The C-Word Page 3

  And so I passed the time until the following Friday’s consultation by writing my cancer-column. ‘Whatever it is,’ I assured everyone before the appointment, ‘it’s better to know about it. Then we can get back to being practical instead of working ourselves up by guessing.’

  P and I introduced my folks to the professor and nurse who we’d seen the previous Tuesday.

  ‘Oh, it is good that you’ve got your parents around you,’ said the nurse as she shook my dad’s hand. ‘Long may it continue,’ she added enigmatically, as my mum clocked her meaning. ‘I’m sorry to keep you waiting, Lisa,’ she said, turning to me, ‘but Prof wants to see the easy ones first; he’d like to spend a bit more time with you.’

  I turned to P, then to my folks, as the nurse walked away. Dad later told me that the look on my face will haunt him for the rest of his life. ‘Well, that’s it, then,’ I grunted, defeated. ‘She’s preparing me for the worst.’ Nobody disagreed. We all knew that I was about to hear the word ‘invasive’.

  That wasn’t all P and I heard. Back in his office, the professor pointed with his rollerball to a diagram of a breast that reminded me of a GCSE Biology paper. He explained that my five-centimetre – five centimetre! – tumour wasn’t just invasive, that it was not, in fact, early stages at all, but likely to be grade two or three, depending on whether he discovered a spread to my lymph nodes during my mastectomy.

  ‘How many grades are there?’ I asked, a cancer novice desperate to learn more.

  ‘Four,’ said the nurse.

  ‘Shit,’ I exhaled, quickly apologising for the expletive I’d let slip. I pulled my chair forward and rested both forearms on the professor’s desk, my hands flat out on the dark oak, meaning business. ‘What I can’t understand,’ I asserted, oddly cold and businesslike, ‘is how I didn’t find this sooner. How neither of us found this sooner,’ I continued, gesturing to P. ‘I mean, it’s five centimetres!’

  The professor drew more shapes on the breast diagram to demonstrate how the tumour had been growing immediately beneath my nipple, and had only begun to push out to the side – the side where P and I discovered it – as it had grown.

  Mum couldn’t hide her disbelief either. ‘How didn’t anybody pick this up?’ she shrieked at the nurse, accusatorily. ‘How can it be a cyst one moment and a huge, invasive tumour the next?’ I was mortified.

  ‘Let me fetch you all some tea and I’ll answer your questions,’ said the nurse. It was clearly not the first time she’d been in such a situation.

  ‘I just think it’s appalling that nobody picked this up!’ Mum yelled, getting louder and redder with every word. Dad was in pieces, clearly having the same angry thoughts but physically unable to verbalise them due to the wails that were choking him. P’s head was held in his quivering hands as he stared at the patch of carpet that was soaking up his grief-stricken tears. And all of this was my doing. It was my body, my breast, my cancer that had sent my mum insanely livid, my dad deranged with distress and my husband into funereal melancholy. They were reacting as though I’d died, and yet there I sat, party to this tragic scene. I looked from Dad to Mum to P from Dad to P, to Mum. This was all too much. I was suffocating. I couldn’t handle it.

  ‘That’s IT!’ I screamed, propelling myself out of my plastic chair and kicking it back with my heel in one furious motion. ‘I can’t do this. I. CANT. DO. THIS!’ They almost looked as surprised to see me there as they were at the sound of my outcry and the sight of me towering above them all, my bellowing words adding imposing inches to my 5 foot 7 frame. ‘You have GOT to stop it. The lot of you! I know how hard this is – it’s fucking IMPOSSIBLE – but I CANNOT HANDLE seeing you all like this.’ (I figured now was as good a time as any to start saying ‘fuck’ in front of my parents.) ‘I just CAN’T DEAL with this kind of emotion. So you can carry on being like you are and I’ll deal with all of this on my own, or you can pack it in and do it with me. Because I CAN do this on my own, you know,’ I continued haughtily, in what I knew even then was a massive fib. ‘I can do it on my own and get through it all just fine, thank you, but what I CAN’T do is handle your emotion as well as my own, okay? OKAY? So what’s it going to be?’

