The Rose Petal Beach (42 page)

‘No, you can’t help who you love. But you can help how you behave,’ she says, the incredulous look hasn’t left her face. ‘You really aren’t sorry for what you did at all.’ She shakes her head again. ‘What am I doing here? I must be insane.’ She offers me a close-lipped smile and stands. ‘I hope your appointment goes well.’

I’m not going to beg her to stay. I’m not going to let her blackmail me into being here with me. If she can’t get over it, she can’t get over it. But I need calm and stability right now, not drama and tantrums. I need Tami.

She knows that. She knows I need someone who will stay level-headed as they explain what comes next to me. As they put items into my body, take tests, take samples, prod and poke and practically drain me. I need someone to sit with me. To tell me, even if it is silently, they will be there. My body is not my own any longer. It has been taken over by cancer.
Cancer
. It is about to be invaded by the people trying to stop it spreading. I am on the side-lines, watching, learning, trying to understand. I am a woman wandering around in the dark wilderness who needs a guide, or at least a companion who will not panic, who will be there as I start this journey.

I do not understand much of what is happening to me. I do not understand much of what is going to happen to me. I do know that I do not want to go through his alone.

I need Tami. She knows it. She’s going to use it.

But is she? Tami’s not like that. The fact she has spoken to me at all, has come here with me today, is testament to her
not
being like that. She didn’t have to come. I stare at the café door through which she left. She didn’t have to organise a taxi, pay for it and then sit here with me, a few hundred yards from where I am about to become a cancer patient.

I was an ordinary person, now I am about to become a cancer patient.

I need Tami. It’s selfish and it’s wrong, and I shouldn’t have hurt her. I shouldn’t have betrayed her trust. I shouldn’t have even asked her without asking her to be with me. But I need her. The cloud that would not drift away.

A man in a navy blue suit darts across the space from the counter to our table and takes the seat she was sitting in. He smiles sheepishly at me. I glare at him return. He responds with a half shrug and sips his coffee while avidly reading his mobile screen.

My eyes go back to the door and I watch her weave her way through the tightly placed table and chairs as she comes back to me. The cloud that will not drift away.

She stands above the man in the navy blue suit sitting in her seat and glares at him, too. He looks up at her, then at me, and decides the seat is not worth it. As quickly as he appeared, he is gone again. Tami pulls her chair away from the table and faces it away from me. ‘Don’t speak to me,’ she says. ‘The moment you speak to me is the moment I’m gone for good.’

The relief brings tears to my eyes. I’m not going to be alone. Not speaking is a small price to pay to not be alone.

I’ve gone into shock again.

I am sitting here, listening to this doctor talk, and my mind is not grasping onto anything for very long. He has talked about numbers and stages and gradings. He has talked about surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Most of the words slip in and out of my head straight away, like I am trying to hang on tightly to wet soap – impossible to grasp for any length of time.

It’s the word ‘chemotherapy’ that sticks in my head. It’s that which I know about with the word cancer. Your hair falls out. I know that. You have to wear wigs or scarves. I’ve never really looked that good in a scarf. That’s a stupid thing to think right now, isn’t it? When I have so much more to worry about, to think about, to prepare for, I focus on that. Which proves what I’ve thought all along: I’m not grown up enough for this to be happening to me. I need a few more years of life, experience, before I am forced to face this.

I haven’t heard the other word, yet. The word that you always associate with the words breast cancer. I have been waiting for it, I think. Waiting, expecting. It’s coming soon, I can feel it. Like I felt this was not going to turn out to be a cyst, I feel that other word coming.

My heart leaps in fright when I feel a hand around mine. I look down and it’s her hand. She has carefully encircled my hand with hers, and now is slipping her fingers between my fingers. I stare at our hands. Linked. Together. She hasn’t even looked away from the man who is still talking. On the other side of me is sitting the specialist nurse from the other day. She sat with me for a long
time replying to questions I didn’t know I needed to know the answer to. I haven’t actually remembered the answers to any of them. The only thing that stuck in my mind was that I had an appointment today at ten o’clock. Everything else was white noise.

‘There’ll be no need for a mastectomy, then?’ Tami asks. My head turns to her.

‘No. We think a wide local excision will be sufficient.’

‘And you think it is a stage one, grade one cancer at the moment given its size and location?’

‘Yes. We will be able to find out after the surgery which stage it actually is and whether it has spread to the lymph nodes in the armpit, by carrying out a sentinel node biopsy. If this proves to be positive we will remove those nodes during the same procedure.’

‘After the surgery, what happens then, treatment-wise?’

‘A lot of that will depend on the actual stage and grade of the cancer, as well as whether it has spread or if it has remained localised. We will also be able to determine whether it is oestrogen-receptor positive or not. If it has receptors it will most likely respond well to hormone treatment. Once we have all these pieces of information we will be able to map out the best course of treatment.’

Tami is talking because I can’t. She is asking questions, essentially asking the doctor to repeat information he has already given so I will maybe hear it this time. I will take it in. I will understand that this is really happening.

Every night I pray:
Dear God, Please don’t let this be happening. Thank you. Bea

‘Ms Carenden, you are a fit, healthy young woman and it seems we have caught this at a very early stage. All these factors will count in your favour. You will need to undergo more tests and preop prep.’

He’s talking to me again. He is talking to me and I am listening. For the first time since this started, I am listening and I am listening properly.

She has anchored me here by taking my hand. She has stopped
me from floating away, from retreating into denial and pretending this is not happening.

