Authors: Kate Eberlen
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 counselling 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 onto . . .’
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 Programme at the local tertiary college and Leo, our tutor, 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 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 practising 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 the American author 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 GCSEs 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 coloured 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.
Maybe, when things are going well, you shouldn’t tempt fate by trying to make them better.
Our second daughter endured a trickier start to her life than Flora had. During the pregnancy, Charlotte suffered badly from morning sickness. Then the baby was late, which upset the
timetable.