“She was really going for it you know,” Tom winked, all at
once miming the incident for me.
“This is a joke. You’re joking right?”
“Of course I am you fucking potato-head. What are you like?”
I took a moment to mop my brow and dispel the images of Sally “really going for
it” with three geezers before draining my glass and asking Tom for a fag.
“No, you’ve given up,” he said, stubbing his cigarette out
and slipping his packet into his top pocket. “No, nothing happened between
Sally and me. I mean, that was the point, it just wasn’t there… for either of
us, so we drew a nice little neat line under it and pretended it never
happened. Have you been stewing on that for the past… however many years?” he
frowned.
“No,” I lied.
“Good, because there’s nothing to stew on. If anyone should
be stewing on anything, it should be me,” Tom pointed out.
Tom adjusted his position to demonstrate that the
conversation had left him physically uncomfortable then looked down around his
wheels for his coat hanger.
“Here it is,” I said, spotting it on the floor and handing
it to him.
He fed it into his plaster cast and poked about a bit until
he found the spot.
“It’s going to be great wearing this thing for the next two
months,” he scratched. “Anyway, what were we talking about. Oh yes, your little
bundle of joy. Jesus, you’re going to be a dad.”
“So you keep saying.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Numb from the eyebrows downwards,” I replied.
And I did, more or less. See, Sally’s wonderful news came on
top of a whole heap of other recent worries and my brain seemed to have
responded the way it always did, namely by pretending it hadn’t heard. The
whole thing simply wouldn’t sink in and I couldn’t make up my mind how to
react, one way or the other. I guess it’s often the way with guys. We all say
we want kids, just as we all say we want to be in the SAS or the World Cup
final, but when it actually happens most of us just freeze, which weeds most of
us out of the SAS and World Cup finals, but fatherhood is different.
Anyone can be a father. All that’s required is half a bottle
of rosé and nothing good on the telly and hey presto, your very own little
miracle. How could this not batter a man sideways?
“It’s an awesome responsibility,” Tom agreed. “So you want
it then?”
“What? Of course I want it. Wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah I guess, but I’m not the one in the hot seat, am I?
Has Sally had the scan and the test and all that now?”
“No, no we’ve got to do that next week to confirm
everything. Actually, I’m not even supposed to tell anyone because they say
you’re not meant to until you have the scan.”
“Why?”
“Well, in case the baby’s damaged, or deformed or something
and has to… you know, be aborted. It’s a bit hard on the mum then having to go
back and tell everyone that she’s not pregnant any more.”
Tom agreed then asked me why I was telling him then.
“Well Christ I’ve got to tell someone haven’t I, I’m going
out of my head. Don’t tell anyone else though.”
Tom looked around his little empty flat and then down at his
plaster casts, wheel chair and silent, dust-covered phone.
“Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.”
We talked a little more about Sally and babies and so on,
covering all the usual topics such as names, genders and schooling before
exhausting all avenues of responsible conversation and got back to the subject
of sex.
“So, did you end up giving Elenor one or what?”
“No. I almost did but in the end I didn’t,” I finally
admitted. Tom nodded and said he could see it was heading that way from a mile
off. “Yeah well, I don’t know what I was thinking,” I said. “I wasn’t myself.”
“Yes you were. Everyone says that when they do something
stupid, ‘I wasn’t myself’ but that’s bollocks, one up from saying ‘it wasn’t
me, it was some big lads who made me do it’. Sometimes you’ve got to hold up
your hands and take it like a man.”
“When did you get so grown up? Only three weeks ago you were
replacing Rosemary’s granddaughter’s picture with a picture of Nick Griffin and
blaming it on Godfrey. Now you’re holding up your hands and taking it like a
man.”
“She didn’t notice for three days. What a blindo. Anyway,
that’s different, that was just a joke. What you did doesn’t compare.”
“Nearly did,” I corrected him.
“Fine, nearly did. It still doesn’t compare though. You
could’ve fucked up your whole life for the sake of a quick guilty poke. And not
just your life, Sally’s life too. Did you ever think about that?” he asked.
