Miss You

EIGHTEEN Tess

The mobile phone was a recent-enough acquisition for me still to panic whenever I felt it vibrating in my pocket at work. I was on my break, and it was unspoken etiquette that you didn’t yack away in the staffroom, so I stood up and went into the ladies’ toilets to take the call.

“Hello, yes?”

The initial shudder of relief when it wasn’t Hope’s school turned to a muffled drumbeat in my brain when it was the receptionist at the hospital. After nearly four weeks’ waiting, I’d managed to subdue the fear, but it was straight back to total immersion.

“You’ve got the results?” I asked, my heart rate escalating.

From her brisk manner, I could tell that she wasn’t going to reveal anything over the phone. She didn’t have to, because when she offered me an appointment with my counselor at ten o’clock the following morning, I already knew the result of the test—why would I even need an appointment if it was negative?

As I pressed the button to hang up, though, my imagination immediately started inventing reasons why that needn’t be the case: I’d developed a good relationship with my genetics counselor, whose name was Jane, over the chats we’d had before I opted to have the test. Perhaps she wanted to give me the good news in person and shake my hand before sending me on my way? Or perhaps she wanted to remind me that at some stage, we would need to think about Hope getting a test, and discuss a strategy for doing that?

“You all right, Melons?” Lewis winked, as I walked back through the store to the checkouts.

The produce manager had a bit of a thing for me. Produce was really the worst place for him because of all the possibilities for lewd innuendo—if it wasn’t bananas, it was cucumbers, and what he did with a fresh fig had put most of us girls off ever trying one—but he wasn’t a bad bloke. It was all done in good humor.

“Everything all right?” asked my supervisor, when I asked permission to come in late the following day because I had a doctor’s appointment.

“Yes, fine, women’s stuff, you know...”

We were quite a friendly lot—a group of us went out bowling once a month—but there was no one there I knew well enough to confide in.

I’d been working on the checkouts at the new Waitrose since it opened. They did ask me at the interview if I’d thought about training for management because of my A levels, but I told them I saw it more as a job than a career. I wanted to have that imaginative space Shaun had talked about for writing, and it paid better than the other supermarkets because of the bonus. We weren’t just staff, but “partners” in the business, which sounded a lot better, not that it particularly bothered me what I was called. What suited me was that they were prepared to be flexible about my shifts, which meant I could be around for Hope. One of the partners who collected up the shopping trolleys in the car park had learning difficulties, so they understood about that sort of thing.

Not that Hope did need me so much any more. Like any teenager, she was pushing for more independence. With Hope it wasn’t about hanging out in the seafront amusement arcades with her mates, because she didn’t really have mates; it was more things like walking to school unaccompanied and having her own money to spend on her own CDs, and, I suspected, sweets from the One Stop.

There was an open house at school that evening. We’d had a few issues with bullying at the start, but Hope seemed to be doing OK now and managing her lessons with a bit of individual support from her teaching assistant during classes, and a lot from me with her homework.

Usually, Mrs.Goode was the teacher I looked forward to seeing because music was the subject Hope excelled in. Because of all my own stuff swirling around my head it took a little while for me to understand that she was telling me that Hope wasn’t going to be allowed to continue going to choir. Apparently there had been several incidents when things had been said that weren’t very kind and there’d been complaints. Mrs.Goode glanced at Hope, who was sitting next to me staring at the floor, and it suddenly dawned on me, horrified, that it was my sister who had been doing the bullying in this instance.

“Perhaps Hope would like to learn an individual instrument?” Mrs.Goode suggested, eager to offer an alternative. “She’s drawn to the piano, aren’t you, Hope?”

“I’m not sure we could afford piano lessons,” I said. “And we haven’t got a piano at home.”

“I’ve spoken to the head and the school would be prepared to lend Hope a keyboard. With her gifts, I’m sure she’ll pick it up quite quickly. There are books you can get, then if she takes to it and finds she likes it, we can see about tuition...”

She mentioned the name Martin’s Music, which was where the middle-class parents at St.Cuthbert’s used to get their children’s musical instruments. It was a dark little shop, up an alley off the main pedestrianized shopping street, opposite the place where we got our shoes re-heeled. We’d often looked in the window, but we’d never gone in because Dad didn’t like the idea of Hope getting her hands on a recorder or a quarter-size violin, although she’d probably have got a better noise out of them than most kids did.

