Miss You (44 page)

Drinking one right now.

Where?

Carl was there in less than the ten minutes he said it would take him, so I didn’t have the chance to change my mind. He was reasonably tall with broad shoulders, floppy blond hair, and
about twenty-one. There was a really horrible moment when he looked around the cafe, his eyes travelling straight past me, but then he smiled, eyebrows raised, and I smiled back.

‘Tess?’

I wasn’t sure whether to get up, or stay sitting or air-kiss or what, so I just said, ‘Have a seat,’ as if he’d come for a job interview.

He was wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt that was quite clingy so you could see the contours of his chest and he carried around him the warm, slightly animal, smell of a man who’d just
woken up. I imagined him sprawled across a big double bed, phone on the pillow, opening a bleary eye to look at my photo and failing to register I was at least ten years older than him.

‘Can I get you something?’ I asked.

‘I could murder a bacon sandwich,’ he said.

I got myself another latte and a little custard tart.

He told me he was a student doing a degree in English Literature and Icelandic because his mother was from Iceland. For some reason, I told him that I had studied English Literature too, and we
talked about books we had read recently, and when he asked me what I did, I said I was a writer.

‘Wow!’ he said, staring at my mouth.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You’ve got a flake of pastry . . . no, other side.’

The conversation seemed to have come to a natural close. Perhaps he didn’t believe I was a writer, or perhaps being so young and beautiful, writing was the last thing on his mind.

‘So, what shall we do now?’ he asked, holding my eyes with his.

‘We could go for a walk?’ I suggested. ‘It’s a lovely day. But I’ll need to get different shoes.’ I was wearing flip-flops. ‘My flat’s next
door.’

‘Right,’ he said, standing up with me.

I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted. What if he was a strangler? But now it would sound rude to say, ‘No, you just sit here and wait.’ And he’d
probably be gone when I got back.

‘I didn’t actually mean, you know . . .’ I stammered.

He smiled slowly. ‘But is it such a terrible idea?’

Ten years younger, but far more grown up than me.

This was new territory. Casual sex with a toyboy I would never see again. He might be a murderer, but the truth was probably more that he woke up with a hard-on.

‘OK then,’ I said.

My flat is really one large room with the kitchen units and table at one end and a double bed in the front bit near the sash windows looking over the street. I immediately went to the sink and
filled the kettle, but when I swung round and said, ‘Coffee?’ he’d already taken off his T-shirt. His torso was like a sculpture.

‘Do you wax?’ I asked him out of professional curiosity.

‘I don’t need to,’ he said.

So young he hadn’t even grown body hair.

‘I don’t do this sort of thing,’ I said. ‘So I’ve really no idea what the procedure is.’

He laughed gently.

‘Just relax,’ he said, walking towards me, taking the kettle from my hands and putting it down on the table.

I raised my arms obligingly as he lifted the loose silk shirt I was wearing over my head, removed my bra and cupped my breasts as if he was weighing them, then kissed each one. He unbuttoned my
jeans. I stepped out of them. Taking my hand, he pulled me to the bed, lay down next to me, his fingers finding places no other man had found. I began to lose myself to tingles of pleasure so
unexpected I started laughing.

‘What?’ He drew back.

‘No, don’t stop, it’s lovely!’

‘Do you want me to wear a condom?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

Carl took the condom from me and carefully rolled it on – which was a relief because, even after practising on the courgette, I still didn’t feel very confident – then he gave
me another slow smile.

There was something a little odd about taking instructions from a stranger, but I found it empowering looking down at his beautiful face relaxing as I got it right.

‘That’s good. Now do this . . . yes . . . like that . . . oh, yes!’

I’d been in love with Leo, but we’d never talked during sex. I didn’t even know this guy and yet he felt about a hundred times more involved.

Afterwards, I lay on his chest, his sculpted pecs against my breasts, our bodies breathing in sync. Then he withdrew carefully, and wrapped the condom in a tissue.

‘A lot of women your age want a baby,’ he said.

After what we’d just done, I felt it was slightly ungallant of him to refer to my age.

‘And you do that?’ I asked, primly. ‘Aren’t you afraid you might have kids all over the place?’

‘Is that such a terrible idea?’

