Chapter 8
EIGHT
ORLA
I have slept badly, a sleep full of troubling dreams, and now that I am awake – the sky still dark, the promise of spring elusive on this icy morning – I remember why, and I feel the need to record what I learned yesterday.
I was returning home from Imran’s shop, where I still go almost every day to pick up a copy of the Guardian and a pint of milk if I’m running low, as well as to catch up on whatever local gossip he is able to impart, when I saw Anna sitting alone on a bench in the square.
It’s strange how – although our houses have their own gardens and ample space indoors – that place, with its regularly spaced benches and iron railings around its perimeter, seems to offer a sense of privacy.
I’ve spent many hours there myself, tending to the roses or simply sitting beneath the trees and thinking, when I feel the need for solitude.
Anna’s children would have been at school; her husband, I presumed, was out at work, and yet she had chosen this public space to come and sit alone, hunched against the late-afternoon chill, her coat buttoned and her woolly hat pulled down over her ears.
But I saw that she was crying, and so, after hesitating a moment, I decided I could not bear to leave her to her solitude.
I didn’t need to use my key to open the gate; it was standing ajar as she must have left it. I approached her slowly, clearing my throat.
Anna, I said, not sitting down just yet in case my presence was unwelcome. Are you all right?
She looked up at me, her skin bone-white and her eyes red, and she said, No. No, I’m not.
Then I sat next to her, reaching out to touch her gloved hand. She gripped mine fiercely and I waited for her to speak.
Gray is sick, she said at last, with difficulty, as if the cold had numbed her lips or she could barely bring herself to voice the words. Gray is going to die.
Anna! I was appalled. Of all the things for her to tell me, this was the last I had expected.
My neighbour, who I’ve seen almost every day for twenty years – that vital man, so full of life and laughter.
It seemed impossible. It was the other thing I had been expecting her to tell me – or one of the other things.
After that, the words came out of her in a rush. She stopped crying, but her voice was as hoarse as if she had been screaming.
He has cancer, she told me. The tests show it is inoperable – it has spread from his pancreas to his liver. The time he has left can be measured in weeks – months at best.
Is there nothing they can do? I asked.
What she told me next surprised me almost more than her original revelation.
He’d only got one kidney, she said. He always has had – she continued – ever since I’ve known him.
But it wasn’t congenital – he wasn’t born that way, although some people are apparently.
He donated it. He gave it to a friend when he was twenty-two, before I met him.
He doesn’t really talk about it. I always thought it was a good thing – a wonderful thing for him to have done. But now…
Now, it transpired, Gray’s body is not strong enough to withstand chemotherapy.
That altruistic act as a young man has turned into a death sentence – or so it seems to her.
I know very little about medical matters – I have never needed to, thank God – but I suspect the prognosis might be the same even if he had two functioning kidneys.
For Anna, though, this feels like the deciding factor, the one thing she is focusing on.
There was something else, too. I could sense it in Anna’s utter dejection – the way she tilted her head and looked at me as if she was about to say something else, but didn’t. Something equally painful and perhaps even harder for her to come to terms with.
Something she is keeping to herself, at least for now.
I know about secrets. I know how they eat away at the soul in the same way cancer eats at the body – as silent, as invisible and as deadly. I know how it feels to live in fear of them being brought to light.
But I didn’t say that, or even ask many questions. I only listened to her, holding her hands as the last of the day faded, and lights began to come on in the surrounding houses.
Poor Anna. Those poor children.