“Yes yes yes, I thought about it,” I assured him, though
that sounded even worse so I added, “which is why I didn’t go through with it.”
This wasn’t so much a lie, more a fuzzy grey area.
“Well that’s for the best,” he said. “Believe me, you
would’ve hated yourself for it. Seriously, you would’ve. Because you love
Sally… no no no, I’m not getting soppy or anything, I’m just saying, you do.
And if you had ended up banging Elenor you would’ve felt so guilty that you
would’ve never been able to feel the same about Sally again. And that’s a
terrible price to pay for a bit of dirty nooky,” he lectured.
“Yeah, I know you’re right,” I said, rubbing my face and
reaching for another beer. I passed Tom one too and we paused the conversation
to top up our glasses.
“You reckon she is dirty then?” I asked when we resumed.
“Old Elenor?”
“God yeah, a right dirty old cow I bet,” he conjectured,
giving my mixed feelings a quick stir. “You can always tell.”
“I can see Elenor with three geezers more than I can see
Sally with three geezers,” I told him.
“I can see both of them with three geezers – couple of
slags,” Tom informed me, taking a considered puff on his cigarette. “Anyway,
you don’t want to worry about that, dirty nooky ain’t all it’s cracked up to
be. And after one or two rounds the appeal’s gone anyway so that all you’re
left with is a big load of guilt and a skeleton that’ll rattle around in your
cupboard for the rest of your life. Honestly mate, it ain’t worth it.”
“I know. At least I know now,” I agreed, and I did. As sexy
as I found Elenor, I also found her seriously annoying. I just hadn’t been able
to see that side of her for a few weeks because my horn kept obscuring the
view. A bucket of cold reality in the face and I suddenly couldn’t understand
why I’d even wanted her in my room.
“So what’s she been like since the party?”
“A little bit offish actually. She hasn’t said anything
about it so I figure it’s best left alone.”
“Probably annoyed at you for turning her down. Girls like
Elenor don’t like to be turned down,” Tom surmised. “They’re not used to it.”
I had thought about pulling her to one side to talk to her
but when I saw how funny she was being with me I decided to take the coward’s
way out and simply put up my own set of shutters. Chuck Godfrey not talking to
me in the mix, the rest of the Xtremers glaring at me because my mate had got
their mate fired and Norman popping around every five minutes to bang on about
his fucking report and I can’t tell you what a joy work was at the moment.
“Still, look on the bright side,” Tom said. “You’ll probably
never get another chance with Elenor, not now that you fucked this one up.
That’s the rule. Blokes only ever get one shot at a girl and if you don’t take
it there and then, a lifetime of trying will never present you with another,”
he reckoned, making me remember my near-miss with Abigail all those
regret-filled years ago.
“Hmm,” I agreed.
“Cheer up mate, that’s a good thing,” Tom said, when he saw
the look his last insight had left on my face.
“Yeah. Yeah, I know it is,” I conceded.
“Don’t worry, just think, this time next year, you’ll be a
dad. Then you’ll really know what problems are all about,” Tom winked.
I’m so excited about my news that I
want to tell everyone, but I still haven’t had my scan and until I do I mustn’t
say a word. But you’ve no idea how hard that is.
I can’t make up my mind if Andrew’s taking it all in his
stride or is contemplating doing a runner. He certainly seems to have a few
anxieties he’s not letting me in on because he looks positively stilted every
time we talk about it. Not so much the proud father who’s impregnated his wife
as the guilty little pooch who’s pooed somewhere you’re yet to find.
But I couldn’t be more excited if I tried. I drift off to
sleep every night dreaming about my baby. Being with him or her. Taking care of
him or her and smothering them in love. It feels so right that I can’t
understand why we waited this long. A whole new chapter of my life is opening
up before me and I suddenly feel complete. My God, if this is how I feel after
only ten weeks, what am I going to feel like when my baby actually arrives? I
know it’s an over-used expression but it really feels like I have a miracle
growing inside me. And all those children I’ve taught over the years, and all
the children in the other classes, other schools and other countries, they all
must’ve brought the same feelings into the world with them.
