Always You and Me

Prologue

The bell announcing the end of visiting hours had long since been rung. I’d ignored it. I almost wished someone would come and challenge me about it, because I was spoiling for a fight. I was filled with red-hot rage, the kind that keeps threatening to erupt like lava from an unstable volcano.

‘I hate you for this,’ I told a God I didn’t believe in, just in case – against all odds – he happened to be lurking on the other side of the water-marked mirror in the ladies’ toilets.

He chose not to reply, and all I saw in the mirror was a woman who looked about a decade older than the thirty years on her birth certificate. I looked even worse than my passport photograph, which I’d always thought was physically impossible.

My eyes were no longer red-rimmed because there comes a point when you’ve cried yourself dry. All I could see in them was an aching sadness for something that hadn’t even happened yet.

But it would tonight.

My hair was freshly washed, not because I cared how I looked, but because Adam had always liked to burrow his face in the long chestnut strands and inhale my apple-scented shampoo. We could at least still do that, although it had been weeks since he’d been able to pull me into his arms and kiss me until I was breathless, and even longer since he’d been able to lift me off my feet and carry me to our bedroom and lay me down on the cool crisp sheets and—

‘Enough,’ I told my reflection fiercely. ‘Do not go there, Lily.’

The door behind me swung open and I immediately dropped my eyes when I recognised another regular visitor at the hospice. The woman was older than me, and we were on nodding terms in the lift or in the corridor, two refugees in a country we’d never wanted to visit. I didn’t imagine I’d ever see her again after today.

I grabbed a handful of paper towels, in too much of a hurry to squander the twenty seconds or so the Dyson fan needed to dry my hands. As I slipped back into Adam’s room my eyes automatically went to the clock on the wall. I’d been gone for six minutes. Six minutes I’d never be able to claw back.

Adam’s eyes were closed, but they flickered open when he heard the scrape of my chair as I pulled it closer to the bed. He turned his head slowly towards me, as though the bones were fragile and the sinews rusty. When he winced, I felt the pain as though it was mine.

‘Hey, beautiful,’ he said in a voice that sounded about a hundred years old.

I smiled sadly. ‘Only in your eyes.’

He swallowed uncomfortably and I was on my feet in an instant, reaching for the water glass and straw. I slipped my hand beneath his neck and lifted his head from the pillow because he no longer had the strength to do it himself. He’d carried an eight-foot Christmas tree up three flights of stairs to our flat just three months ago, and today something as simple as raising his head to sip from a damn plastic beaker was beyond him.

I turned to look out of the window for a moment, because I didn’t want him to see the anger in my eyes. Adam was the best person I’d ever met – the best person anyone who knew him had ever met – and the fact that no one was going to get the chance to know just how totally incredible he was after today was nothing less than an outrage.

His eyes told me he’d drunk enough, and I lowered him back on the pillows.

‘Are you in pain? Shall I get someone?’ My hand was already hovering by the Call button.

He shook his head. The drugs made him drowsy, and over the last few days, since we were told that the sand in the hourglass was finally running out, he’d refused to take them at all.

‘I’m not wasting a single second being spaced out. If this is all the time we have—’ I’d sobbed then, I couldn’t help it, and he’d taken hold of my hand before continuing. ‘If this is it, then I want to be here in the moment with you, right up until I draw my very last breath.’

‘You’re going to be with me for longer than that. We said forever, remember? We wrote it into our vows. You don’t get to wriggle out of it now, buster.’

‘I’m not sure dying is wriggling out of it,’ he’d said gently. ‘But I am reneging on our deal. And I’m so, so sorry to do that to you, Lily. I think perhaps you should sue.’

That was Adam, determined to make me smile even when my heart was literally being torn in two.

‘Is Fletcher still here?’ he asked unexpectedly.

I swallowed uncomfortably before answering. Adam’s short-term memory had begun to waver, like a radio signal that kept slipping off station into a different frequency.

‘No, hon. Raegan took him back to her place a few hours ago. Remember?’

I watched as the man I loved, with a Mensa-level IQ, tried to gather up the fragments of his fractured memory and piece it back together.

Fletcher was Adam’s dog. He’d been in Adam’s life even longer than I had, and I really didn’t know what I would have done if the hospice had denied my request to bring him in for a final visit.

The nurse I’d asked had drawn in her breath before replying, and I was ready to launch in with every persuasive argument I’d spent most of the previous night compiling.

‘Yes, of course you can,’ she’d said. ‘I think maybe you should bring him in tomorrow.’ And instead of thanking her for her kindness I’d immediately burst into tears, because I knew what the concession meant. The clock ticking away the time we had left suddenly got a little louder.

Fletcher was not a particularly intelligent border collie, with a tendency to eat slippers, incoming mail, and even the occasional sock. I’d had no idea how he’d react in an alien environment with so many unfamiliar sounds and smells.

