Page 130 of Where Do We Go From Here?
‘I don’t… How can I not know this?’ Wendy asks. ‘I mean, Christ, Neil. I’m your sister.’
‘I know,’ Neil says. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘We…’ Neil glances at his wife and she sighs and nods. ‘We were worried about you, really,’ he explains. ‘We were worried about you even before Mum. What with the drinking and… your general… I don’t know… stress levels… And then…’
‘We were worried it would send you over the edge,’ Sue says. ‘I thought you had enough to deal with.’
‘And you weren’t that easy-going about anything,’ Neil says. ‘So I didn’t want you making a fuss.’
‘A fuss?’ Wendy splutters.
‘Yeah. You know what you can be like. You’re hardly the best person to have around in a crisis.’
‘I’m not?’ Wendy asks. She’s shocked about this. She’s always considered herselfgreatin a crisis.
‘No, you’re not.’
‘OK. Well, I guess I didn’t know that,’ she says. ‘And did anyone else know about this, about the cancer? Did Harry? Did you tell the kids?’
Sue shakes her head.
‘Harry only knew—’ Neil starts.
‘Are we doing that?’ Sue says, interrupting him.
‘Oh, OK. Sorry, no. Maybe not.’
‘What?’ Wendy asks. ‘Are we doing what?’
‘Nothing, really,’ Neil says. ‘Never mind.’
‘But all this was going on when?’ Wendy asks, trying to reframe her internal narrative of the last six years.
‘Well, they found it in, what – 2018, wasn’t it?’ Neil asks.
Sue nods. ‘It really was a couple of weeks before you told us about your mum.’
‘And I was going to tell you. I was, you know, prepping myself to tell you. But then you called about Mum, and I somehow couldn’t.’
‘There wasn’t really any space to tell you,’ Sue says. ‘If that makes any sense.’
‘You were all about Mum, which was normal. And you were really upset about Mum. Which was obviously normal, too. But we did think that you might find out. And we sort of decided to deal with that as and when.’
‘Neil was having his first surgery while youwere in and out with your mum as an outpatient,’ Sue says. ‘So we thought we might bump into you then. Or at one of the check-ups. We thought you might find out that way. Or that one of your nurse friends might tell you. But you never did find out, so… so we just… left it, really.’
‘We were maybe a bit spineless about it, looking back,’ Neil says. ‘I still don’t know. And if we were, I’m sorry.’
‘We honestly didn’t know what was best,’ Sue says. ‘We couldn’t decide whether to tell you or not.’
‘We talked about it all the time,’ Neil says.
‘All the time,’ Sue confirms.
‘Your surgery,’ Wendy says, sifting through the conversation, grasping at words that might help her understand. ‘You said surgery…’
‘Yeah, they had to remove one,’ Neil says. ‘Replaced it with a plastic fantastic.’