  The nurse chose this moment to walk back into the room with tea and tissues. She looked pretty shell-shocked herself. Either she’d heard what was going on in there – hell, I’m sure most of Central London heard what was going on in there – or she was completely thrown by the stupefied silence that had descended on the room, thanks to my unexpected kick-ass outburst.

  ‘Would you like me to explain everything again?’ she asked my folks, who nodded calmly in agreement like two toddlers on the naughty step. This was for their benefit more than mine, although the nurse purposefully turned to me during the part about chemotherapy; the part that finished ‘… and you will lose your hair’.

  I looked at Mum, crestfallen. She knew what I was thinking.

  ‘I won’t be able to go to Jamie’s wedding,’ I said. Jamie and Leanne’s big day was four months away – slap-bang in the middle of my likely chemotherapy schedule.

  ‘Of course you will,’ said the nurse. ‘You’ll be able to wear a lovely long wig or a pretty headscarf and you’ll look amazing.’

  I ignored her assurances. I couldn’t possibly turn up to such an important occasion in a wig. Wigs are for fancy dress, not weddings. And a headscarf? Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. Who did she think I was, a fortune-teller? As she continued her recap of my diagnosis, my mind took a mental snapshot of the four of us beside the beautiful bride and the proud groom – Mum, Dad and P in their finery and then, standing awkwardly beside them, a balding, bloated George Dawes lookalike in a cocktail dress, ruining the photographs of my brother’s happiest day for ever more.

  CHAPTER 3

  Let me get this off my chest

  People keep telling me that I needn’t keep ‘being brave’ and that I ‘don’t have to feel positive all the time’ (get ‘brave’ and ‘positive’ on my Most Hated list IMMEDIATELY). They say that whenever I want to let it all out or get really angry or have a good cry, I can talk to them. And it’s good of them to say so.

  But let me say this for the record: I am not consciously being anything. I will never want to have a good cry or rant or whinge. Those things happen spontaneously: trying on pyjamas in Marks & Spencer, watering the garden, stirring my tea, blowing out a candle before I go to bed. At the moment, every reaction is spontaneous (hence a poor teenage shop assistant getting both barrels in Dixons recently).

  In fact, this is the first fucking time in my whole life when I’ve stopped giving a shit about how I’m being, the way I’m acting or how I’m coming across to other people. Again: I am not trying to be anything, I’m just getting on with it.

  None of these words, today or any other day, are for your benefit. I’m not ‘being brave’ to make you feel better. Repeat: I. Am. Not. Being. Brave. You needn’t be concerned about how I’m coping. There is no ‘how’ here. I’m just coping. There’s no good or bad way to do it. You’d cope too.

  *

  ‘LET’S GET SOMETHING to eat before we go home,’ I said to P and my folks as we left the hospital, still the reluctant flag-waving leader on our guided tour of cancer. After my chair-kicking outburst, they knew better than to suggest otherwise, and followed me in dazed single-file to the nearest restaurant, like unsteady newborn ducks being led to water by their plucky mother. We each pulled up a stool in The World’s Worst Tapas Restaurant, throwing our bags and a rainforest’s worth of breast cancer information leaflets onto the table. I hoped their presence would go some way to explaining our stunned, miserable, red-eyed faces to our concerned-looking waiter.

  We’re an annoyingly polite family at the best of times – only ordering starters once it’s been ascertained that everybody wants one, filling DVD rental trips with the kind of no-you-choose routine that makes the process of selecting a movie longer than the film itself – but that day more than ever it was impossi
ble to ascertain what anyone wanted to eat, so floored were we by the further details of my diagnosis. I took the reins again, hurriedly ordering nondescript plates of bravas, croquettas and tortilla, in an attempt both to get everyone sufficiently fed and to quickly shoo away our increasingly confused waiter.

