The First Last Kiss (43 page)

His face breaks out into the biggest smile I have ever seen. His skin rumples around his eyes with lines stretching out towards his temples like arrows shooting from a bow.

He grabs my hands and pulls me into a hug. ‘You’re ready, you’re really, honestly ready?’ he whispers into my ear. ‘You’re not just saying it because of the . . . cancer?’

I pull back and stare at him intently. I need him to know this isn’t a knee-jerk reaction.

‘Ry, I’ve been trying to tell you this since I got back from New York. Being out there made me realize that I’m ready for the next stage of our life. I’m more than ready! More than anything I want to be a mum.’

He grins then, and I feel a spark of hope. Someday we will look back and realize it was a narrow escape, a second chance, no, a third chance. We’ve overcome obstacles before, we’ll do it again. ‘So let’s go in now and let them tell us the good news, OK?’ Ryan doesn’t answer. He just nods and swallows so his Adam’s apple bobs up and down in his throat like a buoy. I hold out my hand to him and I smile, bigger and wider and brighter than I have ever smiled before. I can feel the positivity flooding my body like the sunlight that is now filtering through the clouds. It’s all going to be alright. I know it. I just know it.

We’re sitting in silence outside the consultant’s office, steadfastly watching the clock. But the digits are barely moving. We’ve only been here five minutes but it feels like five hours. Time has slowed almost to a standstill. I’m hoping this is a sign that we have time. Lots of it. Because suddenly I feel like I’ve wasted so much.

I look up and everything goes into slow motion as the door opens and there he is. I’m sure there is a head, attached to a body, in some clothes. Perhaps there is a white coat. I don’t notice because all I can see is his smile. A gentle, coaxing, encouraging smile.

This is A Very Good Sign. I am certain of this. His floating mouth reminds me of the Cheshire Cat’s and I watch transfixed as it morphs into an ‘oooh’ as he speaks.

‘Mr Coo-ooooh-ooo-per,’ he yawns.

Why has everything gone so weird? I feel like I have taken hallucinogenic drugs or something . . .

‘Molly?’ I look at Ryan but he is yawning too, his face taking on Edvard Munch-like qualities as he curves and twists and then . . . everything goes black.

We are sitting in the consultant’s office and I’m sipping more strong, sweet tea as Ryan holds me. I fainted apparently. How embarrassing. A nurse is smiling kindly at me, the consultant is sitting behind his desk.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I mumble, to no one in particular.

‘Don’t worry,’ the doctor replies. I’m relieved to see that there’s now a face attached to the mouth and a body attached to his head. ‘You chose the best place to faint. Plenty of people here to help!’ The nurse smiles in acknowledgement of his weak joke. The doctor – Dr George Harper, his badge says – isn’t smiling any more. His face is serious, kindly, considerate.
Benign
, I think. Then I mentally chastise myself. Why has that word appeared in my brain to torment me?

‘So Mr and Mrs Cooper,’ Dr Harper says. A giggle erupts out of my mouth and he glances at me like I might just hit the floor again.

‘She always laughs when she’s nervous,’ Ryan explains with a smile, and the doctor nods patiently.

‘It’s because it makes us sound so old! But we’re not!’ I blurt out. Ryan squeezes my hand. ‘We’re so young . . . ’ I whisper.

It occurs to me that I would love to see Ryan with grey hair. Grey and old and lined and wrinkled, I want to see that desperately. I can feel my chest tightening, my breath shortening and the tears coming back. I blink furiously.

Ryan squeezes my hand again, and I smile at him weakly.

‘So,’ the consultant says, ‘we have the results of your CT scan and . . . ’

Pause.

There’s no noise in the room, not a single breath, not a whisper from the trees outside, only the wall clock can be heard.

‘It’s not good news, I’m afraid.’

Tick.

I gasp as I take a breath.

‘What do you mean exactly?’ Ryan says. His voice is a whisper. He’s squeezing my hand.

Tick
.

Clinging on for dear life.

Tick
.

‘This is not stage three as we suspected; the scan has shown it’s stage four. As well as the presence of melanoma in your lymph glands, the metastatic cancer has spread,’ the consultant says gravely. He folds his hands on his desk. I glance at the picture on his desk. A wife, two kids. Boy and girl. ‘And the melanoma cancer cells have formed a metastatic tumour that has caused an intravasation . . . ’ Furrowed brows all round. ‘By that I mean that the cancer has spread through the walls of your lung and liver . . . ’

I think of Ryan panting after a short jog, of his swollen stomach that no amount of sit-ups could shift. He thought it was age. The dreaded 3-0. The beginning of middle-age spread. I’d joked it was ‘marriage spread’. We’d joked about it.

We’d. Joked. About. It.

