One Summer Between Friends

by Trish Morey

  ‘A marker?’

  ‘Made of titanium. This one’s in the shape of a top hat.’

  ‘Isn’t that a metal? My boob won’t go off when I go through airport security? Because that might be hard to explain. Not to mention prove.’

  The nurse laughed. ‘No. No sirens. No alarms.’ The needle moved again. ‘That’s the marker going in now.’

  And then she was slowly unhitched and had dressings applied to her wound.

  And when, finally, she managed to get vertical after being so long lying still, they showed her the slide of the calcifications they’d retrieved—tiny white egg-shaped dots they’d plucked from her breast. So tiny and yet the cause of so much trouble.

  She was definitely getting an education, Jules thought, remembering Molly’s words. A pity it was an education she’d never wanted.

  Jules and Molly went to dinner together that night, to a tiny Thai restaurant that thankfully didn’t serve margaritas or offer karaoke, where they compared family reactions to the news. Molly’s kids were just as upset as Della had been, and Jules couldn’t imagine having to cope with the tears of Della times four.

  But when she went to bed that night, Jules wasn’t thinking about home. Instead, her thoughts returned to Sarah, wondering what her former friend would think if she knew what Jules was going through, with her life suddenly full of questions with no easy or quick answers.

  Sarah wouldn’t be too cut up about it, that was for certain. She’d probably be feeling a little smug.

  Jules rolled over, trying to get comfortable. Maybe it was good she hadn’t been tempted to look Sarah up. Because whatever happened and wherever this whole breast thing ended, while Sarah had lost everything, Jules still had Della. When it all came down to it, what right to sympathy did she have?

  And then, somewhere along her train of thought, Sarah morphed into Floss and the atmosphere closed in, and it was suddenly raining. Or maybe it was just that everything looked misty through Jules’s eyes. Misty, dull and hopeless. Exactly how she’d felt when she’d found out she was pregnant.

  Jules had desperately needed to tell someone and there was no way she could reach out to Sarah. Goal-oriented Sarah. Confident city-slicker Sarah. Horrifically betrayed Sarah. So she’d turned to Floss, hoping that she might understand. Level-headed Floss, mother of four, would know what to do. Wasn’t that what levelheaded friends were for? So she’d told Floss that she was pregnant and her friend’s shoulder had been everything Jules had needed and more. Sympathetic. Understanding. Full of good advice and support and the balm to her soul that she’d needed. Until she’d asked who the father was, and Jules, in a fit of honesty, had tearfully confessed, and Floss had turned from supportive confidante to appalled and horrified antagonist.

  She woke up in a sweaty tangle of sheets with an ache from the wound in her breast and a horrible sense of why this was happening to her. This was payback. Justice. The gods were exacting their revenge for what she’d done, and they were exacting it right under Sarah’s nose, in her town.

  And maybe, Jules thought, as she unravelled her tangled sheets and flipped her pillow over to find a cooler side, it was exactly what she deserved.

  13

  It felt strange being back on Lord Howe. It was the same as it had always been, and that made sense, because strict development controls meant the island never changed dramatically, but it felt different too. It was as if nothing had changed, yet everything had. Everything had shifted.

  Or maybe it was just Sarah herself who’d changed.

  She shook her head as she closed the store. No surprise there, either. You didn’t expect to drop a brick on a concrete floor without a few corners chipping off. Maybe even breaking in two. And she’d been dropped from a great height, after all.

  She switched off the lights, mentally patting herself on the back for getting this far. She was here, she’d survived her first few days, and she was coping. Her brand of coping might come with counting down the days until she could leave again, but she was coping. She’d imagined a roll call of ghosts calling by the shop, a bit like in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, but nobody had. By accident or design, her ghosts all seemed to be keeping their distance. Exactly the way she preferred it.

  Back in the house, the kitchen was filled with the scent of a casserole she had softly bubbling away in the slow cooker and the sound of Dot complaining to Sam as he helped her with her physio, punctuated by Sam’s gentle words of encouragement. Sarah smiled. Her father had the patience of a saint. She gave the casserole a stir—not too long now—and added green beans.

