One Summer Between Friends

by Trish Morey

  Jules found a smile for the drama queen across the aisle, the woman who might once have been her, before she sat back in her seat and closed her eyes again. There was more than one kind of rough ride in this world, and right now turbulence was the least of her worries.

  Sydney’s air felt heavy and scented with petrol fumes and industry, so different to the fresh island air she’d left behind on Lord Howe. Jules found herself sniffing unappreciatively as she left the lodge the next morning on her way to the nearby clinic, a fresh wave of nerves welling up from the pit of her stomach and tingling its way along her limbs.

  This was it. The lump on her breast was still there. She’d checked this morning of course. How could she not? But no matter how hard she’d wished it away, no matter how many times she’d wished it would shrink to nothing in the night so she could say to the doctor, Nothing to see here! it was still there. There was no getting out of this.

  She snorted, her hand poised on the clinic’s door. As if wishing it away was ever going to work. She’d wished her pregnancy away, hadn’t she? Wished it would disappear in the night? That hadn’t got her far either.

  A stab of guilt pierced her heart. What kind of mother was she that she could ever have wished her daughter away?

  But things were different now. Having Della had been a game changer. When Jules looked back, she’d been drifting through life until she’d had Della. No cares, no responsibilities, nothing but herself to worry about. But when Della was born, Jules had realised in a thunderclap just how empty and purposeless her life had been. More than that, how selfish her life had been.

  Maybe this—whatever this turned out to be—might end up being a game changer too?

  She took a deep breath before she pushed open the door.

  Hold that thought.

  Jules had never had a mammogram. She’d had ultrasound scans when she was pregnant with Della, so she was familiar with the feel of the gel and the slide of the probe over her skin, and while she was more than thankful she didn’t need to be holding a litre of water while the breast ultrasound happened, she’d never experienced the womanly delight of having her breasts squeezed by a machine until they were spread between the plates like hot cakes. Both breasts, one after the other.

  ‘I thought I was just going to have a needle biopsy on the lump,’ she said, feeling overwhelmed that it wasn’t just the breast with the lump that was getting attention.

  The technician smiled. Jules had come to expect it, because everyone smiled here, from the people managing the accommodation to the receptionists at the desks. ‘No doubt the specialists want a good look at what’s going on in both your breasts.’

  ‘Fabulous,’ Jules said, feeling like she’d unwittingly fallen into a rabbit hole in which she could travel in only one direction—deeper. Her lips pulled into a grimace as the two plates clamped tight on her breast and then kept right on pressing.

  ‘Okay?’ asked the operator.

  ‘Never felt better,’ Jules lied through teeth gritted almost as tightly as the plates, her body tilted unnaturally, armpit rammed into a corner of the machine as her arm bent over it at an awkward angle. ‘You are going to pump this baby up again afterwards, aren’t you?’

  The technician gave a lilting laugh. ‘It won’t be for long, I promise.’

  Why did everyone have to be so nice? Why did everyone have to be so positive and empathetic? Everything she’d read in the brochures, all the stories and testimonials she’d read online, were true. Everybody she met was so positive, compassionate and caring that, frankly, it was disarming. So okay, she was a cynic from way back, but why would they be so nice unless they were trying to distract you from thinking the worst?

  ‘Back in a moment,’ the technician said, before she disappeared behind a screen to press a button and capture the image.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Jules called after her, more than a little frustrated that finding out if her lump was cancerous or not wasn’t going to be as straightforward as she’d expected—as she’d damn well wanted. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’ Certainly not with her breast—and by extension, the rest of her—held hostage by this modern-day instrument of torture.

  ‘We’re done,’ the operator said with a smile on her return. Another smile. And sure, it was nice, but it was unnerving too.

  ‘Can you tell anything from the shots? Could you see anything?’ Jules asked hopefully as the machine released her and she tenderly peeled her flattened breast away from the plate. Because surely if something looked bad it would show up?

  This time the technician’s smile was soft and sad. ‘I’m sorry, I just take the pictures. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.’

