It’s Getting Hot in Here

Chapter 1

To-do list

Find maths tutor for Jacob

Book appointment for HRT

Find solution to Leo’s 2am gaming sessions – Wi-Fi timer? Cattle prod?

Cancel direct debit for Total Pilates studio

Order 37 pieces of cheese for PTA wine tasting

Start DIY panelling in living room

Return jumpsuit, leather trousers and weird bandeau thing to ASOS

Disable online purchases after 9pm on a Friday

Buy age 10–11 school trousers, GSCE Chemistry textbook

Find a baseball club for Jacob

Reinstall Drinkaware app

Switch energy provider

Buy socks (both kids)

REMEMBER TO TAKE STUPID EXPENSIVE COLLAGEN

Descale kettle

‘Is that kettle really still on there?’

Rose shakes her head, amused, as she glances at my phone. ‘Go on, just delete it. You know it’s never going to happen.’

‘Yes, it is,’ I say defiantly. ‘One day. I’ve already bought the descaler tablets. Not sure where I’ve put them, but still . . .’

The first time I came to hospital with Rose, I felt like a spare part. I couldn’t really work out what my role was supposed to be as we sat in the waiting room and I could only waffle on about nothing of consequence. I felt as if I should be providing words of wisdom, advice, or at least a discussion more profound than First Dates Hotel.

It took a couple of appointments before something became clear. I wasn’t there for wisdom. The waffle was the whole point. I suppose cancer is a shit topic of conversation for anyone, especially if you’re the one who’s got it. Since then, on the occasions when I’ve accompanied her for appointments with her consultant breast surgeon, or now, for radiotherapy, it’s been the same story. We’ve talked a lot about what she’s going through since her diagnosis, but quite often she prefers to stick to subjects she actively enjoys slagging off, such as my ex-husband.

‘He bought the boys what? ’ she asks when I tell her about Brendan’s latest gift.

‘A hamster,’ I reply.

‘Idiot,’ she mutters, then catches my eye. ‘Sorry, but he is.’

I’ve tried to resist becoming a stereotypical man-basher since the divorce, but Rose has no such qualms. But then, she is married to someone who considers himself the luckiest man alive to have found her – which sets the bar impossibly high. She thinks I deserve the same love and happiness that have been lavished on her; in fact, she thinks everyone does. This would make her a romantic if she wasn’t so cynical about almost everything else.

‘Doesn’t he think you’ve got enough to look after, between a full-time job, two kids and a kettle to descale?’ she adds.

‘It’ll all get a bit easier once I’ve got the PTA Wine Quiz out of the way,’ I tell her, knowing that, since we’ve been in here, I’ve probably accumulated 16 new WhatsApp messages on this very topic.

‘Well, you know my view on that. You’ve only got yourself to blame for signing up. Why would you volunteer to organise something like that?’

‘I’ve got an affliction,’ I tell her. ‘If someone asks for a helper, I can’t bear the sound of silence. My hand shoots up before I can stop it happening.’

‘You need to knock that on the head immediately. So, this hamster. What made Brendan think it was a good idea?’

‘Oh, Jacob’s been banging on forever about wanting a pet. Brendan took him for a Happy Meal on Saturday and I think he had a rush of blood to the head. He’d said he was taking him for a new toy. I was expecting some Lego.’

‘Well, that’s typical. He gets to look like Santa Claus, while you’re left to pick up shit after a rodent.’

‘If you’re attempting to wind me up about this, you’re succeeding,’ I tell her.

‘Good. Did you point out to him that he should’ve consulted you in the first place?’

‘Of course. His response was: “At least it’s not a puppy”.’

‘Personally, I’d tell him to take it back,’ she says.

‘I don’t think it’s like returning a pair of chinos to TK Maxx. Anyway, Jacob loves the thing, so I’m just getting on with it. To be fair, I’ve never seen him so happy. He’s christened it Alan.’

‘Rose Riley?’

The nurse who calls her name is cheerful, with grey hair and large hips that would make her look like someone’s nana if it weren’t for a small tattoo on the inside of her wrist.

‘How are we today, darling? Let’s get you started, shall we?’

Rose is here for radiotherapy, which she’s been having every day for the last week and a half. The treatment doesn’t take long – she was gone less than thirty minutes last time – and as I wait in the hospital café for her, I find myself trying to work out how many years we’ve known each other. The answer turns out to be 25. Which is ridiculous . . . especially because, in my head, I’m still only 25 years old.

