Miss You (16 page)

‘Yes,’ I assured her, patting my handbag. ‘But it’s not really
for
breast cancer, Hope, it’s
against
breast cancer.’

I don’t know if I was the only person who found it a bit disturbing when all the little girls in the school shouted ‘Yippee!’ after Breast Cancer Research was announced as the
charity the school was supporting on mufti day so they could wear pink. The choice of charity wasn’t just for Hope and me, by the way. When you’ve lost someone, you discover that almost
everyone else seems to have a friend or relative who’s been affected. You’d think that would put your own suffering in perspective, but it doesn’t really.

Hope didn’t do chit-chat like most children her age, so on our walks to school, we played games like the counting game, where we’d have to choose a category like flowers or animals,
and we’d spend the walk up to the main road spotting, and the bit with all the traffic listing. Usually Hope’s list was much longer than mine because she’d have seen all the
little purple flowers growing out of a wall, or the dandelion clocks and daisies on a lawn.

Hope’s favourite was the silence game, where we’d do the first part in complete silence and then tell each other all the sounds we’d heard. Hope always won that because
she’d hear not just a car door slamming and the wheels on the gravel of the drive, but the indicator ticking and the snatch of song on the car radio, which she could usually identify.

‘Hands up everyone who’s brought their pound for breast cancer,’ Hope’s class teacher asked, when she’d got them all sitting on the carpet in
front of her.

‘It’s not for breast cancer, it’s against breast cancer!’

‘Thank you for that correction, Hope. Now, would you like to volunteer to collect up all the pounds for me?’

‘No.’

A ripple of laughter went around the class.

Hope’s being a bit different showed more than it had in Reception, when a lot of them were still doing their own thing. Even the star girls – there are always one or two of them in a
class, usually the tallest and brightest, with nice mums who’ve had a word with them about some children finding things more difficult – had given up trying to include Hope in their
games of families or hospitals because she refused to cooperate or perform the role she was assigned.

For the first few terms, Hope had been invited to other children’s birthday parties, but that had tailed off now that they were doing things in smaller friendship groups, like cinema trips
or going to the waterslide park. Asking Hope meant asking me too, and that was a bit awkward with me not being a child and not being a mum either, and the children calling me Miss Costello.

On the plus side, we saved money on the presents, and it was more comfortable keeping a professional distance. You’re in a privileged position as a TA. In the course of the day, you pick
up a lot of personal stuff about the children’s home life like Chantelle’s sixteen-year-old sister having a baby so she could get her own flat, and Kaylie’s mum thinking someone
in the family was a ‘fucking waste of space’ (the phrase that rang out from the Wendy house whenever it was Kaylie’s turn to be mother in Golden Time).

Hope didn’t seem to notice she was being excluded, but I got a feeling of anguish each time I was stuffing the going-home post into the children’s folders and there was no little
pastel envelope with her name on it.

It was the same at the school disco, which was a bit mad, really, because there was nothing Hope loved more than music, but she was dancing by herself, as if there was an invisible fence around
her that kept the other children at a distance.

The usual DJ was Bryan Leary, who did the socials at the church, playing songs like ‘Magic Moments’, but this time, Mrs Corcoran’s secretary had had to find a different guy
– the Music Man, it said on his poster – because Bryan had a problem with his waterworks.

The new DJ was much younger. He started off with ‘I am a Music Man’, producing musical instruments from under the decks, a bit like Mary Poppins and her carpet bag, then went
straight into the first bars of ‘Hit Me Baby One More Time’, causing a few raised eyebrows among the senior staff.

Lowering the volume, the Music Man spoke into his mic. ‘Who knows how to play Musical Statues?’

Hands went up. The music went up.

‘Oh, baby baby . . . !’

Hope loved the song, but she didn’t really get the idea of the game. Her reaction to him cutting the music was to look cross rather than stop moving.

I said a silent prayer that the Music Man wouldn’t make her first out.

‘OK, kids,’ he said. ‘That was just a practice. This time, when the music stops, you stop, right?’

The instructions couldn’t have been clearer, but Hope was in her own Britney world. I think the Music Man must have seen the look of panic on my face as I crept around the back of the hall
to be close to Hope when she was called out.