He’d sat beside me on the passenger seat today as I drove to the hospice, for once not fidgeting, pawing at the window, or trying to climb on to my lap. As we pulled into the car park, he sat up higher in his seat and looked directly at the low red-brick building that had been home to his owner for the last four weeks.

He gave a single soulful whine.

‘Can you sense him, Fletch? Can you tell that he’s in there?’

Fletcher looked at me with eyes that suddenly seemed knowing.

‘You have to be good today,’ I told him as I clipped the lead to his collar. ‘You mustn’t upset anyone.’

Adam’s dog looked at the tears coursing down my cheeks, as if to say that ship might already have sailed.

‘You’re here to say goodbye to him, boy,’ I whispered brokenly. Fletcher watched me with an almost human expression of empathy. ‘But I think you know that, don’t you?’

For two hours Adam’s dog sat beside the bed, within easy reach of the hand that fondled his silky ears the way it had done a thousand times before. And would never do again. As much as it broke my heart, I think having his old friend there helped heal something in Adam’s.

Towards the end of the visit, I lifted the dog on to the bed. There were intravenous drips and wires everywhere, but Fletcher, who was possibly the clumsiest hound in the world, didn’t disturb a single one. He simply lay down on the mattress and stared up at his owner with a devotion that matched mine. We both loved this man with all our heart. And tonight we were both going to lose him.

The hospice staff were invisible angels, slipping unobtrusively in and out of Adam’s room throughout the night, checking him, checking me, tweaking machinery, and then silently disappearing back into the shadows. Someone had turned off the harsh overhead lamp, leaving the room bathed in the subdued glow of the panel light behind the bed. It was still bright enough to see every detail of the face I’d planned on waking up beside for the next sixty years or so. The thought caught me unawares, and whatever I had been saying was lost in a broken sob.

‘Oh, babe,’ Adam said, managing to lift his arm off the mattress with a strength I thought he’d already lost. ‘Come here.’

I went to him, negotiating my way through the tangle of wires and tubes to lay my head on his chest. It was my favourite place to sleep, with the reassuring steady thud of his heart beating beneath my ear. Tonight its rhythm was off, like a song being played at the wrong tempo. It came fast in a flurry of beats, and then slow with excruciatingly long gaps before the next reassuring thump.

‘Adam will slow down , ’ they had told me. ‘He’ll become drowsy and may sleep for long periods of time. He won’t want to eat or drink. Gradually his body will begin to shut down.’

‘Will it . . . will it hurt?’ I’d asked, my face awash with tears that I hadn’t bothered trying to wipe away.

‘We won’t let it,’ the doctor had told me gently . ‘We’ll give him whatever he needs. ’

Later I would replay those words over and over again. Because what my husband needed was the one thing that no one could give him: a miracle. A cure for the disease that was stealing him away from us.

‘Climb under the covers,’ Adam said now, his voice low.

‘I’m pretty sure that’s not allowed,’ I whispered, already kicking off my shoes and glancing worriedly towards the door as they hit the floor with a noisy clatter.

‘I don’t think they’ll throw me out for misbehaviour.’

‘Are we going to be misbehaving?’ I asked, trying to make him smile. Adam had the best smile of anyone I’d ever met.

‘I wish,’ he said with regret, his eyes looking deep into mine.

It seemed beyond wrong that even after all these years I could still remember the first time we’d made love and yet I couldn’t recall the last time.

All I knew was that it had fallen somewhere between growing vaguely concerned about Adam’s niggling symptoms, and the day we’d sat, white-faced and terrified, in an oncologist’s office.

‘Can you please just give it to me straight?’ Adam had asked him. ‘I don’t want some dressed-up version of the truth. Just how bad is it?’

The doctor had paused for a long moment. He hadn’t needed to look down at the test results or refer to the X-rays fanned out on the desk before him. He’d locked eyes with Adam.

‘Bad,’ he’d said quietly. ‘It’s bad.’

The minutes slid silently into hours. Staff changed shifts and the corridor outside Adam’s room grew quieter.

‘Talk to me,’ Adam said, as I lay pretzelled against him.

‘What about?’

He gave a ghost of a smile. ‘Anything. I just want to hear your voice. Tell me what you thought of me the first time we met.’

‘That’s easy. I thought you were a bit of a knob. Far too overconfident.’

He gave a low chuckle, which turned into a worrying coughing fit. His lungs were compromised now. His breathing was no longer silent. There was a rasp to it that I knew wasn’t going to go away.

I did as he asked, telling stories that all began with the words ‘Remember when . . .’ They made us smile, they made us cry – but that was okay too, because we were doing it together. And ‘together’ was a luxury we wouldn’t have for much longer.

Almost as if he sensed the dark avenue my thoughts had turned down, Adam’s arms tightened around me. It was after midnight and the hospice was silent except for the occasional quietly trodden footsteps travelling the corridor.

‘Lily, I have something I need to ask you. Something I want you to promise.’