Jesus!

He started getting dressed. I remained in bed, under the duvet, oddly embarrassed now to be naked in front of him.

Carl.

For some reason, that ad that used to be everywhere flashed across my mind. I began to laugh again. He looked at me, perplexed.

‘Carling refreshes the places other beers cannot reach!’

(‘Can you believe he was too young to know that ad?’ I asked Doll, when I called her straight after he’d gone.

‘Wasn’t it Heineken?’ she said.)

‘So, what are you supposed to say after one of these encounters?’ I asked him as he tied his laces.

‘I had a good time,’ he said, leaning over the bed to give me a final kiss.

‘Me too,’ I squeaked, pulling the duvet right up to my chin.

He opened the door and looked at me. I waved my fingers over the top of the duvet and then the door closed, he was gone, and the flat felt very silent. I thought for a moment that I might cry,
but my mind was perfectly clear and happy; my body tingled all over as if it had been reawakened.
The pleasures of the flesh
, I thought, giddily, touching myself again down there where it
still felt warm and fluttery with one hand, running the other ever so lightly over my breasts, feeling my nipples pucker up beneath the tips of my fingers. I stopped, lifted my hand away, then
touched again, pushing a little harder.

The lump was right behind the nipple, not round the edges of the breast, where I’d always imagined finding it.

(‘Oh shit,’ said Doll.)

The trouble with embracing life is you forget to fear the worst. It had only been six months since my annual MRI scan and a consultant had examined me in preparation for
surgery since then, and I’d checked myself, but clearly not as rigorously as I should have because the lump was already the size of a hazelnut.

If you were a nut, what would you be?

The locum GP said it was probably a cyst, because it was incredibly rare for someone of my age to get breast cancer.

‘Look at my notes,’ I said.

His face changed. And I knew then, for sure.

People talk about waiting lists on the NHS, but when it’s cancer, everything moves very fast. You’re going along with your life, having casual sex with a Nordic student, then two
weeks later, you’re lying in one of those hospital gowns waiting to go down to the operating theatre, and you’re thinking,
What if I hadn’t met Carl? Would I now be running
round Hyde Park as normal? How big would the lump have had to get? How long would I have gone on feeling fine?

My dad and Anne came to see me with Hope.

‘First my wife, now my daughter!’ Dad started, before Anne ordered him to go outside and get some air.

‘You’re strong, Tess,’ she said, gripping my hand, big gold rings digging into the undersides of my fingers. ‘You’ve got what it takes to fight this thing
off.’

But I knew it didn’t work like that. My mother was a strong woman. Quiet, but strong. Nobody just surrenders, do they?

‘Do you have a pink diamond?’ Hope asked.

‘Pink diamond?’ I echoed.

‘Doll got a pink diamond against breast cancer,’ said Hope.

The nurse asked me if I was ready for my pre-med.

Anne gave me a kiss, then left me with Hope. I thought for a moment that my sister was going to follow suit and kiss me too, but she didn’t. She just stood there. Suddenly, I really needed
to feel Hope’s awkward, ungiving weight against my chest and smell the familiar scent of L’Oréal Kids strawberry shampoo I’d washed her hair in so many times and which she
still used because it wouldn’t occur to her to try anything else.

I’d always loved Hope unconditionally, but just this once I
so
wanted to be loved back.

Feeling myself drifting, I stretched my hand towards her, but still she stood just out of reach.

‘You’re not going to die, Tree,’ she suddenly announced.

In my woozy state, I could picture the conversation that had gone on, when Hope, hearing the word ‘cancer’, would have asked, ‘Is Tree going to die?’

And Anne and my father would have looked at each other awkwardly, not knowing quite how to respond, and, just before the silence got too long, one of them, probably Anne, would have said,
‘No. She’s not going to die.’

Because we’d all learned over the years that Hope didn’t do ‘probably’ or ‘yet’. What she needed was an answer to her question.

Just like the rest of us, really.

A wave of blissful relief, knowing that I meant something to her, washed through my body. Maybe it was just the drugs.

‘Are you asleep?’ Hope asked.

‘Almost,’ I whispered.

‘Shall I sing you?’

‘Yes, please.’