‘This time, you’re going to have to listen up real careful . . .’

The music stopped; four children didn’t. Emma and Kaylie sat out of their own accord, Patrick had to be tapped on the shoulder.

‘You’ve got to sit out now, Hope,’ I whispered.

There was a chorus of ‘Hope’s cheating!’

I looked despairingly at the DJ. He put the music on and cut it almost immediately, so the whole year was out.

‘Who wants another game?’ he asked. ‘Make some noise! You call that noise? I can’t hear you! Who wants another game? Make some noise!’

It was such an unlikely command, some of the brighter children glanced at Mrs Corcoran for confirmation before shouting, ‘Meeeeeeee!’

‘We’re going to have a dancing competition. Who knows this song?’

The opening bars of ‘Tragedy’, by Steps.

Hope’s hand shot up along with almost every girl in the room.

‘Who’s going to dance to this song?’

Hope’s hand stayed firmly in the air.

‘OK then. Get dancing. And remember! I’m watching.’

As Hope began performing an elaborate sequence of steps and mime to the music, I noticed that a few of the other girls were trying to do the same routine, but none of them was hitting the beat
like Hope. The teaching staff started to nudge each other, and point at her. Squashed like a sausage into the gleaming pink dress which was riding up her thighs almost to knicker level, Hope was
totally unaware that anyone was looking at her.

‘I’m a fantastic dancer,’ she announced to Dad that evening.

‘Is that right now?’

‘The Music Man said.’

‘The Music Man, is it?’

‘She really is,’ I told him. ‘She won a sweetie in the dance competition, didn’t you, Hope?’

‘Where did you learn to dance?’ Dad asked.

‘On
Top of the Pops
,’ Hope explained.

‘
Top of the Pops
, is it now?’

Dad never really listened. His way of communicating with us often constituted simply repeating the ends of our sentences.

‘Like a bloody budgerigar,’ Mum used to say.

We were eating from the chippie, which probably meant he’d had a win on the horses.

‘Perhaps Hope could go to a ballet class?’ I ventured. ‘Some of the other girls are full of their shows.’

‘Ballet?’ said my father. ‘Would you look at her, Tess?’

I kicked myself for using the word. In his eyes, ballet had been Kevin’s downfall.

‘It’s more about moving to the music at their age,’ I told him. ‘Honestly, Dad, you should have seen her dancing.’

‘Ballet class!’ my father dismissed the idea. ‘Do you think I’m made of money?’ he added, with that semitone of threat in his voice that hinted at worse and we both
knew better than to oppose him.

When Hope had gone to sleep, I went back into the bathroom, to clean the bath and tidy up. I picked up the pink dress off the lino floor where she’d discarded it.

Pink was such a happy, upbeat colour for breast cancer. If you’d asked me to associate a colour, I’d have chosen black or very dark grey.

I suppose the idea is to empower. The language people use about cancer is all about fighting and battling and being brave, as if it’s an external threat that you have to vanquish. But if
it was just about having the right attitude, most people would survive, wouldn’t they?

I envisaged cancer more as a covert sleeper cell that I had to outwit. I’d read enough articles in magazines to know that I had to examine my breasts regularly. In the months following
Mum’s death, I’d convinced myself that I’d discovered several bumps and suspicious thickenings, then felt like a time waster when they’d disappeared by the time I got a GP
appointment.

On the third visit, I got the new female GP.

‘Breasts are very prone to hormonal fluctuations,’ she told me. ‘So it’s best to stick to once a month. A few days after your period is normally a good time. Can you show
me how you examine yourself?’

‘In bed,’ I said, lying back on the examining table, my hands hovering above my breasts, unwilling to touch them in front of her.

Being brought up a good Catholic girl, the combination of trepidation and shame was bad enough in the dark, under my duvet, surreptitiously feeling around with Father Michael’s grave
warnings from our confirmation classes about ‘the pleasures of the flesh’ echoing faintly through my brain.

‘I think you’ll find it easier standing up,’ said the doctor, matter-of-factly. ‘What I do is stand in front of the bathroom mirror, so I can do a visual check for any
difference in appearance, pigmentation or puckering, then I examine each breast methodically.’