Time does a weird thing as you get older. When I was a teenager, there were a handful of middle-aged women that I admired: an inspiring history teacher, Alexis Carrington from Dynasty and a rebellious aunt who’d travelled around the Greek islands on a motorbike with a handsome hippie who looked like Jesus. But I never quite pictured being in my forties myself. I knew on a theoretical level that one day it would happen but it felt so far removed from reality that I couldn’t get my head around it.

I’m 47 now, which should have been enough time to get used to it. Yet, my outlook remains suspended around the time Oasis were in the charts and Tony Blair was running the country – even if the same can’t be said for my pelvic floor. It was back in the heady 1990s that Rose and I shared a house with two other BBC trainees and a landlord who – judging by how high he kept the heating on – must, with hindsight, have been running a cannabis farm in his loft.

Even then we looked like physical opposites. I’m five foot five, average build, with blue-grey eyes, full lips and thick, brown hair that has been every style and shade under the sun over the years, but now sits just below my shoulders. Rose inherited her pale skin, fine features and long, red hair from her mother, but gets her height from her dad’s side. She’s a full five inches taller than me, with slender hips and a narrow waist, which means she never faces the constant battle I have to find jeans that fit.

I don’t know if I’m too old to have a ‘best friend’ now. The phrase feels better suited to little girls in playgrounds. But there’s no question that I love her. She’s the sister I never had; the wife I would have married had I not had the misfortune of being heterosexual. She’s my wing woman both in life and in work. For near enough the last decade we’ve both been employed by the rapidly growing UK outpost of MotionMax+, a streaming service with more than 76 million subscribers worldwide.

Throughout the whirlwind of the last couple of months – Rose’s diagnosis, then lumpectomy – she has remained resolutely positive. But as we head downstairs after her treatment session, it’s clear just how much the radiotherapy has wiped her out. She has 10 more days of this – and she already looks broken.

‘Silly question, but how are you?’ I ask. ‘Under the circumstances, I mean.’

‘Under those, I’m positively tickety-boo. Eurgh . . . sorry. I’m just exhausted. And my skin feels hideous. I was warned it might burn where I’d been treated but it’s gone all the way up to my neck,’ she winces, reaching up to the angry-looking patch.

‘Oh Rose . . . do you want to go for a coffee before I take you home?’ I ask.

‘I haven’t got the energy to even lift a cup right now. Is that all right?’

‘Course it is,’ I say, gently.

It’s just as we’re heading across the huge hospital concourse that she says something I’d been expecting long before now.

‘I think I’m going to have to take up that offer of more time off work, aren’t I?’ she sighs.

‘Personally, I think that would be the wisest option.’

‘I’d just really wanted to try to keep some normality in the midst of this shit show,’ she says. ‘Does that make sense?’

‘It does but some things are more important, Rose. Getting better, for one thing.’

‘The timing’s awful . . .’

‘Oh seriously, who cares?’ I protest.

‘ I care.’

‘I know, but this is temporary. You need to make yourself the priority now.’

Her feet come to a stop and I realise there are tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, come here, you,’ I say, beckoning her in for the most careful of hugs, which she accepts. She squeezes me briefly, then, conscious that we’re blocking the corridor, pulls away and sniffs. We start walking again.

‘Have you spoken to HR about how long they’ll let you stay off?’

‘I’m allowed up to six months on full pay but by the time I added my holiday entitlement, it’s more. They’ll have to bring someone in to cover, which I don’t like the sound of.’

‘Why not?’

‘What if my replacement is terrible? Or – worse – really good? ’

‘They won’t be as good as you. You are too hard an act to follow.’

We step outside into the first decent phone reception since we arrived and a blaze of notifications appear on my screen. One of which is a voicemail from my mother, who was picking Jacob up from school in my absence. I bypass her message – it usually takes several minutes and an update about something she’s just read in the Daily Mail before she gets to the point – and call her mobile instead.

But it’s Jacob who answers.

‘Mum!’ he gasps breathlessly. ‘You won’t believe what’s happened!’

Like all 10-year-olds, it doesn’t take much to excite him. He once called me in the middle of a Content Bundling workshop I was leading to tell me that they’d started selling a new flavour of Prime in the newsagent at the end of our road.

‘What is it, sweetie?’

‘Alan has given birth!’

Blood drains from my face like sand from an egg timer.

‘Is this a joke?’

‘No, it’s real!’ he giggles excitedly. ‘Grandma let us in to the house and I ran over to Alan’s cage and found the hamster babies. All nine of them.’