Amazing then how the world’s not a nicer place isn’t it?
Sally got her period.
It came out of the blue because up until this point she’d
been utterly utterly utterly convinced she’d been pregnant. It was something
that Sally just hadn’t expected.
“Come on love, don’t fret it. After all, we hadn’t planned
that one anyway,” I said in an ill-conceived attempt to cheer her up. I then
went on to compare her false alarm to finding twenty quid in the street, only
to realise it had fallen out of your own pocket in the first place.
Not my finest hour.
So I tried to gee her up with a couple of Nicole Kidman
movies and an industrial-sized box of Maltesers which did the trick for a
couple of nights…
But then something really awful happened.
Sally continued to feel nauseous and bloated for another
week or so, prompting her to seek a second opinion in case she actually was
still pregnant. And that’s when it was confirmed to us that she wasn’t.
No, Sally actually had cancer.
It smacks you right in the face when you say it, doesn’t it?
But that was the fact of the matter. Sally had cancer. Or at least, suspected
cancer. Ovarian to be precise.
We had it confirmed a couple of days later after Sally went
up for tests and something called a transvaginal ultrasound screening. We’d
tried to take our minds off the worst by joking about the name, with Sally
reckoning it sounded like Dracula’s music system or something, but the joking
stopped when the screening actually found something.
What a nightmare! And one that had an effect on me that of a
thousand buckets of cold water couldn’t have matched, dislodging all remaining
thoughts of Elenor from my brain. Though these would later come back to haunt
me.
At first, I couldn’t take it in because cancer wasn’t
something young school teachers got. Cancer was something hell-raising movie legends
got after a lifetime of booze and broads. At the very least, it was something
your great Auntie Ada got and was perfectly all right about.
“Don’t worry about me, I’ve had a good
innings. Just see to it that my cats are well taken care of and I’ll leave you
all my money. What’s that? Why yes, I do have an old Hessian sack and a couple
of bricks. Why do you ask?”
But young, intelligent, kind and caring school teachers?
What was all that about?
At first, it was so much to take in that both Sally and I chose
to bury our heads in the sand. We didn’t go as far and kidding ourselves that
there was nothing wrong at all, but we opted to believe it wasn’t anything
serious; a tiny little polyp, small and insignificant, that could be batted
away as easily as a fly and wasn’t it lucky we found it at an early stage?
But until the doctors took a good look inside Sally, we
wouldn’t know for sure. And that was probably the hardest part. The waiting.
Days dragged their heels like you wouldn’t believe and neither of us dared to
speculate as to the extent of Sally’s disease for fear of letting it into our
minds.
It was a terrible week. I decided I couldn’t just sit still,
so I got myself down the local library and started reading up on the enemy.
Here are a few facts I found out which I want share with you before we go on
any further.
There are four stages of ovarian cancer – stage I
being the earliest and stage IV being the last. In addition to this, there are
three classifications for each stage – A, B and C (C being the least
desirable). Then you have the grades for the tumours themselves – grade
I, II and III, indicating what sort of mood the tumour's in and let's not
forget the strain of the cancer itself.
There are six main variants of ovarian cancer; serous, mucinous,
endometrioid, clear cell and a couple of others I jotted down, but
unfortunately can't read back. I thought I would be able to handle it from an
academic point of view but after only half an hour of horror, my handwriting
could've passed for Guy Fawkes' final note to the milkman.
Ovarian cancer on the whole, was the fourth most common form
of cancer in women though the survival rate was sadly poor when compared with
other cancers.
See, the thing is, if you caught it early, like with all
cancers, you could pretty much root it out and eradicate it with surgery and
drugs. But ovarian cancer's tricky because it's hidden away and the symptoms
and signals it gives off can be so easily misconstrued. Lots of women dismiss
their disease as heartburn or even indigestion. Sally dismissed hers as a baby,
something Queen Mary I did too back in 1558, much to her and the newly
rejuvenated Catholic England's dismay. As a matter of fact, the most common way
in which ovarian cancer is usually discovered is when couples go in for IVF
treatment and the scan turns up the reason they’re having difficulties.