The First Last Kiss (51 page)

As you can probably tell, I’ve been doing a lot of looking back recently. Cancer does that to you, you know. It makes you examine everything; it’s like having an emotional CT scan of your life at the same time as the physical one that your loved one is having. Anyway, now I wonder what I’d been so scared of and I realize that I didn’t want anyone else to look at me and think that they knew how I felt. I didn’t want them to be a witness to my emotions. The less people saw, the less they could hurt me. But in doing so it meant I never really let anyone in. I kept everyone – even my best friend – at arm’s-length, always keeping my counsel when it came to my real emotions and feelings (apart from in my typically angsty teenage diary).

But Ryan changed that. And I’m glad he’s changed me because in letting him in, I realized that he was what I was looking for all along. Somewhere warm, inviting, a place where I felt instantly comfortable. He was the home I’d been looking for my whole life. Somewhere that embraced me without expectation. He opened his heart to me and in doing so, opened the door to my heart.

Because of him I let his wonderful family in, and my own family who I’d shut down from a long time before. I became closer to my friends and I have grown to adore his. And now I’m glad because I need everyone to know how I feel now. I am scared, no, I’m fucking
petrified
, every single day, of what horrors it may bring. I am also desperately sad (but trying so hard not to seem so!) and I’m achingly lonely. Ryan is still with me, but I know that really I am in this thing alone. He’s only here for the short haul and I need to know how to live when he’s gone. And honestly, I’m not sure I can. So right now I need to be able to cry to my best friends, to have my mum soothe me with kind words and cuddles, I need to tell my colleagues when I feel shit, when I am in pieces because my husband is dying of cancer. Yes, dying. I need to say that. Over and over sometimes so that it feels real. I need to cry uncontrollably and laugh hysterically whenever I want to, in whatever situation and at whatever time. I need to be able to do this and for people to understand and not judge me for letting my feelings out – no matter how they come and how ugly they are, because living with someone with terminal cancer
is
ugly. It can’t be covered with frosted icing and sprinkles. It can’t be dressed up in a LBD and a pair of heels and dragged out for a night on the town. It can’t be glossed over with a smile. It needs to cry in a room and be comforted. It needs for people not to be scared when it looks them in the eye. It needs to not feel like it should wear a mask in order to protect everyone – including the cancer itself. It needs to go public.

But the irony is, now that I need these public displays of affection, no one seems able to give them to me. I feel like I’m being punished for my approach pre-Ryan. Because everyone is so fucking
controlled
around me. Can I use the F word here, Ed? Sorry if not. It just seems the only appropriate one to use. It feels appropriate to be inappropriate, if you like. Because every word that is spoken to me, every facial expression that my friends and family expose me to, or conversation they know I’ll hear, is sharply regulated. It’s like when I edit photos from a shoot, to only show the best possible picture. The only people who don’t do this are Ryan’s doctors, and Ryan. And actually, come to think of it, probably not even him.

Because I have no idea how much Ryan is controlling in all of this. I’m sure he hides the worst from me, even though we swore on the day that he was diagnosed that we’d be honest with each other. But the truth is, we love each other too much to be completely honest. So we laugh and joke, and we pretend everything is OK, in order to make it better for other person. But we know that, ultimately, we can’t take away each other’s pain because we’re travelling in different directions. Going on different journeys. He is facing no future and I am . . . facing a future without him.

Which would you pick?

I know, tough call, right? No, don’t put your mask on because I asked you a tough question. I know that’s what my friends and my colleagues and my family are trying to do. They are trying to control the amount of pain that I see in them because I have enough of my own to deal with. And I know they’re also trying to protect themselves from seeing too much of the pain that I am in. Their masks are on – and so is mine.

But you know what I wish? I wish that at some point we could all just let go, just let go of everything, scream, shout, cry, laugh, fucking
swear
(sorry Ed. Again.), weep and wail uncontrollably in front of each other, like I know we all want to. What’s the famous quote? ‘Love is the price we pay for grief’? Well then, let’s love uncontrollably and then grieve uncontrollably. Right now, I don’t think I can do anything less.