“Can we go to Martin’s Music?” Hope asked as we walked home.

“It’ll be closed now.”

“Can we go when it’s open?”

“We can, Hope, but only if you promise to be kind.”

She said nothing. Was she capable of remorse, I wondered? Even though I’d known her all her life, I never had the slightest inkling of what was going through her mind.

“Hope, you know when those boys outside the One Stop shouted at you and called you fat?” I said. “Did you get a funny feeling inside?”

“Not funny!”

“I mean a horrible feeling.”

I took her silence to mean yes.

“You see, Hope, when you say to Emily in choir that she’s singing the wrong notes, she gets that horrible feeling too. So it’s not very nice, is it?”

“Emily does sing all the wrong notes.”

Well, you’re fat, I felt like saying, but you don’t, do you?

I couldn’t get to sleep that night, but when I finally dozed off in the early hours, I dreamed I was opening the door to the consulting room and my counselor Jane was standing there with a bottle of champagne. As the cork shot across the room towards me, I woke with a jolt of elation that instantly returned to dread.

I looked at the alarm clock. Four hours to go. With the town still sleeping, I got up and went for a long walk along the clifftop, watching the sun rise over the water and the whole sky turning pink. Red sky in the morning. If I hadn’t already known, I knew then.

Hope had no idea, obviously, and I was wearing my shop uniform as usual, so she found it peculiar and unwelcome when I gave her an extra-long hug before waving her off up the road. She walked to school on her own now, but there was never a morning when I didn’t feel as if I was holding my breath until around nine, by which time I knew the school would have phoned me if she hadn’t turned up.

The bus driver said, “Cheer up, love. It may never happen!” Which I thought was a bit insensitive, given that I’d just asked for a fare to the hospital.

I tried to make my smile menacing in its insincerity, then sat down, wondering whether a woman had ever said that to a man, and what men were thinking when they said it. I mean, did they really want to brighten your day, or was it a way of saying, “You’re a miserable cow,” and getting away with it?

When I nervously opened the door to the counselor’s room, Jane said, “Come in, Tess!” without looking up from her computer screen.

“Have a seat!” Now she was smiling at me, but I could see the little flicker of terror in her eyes.

For a split second I thought, I don’t have to do this. Why don’t I tell her that I’ve changed my mind and just leave not knowing? I’d always said that not knowing was the worst thing, but now it suddenly seemed like the attractive option. Except I did know.

“I’m afraid it is a positive result.”

I thought I’d explored all the possible feelings I might have on hearing those words—because you do that, don’t you, hoping that if you really believe the worst, you’ll trick it out of happening?—but it wasn’t like any of those scenarios. I suppose that’s why they tell you to sit down, because you feel like you’re falling through a void. I’d never understood before why being seated would help.

Jane’s lips were moving, but I couldn’t really hear what she was saying because my brain was a blur. I’d done all the research. When we left New York, Shaun had presented me with a laptop for writing, but once I’d got the Internet at home it was like discovering an infinite library and I spent a lot of time reading, not just about cancer. I knew that when you test positive for a mutation of the brCA 1 or 2 genes—mine, Jane was saying, was brCA 2—you’ve got two choices. You can opt for preventative surgery. First a bilateral mastectomy, then removal of the ovaries, leading to an early menopause. Or you can choose surveillance, which means you get a mammogram and MRI scan every year, so you can act quickly if anything shows up.

But it wasn’t really my choice, Jane seemed to be telling me now. Even though the cancer tends to occur a little bit earlier as it passes down through the generations, they’d still be pretty reluctant to give me radical surgery at the age of twenty-five, especially since I hadn’t yet had children.

“But if you’re offering me yearly mammograms and MRI scans, you must think it’s a possibility?” I argued.

“It’s very unlikely.”

“But it was very unlikely that I’d test positive, wasn’t it?”

Jane looked at her notes.

“Your grandmother died at fifty-one. Your mother was forty-eight,” she said. “You’ve got time on your side.”