  Our roles, I realised, had reversed: suddenly I was the parent, taking care of my lost-looking, infantile brood; dishing out the don’t-worrys and it’ll-be-okays that I hoped would comfort them. Dad later admitted that he feared I was becoming our family’s matriarch at such a young age. And, notoriously bossy as I am, it wasn’t a position I was interested in. Almost as soon as the words ‘breast cancer’ had entered our world, it felt as if everyone was suddenly looking to me for strength and guidance and cues on how to act or what to say. And half of me felt pleased that they did; but the other half felt like a clueless, desperate child. What made anyone think that at twenty-eight – twenty-eight! – I was any better equipped than them to deal with this? Why was I suddenly the ringleader? I was the child. I was the one in trouble. I was the one in need of help. How could I scream my parents into submission one minute and expect them to wipe away my tears the next? Nothing, nothing, not a single fucking thing about this was fair, and I wanted to wail and scream and throw a noisy, fist-banging fit on the restaurant floor. But just as having to keep it together for everyone I loved wasn’t fair, it was simultaneously the only thing I could bring myself to do.

  When our crapas eventually arrived, I encouraged P, Mum and Dad to eat something, using their fork-pushing as an excuse to ignore my own food and instead make a list of the people I needed to keep informed. Jamie was first, then my mate Tills.

  ‘Perhaps I ought to tell J,’ said Mum.

  ‘No, this is for me to do,’ I snapped, in the manner of a haughty headmistress. ‘In fact, I’m doing it right now,’ I insisted, grabbing my phone from the table as though it were a clipboard from which I was about to read the school register. I stood watching P and my folks stare at their plates from the opposite side of the road as I called Jamie, picking at the flaking paint on some iron railings as his phone rang.

  ‘Mate, it’s me … it’s invasive,’ I revealed, wishing as soon as I’d said it that I’d found a better way to break the news.

  ‘Fuck,’ came the instant reply. ‘Shit, sis … fuck. What are they going to do?’

  I recounted the routine like a shopping list. ‘Well, first I’m seeing a fertility expert to see whether I can get any eggs frozen before chemotherapy shoots the lot of them to shit. Then this Friday I’m having a mastectomy and once I’ve recovered from that there’ll be a few months of chemo.’ The phone line crackled with sniffs and mumbled expletives, but I continued with my cancer-catalogue. ‘And then there’ll be some radiotherapy and finally some hormone therapy, but to be honest I’m not really sure what that means.’

  Jamie composed himself. ‘And all of that is going to work, right?’ I could sense the panic in his voice and it frightened the hell out of me.

  ‘It’d fucking bett … yes, mate, of course it’s going to work,’ I corrected myself, choosing then and there to keep my doubts to myself. ‘They’re all really positive, J,’ I said, finally finding a more sensitive tone. ‘I’m young enough and tough enough to be able to handle this, y’know, and they’re throwing everything they’ve got at it.’

  I glanced back over to the restaurant window, trying to lip-read what P, Mum and Dad were saying to each other. I assumed this was a tapas-sized taster of what was to come: being talked about whenever I was absent, but continually unaware of what was being said.

  ‘Will you be okay, dude?’ I asked Jamie.

  ‘Of course I’ll be okay, you nobhead,’ he replied, as I welcomed the relief of someone finally lightening the tone. ‘I just want you to be, sis.’

  My call to Tills went a similar way. I came clean about my tumour and recited the treatment shopping list. She gasped in all the right places and said ‘fuck’ a lot. Tills had clearly been steeling herself to hear the worst, and immediately switched into super-practical mode, deciding who she would tell on my behalf and how she could clear her diary for any time I might need her. She was brilliantly frank, and I was instantly grateful.

  ‘I can’t be doing with tears right now, Tills,’ I said.

  ‘Which is why you won’t be getting any from me,’ she replied. ‘In fact, it’s your duty to tell people to shut the fuck up whenever you want to. You’ve got to do this your way and it’s not going to help if people are blubbering around you.’

  I told her how I’d screamed my family into silence at the hospital, and she congratulated my efforts. ‘That’s my girl,’ she said. ‘You kick some ass.’

  It seemed that there’d been some similar ass-kicking in the restaurant – though I’m still not sure by whom. By the time I’d made my calls and returned to my stool, P and my folks were sitting upright and feigning smiles, having apparently decided that straightforward and practical was their best tactic from here on in.

  ‘We’ve been talking,’ said Dad, ‘and if you two want any time on your own, just say the word and we’ll piss off back up the motorway.’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ I thought to myself. Dad saying ‘piss’ and Jamie calling me a nobhead was exactly the kind of discourse I was after. Yes, this was The Worst News In The History Of The World, and yes, it was heartbreaking and upsetting and frightening and going to take one hell of a joint effort to get through, but there wasn’t a hope of any of us getting through it if there wasn’t even a sniff of light-heartedness about the situation.

