Page 95 of Things We Never Said
Anyway, three of the others in the trial have died already, so I suppose I’m lucky to still be here at all.
I’ve been in and out like a yo-yo these last few weeks, which is why I haven’t been able to finish off my tapes.
You’ve been so sweet, Sean. So sweet and so brave.
We’re all still pretending that I’m going to get through this; we’re all saying that some miracle is going to happen. April, bless her, keeps bringing me printouts of the cancer-curing properties of cannabis, and aspirin, and nettle tea and God knows what else. And I keep promising to try them all when I get home.
I think April is the only person who really still believes that might happen. In fact, I chatted to the psychologist about her this morning. I wanted to know whether I should ram the whole thing down her throat, so to speak. I wanted to know if I should sit her down and chant, ‘I’m dying, April, I’m dying, April; your mother is going to be dead soon.’ Perhaps if I said it over and over again she’d get it in the end. But the psychologist said that denial is sometimes a kind of protection thing. Like a circuit breaker or something. ‘She’ll deal with it,’ he said, ‘when she’s ready.’
You’re saying the same things as April, too. You’re still talking about summer holidays and where we might go but I can see in your eyes that you don’t believe it. But thank you, my darling, for pretending. It’s so much more fun to look at those brochures of Lanzarote and imagine us all there. It’s so much less depressing than sitting in silence waiting for me to pop my clogs – and, believe me, that really is the way most of the visiting families behave around here.
So, back to today’s photo, which is of our last actual holiday and, by the time you listen to this, our last ever holiday, I suppose. And God, what a waste of a great holiday that was.
I’ve been reading one of the self-help books from the hospital library; it’s about dealing with one’s own death, and there’s this huge chunk about living in the moment. Because, like the Buddhists apparently say, there is no future and there is no past. They’re both just things that happen in your mind. In reality, there is only ever the present moment. The problem, it seems, is that people with terminal diseases (and people, apparently, facing old age and eventually their own deaths) lose their ability to live in the moment. They’re so worried about the end of the journey that they fail to enjoy themselves getting there. Which is pretty understandable, but still a terrible waste. A waste that is perfectly illustrated by our time in the south of France.
Do you know, I hardly remember any of it? It’s as if the whole thing happened behind a big, frosty window.
Because of my back pain, I had been going back and forth to the doctor, the clinic and Addenbrooke’s Hospital, but still nothing had been found. (Though I do sometimes wonder if the doctors weren’t looking through a frosty window, as well. They certainly didn’t seem to be very good at spotting anything on those scans.)
Anyway, the current theory we were working on was a slipped disc, and it wasn’t until my normal doctor sent me (finally) for blood tests that anyone even began to suspect anything at all.
Because – ever since the car – my back pain had been, let’s say, a difficult subject, I told you as little as possible about what was going on. You seemed to have exhausted whatever sympathy you had for my back, and any mention of it, or doctors, or tests, tended to be met with a blank expression, or occasionally even an eye roll.
So I even used to hide the bus tickets, so that you wouldn’t know I’d been out there again. I felt, I suppose, embarrassed about it all.
The news came at the end of July. Because of something in the blood tests, too much Billy Rubin or something, they sent me for a fresh set of scans. I wasn’t expecting anything much to show up – I’d pretty much given up hope by then – but when they phoned me up to ask me to come back in to discuss the results, it was unusual enough that I knew something was wrong.
By the time I got home from the meeting, I knew. Oh, I didn’t know how advanced the whole thing was quite yet and we didn’t know it had spread, either, but my back pain finally had a cause, and it wasn’t a good one.
I didn’t manage to tell you though, did I? Even before I got home, you had sent me a text message saying something like:Where are you? When are you home? I have a surprise for you!
I was on the bus when I read it.Oh boy, and do I have one for you, I thought, grimly.
You were all excited when I got in. You’d found, and booked, a villa in France, and you were on a website busily booking plane tickets and a hire car. Should I have told you there and then? I don’t know. But I couldn’t. It honestly felt as if the space for me to tell you at that moment simply wasn’t there.
I thought we’d have to cancel. I thought the hospital dates would make the whole French escapade an impossibility. But when I phoned them up on the following Monday morning, the dates, miraculously, all fitted. I had a meeting booked with the anaesthetist two days before we were due to go away and the surgery two days after we got back.
Now, as you know, I have always been a sucker for a sign. And I took that as a sign. A big, pointy, unmissable sign. Is that silly of me? I expect you’ll think so.
It’s strange because even then, even before we really knew anything, the idea of one last holiday together was on my mind. So perhaps, deep down, that’s why I kept it quiet. Perhaps, deep down, I knew.
Whatever the reason, I decided to say nothing. You knew something was wrong, of course, and you kept on asking me if everything was all right. You even thought I had the hump about going to France at one point.
There was only one moment when I nearly told you. We were in that pizzeria in that town on the hill – Mons, was it? Anyway, I almost told you there. The view was beautiful and the sky was so blue and I felt briefly happy and then overwhelmed by sadness – the way you can sometimes swing from one to the other – and it was on the tip of my tongue when that waiter tripped over with our wine. And again, I took it as a sign. I took his tipping wine over me as some kind of divine intervention.
I was weird for the whole ten days, I know that. And because I was weird, you, in turn, were worried. We didn’t have much fun.
Everything about that trip – the flight, the drive, that gorgeous villa, the pool, the meals, even your presence – it was all wasted. And it was wasted because, as the book so clearly explains, I had lost my ability to live in the moment. Perhaps if I’d read the damned book beforehand it might have helped us have a better holiday.
On the last day, there was that big summer storm.
It was very dramatic, with thunder and lightning, and rain like I’d never seen before. But it was warm, all the same – warm enough in the morning for us to still swim in the pool. I think that moment, swimming with you, with those cool hard drops whacking us on the shoulders, was the only moment in the entire ten days I was actually present. The rest of the time I was lost inside my head; lost in my fears for the future, I suppose.
The rain continued all day, and in the afternoon I put my jacket on and you that big blue jumper, and we sat on the tatty grey sofa they had on the porch and watched the raindrops hitting the surface of the pool. The outdoor sofa reminded me, bizarrely, of sitting in Mum’s garden in Margate.
I’d pretty much avoided drink for the entire holiday for the simple reason that I was scared it would loosen my tongue. And that’s the exact reason I let myself drink that afternoon. I had an operation booked in three days’ time, after all. I had to tell you.
We drank the best part of two bottles of champagne between us, and for a moment the alcohol enabled me to forget. It let me connect with you again and we snuggled together on the sofa and stared out at the crazy rain. You had two French cigarettes left, so we had one each and felt dizzy.