  Through the kitchen window she could see the sky was painted with streaks of red, the trees swaying into shadow, and the simple beauty called to her. Dinner was at least half an hour away and she wasn’t needed here.

  ‘I’m going out for a walk,’ she called, as she shrugged on her jacket and pocketed a torch. ‘Back in a little while.’

  She closed the door on her mother’s protest that it was getting dark and her dad’s ‘Cheerio!’, and set off up the road. She was on her feet all day in the shop, but it was good to really stride out now. She was puffing by the time she got to the top of the hill, grateful when the road flattened as it curved around to follow the ridge along the top of the island.

  The air was fresh against her heated face, the bitumen a dark ribbon beneath her feet. Amid the stir and rustle of palms and the call of a settling bird, she could hear small waves breaking nearby and turned right when the road divided, heading towards the beach. The whoosh of waves was louder here, the smell of salt and sea on the air. She walked across the park to where the grass met the sand and stood in the gloom, looking out over the darkening sea and the slumbering bulges of the Admiralty Islands before turning her eyes to the inky sky above, lighting up now with the Milky Way, the sky like velvet dusted with diamantes. She couldn’t remember seeing stars in Sydney. Star soup, she used to call it, like the fish soup Ned’s Beach became when tourists turned up to feed the fish from bags of pellets they’d bought.

  Ned’s Beach. She hadn’t been down here for years, not since her twenty-first. They’d all staggered to the sand the day after the party, her and Richard, Floss and Andy, and Jules, who seemed to be nursing the biggest hangover of the lot and so grumpy with it she was almost toxic, but not just with Richard for once. Richard reckoned it was because the Swedish chef from Halfway Jules had been seeing had flown off the island the day before the party without telling her. Sarah wasn’t so sure; Jules hadn’t seemed too cut up about it at the party. But like a dog with a bone, Richard hadn’t let go.

  ‘Maybe if you weren’t such a grumpy bitch,’ Richard had said to Jules, ‘you might manage to hold onto a boyfriend for a change.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Sarah had told him.

  But Jules had delivered the final word when she’d given him the finger and told him to fuck off, before storming away.

  ‘Good riddance,’ Richard had called after her.

  And Sarah, whose head had been pounding after too much cheap wine and too much drunken dancing, was so relieved the sniping might stop now that Jules was gone that she had been glad to see the back of her too.

  Sarah raised her head to the stars and sighed uneasily. Should she have gone after Jules that night to find out what was wrong instead of just letting her go? Would it have changed anything if she had? Would things be different now?

  She shook her head and turned her back on the beach. There was no peace for her here.

  When she got to the main road she wasn’t ready to head home. Her thoughts were still unsettled, memories rattling loose. Her feet took her down the road towards the lagoon, past Halfway, which was already bustling with the dinner crowd. Past the little store where she and Jules and Floss had hung out eating ice-creams or hot chips after school and gossiping about boys, safely away from the eyes and the ears of her mother. Floss full of talk of Andy and how they were going to marry and have four kids. Jules stating, with a certainty that was unnerv
ing, that there were enough people in the world and on the island and that she was never having kids. Unlike Sarah, who’d assumed it was an inevitable part of life, like growing up and getting married, and that one day she was bound to end up with a couple of kids of her own.

  Funny how life turned out.

  Sarah blinked, swallowing a surge of grief, and kept walking, accompanied by the surf booming over the coral reef that fringed the lagoon. She switched on her torch, pointing it at the road, more to let drivers know she was there than to light the way ahead.

  She stopped at the T-junction that would take her back up the hill to home. Stopped and looked out at the sea and the thin line of beach that glowed under the risen moon and stars. She recognised the dark shadow on the water as the pontoon the three of them had raced around before flopping onto the grass that flanked the sandy beach the day before she’d left to do her HSC in Sydney. That perfect summer day when she’d sworn to her friends that she’d be back. The three of them linking their index fingers together the way they’d done since Year 1.