  After that, the needle biopsy was almost a formality. Jules went willingly, thinking, Finally we’re getting somewhere. ‘This was the reason I came,’ she said, as the doctor guided the needle into the numbed skin of her breast. ‘And so far I’ve had everything else but.’

  ‘It can seem a bit of a conveyor belt,’ the doctor said unapologetically, focusing on her work. But then she pulled the syringe back and the requisite smile followed. ‘Once we get hold of you, we don’t like to let you go.’

  Jules sighed. ‘I was kind of getting that impression.’ She looked at the needle in the doctor’s hand. ‘I don’t suppose you can tell anything from that already? I don’t know if I can wait two days to get my results.’

  The doctor shook her head. ‘The hardest part is the waiting for test results to come back, I know.’

  ‘But if it does show—’ Jules wasn’t able to finish the sentence.

  The nurse by Jules’s side stroked her shoulder while the doctor said, ‘The biopsy is just a test. It’s a tool, nothing to be afraid of in itself. But what you need to know, and to focus on, is that at least seventy per cent of breast biopsies come back negative for cancer.’

  Seventy per cent! Jules had never been crash-hot at maths in school. Percentages, decimals, fractions—such baffling concepts had been Sarah’s domain. Jules had preferred playing sport to playing with numbers, but clearly she’d missed something, because numbers could be truly beautiful. She’d been freaking out about a thirty per cent chance of getting a positive result. She could handle that kind of maths, because on the flipside, it meant she had a seven in ten chance of getting back on that plane in two days and putting this all behind her.

  After the test, Jules dressed quickly, feeling more hopeful than she had all day. She didn’t want to start counting chickens, but seven out of ten was far more positive than three out of ten. All her imaginary dots seemed ridiculous and overblown now, and when the results came in, there was a good chance she’d have confirmation of that.

  Back at the lodge, she was in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea when a woman trailing a piece of blue wool from a tapestry bag tucked under her arm joined her at the bench, found herself a mug and helped herself to coffee. Jules recognised her. She’d seen her a couple of times in waiting rooms, or passed her in the clinic’s corridors. More noticeably, she was also the first person Jules had seen today who wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, squeezing her teabag before putting it into the bin. ‘Are you another inmate then?’

  The woman looked up at her, her startled eyes circled with shadows.

  ‘Sorry, bad joke,’ Jules said. ‘I saw you on that conveyor belt they call a clinic today, so I figured you’re stuck here having tests too, although you were busy knitting so you probably didn’t notice me. I’m Jules, from Lord Howe Island, hoping to get the all-clear in a couple of days and go home.’

  ‘Oh,’ the woman said, nodding, sandy-coloured tendrils of hair moving listlessly around her face. ‘Yeah, I’m Molly. From out past Narrabri. And snap. Waiting on results too.’

  ‘It’s the pits, isn’t it,’ said Jules, sitting down at the table and picking up a Scotch Finger biscuit. ‘I hate waiting. And meanwhile everyone keeps on smiling and saying, “Don’t worry.”’

  Molly smiled thinly and put her bag
on the table as she sat down next to Jules. ‘I noticed that—the smiling thing.’

  ‘I mean,’ said Jules, ‘it’s nice and all …’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Molly, nodding. ‘It’s nice.’

  ‘Just—weird.’

  This time Molly laughed. She dropped her head into one hand and sighed, and when she looked up, Jules could see tears in her eyes. ‘Thank you. That’s the first time I’ve laughed all day. I needed it.’

  Jules looked around. Most of the other patients seemed to have someone with them, a partner or friend to keep them company. But this woman didn’t look like she was waiting for anyone.

  ‘Are you here by yourself?’

  ‘Yeah. Mum’s looking after the kids while Wayne’s managing the farm.’ The woman rested one hand on her knitting bag. ‘I think knitting is the only thing keeping me sane at the moment. I figure if I concentrate on a pattern, I can’t think too much. How about you?’

  Jules nodded. ‘My mum’s looking after my daughter. There’s no-one else.’ She took a sip of her tea. ‘How many kids do you have?’