So I was lulled into anaesthesia by her pitch-perfect cover of ABBA’s ‘I Have a Dream’.

In a leafy road just five minutes’ walk from the hospital where I was working, I looked up and down the street before pressing the doorbell, checking that no one could
see me, as if my appointment was somehow secret, or shameful.

There was no chaise longue for me to lie on, just two comfortable chairs. Dorothy was more homely and less intellectual than I’d imagined she would be. After going over my history, she
asked me to talk her through the accident.

‘It’s like a loop of film running in my brain,’ I said.

‘What’s on the film?’

Ross’s face glancing back at me through the thickly falling snow, his teeth white, his eyes hidden behind mirror ski goggles, flakes settling on his dark, swept-back hair.

‘He’s in front of me,’ I said. ‘Skiing at speed, and he glances back to see if I’m there and then there’s this tree and he’s missed the split second he
needed to avoid it . . .’

‘But you weren’t there?’

‘No, but we’d raced a hundred times. It’s what he did.’

‘OK, so let’s say that
is
what happened, even though you don’t know it is. If you’d been there, behind him, how would that have made a difference?’

I never got beyond the glance, the tree, the smash, the consuming panic.

I didn’t have an answer to her question.

We sat in silence for what seemed like forever.

‘The injuries Ross sustained,’ she eventually said. ‘Could you have saved him, if you had been there?’

‘No.’

‘Even if you’d been an A&E doctor?’

I smiled. Was that perhaps why I’d ended up in A&E?

‘No. The brain damage was catastrophic.’

‘And yet you believe, in some way, that you caused his death?’

‘I should have been with him!’

‘Why? You knew it was dangerous. You tried to stop him.’

I heard myself saying, ‘Maybe I didn’t try hard enough . . .’

It was the admission I’d promised myself I would never make. Not to my parents, or to the rescue party, or to the police. I should have tried harder. But I walked away.

My eyes filled with tears. Dorothy let me cry.

‘How did it feel walking away from him?’ she gently asked.

‘It felt good,’ I sniffed. ‘Like I’d given up caring if he liked me any more.’

‘So you left him powerless?’

‘Yes.’ I began to weep again.

‘And that’s why it happened?’

It sounded so ridiculous spoken out loud.

‘Did you feel relieved when your brother died?’ she asked. ‘Did you think that his bullying would stop?’

‘I couldn’t seem to feel anything. It was a kind of deadening, interspersed with moments of panic, not relief at all,’ I said.

‘Because the bullying didn’t really stop, did it?’ she said, gently. ‘You were so used to being bullied, it carried on without him.’

Strange how one sentence can make sense of sixteen years.

It was Nash who’d persuaded me to talk to someone after I’d finally explained about what happened to Ross.

‘I had a patient with similar indications in series three,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure you’re suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’

I wondered why in all the years of studying Medicine that had never occurred to me.

‘Because you never told anyone, maybe?’ Nash said.

We were drinking in her club, not the one Charlotte and I had been to on that fateful day in 2001, but a similarly exclusive private members’ place on Shaftesbury Avenue.

‘I leave my left-wing credentials in the cloakroom,’ Nash breezily informed me, pre-empting any sarcastic remark I might think of making when she signed us in.

The club backed onto another of those secret gardens you find behind the most unlikely streets in London. Nash was a defiant smoker. I still pretended I wasn’t, despite occasionally buying
a packet of ten, lighting one and taking a couple of drags before stubbing it out with the heel of my shoe. So we were on the terrace, companionably silent, almost as if unwilling to move on to
another topic.

Finally, Nash said, ‘You know I’ve always liked you.’

‘And I’ve always liked you,’ I said.

‘I don’t suppose you’re interested in becoming a casualty of my torrid and disastrous love life?’ she asked.

The panic started in my stomach, then ripped up my throat to my brain. Nash had been my rock since the girls left, lending me the money for the few months I needed to complete my training,
supporting me through the first exhausting weeks back at work, sympathizing about the difficulty of diagnosing deep vein thrombosis and the horror of dealing with an acid attack from her on-screen
experience of emergency admissions. Nash knew all my worst bits and I knew hers, but it just wasn’t there for me, and I knew it would have to be all or nothing with her.