it creates change. So if you wanted to live, and you wanted it enough, you could make it happen. People who died clearly just didn’t want to live that much. As a child, Julie wasn’t scared of cancer or MS or AIDS, because she knew that if you tried hard enough, you could make yourself better.
That’s why Julie’s devoted her life to avoiding accidents. Car accidents, plane crashes, choking on a fishbone, getting stuck in
a tall building that catches fire, accidental poisoning, food allergies, Toxic Shock Syndrome. The theory: you take away risk and end up with a non-risk activity. That’s maths. But now Julie realises that life isn’t a non-risk activity or even a low-risk activity. Life ends in death no matter what you do. It’s high risk.
She manages to sit up. She looks at all the mess in her room and imagines it all being boxed up and thrown away. Her books and clothes would probably be sent to Oxfam and the rest would just get thrown out and end up in some landfill somewhere. Julie imagines all her pieces of paper becoming pulp and her pencils decomposing. Then she sees all the plastic things in her room. They’re not biodegradable. And then she realises that her plastic ruler, her biros and her calculator will actually exist for longer than she will. They’re not biodegradable. She is. When she’s dead and forgotten her ruler and pens and her calculator will still exist. They’re artificial. They never lived; they can’t die. When Julie dies the rest of the world will carry on and she’ll never get to see it. And her calculator will still be there at the bottom of some pit somewhere but no one will ever use it again. It won’t work any more and the metal parts will have rusted away but the place on the plastic where she carved her name with a compass will never disappear. This is the saddest thought she’s ever had.
Julie imagines telling Luke about her revelation, and she sees him laughing.
‘You thought about death?’ he’s saying. ‘Hey, what a surprise.’
But this isn’t the way Julie normally thinks about death. She goes straight over.
Luke comforts Julie while she cries.
‘It’ll be OK,’ he says, stroking her hair.
‘I don’t want to die,’ she says.
‘You won’t die until you’re very old. I promise.’
‘But I’ll be old before I know it and . . .’
‘Old people don’t mind dying,’ says Luke. ‘They’re prepared for it.’
‘What, the ones on TV, you mean?’
Luke’s face falls. He moves away from Julie. ‘I . . .’
‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ Julie says. ‘Luke, I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s not my fault I’ve only got the TV. I do try to understand life.’
‘I know.’
‘I want to go out and discover all this myself.’
‘I know.’
‘I hate the way everything I know is filtered through that fucking glass screen.’ He points at his TV. ‘Or that one.’ He points at his computer. ‘Fucking, goddamn screens. I hate it, Julie.’
Now Julie comforts Luke. He doesn’t cry, though. He seems to be trying to find the right words to say something.
‘At least we’re not like David,’ he says, in the end. ‘Poor David.’ And then Luke does start to cry. ‘Poor David,’ he keeps saying. He doesn’t even know David but that doesn’t seem to matter.
‘We’re going to get you out of here,’ says Julie softly. ‘We’ll find a way.’
Chapter 12
On the day her A levels started, Julie still wasn’t sure what she was going to do about all her university offers. Her dad had been pleased; her mum was thrilled – separately, obviously, since they were no longer together when the offers all came along.
Julie was eighteen, and still at that stage where every detail of her education could still be monitored. She knew that if she got her predicted four As for her A levels she’d have very little control over her future. As if she was one of the molecules she studied in chemistry, everybody would watch what she did next, and help, while she weighed up her options and chose which university to go to. Her parents would help her prepare for going away; her dad would give her financial advice, and her mum might help her pack, or at least give her a lecture on being a successful, strong, in-control woman. Her dad would drive her to the university, not allowing her to drive herself in the clapped-out Mini, and her mum might wave, if she was there.
She sat down to her first exam – physics – imagining this moment. All she could see was Luke at the window, the same way he’d been when she first saw him, waving goodbye to her. That song, ‘Say Hello, Wave Goodbye’, had come to her as she looked at the unopened physics paper and she’d lost herself in the lyrics as they came into her head. She’d never even realised she knew the lyrics to that song. Julie loved exams, and she’d studied for this one for two years. But she failed it on purpose, because there wasn’t anything else she could do.