  ‘Yeah. I think maybe you’d better piss off.’ I winked at Dad, turning to P for his consent. (As if he’d have disagreed. I’m sure if I’d have played Veruca Salt and asked for a pony and an MX5 and a Mulberry handbag he’d have let me get away with it.)

  We paid our bill, piled into the car and headed back to the flat, making further lists of who to tell and how, each of our phones chirping a chorus of text-message beeps on the way. But as everyone else kept to their secret pact of staying practical and helpful and upbeat, our roles began to shift again, and I became the needy, petulant child to their calm, considered guardians. Bottom lip protruding, I stared out of the window at the backpacked tourists wandering along Baker Street, seeking out other girls my age. ‘Why wasn’t it you?’ I thought as we passed a happy-looking twenty-something, arm in arm with her equally – and nauseatingly – happy-looking boyfriend. ‘Why haven’t you got this?’

  I imagined all the things she could have done to justify a tumour in her breast. Perhaps she’d once seriously assaulted someone or committed fraud or perhaps her boyfriend was blissfully unaware of the husband and kids who assumed she was out at work. I made a mental list of the things I’d done that could have tipped my own karma in the wrong direction, but drew blanks at teenage hair-pulling, exaggerating my CV and stealing a carpet from an Indian restaurant in Freshers’ Week. But even if I had nicked every CD in my collection, kicked the crap out of my school nemesis or cheated on every boyfriend I’d had, would that mean that I deserved to get cancer?

  ‘It’s not fucking fair,’ I whinged when we got back home and resumed our positions – P on a floor cushion, me on the sofa, Dad in the armchair and Mum on the ottoman in the bay window. I wasn’t timid or tearful or frightened. Just angry. Blood-boilingly angry. I needed to stomp and shout and swear and punch things – and I needed to do it on my own. So, selfish as it was to make them do it, my parents packed their car and drove back up to Derby, to give my brother the support he needed as much as any of us, and to make arrangements to waste their annual leave on seeing me through The Bullshit.

  My phone was ringing off the hook. Everyone had known that I was heading back to hospital for the details of my diagnosis, and the callers were a mixture of those curious to know the extent of my illness and those who’d just heard the grade-two-or-three reality. I ignored them all, choosing instead to tidy up the kitchen, throwing plates loudly and c
arelessly back into their drawers and kicking cupboard doors shut. Meanwhile P played secretary, cutting short every ring of my phone but eventually accepting a conference call from my bosses.

  Hanging up the phone, P timidly explained what had been said: that work had signed me off immediately and that if ever there was anything they could do to help – taxis to the hospital, rescue packages, magazine subscriptions – to make sure they were the first people we called. Few companies would be so supportive, but not even their show of generous assistance could penetrate my blind rage. I was growing more livid with every second; more enraged with every breath. Hurling open my wardrobe doors and tearing bin liners off a fast-unravelling roll, I set to the task of pulling my newly bought summer clothes from their hangers, violently stuffing them into bags in protest at the summertime fun I would now be absent from.

  Once my tantrum was done, P held me in his comforting arms, calming me with cuddles as the doorbell rang. My friend Ali had driven over, armed with cake, to do what she could to console us. She usually bursts in like the Tasmanian Devil, but this time she was quieter than usual as she edged around the front door and took herself into the kitchen to make a round of tea. P and I silently acknowledged what a huge deal it must have been for her to make this visit, having lost her mum to the same disease. ‘Right then,’ she said, positioning herself between us on the sofa. ‘I’ve got something that’ll cheer you up.’ She produced from her pocket her mobile phone, pressing play on a series of hen-night-karaoke-session videos that I’d hoped P would never see. ‘Whatever state this thing gets you into, Mac,’ said Ali – one of the few people who still calls me by my maiden-name-influenced nickname – ‘It can’t be worse than this.’ She pulled me closer for a one-armed hug as the three of us cried with laughter at footage of me rapping as well as a gin-fuelled Midlander is able.