Chapter 2
2
W ell, Kay thought, this has never happened before. Twice now, in a little over two years she was looking at beachwear. Like buses, she was thinking, you wait for ages and then they all come at once. Because before that last-minute week in Cyprus a couple of years back, with her two best friends, Helen and Caro, she hadn’t bought a swimsuit in over twenty years. Maybe even longer. Cyprus had been her first holiday in who knew how long, and the memory of preparing for it made her smile now. She’d been a fox in a chicken coop! Dashing into Tesco the evening before, picking up frozen dinners, throwing in a cheap scarlet sarong along on the way.
And here she was again, with more time and a lot more choice, literally walled in by bikinis and swimsuits, tankinis and … monokinis? Kay frowned. Styles had certainly changed since she was last in the market for a two-piece, which she wasn’t. Not with her waistline. Leaving the monokinis behind, she moved on to a display of more modest looking one-pieces. But they were prudish-looking things, navy and black, high-cut on the top, low-cut on the bottom. The beach equivalent of a viscose blouse, and more suitable for aqua-fit on a Monday night at the local swimming pool, than white-sand beaches. No. Kay shook her head. If there was one thing she didn’t want to be anymore, it was sensible. The sarong was past its best, that much had been obvious on the long weekend she’d taken to Cyprus back in April, supposedly to plan Caro’s wedding (although in the end Caro had gone ahead and done what she always did, made an executive decision, so the venue was now a town hall in North London).
She paused. On the other hand, a high cut would cover the scars. Scars that she didn’t have when she’d grabbed that sarong. Scars from a successful lymph-node dissection, which had been followed by months of radiotherapy and infusions. All in all, nearly a year of treatment that had proved more successful than anyone had dared hope. So now she was officially a survivor of stage-four skin cancer, standing on the right side of those hopeful fifty percent, the lucky ones praying to live beyond five years. To live! Oh, to live! Yes, she was lucky, and she knew it. Four months since her last scan, another two until the next. And those gaps might only get longer.
Thinking this, she moved on, pausing to stop in front of a leopard-print bikini that had a mercifully large bottom. It was a beautiful thing, tawny colours, gold hoops and much ruching. Beachwear to imagine yourself in, tanned, windswept and carefree. Beachwear that said, ‘look at me!’ Beachwear that was anything but sensible.
But the price-tag had her moving again. Two hundred and fifty pounds? For something she would probably wear no more than … As if she had come face to face with a brick wall, she stopped walking, hitched her handbag over her shoulder and looked up. In less than a week she would be retiring. Leaving her role as head of the maths department at the secondary school where she had worked for thirty years and relocating to Cyprus. Flying out on a flight she had yet to book, where – for crying out loud Kay! – she could wear a leopard-print bikini every day of the week. She could wear it until the vivid feline colours had washed out to the pastels of her knickers. And frankly if it lasted as long as her knickers had, most of which had been purchased in the last century, then two hundred and fifty was a bargain.
Without hesitating, she whipped the hanger off the rail and marched herself to the nearest cash-desk, declining a suggestion that she might like to try it on. That, she knew, would break the spell and anyway she was due to meet Helen in less than ten minutes. She watched instead, mesmerized, as with paper as thin as her dreams, the assistant folded the bikini into a small square.
‘What a wonderful idea,’ her consultant had said. ‘All that sunshine and Mediterranean diet.’
‘We’ll be visiting all the time,’ Helen kept saying.
‘Once you get used to the travel, you won’t even notice,’ Caro promised.
‘I’ll be fine, Mum.’ Alex her twenty-four-year-old son had told her. Alex, whose special needs had left him unable to cope with mainstream education, whose career would probably never extend beyond the garden centre in which he worked, who had never left home, who really wasn’t like other twenty-four-year-olds and therefore might not be fine.
‘It’s time you lived your life for yourself, ’ from her father, a widower of less than twelve months, after her mother had finally succumbed to the dementia that had held her these last years.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ the assistant said, handing Kay the package. ‘Are you going anywhere nice to wear it?’
‘Cyprus.’
‘How wonderful.’ The assistant smiled. You’ll get plenty of opportunity out there.’
Kay returned the smile. She did, it seemed, have plenty of opportunities, to live, to wear a bikini for the first time in decades. But what would have happened if Caro hadn’t invited her on that holiday to Cyprus? And what would have happened if she hadn’t got sick? What opportunities would she be facing in that parallel universe?
They were questions she couldn’t answer, but as she stepped onto the escalator there was one thing she knew in her bones to be true. If these things hadn’t happened, she would have gone through the rest of her life never even thinking about splashing out two-hundred-and-fifty-pounds on a leopard-print bikini.