  Best friends in the world.

  Best friends in the universe.

  Best friends forever.

  Sarah shook her head. So close they’d been back then. The three of them together, standing tall and solid, a foundation upon which their young lives had been built.

  The breeze set the palm fronds rattling above her, almost like voices chattering in the treetops. Sarah looked up and listened. These palms had watched her grow up. These palms and their tangled vines had seen her leave the island, and then return. And she realised it didn’t matter how far she walked on this island, the past was all around her here.

  She shivered.

  And so too were her ghosts.

  14

  Time dragged. By the time Jules’s appointment to get her biopsy results had come, she was over waiting. She’d given up thinking in percentages and was prepared to think the worst. And why shouldn’t she? Didn’t she deserve it after what she’d done?

  So when the oncologist told her they’d found cancerous cells within the walls of the calcifications, earning her a diagnosis of Ductal Carcinoma In Situ, it came as no surprise that she wasn’t getting off this roundabout any time soon.

  A nurse sitting in the corner smiled sympathetically and Jules felt ill. She watched as the oncologist pulled a sheet from a pad that had a diagram of a woman’s breasts and started scribbling over it, showing her where her dots had been found, pointing to the cross-sections of ducts with their various stages, circling the one that equated with her condition.

  ‘DCIS can be a precursor to more invasive breast cancer. The trouble is, we can’t predict which cases turn invasive.’ There was a lot more information, then the doctor asked, ‘Do you understand?’

  Jules nodded. ‘So what happens now?’ she asked, almost numbed to the disappointment and shock.

  ‘We remove it surgically,’ said the oncologist. ‘It’s only a small focus, and from what we can tell, your lymph nodes aren’t compromised. We remove it in what’s called a wide local incision, which means we only take as much surrounding tissue as we need to ensure we’ve got it all. At this stage I’m ruling out chemotherapy, and whether we need to think about a course of radiotherapy will depend on the histopathology report. Of course, that wouldn’t happen until your wound is healed, so you can go home for a few weeks.’

  ‘A lumpectomy.’

  ‘Exactly.’ The oncologist nodded, then looked down at her notes, a slight frown marring her perfect brows. ‘Do you have anyone staying with you? Or any family you can call on to be with you? It’s not major surgery, but it’s still surgery, with all that entails, and it always helps to have family on hand, especially after a diagnosis like this. It can be upsetting, and that’s normal.’

  ‘No,’ Jules said, her throat tight and dry. ‘They’re all at home on Lord Howe.’

  ‘No friends a bit more local you could call upon to keep you company while you have surgery?’

  And again Jules thought of Sarah. Sarah was local. Jules gave a half-smile, imagining how Sarah would feel getting a call from Jules to ask her to hold her hand while she was getting part of her boob cut out. Sarah would probably say yes, but only on the condition she could wield the scalpel.

  Maybe not a good idea.

  Then there were Richard’s parents in Goulburn, but she’d only met them a couple of times, and one of those was at Richard’s memorial service. When it all came down to it, she barely knew them. They were lovely, and no doubt they’d come if she asked them for help, but they’d expect to see their grandchild, and then they’d be disappointed and uncomfortable and Jules would only end up feeling guilty that Della wasn’t here.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said, forcing a smile. ‘Let’s do it. I want to go home. I want it to be over.’

  ‘I understand, but as I said, you might have to come back for a course of radiotherapy.’

  ‘But no chemo.’

  The oncologist shook her head. ‘Recent research is showing that in cases like yours, chemotherapy doesn’t provide any further protection from recurrence of the disease. And we don’t believe there’s any point making your recovery any harder than it has to be.’

  No chemo? No hair loss or mouth ulcers or all those other horrid side effects she’d read about while she’d been doing her research? Jules found a weak smile in the midst of her disappointment. ‘So that’s actually a win, isn’t it?’

