Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Back when I was younger, Greta and I once got the stern gaze of our teacher when, sat at the back of the class, we decided to draw enormous vulvas on the textbooks.
Penises were so overrated and overexposed within the education curriculum but vulvas, now that’s not something you see doodled in the back of a school textbook every day.
That’s got some originality, that’s breaking new ground in the art of textbook graffiti.
You’d be surprised how hard it is to draw one from memory, from the clitoris down to the labia majora, making sure you got the shape and curve of things quite right. Our teacher spotted it, of course, but I always remember very clearly that we didn’t get in trouble for our art pieces.
We didn’t get in trouble mostly because Greta’s mum was in hospital at the time.
While I’ll never be thankful that Greta was only fourteen when her mum died, a part of me is thankful that, when I drew the fattest labia I could summon, we were spared the wrath of Mr Trimmer’s detention, and it was the first time she’d smiled in months.
After that, Mr Trimmer never looked at me the same way again. Probably because I gave one of the labias a very fetching bow tie.
Bill had remained annoyingly vague about why we were here, saying only, and rather obtusely, that ‘Ben just fell’.
But I could tell there was something he wasn’t telling me.
After he lent me his charger for my phone that was as flat as a dab, he had claimed he would try to stay awake, but by the time I stirred at 5.
30 a.m. on Sunday morning, he was still out like a light, long heavy snores emanating from his nasal passageways.
The first rays of a pinky-red dawn were beginning to filter through the hospital blinds, stretching wide across the linoleum flooring.
I rose to my feet, trotted the ten feet over to the other end of the corridor and stretched my arms as high as I could above my head.
Then I noticed, through the glazed window to the hospital room, I could just about make out the figure of Ben sitting upright in bed.
He was awake, presumably watching TV with the colours of the screen casting an iridescent gleam across his face.
I crept into the room as quietly as I could, wary of catching the attention of a rogue doctor or nurse who might curtly remind me of the hospital’s visiting hours.
‘Hey, champ,’ I said, keeping my tone as light and playful as possible. ‘I told you if you kept doing it too much you’d go blind or your palms would get hairy.’
‘What’s up, sport?’ he replied, mirroring my tone of fake ebullience. I could see it clearly on his face. He looked tired, no, actually he looked weary. As if someone had taken some kind of industrial-grade emotional vacuum to suck all of the joy and hope out of his face.
‘Is anyone going to tell me what’s wrong with you, or am I going to have to play doctor and diagnose you myself?’ I asked, half joking, but I was starting to feel the unease in my gut. Something wasn’t right and it had been that way for a few days now.
He chuckled softly, though the sound quickly faded, leaving behind a brief, pained wince that I’m sure he hoped I wouldn’t notice. I pulled up one of the chairs, its design just as obnoxiously uncomfortable as the ones out in the hallway, and sat down across from him.
‘I don’t want to lie to you, Ruth,’ he said, his voice measured and steady. ‘But after I tell you this, I want you to promise me that you won’t try to suffer with me through all of this.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I asked, confused not just by his words, but by the mournful and maudlin way he spoke them, as though each word was causing him a level of anguish that I couldn’t hope to understand.
‘Look,’ he said, meeting my eyes, ‘one of the reasons I fell in love with you is because you’re kind, Ruth. Which is not something that’s particularly ubiquitous nowadays. You’re kind to people who don’t deserve it, and I don’t want you to be kind to me anymore.’
I’d be lying if I said my mind hadn’t started piecing things together before I sat down, but I didn’t want to believe he was going to say what I thought he was.
‘So, what is it?’ I asked, trying to stay steady, but my voice was faltering and breaking. I wasn’t any kind of medical professional, but I at least wanted to know the name of the thing inside his body trying to kill him.
‘Glioblastoma,’ he said finally, the word landing with an emotional weight I recognised all too well.
He must have seen the vacant expression as I tried to wonder what kind of cancer it exactly was, I think I had heard of it before.
‘It’s a brain tumour,’ he clarified, ‘a proper nasty, aggressive one. It grows fast and spreads through the brain tissue like a forest fire.’
‘And… what? You can’t get chemo?’ I asked, desperately.
‘They can do surgery, and they can do chemo,’ he replied with a rhythm to his words, as if he was repeating what he had been told by professionals numerous times. ‘They’re asking if I want to start next week.’
Something told me that, though he’d stopped speaking, he hadn’t said everything he wanted to, so I stayed quiet.
‘I’m scared, Ruth, I’m really scared,’ he said with a vulnerability I don’t think I had ever seen from him before, even when we were married.
‘I don’t want to die but I’m just so scared how this thing is going to change me.
The doctor said as it grows, it’ll affect my mood, my personality, I can get violent, aggressive.
And I don’t want to change, Ruth. And I don’t want anyone’s last memories of me to be of someone I wasn’t. ’
His gaze dropped, fixing a glare on some vacant patch of air.
‘So, how long are we talking?’ I felt like that was the question I had really been waiting to ask.
‘I’ve got about twelve months if I go through with chemo and surgery,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The doctor said two years if things go really well.’
I felt like I should have started sobbing then, but it all seemed too cruel to process fully. All I could manage was the simplest, most primal thought pounding around my head.
‘But… I don’t want you to die,’ I whispered, as if this would somehow stop the tumour in its tracks, raise its hands as if to surrender and retreat back to where it came from, as if me saying that had some kind of impact.
‘I don’t want to die either, Ruth,’ he affirmed, his voice breaking as I could see him successfully hold back the tears from spilling.
He hadn’t often cried during our marriage but there was something about him refusing to weep now, that felt even more devastating.
