Authors: Kate Eberlen
‘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 humour.
‘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 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 counsellor 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 counsellor’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 counselling. 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 cashback or give out the charity
tokens.
‘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 that 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, a box of Tena and a jar of Options 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 Lil-Lets for his partner
without trying to hide them behind the toilet roll.
‘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.