The C-Word Page 2

  The noise continued. Clack-clack-clack. I made it back to the flat and, climbing out of the car as I jerked the handbrake, spotted the flat tyre. ‘Bollocks,’ I spat, a little too loudly for my quiet suburban street, and headed into the flat to ditch my bag and call P. As his phone rang, I went back out to the car to survey the damage, angrily slamming the front door behind me. Another expletive echoed around my neighbourhood. ‘Tiiits!’ My keys were still in my handbag. The kid next door stuck his head over the fence and grinned, mischievously impressed by my swearing. I left a few more on P’s answerphone, and couldn’t help but wonder if this was the universe’s wicked way of forecasting a shitstorm.

  Each busy at work over the following couple of days, P and I did our best to keep ourselves occupied at home, too, avoiding talking about the obvious by going out for dinner on the Monday night with Mum, who was staying over prior to a conference in London. Whenever conversation turned to the following day, the three of us would robotically recite the consultant’s reassurances like some sort of panic-avoiding mantra.

  ‘So I’m going to have to shoot off a bit early tomorrow,’ I’d told my boss earlier that day. ‘I had a biopsy on a lump in my boob at the weekend and I’m getting the results.’

  She looked up from the sink as we washed our hands in the toilets of our client’s office. ‘But it won’t be anything to worry about, surely?’

  I scrunched up my face and gave a little shake of the head. ‘Probably a cyst,’ I said. ‘I’ll be back in to check proofs on Wednesday morning.’

  I wasn’t.

  ‘We’re running a bit behind, but we’ll do your mammogram as soon as the room’s free,’ said the nurse, crouching in front of us and resting her hand on my knee.

  ‘She just touched my leg,’ I whispered to P. ‘I’ve never met her. What’s all that about?’

  Even the waiting room was confusing to me. I didn’t even realise I was scheduled for a mammogram. P brushed off my suspicion. ‘She’s probably just a touchy-feely person; some nurses are like that,’ he said unconvincingly, getting back to his BlackBerry while still gripping my left hand.

  An hour passed. People who came in long after us were being seen almost immediately. I avoided asking the receptionist what was going on and instead opted for tutting loudly and craning my neck to see how often the door to the mammogram room was opening. Eventually, another nurse appeared from that end of the corridor. She handed me a gown and led me through the door, all the while gushing with compliments about my scuffed, red shoes. ‘They’re take-you-anywhere shoes, those,’ she said, as I stood before the six-foot-high machine and she adjusted a flat, metal plate for me to rest my boob on.

  ‘I guess so,’ I said, more concerned about the second plate closing down above my bust.

  ‘It’s going to squeeze a bit, but it’s only for a few seconds,’ she explained as I sucked in sharp intakes of breath to stop myself from crying at the sight – and pain – of my tit being flattened like a piece of Play-Doh. ‘I could do with some shoes like that,’ she continued. ‘The kind that’ll take you to work and then the pub afterwards and not leave you with blisters. And red’s such a versatile colour.’ The machine whirred back to its resting position.

  ‘Something’s up here,’ I thought. ‘Nobody gets that excited about £12 cork wedges.’ And suddenly the other nurse’s knee-touch made sense. I was being primed for a cancer diagnosis.

  Pulling my sequined star-motif T-shirt back on, the nurse led P and me into my specialist’s room, still impossibly chirpy and complimentary and high-pitched. There was a scan of my boobs on a wall-hung light box. I was amazed at how quickly it had got there; it reminded me of the time I broke my wrist at Rollerworld as a kid, and how exciting I found it at the hospital, looking at my X-rays, being put in plaster and pinning an ‘I’ve been to casualty’ badge to my sling. But, from the sombre look on the faces of my specialist and the nurse beside him, P and I could tell that my days of exciting hospital appointments had come to a whiplash-inducing halt.

  From behind his imposing desk, my specialist pointed to a cloudy area on the scan, saying sentences I can’t recall that could only point to one conclusion. I heard the words ‘breast cancer’. The rest was white noise.

  Talk about post-holiday blues. My tan has never faded so fast.

  CHAPTER 2

  Reality bites

  ‘It’s probably just a cyst.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be completely benign.’