  ‘Four under seven.’ Molly looked numbly into the coffee she hadn’t touched. ‘Stuey’s only eighteen months old. I hate being away from home. I hate—’ She looked around. ‘Look, don’t get me wrong, it’s fantastic what they do here, and everyone’s wonderful. But it’s not home, is it?’ She turned to Jules, and in the cold light of the downlit kitchen, Jules could see how stress was pulling the skin over Molly’s cheekbones taut. ‘And everyone is so nice and saying don’t worry, only how can you not worry when you get sent to a place like this and you could have cancer and you’ve been here since yesterday and you still don’t know?’ She looked beseechingly at Jules like she was waiting for an answer, or at the very least reassurance, and then she seemed to cave in on herself as her shoulders sagged. She shook her head. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You’ve obviously got your own shit to worry about. You don’t need anyone else’s.’

  ‘It’s okay, I get it,’ Jules said, feeling the pull of her own daughter, knowing Della was at home with her grandmother when Jules should be the one looking after her. And she only had one child to worry about, not four. ‘I feel like I’m stuck in no man’s land. There’s this lump on my breast and nobody knows exactly what it is yet, but until they work it out, my life has been consumed by it. It’s like being stuck on a roundabout and not knowing when or where you’ll get off. I kind of wish I’d never found it.’

  ‘Huh,’ Molly said. ‘Wayne found mine. I wish he’d kept his mouth shut too.’

  ‘But then, it could be a good thing that he did find it,’ said Jules. ‘If it is something, I mean.’

  ‘I know. I still don’t have to like it, do I? You’re right, it’s a bloody roundabout and I’m stuck on it, and I don’t care how many people tell me not to worry, bottom line is, worry or not, I don’t want to die, Jules. Jeez, I haven’t got time to die. Too many people are depending on me.’

  Jules looked at the woman on the verge of tears beside her, the woman from western New South Wales whose suntanned face and sun-bleached hair spoke of the outback, a world of which Jules knew little, but a woman with whom she had more than a little in common, and she knew that fretting over what the results would bring would do neither of them any good. ‘Bugger it, Molly, you know what we need?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We need to go and get royally pissed.’

  Two proseccos and two margaritas down and one thing was clear: Molly was even worse at karaoke than Jules, but they didn’t let that stop them. Together they’d murdered ‘Dancing Queen’, made a screeching abomination of Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’, and rounded out their set with a heartfelt rendition of Queen’s ‘We Are the Champions’ before collapsing onto their seats in fits of laughter.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ Molly said, gasping for air. ‘A couple of people in the audience even cheered.’

  Jules snorted. ‘Only because we sat down.’ She picked up margarita number three that Molly had insisted they order before they got up to sing, clinked Molly’s glass and raised her own in a toast. ‘Here’s to you and me, Molly. Fuck cancer.’

  Molly looked conflicted. ‘We don’t even know we’ve got it yet.’

  ‘What’s it matter? Fuck it anyway.’

  Molly lifted her glass, shoulders back, chin up. ‘Yeah, fuck cancer,’ she said, and downed the lot.

  Jules woke the next morning with the pressing need to pee, a list as long as her arm that she really needed to get stuck into and a hangover that felt like a jackhammer had been let loose in her skull. She groaned as she eased herself upright. Way to fuck cancer all right—she was going to die of this hangover before she knew if she even had cancer. She hadn’t felt this bad since Sarah’s twenty-first party. She’d danced and sung and got seriously pissed that night too. God, you’d think a woman would learn. She was getting too old for hangovers. All she needed was to find some painkillers, because her list wouldn’t wait. It was the shopping that made this whole unexpected trip kind of worthwhile. And if she managed to visit a couple of TAFEs she’d found online that offered an administration course, that would be a bonus.

  Once her headache was less jackhammer and more thick dullness, she tackled the shops. She dragged herself around the children’s wear department at Myer, buying new summer clothes for Della, not even batting an eyelid that she was paying full price, when usually she’d scour the online catalogues for bargains, because she figured she was already saving on delivery.