At first, failing the exams was difficult. She’d revised like mad – not that she needed to, and it would have been easy for Julie to get As in all her subjects. It was far harder to fail pitifully, to quell her urges to impress the examiner and do her best, things she’d always excelled at in the past. But she had to fail. If she failed she could be there for Luke. If she failed, she could get her life back and breathe again, rather than live through the shallow-breathing head-dizzying hell of student grants and halls of residence and other people and everyone being so proud but expecting so much. Julie knew she was doing the right thing. In some warped way she knew she’d be moving back on the right side of the microscope if she did this. She felt like a hero. She had to feel like that, because it was the only thing that gave her the courage to do what she did.
By mid-June, Julie had thrown away her future. She still had the last chemistry and maths exams to go but what she’d already done – her life’s great work – was enough to ruin all her chances of a place in any scientific department of any higher-educational institution in the country. Each time Julie failed another exam, she walked out of the exam room defiant, rebellious, and feeling only slightly sick. Her failure was her secret, for the time being, and she sank into it like a huge blanket, comforting and secure. The only times this feeling evaporated were on the horrible, chilling mornings when she’d wake up and think it had all been a bad dream; that she’d just woken up from a nightmare in which she was throwing her future away. But instead of waking up and finding it was all only a dream, she was waking up to find that the nightmare hadn’t been a dream at all; it was actually her life.
Every morning during the exam period Julie would see an image of her mother, colourful and proud on Greenham Common, or in her old polytechnic student bar, talking about feminism and education and how proud she was to have a daughter who was brave and strong and who could run the world one day if she wanted. She’d see her mother and know she should be succeeding for her but then she’d remember that her mother was the one who’d left her, right in the middle of her last year at school, and that she couldn’t care if she’d done that. Maybe failing would make her care again but anyway, perhaps in the end Julie’s mother didn’t matter to her as much as her only friend, who could look out of the window only at night, and probably wouldn’t even be able to see her off if she did leave to go to university because she’d have to leave in the day, like normal people do.
For a few years after the exams, Julie went to imaginary evening classes in her head just before she dropped off to sleep and got the four As that she deserved. In the dreams, she did it in secret, just for herself, so she could go to university once Luke was cured. In her head, a man in a white coat came to her front door one day and demanded to know what happened to her all those years ago – the brightest applicant he’d ever encountered. In the fantasy, she cried into his shoulder and explained that she’d deliberately failed her exams because her friend needed her, and he was so shocked, so stunned, so impressed by her admission, that he demanded that she accept an offer to do research at his institution, which was always either Oxford or Cambridge, right away. When Julie said she still wouldn’t go because of Luke, the man insisted that Luke came too, so that he could be studied, cured and ultimately set free.
But the only person who ever came to Julie’s door was the postman, and all he ever brought her were catalogues that she didn’t want, which she only got because she couldn’t say no to the women with the clipboards on the High Street.
Perhaps the worst thing was that he
r parents weren’t totally shocked when Julie failed. She’d spent every day since her exams crying, certain she’d done the right thing but feeling inexplicably sentimental, already missing the future she would never have. She knew that when she picked up the envelope from the school, her life would change – for the better – and everyone would leave her alone. She had done the right thing, hadn’t she?
It was too late. By the time the results came, Julie’s certainty was stuck to her like a frozen smile and she couldn’t question it any more. When she showed the contents of the envelope to her father, he just shook his head and said, ‘I’ll run you into town on Monday and we’ll find you a job.’ Her mother had looked at her father in a strange way and looked at Julie and looked at her hands and said, eventually, ‘Julie can find her own job, can’t you?’ And that was pretty much that.
And Julie was free.
Chapter 13
By Monday morning, the tills at The Edge are working again.
Lunchtime is quieter than usual on the whole retail park and Julie’s pretty bored by the time Leanne comes over at about three. It’s raining so hard that Leanne’s usually perky blonde hair is hanging in spiky tendrils around her face when she walks into the restaurant. Julie’s dying for a fag but she finishes topping up the salad bar while Leanne talks about Chantel, who’s arriving tomorrow.
‘. . . totally fucked with all the floods,’ she’s saying.
‘What?’ says Julie. She’s been thinking about David all day, and his testicles, and the cancer inside them. It’s the first time she’s been able to think about a disease without being terrified she might get it herself. It’s a weird feeling. David must be so scared. It’s horrible.
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