M x

The I Think I Love You Kiss

Something I can’t help but wonder in these cancer-stricken days is, what was I so afraid of? Why did I worry that I’d met Ryan too young? Because now, when I look back, it’s clear to me that I fell in love with Ryan long before our first kiss, long before I said it or perhaps even thought it. Now I feel like I was born loving him which means meeting him could never have happened early enough.

<

I’m cuddled up with Ryan on my second-hand sofa, in my draughty, badly furnished flat on Holloway Road. Ever since meeting his parents two weeks ago, Ryan has been getting on the train from Leigh into Fenchurch Street and coming to meet me from work every night after he finishes teaching at school. We go for a drink, or a meal, or sometimes we just hang out together at my place.

Right from the moment we kissed I had this awfully, wonderfully, terrifyingly liberating feeling that I could fall in love with Ryan. I know, right? This from the girl who always said she didn’t believe in it. I’ve never told a boyfriend I love him or been with anyone who would say it to me.

I smile blissfully and close my eyes as I breathe in his comforting scent and wonder how I could have resisted him for so long. It, like him, is a riot of contradictions: it’s sexy but safe; he smells of home but also of adventure, of sport; sunshine and rain; the past and the future. It – he – is utterly intoxicating.

When we’re not together, we exchange text messages at work, he phones me at lunchtime to tell me what he’s been up to and I get updates of his whereabouts on his journey into London to meet me. He tells me what he’s reading, watching, doing, seeing. And I want to know it all. For the first time in my life I want to know every single thing about him, and – somewhat scarily for me – I want him to know everything about me.

The other night Ryan and I were curled up on my sofa with our limbs entwined, ‘Like the tentacles of a giant love monster,’ Ryan had said, and stroked his finger down my arm. I bristled, like I always knew I would if a guy used the L word – but it was with excitement. We’d been seeing each other for three weeks and I knew we were on the cusp of Saying It.

I turned my face from where it was resting on his chest and unbuttoned his shirt, slipping my hand underneath to expose his chest. I studied his torso appraisingly for a moment, trying to memorize each patch of skin, each freckle or blemish, I felt like I wanted to know every single slope, every bump and crevice of his body.

I’d traced my finger over the assortment of three different moles that lay just under his left nipple. ‘These look like Revels,’ I’d solemnly announced, and Ryan had lifted his head off the couch and burst out laughing.

‘Molly Carter, how do you always manage to see things that no one else ever would?’

I’d grinned and brushed the apex of my fingertip over his nipple. ‘This is the nutty one.’ Then I’d traced my finger down to a little mole directly underneath, that looked like a disc. ‘Right here is a Minstrel, and here’, I’d pointed at a small, pale-brown nugget that sat up proudly further down his chest, ‘is one of those little toffee surprises.’

Ryan took my hand and guided it down until my hand hovered over his groin.

‘Now let me introduce you to the king of confectionary,’ he’d said, his voice husky, not with humour but with longing.

I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing and slid off the sofa and onto the floor, holding my stomach as Ryan pelted me with cushions. Then he tickled me and we rolled around together until he pinned me down and kissed me softly, deeply and with such intensity that I knew I couldn’t hold out a moment longer.

We waited until we could wait no more, until our kisses were so urgent, our skin so desperate to connect that we peeled each other’s clothes off like oranges, layer after infuriating layer, panting and grabbing, grasping and grappling, until we lay down naked next to each other on the sofa. I wanted him so desperately. I kissed him hard and deep, my tongue exploring the deep recesses of his warm, welcoming mouth. I grasped his buttocks, begging him to enter me. But he just lay gently on top of me, covering me with warmth, his strong forearms either side of my face taking the weight of his body, his fingers slowly combing through my hair. He gazed at me for what felt like hours, his eyes a mirrored prism of blue, a sexy, crooked smile hovering over his lips that hinted at lust and experience and confidence and patience and . . . and . . . something else, something not quite distinguishable. Love? I didn’t know for sure because I hadn’t ever seen it before. I didn’t want to think it, but it’s what I felt. I felt it in his gaze and in the way that he rolled onto his side, his eyes never leaving mine as he rested his head on his arm and let his fingers travel from my scalp down my neck and shoulders and then across the contours of my body, infuriatingly slowly, like they were branding me, until I groaned with frustration and desperation.