  ‘If it turns out the cancer is invasive.’

  ‘In case you require chemotherapy.’

  ‘In the unlikely event that the CT scan shows cancer in other organs …’

  Yadda yadda yadda. Will someone give me a straight answer, for fuck’s sake?

  Forgive my bleak outlook, but right now I’m struggling to hunt down the humour that fools everyone else into thinking I’m handling all this. Today, I’m not handling anything. All I can see at the moment is the fact that cancer kills. And before you start, don’t go telling me that time is on my side, that breast cancer is really curable these days, that I’m a fighter … I’m well aware of all those things, thank you very much. And I also know that if you were in my patent pumps, you’d be looking at the bleakest outcome too.

  *

  ‘I DON’T UNDERSTAND what they told me,’ I said to P as we walked from the hospital to the car park. ‘I can’t take it in.’ I was on autopilot. P too. God knows how he managed to drive us home.

  ‘They told us the news,’ he said. (At this early stage, none of us could bring ourselves to say the word ‘cancer’, which is how its replacement, ‘The Bullshit’, came about – the He Who Must Not Be Named to cancer’s Voldemort.) ‘And then they said that they’d need to determine whether it’s invasive or non-invasive. Non-invasive is better – you might get away without chemotherapy then – but if it’s invasive, you’re going to need chemotherapy and radiotherapy as soon as your mastectomy is out of the way.’ I couldn’t get my head around the multi-syllable medical vocab I was suddenly having to learn.

  ‘And that’s really necessary, is it, the mastectomy?’ I spat, as though it were P who’d decided that it must be done.

  ‘It is, babe,’ he said, ignoring my barbed tone. ‘They’ll give you the date for that when we go back in on Friday for the results of your core biopsy.’

  The core biopsy was a bitch. Before having it, but right after getting ‘the news’, I’d been led out of the room by the professor and nurse who broke it to me and handed a cup of tea. I’d say that both P and I were in tears, but in fact we were doing that kind of crying that comes without tears. Startled crying. Confused crying. Frozen-to-your-core, terrified crying. The kind of crying that sends your body into such paralysing, world-stopping shock that your tear ducts can’t function, so you just sniff and wail and tremble, like an actor who can’t produce the good stuff on cue.

  P stared at his BlackBerry. ‘Shit,’ he said, looking up at me with yet another level of terror in his eyes. ‘Your mum and dad. I’ve missed a ton of calls.’ Fuck. Mum and Dad. How was I going to tell them? As we sat in the hospital, Mum would have been on the train back from a day-long London conference to my hometown of Derby, where Dad would soon be driving to the local station to pick her up. We’d been in the hospital for almost four hours. They’d both been calling the entire time. And since I always – always – make time to speak to my folks every day, whether from airport runways, drunken karaoke sessions or mud-soaked Glastonbury fields, the fact that they’d not been able to get hold of me could only mean one thing.

  ‘We can’t call Mum while she’s on the train,’ I said to P, subtly suggesting with a ‘we’ that it wasn’t a given that I would be making the call. ‘We’ll have to speak to Dad.’ And so we did. No – P did.

  Another nurse appeared to take me for my core biopsy, and P nodded as I was led away. ‘I’ll do it now,’ he said, in a show of selfless courage that was to become typical of his behaviour throughout The Bullshit.
I don’t know what was said in that phone call. I don’t ever want to know what was said in that phone call.

  Feeling helplessly guilty that my stupid, stupid body was soon to break the hearts of my dad, mum and brilliant kid brother Jamie, just as it had my husband before them, I headed into the small, dark room, sat on the bed and stripped to the waist, still snivelling and shaking and stupefied. The nurse explained how the core biopsy was going to work, but of course I wasn’t listening, and so it came as an excruciating shock when what can only be described as an apple corer shot into my bust, pulling with it a sample of the tumour that was threatening to ruin my life, and leaving me bruised and swollen. All the while I stared, moist-eyed, at a watercolour painting on the opposite wall. To this day, I loathe watercolours.