‘ More promises?’ I said, trying to keep my voice light, but there was something about his tone that made the hair stand up on my arms.

There had been a whole collection of things he had wanted me to promise over the last days and weeks. Most of them were pretty doable.

‘Promise me you’ll remember to get the car serviced regularly.’

‘You’re worried about the car?’ I’d asked incredulously.

‘I’m worried about you. I don’t want my time in the afterlife ruined by stressing about you driving around with dodgy brakes.’

Behind the humour in his eyes, I had seen the genuine concern.

‘Okay, babe. I promise I’ll visit the garage regularly.’

But not every promise was so easy to make.

‘Promise me you’ll still take that trip to Australia next year like we planned.’

I’d shaken my head sadly at that one. ‘I don’t want to do that without you. That was our dream.’

Adam had taken my hand between his and squeezed it gently. ‘It’s still our dream. And when you stand on the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, I’m going to be right there beside you. That’s my promise.’

I kind of liked that, so I’d said yes to that one too.

‘Go on then,’ I said to him now in the quiet of his hospice room.

‘This one is really a two-part promise, but it’s the most important one that I’ve asked of you.’

He looked so serious as he stared down at me. It was almost as though he already knew how I’d react.

‘Okay. Whatever it is, I promise I’ll do it,’ I said, gently running my fingers over his furrowed brow.

‘Good,’ Adam said with a slow nod. ‘Because I want you to find Josh and fix things with him.’

‘No.’ The word shot out of me before I had a chance to censor it. ‘Absolutely not,’ I added for extra emphasis. I struggled in his arms but his hold on me was surprisingly strong, in every sense of the word.

‘I need to know you’ll be alright when I’m gone, Lily. You need to go to him.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, gentler this time but just as firm. ‘I will be alright, sweetheart. I’ve told you that. I will be sad, and my heart will be broken for a very long time, maybe forever, but I do not need to go and find the man whose last words to me were that he never wanted to see me again.’

‘That was my fault,’ Adam said, his voice cracking.

‘I chose you , not Josh,’ I reminded him, pressing a kiss on his lips, which felt as dry as sandpaper. ‘I will always choose you. In this life and the next.’

Adam shook his head and one of the machines he was attached to started to beep alarmingly. He was getting agitated, and that was the last thing I wanted.

‘Please, Lily. For me. Go and see him. Listen to what he has to say. And then, when you’ve heard it . . . forgive him. And then forgive me.’

‘You’re not making any sense,’ I said, my voice wobbling. Was this the beginning of the end? They’d warned me that Adam might become confused, or even delusional, and instructing me to go to the man who I’d turned down to be with him was about as deluded as it got.

‘You don’t have to understand now why I’m asking you to do this, but you do have to promise me you’ll go.’

My sigh was long and heartfelt. ‘Alright. If it means this much to you, I’ll do it.’

‘And don’t wait too long. Go to him soon. Promise me.’

‘I promise.’

There is probably a special place in hell for people who lie to someone who’s dying, and I was already halfway there.

It happened in the dark, middle-of-the-night hours, when so many warriors finally lose their fight. I knew it was getting closer by the worried expression in the eyes of the nurses as they came in to check on him.

I struggled to slip out of the bed but a senior nurse, one I’d never really warmed to, stopped me from getting up by placing a firm hand on my shoulder.

‘You’re fine just where you are,’ she said quietly.

The lump in my throat was almost impossible to swallow past.

‘Would you like someone to stay in the room with you?’ She turned her head and nodded to a shadowy corner. ‘We could sit quietly over there.’

I shook my head. ‘I think I’d like it to be just the two of us.’

Her hand was back on my shoulder, gently squeezing it. ‘That’s okay. I understand. You can buzz if you change your mind.’

Adam fought to keep his eyes open for as long as he could; fought to stay with me for every single second we had left. But his body was struggling, and I was hurting him by wanting him to hold on a little bit longer, just for me.

‘Close your eyes, sweetheart.’

‘I don’t want to. I want to see you.’

I leant up and gently kissed him again. ‘I’m there behind your eyes, whether they’re open or closed.’

‘You are and always will be the love of my life, Lily.’

‘And you are mine.’

His eyes closed briefly. ‘Please remember what I asked tonight.’

‘I remember. I remember everything,’ I said. That much at least was no lie. There were some things that would stay with me for all time.

‘I am going to close my eyes now,’ he said, his voice so weak I could hardly hear it.

‘Good idea.’

‘I’ll see you soon, Lily.’

‘You sure will.’

But that was the second lie I told him that night.

Fifteen minutes later, the gap between his breaths grew longer and longer, and then quietly, with the same dignity and bravery that was uniquely his, Adam Tennant – my husband, my best friend, and the love of my life – simply stopped being.

I stared down at his face which, for the first time in months, looked free from pain. From the corner of his eye a single tear had escaped and sat on his cheekbone like a dropped diamond. I bent down and gently kissed it away.