‘But them’s the breaks, ain’t it?’ He forced another artificial smile through the tears, though the brittle bravado wasn’t fooling either of us.
I knew he was doing his best to try and suppress everything he was feeling for my benefit: the fear, the regret, the grief, the looming realisation of your own mortality.
We all know, deep down, that we’re going to die someday.
But there’s a moment when that abstract, distant notion rapidly hardens into a cold, blunt truth.
I saw it at least once a week when I helped someone come in to plan their funeral.
I think we assume that death will only come for us once we feel sated by life, as though having your life abruptly and tragically cut short is something that happens to other people, never actually to us.
In an instant, you feel the weight of every ordinary day you wished away, every postponed moment or holiday, and realise you never had as much time as you thought.
‘But you have to get the chemo, Ben,’ I urged. ‘I mean, I can’t remember the details, but I heard about this guy on the news, he had this inoperable brain tumour or something, and he fought it. He lived another six, seven years. There’s still so much life you could still have.’
‘Ruth,’ he said gently. ‘You know, the really cruel thing about glioblastoma is that it always comes back. Always. The five-year survival rate? Five to ten per cent, and the percentage it comes back: ninety.’
‘How do you know that?’ I asked.
‘Do you want to know how much time I’ve spent on the internet researching this thing?’ he replied wryly. ‘All my targeted ads on my phone now are about cancer, or wills, or skydiving, weirdly.’
I didn’t know what else to say, I didn’t even know how to react.
He turned his eyes to listlessly watch the television as I just stared intensely down at the hospital bed sheets.
After staring at it for so long, I now realised its design was made up of thousands of primary colour caducei interlocking with one another.
‘Did you not wonder why I’ve been at home more?’ he asked, with a little jest as if it was all one big prank he had been playing. ‘I’ve been signed off work since the diagnosis.’
‘I noticed you’ve been arguing with Bill a lot more.’
‘Yeah, that’s something for another day.’
‘Oh, Ben, love,’ I murmured, sliding my chair closer to his bed and reaching out, wrapping my hand carefully around his and squeezing gently. He turned to me, his eyes still glassy and exhausted, and I lifted his hand to my face, nuzzling my lips against it tenderly.
‘I’ll always be kind to you, Ben,’ I said, ‘and you know there’s nothing you can do to stop that.’
I didn’t know if losing Ben this way was worse than losing Greta.
Is it better to know someone’s days are numbered so you can make the most of them, or to have no idea, and for their last day to feel just like any other?
More and more, I felt death begin to take on a shape, its vague, shadowy ambiguity sharpening.
It was starting to feel like this vindictive amorphous being, deliberately taking things from me just to see how much it could make me hurt.
Ben didn’t speak any more after that, probably realising that another person knowing about his diagnosis made his impending death feel even more real.
The life he’d always enjoyed so much was coming to an abrupt end.
After a while, he gently closed his eyes, and I sat there, watching him sleep for a bit longer.
Not in a creepy way – at least, I didn’t think it was creepy.
I was just trying to imagine what he might look like dead, to prepare myself for the crushing weight I would feel when I looked into his open casket. Okay… maybe that was a bit creepy.
There were no storm clouds bellowing to echo my mood; instead, the Sunday morning blushed pink and red, a ‘shepherd’s delight’, while the sun rose, devouring the colours as it climbed across the sky.
A lovely, soft-spoken nurse came in. Instead of kicking me out for violating sacred visitor hours, she asked if we wanted any tea and then returned with her own personal mug, since the rest of the visitor crockery was in the dishwasher.
I promised I’d take good care of it as I lifted it to my eyeline to see why she favoured this particular piece of crockery.
The faded but still visible image on the front was one of the Virgin Mary, hands outstretched and immersed in a cloud just outside what I presumed were the gates of heaven with some Italian writing that had been worn away over time.
I noticed at about ten that the TV was still on with the sound muted, and I casually turned my head to see what the headlines of today were.
Probably something dire about the economy, I thought, or some middle-aged clot moaning about the colour of bin bags and some numpty marrying a toaster.
As I carefully took a sip of tea, I began to process what some half-handsome newsperson was saying.
Oh. No. I read the ticker.
The TellTale Killer Returns: Deadly Serial Killer Resurfaces After Two Years. Police Issue Warning.
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.
I grabbed the remote and rapidly cranked the volume up, in the moment not caring if I woke Ben, as I stared, slack-jawed and stunned, at the screen.
Every muscle in my body felt like it was burning, frying from the inside out with a crackling, electric anxiety of a million volts.
Sweat coated every inch of my skin within an instant, and my breath caught, jagged in my throat, as I reread the headline on the screen again and again, trying to make sense of it.
And there it was, front and centre, in glorious, horrifying detail: the note I’d written, sent to the paper the night before.
I will strike again.
The newscasters were already deep into their analysis, speaking in grave, morose tones about the TellTale Killer’s return and what this meant for the UK.
Plastered across the screen, I flicked to the subsequent channels doing their morning updates and it was on, every, single one.
Another solemn-looking man, another solemn-looking woman, and then three middle-aged women on a bright red sofa discussing whether the TellTale Killer was ‘a narcissist, an unstable genius, or just a really sassy Gemini’.
It was as though I’d been playing Buckaroo without knowing it, stacking one thing after another, oblivious to the inevitable chaos that was about to commence.
I’d thought I had control, I thought it would never explode to this degree.
But in that moment, I understood just how spectacularly I’d fucked up.
The muscles in my hand went limp and the mug slipped from my hand and shattered on the hospital room floor.
I am so, so sorry, Mary.