Ryan is clutching me now, pulling me closer as we grasp for each other as the consultant continues to speak, the words and phrases coming out of his mouth that are another language to us. Then he nods at the nurse and she picks up the baton in the bad-news relay, talking in simpler terms that we can understand. We can try chemo, they can offer pain relief.

Relief, not cure
, I note. She’ll put us in touch with a local Macmillan nurse . . . treatment plan . . . surgery to remove the lymph glands, chemo if we want to go that route . . . to win time . . . ensure we have lots of support.

‘How much time?’ Ryan says, his voice sounding like an old LP that’s been put on the wrong speed.

The nurse gently replies that there’s no estimate on time, he could have months ahead, a year. The doctor says that he can see that this is hard to take in. Then comes the apology.

‘I’m so sorry . . . ’

And then the retreat.

They’ll leave us alone for a few minutes. So we can take it in . . . but I’m not listening any more. I am looking only at my husband. I’m thinking only of my husband, my incredible, handsome, active, fit young husband.

My dying husband.

And then the door shuts and Ryan’s lips meet mine in a sequence of stumbling movements that reminds me of our first kiss; it literally transports me back to that moment in The Grand, when Ryan tried to find my lips so indelicately. Now we do the same, clutching as we gasp for breath between our tears, and we kiss as if we are drowning and it occurs to me that this is actually a world away from our first kiss.

This kiss, right now, begins the countdown to our last. It is our first last kiss. And as that thought occurs to me, I kiss Ryan with every ounce of love for him I have ever had, a love that at times has been too big for me to cope with, a love beyond my years. And, now it seems, beyond his. As his body begins to shake and the tsunami of tears comes, I cradle his head to my lap and I stroke his golden hair, and I whisper that I’m going to make every kiss, every touch, every moment last a lifetime. I’ll savour every single kiss from now until the . . . not the end, until forever.

3.27 p.m.

Mum and Dad arrive just as the van’s leaving. I’m glad to have them here. They flank me closely as we watch it pull out of the driveway and down the road.

‘Are you OK, dear?’ Mum says, one hand on my shoulder, the other on my arm. ‘This must be so hard for you.’

I nod. ‘It is, Mum, but I also know that van is just full of sentimental crutches that I don’t need any more because the memories, well, they’re all here, aren’t they?’ I tap my head. I look at them both and they smile and nod.

I know I sound like I’m just saying it, but if there’s one thing that Ryan’s cancer has taught me it’s that it’s the memories that stay with us forever, not the stuff that’s attached to them. I used to think that taking photographs would make me see things better, freeze the moment, remember it forever. But I realize that the only way to do that is to
live
in the moment, not behind a lens. We don’t actually
need
pictures or endless videos or keepsakes or engagement rings to recall these special moments, because they’ll always be there. Even if they fade a little over time, one day the sun will shine in the sky on a particular morning in a particular way, or we’ll discover a long-lost item, a shell, perhaps, or a card will arrive in the post . . . and it’ll all come flooding back. And the memories will be good, and we’ll know that we are blessed to have them. And then we’ll feel lucky to have been given the chance to make more . . .

‘I’d better get started on the house,’ Mum says, throwing a look at Dad that says ‘Let’s give her a moment’. Dad nods and is about to follow her inside, when he turns around and puts his arms around me and kisses me on the head as if he is blessing me.

‘You just keep putting photos up here in the album, OK, Molly? I know you have so many more wonderful ones to come.’

I nod. Wanting to say all the things I didn’t say to him for so long. Finally I settle for four words.

‘I love you, Dad,’ and he smiles and walks inside.

I pull out my mobile, feeling a sudden urge to call him. I just pray that he answers.

‘Hey,’ I say softly as he picks up on the first ring. ‘I’m all done here,’ I say. ‘Are you ready? Because I’m coming to get—’

‘I love it when you act all bossy,’ he laughs.

A flash of a memory, quickly replaced, but not without a mental nod of acknowledgement.

‘You’d better get used to it,’ I laugh, tucking the phone under my ear as I put my coat on and lift my bag onto my shoulder. ‘I’m not about to change.’ I tilt the two suitcases that are sitting next to me into a pulling position. ‘I’ll be at the hospital in half an hour, OK?’

The Constable Kiss

‘The heart is a museum, filled with the exhibits of a lifetime’s loves.’ Diane Ackerman

Isn’t that a lovely quote? I came across it recently and it made me think about my relationships; not just with Ryan but my friends and family too. I imagined them all carefully curated in my heart. Ryan is on display as reportage-style photographs, a never-ending series of him running, jumping, kicking, diving, sailing, laughing, winking, reaching, staring, grinning, kissing.