  ‘Did you call him?’ I asked P as I walked back into the waiting room, though I could tell from his grey pallor that he had. I retched at the thought of P’s words bringing my dad – my brilliant Dad; the one person in the world I most want to be like – such woe with the news that no parent can prepare themselves for. ‘You need to call him,’ P replied solemnly as we walked out of the clinic, bidding the professor and his nurse a purposeful goodbye as we left. (A cancer diagnosis, I’ve discovered, tends to enhance Britishness – pleasantries, talk of the weather, cups of tea … as though in a crisis, politeness is all we have left.)

  It’s funny what your brain forgets. More than ‘everything’s going to be okay’, I can’t remember what I told my dad on the phone as P and I drove home from the hospital. Nor can I remember what I told Mum when I later spoke to her. Nor the reactions of my closest friends, who were on the receiving end of the same kind of phone call. Not even the words of my boss, who I called at home that night.

  I recently asked my family what they remember of that day, expecting to hear meticulous, blow-by-blow stories of exactly what was said, what the weather was like and what song was on the radio. But not even they can recount any details. Mum remembers little more than ‘a feeling of absolute terror’. Dad remembers his head being ‘scrambled’ and trying to hold it together while talking to P, but breaking down as soon as he ended the call. Jamie assumed that Mum must have been wrong when she said ‘it’s cancer’, but abruptly thought ‘fuck me, it’s real’ when he saw Dad in tears two steps behind. And P? Well, P was with me. And short of disbelief, confusion and a sudden inability to swallow, his recollection is as sketchy as mine.

  It’s by no means a perfect account of those bleak few hours – certainly not enough for a Crimewatch reconstruction, say, or a Match of the Day highlights package – but those snatched film stills, those tiny moments in time, are what remain on the editing-room floor. It’s as though our minds have wiped it all like a hard drive we’d hoped to protect; as though what was stored is of no use to us; as though we’re better off without it. And I’m grateful. I want to be protected from that stuff, from those painful moments that punctuated the beginning of The Bullshit. The phone calls, the conversations, the moment I first saw my parents after they’d thrown what they could into a case, dropping off keys and terrible news with Jamie, before heading down to London as quickly as the speed cameras of the M40 would allow them.

  Something neither my brain – nor my hard drive – has wiped, however, was the embarrassingly cop-out, multi-recipient email I sent to the friends I hadn’t told in a phone call.

  Subject: Well here I am to stuff up your Wednesday morning.

  Hi everyone

  First off, please forgive the group mailer. I won’t beat about the bush here as this is a difficult enough email to send, so here’s the thing: I have breast cancer. We’re hoping it’s only early stages and while it’s very unusual to get it at my age, I’m told that’s actually going to help me in getting over it. I had a core biopsy yesterday which will determine whether the cancer is invasive or non-invasive (we’re gunning for the latter), and that in turn will determine my course of treatment. Either way, after Friday they’ll get straight round to it treatment-wise and it’ll be easier all round (she says, naively) because we can be practical about it all, rather than emotional (and to be honest, I can’t be dealing with the emotional side of it). So that’s my news. Sorry to those of you who I’m suddenly back in touch with thanks to this bullshit, and I promise I’ll keep you all posted as much as I can. Now for fuck’s sake, someone tell an inappropriate joke or something.

  Lis xxx

  I can’t help but shake my head and snigger patronisingly at that email. The ill-prepared, misinformed, simplified, cancer’s-messing-with-the-wrong-girl tone makes me cringe. I was stupidly ignorant. But what did I know? At that moment, I’d hoped my cancer was early stages, non-invasive and treatable with little more than a mastectomy. My follow-up appointment that Friday revealed a different story.