‘What are you doing?’ I’d mumbled, wanting to feel him on me, in me.

‘I’m tracing my name on your body, so you remember this always,’ he’d murmured, and then he’d covered my shoulder and neck with dancing kisses as his fingers started dancing elsewhere.

‘Please, I can’t take it any more.’ I’d buried my face in his neck. ‘I want you,’ I’d groaned.

‘You’ve got me,’ he’d replied softly, ‘you’ve really got me, Molly Carter.’

And as he entered me I did the thing that every modern girl is taught not to do as soon as she is taught about sex. But the words had risen up into my mouth, along with my heart and I said it.
It
.

‘I think I love you, Ryan.’

He hadn’t paused, hadn’t missed a beat, he’d just smiled and lowered his forehead to mine as his body reached every single part of me.

‘Well, that’s good because I
know
I love you, Molly Carter. And he kissed me again with such sweet tenderness that in that moment and in every moment since, I gave in. I gave in to him, to love, to my destiny.

The SOS Kiss

There’s this song on Ryan’s current favourite album by Take That (obviously!) called ‘Reach Out’. It’s been on the radio loads recently, literally every time I turn it on I hear it. Sometimes I feel like someone is trying to tell me something. You see, I’m not good at asking for help, I never have been. I’m too proud, but when I hear the lyrics about how we all grieve in different ways and that it’s only love that pulls us through, it pulls me out of my insular world I’ve created here with Ryan, where in between ‘working’ (to be honest these days I just go in to show my face, then come straight home again) I’m his full-time carer. I make him comfortable, pick up his drugs, change his sheets, take him out in his wheelchair. And hearing it reminds me that this isn’t all about him and me. I’m not the only person hurting. And that by asking for help, I might also be helping other people too – not just Ryan, because he and I aren’t the only people needing support right now. It doesn’t all revolve around us. So this is my SOS. Not just a cry for help, but a cry to help . . .

FF>> 20/06/07 11.48 a.m.>

‘Hi, Moll,’ the boys say collectively. Their voices are hushed and they look pale and anguished. If Essex were to be able to prove the existence of vampires in their county I’m pretty sure this is what they’d look like. They’re still more sunrise than
Twilight
, but it is instantly clear to me that they are not in any way dealing well with the fact that Ryan is deteriorating fast.

‘What’s up? You all look like death warmed up,’ I quip. Their horrified looks at each other tell me they are not ready for these kinds of jokes. I’d better prepare them. Ryan isn’t likely to hold back, no matter how they’re feeling. ‘Sorry. It’s what we do around here to deal with it. Joke, I mean. Ryan likes it. He’s still the same old Ryan, you know, despite it all.’

‘All’ being the fact that at his last blood test we were told that the cancer has spread even further. He’d been suffering from increasingly bad headaches, sometimes so bad they made him vomit, and then he woke up with blurred vision in one eye and we both knew what it meant. When the oncologist confirmed what we’d already guessed, Ryan simply said that meant he now had a five-a-side team: skin, spine, bowels, lungs and brain.

Carl stares at me and then looks away. I want to hug him but I am afraid he will crumble. Then I hug him anyway. I’m sick of ignoring what my intuition tells me to do. It’s why I called the Haven Hospice in Leigh yesterday. I want to be sure that when Ryan gives me the nod, as we agreed, that they’re ready to receive him. I know it’ll be soon. I can see by the way Ryan looks at the flat, and at me. Like he’s trying to take it all in. Memorize it. Carl clings on to me like a toddler on to his mum. I squeeze him and then pat him on the back, trying to instil some courage into him. He looks up at me bleakly and then drops his head like it is just too heavy to lift. I take his hand and then usher the rest of the boys in, chatting as much as I possibly can to put them at ease whilst thinking no wonder Ry and I like being on our own. This is
really
hard work.

‘Come in, boys! Ryan will be so glad you’re here! Ahh, you’ve bought beer? Thank you!’ I am talking in exclamation marks and I don’t know how to stop. ‘Yep, go on up, he’s up there waiting for you! Oh, he’s good thanks! Watching football as always! I always know it’s Saturday as I officially become a football widow—’ I realize my mistake as soon as the words come out of my mouth and Carl’s hand goes limp in mine.