  The oncologist left her with the nurse to answer any further questions and give her advice about support services.

  Jules found Molly waiting for her when she got out.

  ‘How did you go?’ Molly asked.

  ‘Crap,’ Jules said. ‘They’ve found cancer in those dots. So—snap—they’re going to cut it out. Only bright side I can see is that I’m on tomorrow’s list with you.’ Jules held up the pink brick that the nurse had given her. ‘Meanwhile I have this to refer to if I have any more questions.’

  The other woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A “My Journey” kit. Apparently it comes with the diagnosis, kind of like a show bag without the junk food. It’s got all kinds of information, apparently, and there’s a diary in case I want to write down my feelings.’

  Molly pulled a face. ‘Not my idea of a journey. Think I’d rather go on a cruise.’

  ‘I know,’ Jules said. ‘Right now I’d settle for going home. A journey I actually want to take.’

  ‘Come on,’ Molly said. ‘I figure we’re both fasting from midnight. So how about we journey to that pub over the road and I’ll buy you a beer.’

  Jules found a grin. ‘They’re the happiest words I’ve heard all day. Let’s do it.’

  The pub was filled with workmen still wearing their hi-vis vests after knock-off time, so the bar was noisy and smelt of stale beer, forlorn hopes and despair. To Jules, it was perfect. She and Molly laid claim to the booth of a vacating group, high-fiving as they sat down. They weren’t leaving Sydney without learning something about city life.

  Jules went to the bar for their first round. By the time she came back, Molly had her knitting out, needles furiously clacking. She put it aside as she took her glass, clinking it with Jules’s. ‘Cheers,’ she said, before they both downed a decent gulp. ‘Are you nervous? I mean about tomorrow and all.’ Molly put her glass down and resumed her knitting.

  Jules nodded, more interested right now in Molly’s needles moving rhythmically as a memory of her nan—Pru’s mum, long lost—floated to the surface. She remembered the jumpers and cardigans her mother had pulled out when Della had been born, items that had been knitted for Jules by her grandmother. Something about the click-clack of Molly’s needles was soothing. Jules thought about the administration courses she’d been meaning to follow up and never got around to—maybe because she wasn’t really that interested—and wondered if knitting could be something she could try while she thought about what she’d really like to do.

  Bec
ause if there was a way to make all this hanging around waiting for things to happen a bit more productive, Jules was all for it.

  ‘Do you think you could teach me to do that?’ she asked.

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Knit.’

  Molly laughed as she took a sip of her beer. ‘Anyone can knit. There’s no secret.’

  ‘So you could teach me then?’

  ‘Of course I could,’ Molly said, pulling a spare pair of needles and ball of wool from her bag. ‘It’s not like it’s rocket science.’

  Which is how two women got to spend the night before they both underwent surgery in a Sydney bar, one teaching the other the rudiments of casting on. Of knit and pearl and stocking stitch. Casting off.

  ‘I’m going to make Della a jumper,’ Jules declared a while later, putting the idea out into the universe as she proudly held up her wonky square, even though it had more holes than stitches. Even if she didn’t have a handle on this knitting thing quite yet, she wasn’t going to waste her time just sitting around.

  15

  There was a stiff wind giving the airport wind sock hell when Floss drove by, heading for the car park. She’d seen the plane land on even windier days so she wasn’t worried, although she knew the wind might give the passengers a few anxious moments as the plane bucked and bounced on its way down. She had five guests arriving for Beached today, one couple coming to celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, along with a party of three sixty-something women who were almost regulars—this was their third visit.

  She parked the car with a few minutes to spare, and found Bill from Sullivan’s already waiting inside the terminal. They talked a while about the weather and the rain they were looking for to fill up their water tanks, and before long the grunty sound of an approaching engine could be heard through the gusty wind. They ventured out to the fenced lawn that served as both departure and arrivals gate to watch the plane come in. It was descending crablike, sideways to the wind, like a shopping trolley with a broken wheel that refused to roll in a straight line.