“But Mum was forty-three when she got cancer the first time... so that brings it down to forty for me...”

“We can’t put a date on it, Tess,” said Jane. “You may never get it. Or it may not happen till you’re seventy.”

“But it could happen tomorrow!”

Jane sighed. She wasn’t going to lie to me.

“If I have the surgery, then my chances of getting cancer go back to the same as everyone else’s?”

“That’s right.”

“So not zero, then?”

“Not zero, no.” She sighed. “Look, Tess, it’ll take a while to process this... you don’t have to make any decisions right away. What I want you to hold on to, Tess, is that knowledge is power.”

That’s what we’d agreed during the counseling. I’d been so relieved when I was eventually offered the test, I’d kind of forgotten that getting it wasn’t the real battle.

Knowledge is power. As I walked back to the bus stop, I’d never felt more powerless. A random act of biology had chosen to give me a death sentence, and there was nothing that I could do to change that.

Word must have got around that I’d gone for a hospital appointment, because there was normally a bit of banter, but today my colleagues seemed quieter than usual. Maybe the fear showed on my face. I spent my shift on autopilot, with all my options repeating in my head so loudly that on several occasions I forgot to ask about cash back.

“You all right, Tess?” my supervisor enquired, when she came to sort out a jammed till roll.

“I’m fine,” I said.

It was true, wasn’t it? There was nothing wrong with me. I was a perfectly healthy woman, but it felt as if I was incubating something horrible inside me, like in Alien. The strange thing was that it wasn’t alien at all. It was in my DNA. Like curly hair, it was part of who I was. That was the impossible bit to get my head around.

Surveillance was a peculiar word to use about the wait-and-see approach, because it felt more like the cancer was watching me than like I was watching it.

Usually, I passed the time on the checkout by making up stories in my head about the customers from their shopping. You can tell a lot about a person from the items in their trolley. I’m not just talking about whether they’re having a party or they’ve got a cat.

Now each item moving towards me on the conveyor belt seemed to carry additional significance.

Weren’t pomegranate seeds supposed to be superfoods that warded off cancer?

“What do you do with them?” I asked the young career woman in a neat little suit from Next, because we were encouraged to build rapport with the customers.

“Anything really,” she said, distractedly. “Scatter them on salad, that kind of thing.”

So why the diet cola? In America, it actually had a label saying that one of the ingredients was known to cause cancer in rats.

Are hot flushes as bad as they say? I wanted to ask the middle-aged woman whose basket included a packet of Menopace tablets, a box of pantiliners and a jar of low-calorie hot chocolate.

Hadn’t the bloke with three-for-the-price-of-two Doritos, a jar of dip and a four-pack of lager heard the advice about maintaining a sensible weight and eating your five-a-day?

“Evening in?”

“Wanna join me?” he said.

I pretended I hadn’t heard. You’d be surprised how many offers I got.

I’d have been more tempted by the guy with Parma ham, ciabatta and a bag of rocket in his trolley. But he was in a serious enough relationship to be picking up Tampax for his partner without trying to hide them behind the toilet paper.

“You all right, Tess?” said Lewis as I walked through the racks of fruit and veg at the end of my shift.

Would he still fancy me with a flat chest? I wondered.

Since I didn’t currently have a boyfriend, wouldn’t now be the ideal time to get the operation done?Or would it be the worst time? If the purpose of surgery was to live happily ever after, wouldn’t having it ruin my chances of doing that?

I walked home, thinking that time alone would help sort out all the questions in my head, but it didn’t really.

Even if I had the surgery, I might die of something else. The mutation of the brCA gene increased your chances of pancreatic cancer, and they couldn’t usually detect that until it was too late.

When would I fit in an operation anyway?

And wasn’t there a risk to surgery? With my luck, I’d die on the operating table. And where would that leave Hope?

If I insisted on having the surgery, there’d be no going back; but if I left it, they might even find a cure.

“When you don’t know what to do, do nothing,” Mum used to say.

But look where that had got her.

That’s the problem with imaginative space. It gives you too much time to think.

Passing the O’Neills’ house, I was half-tempted to ring the bell and have a chat at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, just like we used to do after school. But Mrs.O’Neill would only tell me that God has his reasons. It wasn’t her I needed to talk to anyway. Doll was the person who had always been the counterbalance to my tendency to dwell on things, and she didn’t live there any more.