  She hit the kitchen shops next, feeling a bit brighter as she drooled over a glossy red KitchenAid mixer that would have cost an arm and a leg in freight, even if she’d had the dollars to buy it, before she bought her mother some new non-stick flan tins for her pies, and then she left kitchenware and hunted down some fancy undies (she wasn’t getting ahead of herself or jinxing herself by buying bras just yet) and a new pair of jeans.

  With her hands full of shopping bags, Jules found a café overlooking the mall and nursed a latte. She gave up on achieving anything else for the day; she didn’t have the heart or the energy to go chasing up course counsellors. That could wait. Instead, she popped another painkiller to take the niggling edge off her headache, and wondered how Molly was coping at Taronga Zoo, where she’d gone to take videos to send to her kids. Jules wasn’t sure she envied Molly. Now that her shopping was done, she was content to sit and drink her coffee and watch the city spin by. So different from home. So many people. All so busy. All so fast, dashing to and fro. And high above the mall loomed the office towers like giant anthills, where all the worker ants spent their days.

  Her gaze shifted to some buildings behind which she figured the coat hanger of Sydney Harbour Bridge must be. Somewhere beyond that, on the other side of the harbour, stood another tower, the office tower where Sarah worked. Guilt squeezed Jules’s gut so tight that the pain of it drowned out her headache. Guilt that would never leave her, guilt that only ever eased because Sarah lived two hours and an entire world away, where Jules didn’t have to see her. On a good day she didn’t even have to think about her. But here in Sydney, it was impossible not to think about Sarah. This was her city. Her home.

  And Jules knew that Sarah hated her. Still she couldn’t help but wonder: what was life like for Sarah now? How was she coping? Was she coping?

  Jules stared at the mug of half-drunk coffee, a feeling in her throat like the milk had curdled in her gut.

  Sarah hadn’t looked like she was coping the last time Jules had seen her. God, was it really three and a half years ago? But it had to be. Richard’s memorial service. Sarah had looked like a ghost of herself, her face gaunt, her eyes hollow and haunted. But when Sarah’s eyes had fallen on her, Jules had been able to look right in, and had seen that they weren’t hollow or empty, but filled with a world of pain. And Jules had known then that Richard’s death was only part of the reason for the pain, and that she herself was to blame for the lion’s share.

  She�
�d ached for her old friend then. She still ached for mistakes she wished she could erase. Mistakes that had set off a chain reaction like dominoes falling, heading to a place nobody had wanted to go. A place impossible to avoid.

  There was no way that she could fix all that. There was no way to undo what had been done. There were no words that could explain. But she’d wanted to reach out that day—needed to—if only to give Sarah the letters. One she’d found when she was going through Richard’s papers, one she’d written herself. But by the time Jules had parked Della with Richard’s mother and plucked up the courage to approach her, she’d discovered Sarah had already gone.

  Jules pushed the dregs of her coffee away, wishing she could push the memories away as easily. Wishing she could find an end to the ever-present guilt. There was no way past the guilt. Around her conversation hummed, a baby cried, plates and cutlery clattered and an uncomfortable thought wormed its way into her brain.

  She could always go and see how Sarah was coping herself. After all, she was in Sydney, her shopping was done and she didn’t have anywhere to be until tomorrow morning. Besides, it wasn’t like she’d have to go to Sarah’s house and invade her privacy and risk having the door slammed in her face. She could turn up at her office, somewhere less personal. Less confrontational. And without Della by her side to complicate matters …

  Although Sarah still might refuse to see her.

  Jules sighed, looked at the mound of shredded paper that her anxious fingers had created from the empty sugar sachet without realising, and swept it into the centre of the table. Fair call too. If she were Sarah, would she want to see the woman who’d blown her marriage apart? Not likely.

  And of course Sarah would be coping. She was strong. Turning up at the memorial service proved it, even though it must have been the last place on earth she’d wanted to be. No, Sarah would be fine. Coping and coping well. And no doubt coping all the better for not seeing Jules.

  Shaking her head, Jules collected her bags to return to the lodge. Being in Sydney for this bloody breast thing must be messing with her head for her to be considering such foolish notions. There was no point going to see Sarah. Far better to go home to Lord Howe Island and leave the past behind her where it belonged. There was nothing to be gained by stirring it up.