  With Mum and Dad staying at the flat, we somehow filled the two days before my appointment with the strangest of time-occupying tasks: sizing up mini TVs in Dixons so they’d have something to watch in the box room that was to become their second home; choosing a mattress topper in Ikea to make the sofabed more comfortable; pyjama-buying in Marks & Spencer because Mum insisted my mismatched rock t-shirt and shorts combos weren’t suitable for a five-day stay in hospital. It’s very typical of my family, this kind of behaviour – met with a crisis, we immediately turn to the practicalities. We’d say it’s a Midlands thing, but maybe it’s typical of most families? Yes, there’s been a cancer diagnosis, but there’s still laundry to do, mugs to wash, weeds to pull up and Coronation Street to watch. These simple, seemingly inane, minute-passers are what I and my family do best. (Run out of hot water, forget the matchday parking ticket, or churn up the lawn with an enthusiastic summertime kickabout, however, and it’s meltdown time.) It was our way of making things better, of striving for an indifference to the pain. We couldn’t change the fact that I had cancer, but we could ensure that we had everything in place to make this as smooth a ride as possible, whether it be new pillows or extra teabags or limescale remover for the shower screen.

  The problem with that tactic, however, is that you can fill up your days with pointless activities as much as you like, but the emotion’s going to have to come out at some point, and so the rest of those sombre, surreal forty-eight hours was filled with the kind of agonising and wretched heartbreak that makes you unable to speak or eat or stop yourself from crying noisily in the middle of a busy M&S café. Then sadness turns to anger. Mum shouted at a changing room attendant for not allowing us both into the same cubicle. I erupted into a tantrum when the spotty pyjamas she’d brought me to try on made me ‘look like an ill person’. Dad got frustrated with the instruction manuals of the various gadgets he’d bought to keep me occupied in hospital. All we each longed for was something – anything – to blame, but shop staff, pyjamas and iPod speakers fell disappointingly short of the mark, and rage morphed back into frustrated, confused despair.

  Why we thought shopping was a good idea, I’ll never know. Even at the best of times, we’re not a family who shops well together. For us, the therapy in ‘retail therapy’ is about as exciting a prospect as the therapy in ‘chemotherapy’. Mum is famously short-tempered. Dad is famously uninterested. And I’m famously impatient with their short temper and disinterest. But I guess that in such an otherwise bewildering time, shopping represented something normal. And all we each wanted more than anything else was to enforce some normality on the situation, even though everything happening around us was anything but.

  We’d get back to the flat after our shopping missions and I’d immediately disappear under my duvet fully clothed, lasting little more than twenty minutes before realising that, actually, I needed company, whether or not I made the most of it. Not that we ever made the most of each other’s company when we weren’t out on pointless shopping trips. We rarely did more than sit and stare at each other – me on the sofa, Dad in the armchair, Mum on the ottoman in the bay window – with baffled tears running down our cheeks until P came home from work
, and he joined in too.

  But even being surrounded by my favourite people in the world felt hopelessly lonely, because nobody knew what it was like to be stuck in my tortured mind and my useless body – nor was I keen to tell them. I needed an escape. Some people confide in a therapist, but I didn’t have one. Some people go to confession, but I’d never been to church. Some people talk to their cats, but I wasn’t an animal person. If this had been anything other than cancer – a problem with work, say, or a relationship issue – I’d have instinctively spoken to my family and friends about it. But not only was I completely SICK of talking about cancer after mere days of it being in my stratosphere, but its arrival had given each of my confidantes enough of a shock already, and adding my bleak thoughts to that horrible reality wouldn’t have made them or me feel any better. And so my mind was close to capacity with unspoken thoughts and fears and questions and worries and emotions and frustrations, which I had no idea how or where to download.

  Until Thursday afternoon, when an email I was writing somehow turned into more of a narrative, and it became clear that I’d turned to my Mac for comfort. (It would never have happened on a PC.) And forgive me for offering such a wanky explanation, but writing about the frustrating, life-altering, sheer bloody pain-in-the-arse place in which I found myself seemed the natural thing to do. I wasn’t consciously keeping a diary; I wasn’t even consciously starting a blog – but with more thoughts swimming around my head than I could hold on to, I needed to put them somewhere, and my keyboard offered an easy solution.

  I momentarily flattered myself that I could become the Carrie Bradshaw of breast cancer – all long mousy hair, cross-legged on a bed, dreaming of shoes and baring all to a MacBook. But then reality called, and I looked up to find myself not in a couture-filled Upper East Side apartment, but a bargain-crammed flat in Wandsworth. And as much as I might have convinced myself that White Company pyjama bottoms are the height of sophistication, I doubt they could make quite the same style statement as a pink tutu.