Doll got her wedding and Dave got his wife. That sounds jealous, which I wasn’t really, because in my heart of hearts I knew that they’d be great together. There was a picture of the two of them in the local paper, in the country hotel with the Jacuzzis. Ironically, it appeared on the same day as the headline Fred Out because Fred had sustained a cruciate ligament injury and wouldn’t play again for the rest of the season.

I’d thought about sending them a card, but I couldn’t find the words because I was still smarting over the things she’d said and the things I’d said. I’d sounded like I’d hated her, which wasn’t true, but it still wasn’t on, what she’d done, and we couldn’t just pretend it hadn’t happened. If I’d had a self-righteous notion that denying Doll my friendship would be her punishment, though, that was an own goal, because I was the one who’d lost out on companionship and fun.

Sometimes I wished Doll would just turn up at my checkout and we’d go for a coffee in my break and it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But people are loyal to their own supermarket, and The Dolls House was growing all the time, so she probably didn’t have time for shopping.

Or maybe someone had told her where I worked, and she was deliberately avoiding me?

You’d think with someone you’d known all your life, you’d be able to imagine what they’d say in a given situation even if they weren’t there, but Doll always had her own take on things. She was a cup-half-full person whereas I’d become a bit cup-half-empty since Mum. Now, I thought, there was probably a no-cups-needed kind of joke waiting for one of us to say. We’d been through all the watershed moments together—first day at school, First Communion, first period, first kiss, first parent dying, first serious boyfriend—so it seemed strange that she wouldn’t even know about first serious health dilemma.

I still believed that if I rang her up and told her about the test, she’d be straight over with a bottle of Pinot Grigio, or, these days, probably something pricier like Sancerre that the posh customers bought to go with their sea-bass fillets. But, being married, she’d then go home and tell Dave, and I couldn’t bear the thought of the two of them lying in their king-size bed, after a bout of gymnastic sex, saying, “Poor old Tess!”

When I got in, I rang Shaun. He’d encouraged me all the way through the counseling and the test, so I was dismayed to hear a stunned silence. I realized he’d also been banking on a negative, so now it wasn’t just the shock, it was as if he somehow felt responsible.

I found myself having to reassure him. “Knowledge is power, Shaun. That’s what we have to hold on to...”

But as Kev’s partner, Shaun’s concern was no longer solely for me. “Is it possible Kevin’s inherited the bad gene too?”

“I suppose it must be a fifty-fifty chance,” I said, slightly irritated. I couldn’t bear my brother making it his problem right now.

“Please don’t tell Kev,” I pleaded.

“I think I have to, Tess,” Shaun said.

Which felt like another door closing.

I felt so miserable, I was going to skip my writing class. Then Hope arrived home with the promised keyboard on a special little trolley and immediately started experimenting, and I was sure I’d go mad if I stayed home.

The creative-writing class was part of the Adult Education Program at the local community college and Leo, our teacher, was a university professor with longish salt-and-pepper hair swept back from his face and designer stubble. There were five of us students. Liz had an idea for a romcom set on a cruise liner; Violet was a pensioner whose grandchildren wanted her to write down some of the stories she’d told them about the war; Ashley was a teenage computer geek who was writing a fantasy novel with characters called Snork and Godroon.

We were all different, but we gelled together—and then there was Derek, a retired policeman, who considered himself above the rest of us because he had self-published a crime novel. One evening, he’d collared me on the way to the bus stop, saying we were kindred artistic spirits and would I like to go for an Indian, but I told him that I felt it might disturb the creative dynamic. I know policemen retire early, but fifty was still nearly twice my age, and, to be honest, I was a bit disturbed by his lurid descriptions of murdered women.

It wasn’t just about reading out our writing. Leo set us exercises to build up our skills, like getting us to invent characters for people in old photos he’d bring in, which was a bit like me and Mum making up stuff about people in cafes. The technical term is backstory.

Another week, we’d have to tell three anecdotes about things that had happened in our lives, two true and one false, and see if the class guessed. It was a way of practicing storytelling skills.