‘What will my breast look like after the surgery?’ I ask and she, my friend, my anchor, tightens her fingers around mine.

‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Tami,’ Beatrix says to me in the taxi home.

She is not apologising for real, she is engaging in Beatrix Doubletalk. What she really means is: ‘
How did you know to ask all that stuff? How did you know that if you got the doctor to repeat it some of it might sink in? Why did you hold my hand?
’

The answer is clear: I know her. She may have been faking it all these years, befriending me to try to steal my life, but I wasn’t with her. I know her. I know she has been in denial and won’t have found out any information because she’s trying to believe it’s not happening; I know that with Beatrix it takes several goes to get most messages across; and I know that physical touch grounds her. It’s what she constantly craves to make her feel real. Sometimes Beatrix thinks that if she isn’t held then she will disappear, that no one will believe she is real.

‘I thought I told you not to talk to me,’ I say.

Tami Doubletalk: ‘
I know you. Even though you’ve done this terrible thing, I still know who you really are.
’

If I had trusted myself enough to believe Mirabelle, to accept that I knew her just like I knew Beatrix, Mirabelle might not be … And I might not be stuck in this wasteland of waiting for the next piece of the jigsaw of my memory to reveal itself and tell me exactly what I did that night.

‘Sorry,’ Beatrix mumbles and returns to staring out of the window at Brighton and our way home.

Noah told me last night that he loved me. He whispered it into the nape of my neck before he fell asleep. I pretended to be asleep and not to hear. I don’t want him to say it again. I don’t want to be afraid that now he’s said it that will be it. He’ll hurt me and I’ll have to accept it because he loves me.

She was here when I stayed in the night before surgery, she was here before they took me down, and she was here when I woke up. She had food, an iPod with movies on and a card drawn by Cora and Anansy, covered in hearts and orders to ‘get well soon, Bix’ in what looks like every colour crayon they own. They’ve also stuck on the inside pictures of the three of us in the park, at the beach, in their living room at the house. It is a behemoth of a card, and sits propped up on the bedside cabinet because there is nowhere else to put it.

I have red hair in those pictures, and one of them was taken when I wasn’t sleeping with their father.

The lymph nodes were clear, apparently, so again, another plus point. Another sign that everything is going to be OK. The surgeon described to me that day I first came with Tami what my breast was likely to look like afterwards and he described it to me again before I went under. He said it would look like I had a very slight dent on the left side of my cleavage.

It’s done, there is a piece of me missing, taken to save my life. I used to be whole and complete, now I am missing a piece.

I should be grateful that it wasn’t a bigger piece. I should be grateful that it looks like it will be a stage one, grade one cancer and I may not even need chemo and radiotherapy.

I should be grateful for all these things. And I am. But … Why me? I am not supposed to ask that, I know. I am supposed to look on the positive side and stay strong. I am supposed to look this thing straight in the eye and tell it I’m going to kick its butt. I am scared. How am I supposed to deal with this fear?

‘I think you should tell your mother,’ Tami says, during this visit. She farms her children out to any of their friends who will take them in and feed them, like a dog owner off on a jaunt, so she can come here and be with me.
Me
.

‘Not going to happen,’ I say, trying to move, but the tug of my itchy stitches, the press of the heavy-feeling dressing, halts me.

‘She has a right to know,’ she says.

‘Erm, no, she doesn’t.’

‘It would break my heart if Cora or Anansy went through something like this and they didn’t tell me. I would move worlds to come and be with them.’

‘Remember how the specialist nurse said to be careful who I told because people’s reactions could have a negative effect on me? My mother’s reaction would have a negative effect on me.’

‘You love your mother, though. You’ve always said you were very close.’

I glance down at my blanket, a white waffle thing that doesn’t really keep me warm. ‘Yeah, well, there’s close and there’s close.’

‘I still think you should tell her,’ she says.

‘When my husband left me, I rang my mother in tears. I had no one to talk to and I needed her to tell me it was going to be all right. That I wasn’t to blame and that I wouldn’t be on my own forever. How hard would that be for a mother to say to her child? Whether she meant it or not, I needed to hear that. Instead she was devastated that all the people who had come to the wedding would know that I hadn’t managed to make it work. That she would be the mother of a divorced woman. That people would look at her and think she set me a bad example. And then she started to intimate that I hadn’t worked hard enough to keep him, then she outright said that because I hadn’t given him enough sex he had to look elsewhere. All in the same phone call. I love my mother to bits, but she’s not the person to rely on if you need emotional support.’

Tami has retreated, she is tight-lipped after hearing what my
mother said to me about the end of my marriage. She is poring over her marriage like you would a sandbox your contact lens has fallen into, searching furiously for it, looking for clues. She is also back to thinking I am The Devil. Maybe she never stopped thinking that, but right now her body language says she is wishing herself away from me. ‘I wish you could understand that I did it because I love him,’ I say to her.

At those words, she inhales deeply and glances away in irritation. I do not speak because I know she has something to say. ‘No, you didn’t,’ she eventually states, still staring out of the window. The whole world is going on out there, while I am in here, recovering from surgery and speaking to my love rival. She looks like she is far away, in another land. She sounds like she is talking to me from overseas, her voice drifting slowly and calmly through the air to me.

‘Don’t tell me how I do or don’t feel,’ I say to her. I will not be patronised by her. No matter what she is doing for me, I will not let her tell me I don’t know what I know. ‘I love him.’