It was reassuring to know that she did it too. Made it more clinical somehow.

‘But you know what you’re looking for,’ I said.

She smiled.

‘Actually, Teresa, you’re in a better position than me, because you know your own breasts. Or you should do. You’ll get more confident as you go on. Do you think you can try
that?’

Armed with her advice, I’d managed to reduce the slightly obsessive checking to once a month, but, since it was Breast Cancer Awareness Day, I now locked the bathroom door and stripped
down to the waist.

I’d always been a bit self-conscious about my chest since I developed very quickly, aged twelve, going from nothing to an E-cup in less than six months. I still found myself taking a deep
breath before touching, my pulse rate increasing with dread as I felt around each breast, pressing in a spiral until I reached the nipple, then raising my arm and checking my underarms too. There
were no changes I could detect. I breathed out a long sigh of relief. Another month over and Hope was growing up all the time. If I could just manage to tick off one hundred and thirty-five more
months to get her to the age of eighteen, then it wouldn’t matter so much if I got cancer and died.

I wondered if everyone who was responsible for a young child worried all the time. Or was it just me? Worry’s difficult to admit to, isn’t it? The last thing you want is other people
worrying about you worrying, so you tend to keep it to yourself, which probably makes it all build up.

On the final afternoon before the summer holidays, Hope and I were the last to leave school after hunting for a missing plimsoll. As we walked across the deserted playground,
our footsteps echoing in the sudden silence that falls when four hundred children depart for the summer, I was happy that another year was over. We’d managed to get through it without too
many setbacks. The disco had done wonders for Hope’s self-esteem. The weather was hot. Things were definitely looking up.

‘The Music Man!’ Hope noticed him first.

‘Hey, Hope!’ he said, squatting down to give her a high five, but hitting thin air, because Hope didn’t do high fives.

‘It’s the Music Man, Tree!’

‘Tree?’

‘Short for Teresa. I’m her sister,’ I added, to explain why Hope didn’t have to address me as Miss Costello.

‘I didn’t think you were one of them,’ he said.

His smile made me smile too.

‘Well, I am one of them, but thanks anyway.’

‘I was hoping to catch you,’ he said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘I think I left something in the hall.’

‘Oh, right. What was that?’ I asked.

He looked awkward.

‘Forget that last bit.’

‘You didn’t leave something in the hall?’ I clarified, sounding like a teacher.

‘I was just hoping I’d see you.’

It dawned on me suddenly that he was chatting me up.

Doll would have known what to do, fluttering her eyelashes, maybe touching his arm for a second.

‘Why was that then?’ I sounded as frigid as a nun.

‘Wondered if you fancied going for a coffee sometime?’ he asked.

‘Hope would have to come,’ I blurted.

‘Fine by me, Tree,’ he said.

‘Tess,’ I told him. ‘Tess is what people call me.’

‘Who’s the hunk?’ Doll asked.

She was waiting for us outside the gate in her pink Volkswagen Beetle with the sunroof down and a Mister Softee ice cream in her hand for Hope.

Was he a hunk? The Music Man – I was so flustered I hadn’t even asked his name – was about my height, with short brown hair and clean-shaven like someone responsible who might
wear a uniform, a fireman or a paramedic, not really what you’d think of as a DJ.

‘He’s the Music Man,’ said Hope.

‘I see!’ said Doll, stretching the word ‘see’ to three syllables and giving me a knowing look as I strapped Hope in, as if I’d been keeping him secret.

‘Wondered if you fancied going for a coffee sometime?’ Hope repeated his exact words and intonation.

‘I see,’ said Doll again, as she switched on the ignition.

It’s really not like that
, I was going to say, but didn’t, because it did feel special meeting someone new and a bit older, a man rather than a boy, who had a semi-glamorous
job. If Doll hadn’t seen him, I thought I’d probably have kept it secret, for a while, just until things were a little further along. But I was probably getting ahead of myself.

Doll’s pink Beetle was a present from Fred on their first anniversary. Fred was now a Premiership footballer, and the two of them were about to move into a brand-new
house that they’d bought off-plan.