I worked out that the trick was to set the scene. No point in saying that you’d met George Clooney unless you gave all the details, like you were walking through Leicester Square and there was this big crowd of people outside the cinema waiting for stars to arrive on the red carpet, and you suddenly realized that you’d inadvertently got yourself onto the wrong side of the cordon, when this limo drew up beside you and all these photographers closed in, so you couldn’t move. Then this man got out, straightening his tie, buttoning and unbuttoning his jacket, like men do when they’re on chat shows—I think it’s a nervous thing, but maybe it’s something to do with creasing—and he was so close you could smell his aftershave, and he looked at you, and gave you this, like, “You don’t quite realize who I am, do you? Wait! Now you do!” kind of smile, before moving on in a blizzard of motor drive.

They were all fooled by that one.

For our homework, Leo would give us a word, like “greed,” or “winter”—it could be anything—and we had to write something: a description, a bit of dialogue, a poem, a story, whatever we wanted. But it was important to do it.

“What do writers do?” he’d ask, if anyone turned up with excuses.

“They write,” we’d chorus.

I loved learning a new skill. I suppose it was escapism. When I sat at my computer, everything beyond the Word document just disappeared. Usually I wrote far too much and Leo’s advice to me was to throw away the dictionary and keep it simple.

He had a wide vocabulary though, and was always dropping words like “contextualize” and “Kafkaesque” into the lessons. He was also incredibly well-read. Whenever he mentioned an author he admired, I’d make a note and order their books from the library—Nabokov, Kundera, Grass—for me it was more like doing a course in European literature than creative writing, because I’d be thinking, these authors are so amazing, why am I even bothering? But Leo said we weren’t there to become great writers, we were there to become better writers.

“Write about what you know,” he said.

“Who wants to read about a supermarket?”

Somehow I’d become the joker in the class, which I never was at school. You can be different in a place where nobody knows you, can’t you? More yourself, somehow, or the person you’d like to be.

“Who wants to read about a small-town housewife?” Leo countered.

“I’m not a housewife,” I said.

“No, but Emma Bovary was.”

Occasionally Leo gave me this amused smile, which wasn’t patronizing, or avuncular. I’m not sure of the word for it.

“I’m not Flaubert,” I said.

“No,” said Leo, simply, making me wish I hadn’t tried to show off.

He had this ability to make you feel really intelligent or really stupid and the tension between the two was simultaneously scary and exhilarating. “Tension” was a very Leo word.

The class usually went to the pub afterwards, and sometimes Leo would come along too and keep us rapt with anecdotes and quotations. The thing about him I liked most was his voice, which was melodic and a tiny bit Welsh, like Anthony Hopkins’ or Michael Sheen’s, with an actor’s range from whisper to bellow.

Once, he mentioned the novel he’d written and how the publisher had put a terrible cover on it and mucked up the publicity, which was the reason you couldn’t find it in a bookshop.

“They do say that those who can’t, teach,” said Derek, when Leo was up at the bar, which the rest of us thought was incredibly arrogant and ungenerous.

I ordered Leo’s novel from the library. Of Academic Interest was a dark comedy about an English lecturer on a university campus in the eighties. I read it straight away. The tone reminded me a little bit of a novel I’d read by John Updike. When I said that, Leo’s eyes lit up, so I didn’t tell him I wasn’t that big a fan of that type of writing.

The class took my mind off my test result for a couple of hours, but as soon as I left, it all started rushing back. Standing at the bus stop, I was so preoccupied I didn’t even notice the car pulling up beside me until Leo wound down the window and leaned across the passenger seat.

“Hop in!” he said. “I’ll give you a lift.”

“No, you’re all right. It’s too far...”

“Please!” he said. “I’d like to.”

So then it seemed ruder to refuse.

For the first few minutes, I just sat staring through the windscreen, aware of him occasionally glancing across at me when he slowed down at traffic lights.

“Are you going to say what the problem is, Tess?” he finally asked. “You don’t seem your usual effervescent self.”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me it?”

He made it sound like an assignment, and at first I thought, No, and then I thought, What’s to lose? We’ve got at least half an hour and we can’t just sit here in silence, so I started in with my mother dying of cancer and the cloud hanging over me and how I’d used all my powers of persuasion to get a genetic test and how the irony was that I now wished I hadn’t.