Casey is pop art – eye-catchingly beautiful, vivid and of the moment. Mum is there in various guises; as a sculpture, painstakingly chiselled and poised, and also as a portrait. One of those stilted nineteenth-century ones where you can just see a glimmer of a smile in the starchy get-up. Dad is an Edward Hopper, you know, ‘Man seated in front of a desk in a light-flooded window gazing musingly at a wall with a painting on it’. It is how I always picture him.

I used to wonder what it was he was looking for and recently, on one of Ryan’s bad days (and by proxy, one of mine) I asked him. He lowered his glasses and looked at me with his soft hazel eyes. Then he took my hand and said: ‘The truth, Molly dear. I’m looking for the truth.’ I’d looked at him questioningly, not really understanding what he meant. He’d taken his glasses off and placed them on his laptop. ‘It’s so easy to lose our faith whilst we’re caught in the cogs of the endless grind of real life. But there are three places the truth can
always
be found: In God . . . ’ he’d glanced at me, acknowledging that this has never meant much to me, and I’m finding it even harder now, ‘ . . . in love and in art.’ He’d rested his elbows on his desk and pressed his fingers together. ‘Whenever I am wondering why I am being tested and I can’t get the answers from the first two, I seem to find them in the last. It makes me look at life as a bigger picture and then everything seems to make sense.’

If I’m honest, it is the first thing that anyone has said that has made sense to me since Ryan was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Without realizing he was doing it my dad gave me an answer to a question I didn’t even know I was asking.

Up until that moment I honestly thought I’d lost faith in ‘forever’, but now I know that both love and art
can
last forever because they have the power to transcend
everything
– time, age and indeed, life itself.

And what better way to capture one than with the other?

<

It’s the day of our first official date. I’m sitting in his dad’s Mercedes and all I know is that Ryan is taking me to his favourite place in the world.

‘Australia?’ I joked when he phoned me the day after our kiss in Covent Garden.

‘Maybe next year,’ he’d laughed, and my heart had soared with pleasure. Next year? He thinks we’ll be together next year?

‘I’m thinking somewhere a little closer to home for now. Are you free this Saturday?’

‘I might be,’ I’d said noncommittally, cradling my work phone between my shoulder and neck.

‘Well, babe,’ he’d laughed down the line and I felt a glow of warmth at his words. For some reason, the way he said ‘babe’ sounded sexy, not patronizing. I’m officially a babe now! Molly Carter: teen outcast, now officially a babe! ‘If you
can
spare some time to hang out, meet me outside Leigh train station at eleven. I’ll pick you up straight after footie training.’ My heart had sunk a little when he’d suggested going out in Leigh.

‘I hope you’ll have a shower first!’ I’d noticed that his Essex twang was more defined on the phone, he sounded almost cockney. ‘I promise it’ll be worth it,’ he’d added, as if reading my thoughts.

I step up and tentatively clamber over the stile, trying to keep as much dignity as I possibly can, which is tricky given that I mistakenly allowed Freya to dress me for this date. She instantly confiscated my Converse and presented me with a pair of kitten heels. I should’ve listened to my instincts telling me that anything with the name of an animal is not appropriate attire. Leopard skin, rabbit fur, pussycat bow, kitten heel. I’m furious with myself for wanting to look like the kind of girl he usually dates. I wanted to be as far from my teen self as possible. I thought we’d be going to some restaurant for lunch. Instead we’re going for a picnic up here, in my favourite place. Which turns out is his favourite place, too. Before Casey came along, to free me from my social leprosy, Hadleigh Castle
was
my best friend. As a tortured teenager it was the place I came to unburden my soul, to let out my frustrations and to find peace. I’d come here after school, when I couldn’t face going home, and sometimes I’d come here when I couldn’t face being at school. Those years from eleven to thirteen, before I met Casey, were pretty dark. I just didn’t feel like I fitted in anywhere. My personality traits as stated in my school reports were always: tidy, quiet, disciplined, good. But inside I wasn’t any of those things. I was crying out to be different. But no one heard. I wasn’t aware that my parents wanted more children, but I was painfully aware that I was the only one, and with that came the responsibility to be perfect. I didn’t allow myself to make mistakes, be silly, reckless, careless. Have fun. I was bullied for being the stuck-up girl with the stupid plaits who worked tirelessly, read endlessly and skulked around school with a camera. At home I was under the intense scrutiny of my mum who paid so much attention to me to make sure I met her exacting standards that everything else – including my dad – seemed to disappear. I wanted so badly to hide away. Maybe that’s why I always retreated behind a lens. Or came up here to Hadleigh Castle. It was the only place I felt happy and free. I don’t know what I’d have done if Casey hadn’t come along. She helped give me the courage to find myself, or at least the self I aspired to be from watching those endless 80s films with her. I didn’t realize that was a fake version of me, too. At least now I’ve finally found myself. It only took twenty-two years.