‘Bike, schmike,’ said Rachel. ‘Do you want this dog to go back to someone who’d leave him with a stranger? Do you have any idea what some people will do with a stray dog?’
Buzz had stayed stock still while they were talking about him, but out of the corner of her eye, Gina saw him sink to the ground, and curl up against a bookshelf, trying to make himself invisible. There was something pathetic about his eagerness to vanish from their sight that made her sad and angry at the same time.
Rachel must have seen it too, because her voice trailed off.
‘So it’s OK to leave him with you? Please?’ Gina pounced. ‘It’s just that I’m already late for a meeting . . .’
‘Fine.’ Rachel flapped her hands. ‘Leave him with me. I’ll take him up there at lunchtime. But give me your number in case there’s a problem.’
Gina’s shoulders relaxed. She hadn’t realised how subtly Buzz and his haunted eyes had lassoed her until the tightening band across her head suddenly slackened. She really didn’t want to have to worry about something else, not when she sometimes forgot to make herself supper or spent whole nights lying awake.
‘You’re in safe hands here,’ she told him, and untied her good scarf from his collar, then handed it to Rachel. ‘Consider this a donation. It’s Alexander McQueen.’
Rachel sighed, and looked at Gina as if she knew exactly what she was thinking.
Even in its early stage, the playhouse-shed standing in the centre of Tony’s joinery workshop really was something to behold.
‘Seriously, Tony,’ said Gina, as they stood gazing at it, ‘I could move in there myself.’
It was a shed of two halves. From the front, it was a pretty cabin, with pine shutters decorated with cut-out hearts, and tiny window boxes waiting to be filled with silk flowers; inside there was space for a play kitchen and a table for tea and a comfy chair ‘for grannies’. That was one half. Round the back, however, another, much plainer, door led into a compact Man’s Shed, with enough room inside for a leather recliner, a small television, a beer fridge and whatever else Naomi felt Jason needed to hide out with. The two rooms were separated by a sturdy dividing wall running down the middle, with a discreet serving hatch/observation window.
‘Well, we got the two doors and the two halves thing solved,’ said Tony, surveying it critically. ‘Mind you, it’s not going to be cheap, not with all those details your client wanted.’
‘Don’t worry about that. The budget’s . . . generous.’ Gina didn’t want to think about how many of her own Christmas gifts Naomi had eBayed to pay for it. ‘And the furniture’s next, now you’ve done the main house?’ she added.
The play kitchen was going to be Gina’s own present to Willow: a mini Welsh dresser like the one in her own old house, and a table and chairs in the shape of toadstools to have tea on.
‘Got one of the apprentices on it.’ Tony folded his arms, amused. ‘Started calling Kyle “the Elf”, what with all the little chair legs he’s been making.’
Gina smiled, and took some photos on her phone to send Naomi. Something about the playhouse was making her feel a bit broody, but she couldn’t work out whether it was for children she didn’t have or because, deep down, the little girl inside her was stamping her feet for an all-mod-cons Wendy house with real windows, and a proper black latch on the front door. Maybe a bit of both, she decided. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to want your own scaled-down window boxes, complete with miniature roses.
Gina got home at five, determined to make a start on her project for the week: downloading all her music onto her laptop so she could sell or give away the CDs currently taking up two boxes’ worth of space in her bedroom. She was fed up with having to climb over them to go to bed, and now the sitting room was starting to look clearer, she didn’t want to get used to some level of clutter. The flat had to be cleared.
‘Music’ was item eighteen on her list. The additions were snaking down the lining paper now, some with a few doodles next to them, if Gina felt moved to it. She hadn’t drawn in a long time. Now the whole wall felt like a giant sketch pad, tempting yet off-putting. The list was getting interesting, and she was trying to choose instinctively, rather than with logical reasons.
Some choices were practical – her laptop, her hi-fi speakers, her indulgent feather duvet, which was cool in summer and warm in winter – while some were deliberately impractical and sentimental: a framed photo of her mum and dad at Ascot, the lucky cat mascot Naomi had given her before her A levels. She couldn’t choose just one CD, when so much of her life was soundtracked by her music collection, so she’d chosen all of it.
Gina slotted the first Beatles disk into her laptop to start copying it across, and thought how old-fashioned CD cases looked now. Some of these had been to university with her, some to her house share in London and others were really Stuart’s. Scratched, some with inserts missing, broken hinges. And yet the music was still clean and sharp. She did a rough mental calculation of how much hard cash had been spent on the contents of these two boxes and felt a bit sick. Still, if the charity shop got a quid for each of them, she’d more than paid for Buzz to have a few meals in the rescue.
She frowned. Buzz would be fine. And he wasn’t her responsibility. She’d done the right thing, handed him over to the people who could look after him.
In the time it had taken her to sort out all the Beatles albums into a pile, Revolver had downloaded. Gina ejected the disk, clicked it back into its box and consigned it to GIVE AWAY and reached for Rubber Soul. There was something satisfying about downloading: it was going to fill up a useful chunk of quiet evenings, when she could tell her mother and Naomi that, yes, she was keeping busy, thanks.