“But you haven’t got cancer?” Leo asked, his voice gentle and tentative like Anthony Hopkins’—in Shadowlands, not Silence of the Lambs, obviously.

“No,” I said. “But it’s likely I will get it, at some point.”

Somehow it helped to say it all out loud to someone intelligent and sympathetic, especially after Shaun not being much help.

“There are steps I can take to prevent it, but they’re pretty drastic and I can’t get my head around them...,” I went on.

“Do you have to decide right now?”

“I won’t stop thinking about it unless I do. That’s just the way I am.”

Leo said nothing for the last few miles, but when he stopped outside our house, he switched off the engine and turned to face me, looking into my eyes very seriously.

“On my desk,” he said. “I have a tray marked ‘In’ and a tray marked ‘Out,’ but I also have a tray marked ‘Pending.’ And when I’m not sure what to do about something, I’ll put it in the ‘Pending’ tray, and then I’ve done something with it, you see?”

He had this way of approaching things from a different angle. You’d think he was simply giving you information, and then you’d realize it was a metaphor.

“You’re saying I could make a decision not to make a decision for the moment?” I clarified.

Rewarded with the amused smile, I found myself wondering how he kept his stubble the same length. It was definitely more than a five-o’clock shadow, so he probably shaved every two or three days. But if that was the case, with seven days in a week, you’d expect that on some Thursdays, there would be more growth than others. Perhaps he shaved just once, on Monday morning, and that way we always caught him at the same point. By Sunday night, he was probably approaching a beard, which he’d then shave off in the morning, starting the whole cycle again.

I realized I was staring at his mouth.

“Why don’t you ever write about any of this?” he asked softly.

“It’s a bit personal, isn’t it?” I said, suddenly aware of being physically much closer to him than I’d ever been.

In the distance, I could hear Hope on her keyboard. She had already managed to pick out the notes of “Is This the Way to Amarillo?” which was everywhere because of Comic Relief.

“Graham Greene said that writers have a chip of ice in their hearts,” Leo said. “What do you think he meant?”

“That they look at things in a detached way?” I guessed.

“Exactly!” he said. “Writers see everything that happens as material.”

His eyes held mine for a moment longer and for a split second I was sure he was going to kiss me, then he leaned right across my body to open the passenger door to let me out, and drove off without saying another word. Of course he wasn’t going to kiss me! I told myself, standing on the pavement, feeling slightly light-headed. He was married. His wife worked at the university. But my body still felt trembly inside, and his voice remained in my head all the time I was trying to get Hope to stop playing and go to bed.

I sat down at my laptop. The word Leo had given us to write about was “holiday.”

I found myself thinking about the best holiday we’d ever had as a family. It must have been the summer of 1995, ironically, the year when the brCA 2 gene was identified. I remembered it as such a happy time, with Hope still a toddler, and a bit more room in the house because of the boys leaving home. I’d done really well in my exams and Mum had finished the chemo so Dad splashed out on a package to Tenerife to celebrate. He’d won a trophy at the Irish pub in Playa de Los Cristianos for the best Elvis Presley impersonation with his rendition of “The Wonder of You,” and Mum bought the painted plate that stood next to it on the knick-knack shelf in the kitchen. And all that time, in a lab somewhere, scientists in white coats and masks were using those pipette things they always show on the news when there’s a breakthrough in genetics to squirt colored liquid into test tubes and discover things that would spell disaster for all of us. Not that it was the scientists’ fault, obviously.

I found myself writing about a family by a pool in the Canaries. It was curiously comforting putting myself in my Mum’s shoes, imagining how she must have felt lying in her one-piece swimsuit with the padded cups, with the sky all blue above her and not a cloud in sight.

I wasn’t sure whether it was the beginning of a story, or even a poem, but I gave it the title, “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.”

At the next class, I was more nervous than I’d ever been reading my homework out, because it mattered, somehow.

There was a long silence when I finished.

“That’s the sound of people wanting more,” Leo said, eventually. “And it’s so much better than the sound of people wanting less,” he added, somehow managing to wink privately at me and nod in Derek’s general direction at the same time.