She did some tidying while the Beatles’ albums were being copied, but as she ventured into the Nineties, nostalgia started to slow Gina down. The CDs had been stored in floor-to-ceiling shelves in Dryden Road so she hadn’t looked at the covers in a long time but now she did, and the memories came back as she opened each case.
Nick Drake. Lying in bed with Kit, listening to Five Leaves Left over and over while they kissed until her lips were raw.
Nirvana reminded her of revising with Naomi on the grass behind the rounders pitch.
Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations with tracklists on the back conjured up entire long summer afternoons listening to the radio in her bedroom.
Radiohead, the Flaming Lips, Editors: the sounds of her chemo months. Complicated, textural music she’d never had time for when she was busy but which filled up her afternoons in bed while she was slowly resurfacing after the treatments, unable to move or think, and needing distraction from the pain in her bones, in her muscles. Gina put those to one side: she knew right now she’d never listen to Arcade Fire again because she’d be swamped with nausea.
She wondered what would be the musical memory for this phase of her life. You never really knew until the time had passed completely, and you heard something at random and everything came flooding back.
Alanis Morissette. Gina held Jagged Little Pill and ran her finger over the case, cracked where someone had stood on it at a party. It was the first CD she’d bought, from HMV in Longhampton, and it had sparked off her first proper teenage row with her mother, who seemed convinced that owning a CD with a parental guidance sticker meant that Gina was headed off the rails and into a life of drunkenness and tattoos.
Terry had tried to calm it down. At the peak of the argument, Janet had spat out something about Gina not getting this sort of behaviour from her, and the defiance had abruptly dropped away from Gina to be replaced with curiosity. What, exactly? As far as she knew, her soldier dad had had about as much in common with Alanis Morissette as she did. But Janet had clamped her mouth shut, claimed she had a migraine and stormed off to bed, leaving the questions hanging in the air.
Terry had persuaded her not to pursue it. ‘She’s just worried about you growing up,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t read anything into it. Some of tho
se lyrics are a bit . . . angry, love.’
But as Gina had moaned to Naomi afterwards, what else could she do but read things into it when her mother never told her anything? She read in everything she could. You didn’t get into the SAS if you were any old soldier. Your death didn’t get a complete security blackout unless you were doing something dangerous.
And how was she like her dad? Were there genes in her that could be trained to kill, to stalk, to go charging into danger? Had he been like that all the time? How her mother, so neat and pretty, had ended up married to a man she wouldn’t talk about was as much a part of the mystery as he was. Janet had only known Huw for four years. Less time than Gina had lived with Stuart.
Gina hadn’t been listening to the tracks as they downloaded onto her laptop but on an impulse she clicked on ‘You Oughta Know’.
All the hairs on the back of her arms stood up. She’d forgotten just how much anger was in that song.
The buzzer sounded, and Gina jumped as if someone had come into the room.
She turned off the music and fumbled with the entry-phone, trying to compose herself. Was it the policeman? Maybe Dave back with her bike?
‘Hi,’ said an unfamiliar voice. ‘It’s Rachel Fenwick from the dog rescue. Have you got a moment?’
‘Yes, of course.’ Gina pressed her lips together, pulling herself back. Rachel could take some of these CDs – perfect timing. ‘Push the door, it’s unlocked.’
While Rachel came up the stairs to the flat, Gina moved quickly around the room, straightening the three yellow cushions on her sofa, moving her laptop off the coffee table, relighting the hyacinth candle and turning on a couple of lamps. She found herself hoping that Rachel was calling to tell her that Buzz had been claimed, or was now settled in the kennels up the road. She didn’t want him, but she didn’t want him to be unhappy either.
There was a brisk knock at her door, and when she opened it, Rachel was standing in the doorway with two jute bags, both of which were filled with stuff. Next to her, on a lead attached to a brand new martingale collar, was Buzz.
Gina had a funny sinking feeling. So did Buzz, who cowered a little against Rachel’s jeans.
‘Hello!’ Rachel raked a hand through her dark bob. ‘I have good news and bad news. But mainly good. I think.’
‘You’d better come in,’ said Gina. Rachel seemed much keener to come in than Buzz did.
Chapter Eleven
ITEM: a tatty red A4 file of hospital notes, referral letters, appointment cards, printed fact sheets, Internet printouts
Longhampton, June 2008
Stuart hasn’t stopped talking since they left the hospital car park, but the words are sliding past Gina’s ears. Instead she’s ticking off the familiar buildings on her side of the road: the row of Victorian terraced houses painted pink, yellow and fawn, the Neapolitan houses, as she’s always thought of them, two Border Oak new-builds, then the church. The creamy magnolias in the garden of the big villa set back from the road, exploding with exuberance over the wall. And then the main run of houses peters out, and they’re passing the old technical college, the Esso garage, heading back to half-finished Dryden Road, and the anaglypta they were going to steam off this weekend.
The outside world is exactly the same as it was when they passed this way a few hours ago, yet it feels as if it’s pivoting in the opposite direction. The anaglypta will still need steaming. It’s just that now she has breast cancer.
She tries it again in her head. Now I have breast cancer.
It still sounds as if she’s talking about someone else. Someone braver, someone older.
Following her consultation with the Midlands’ best breast surgeon, Gina officially has one small lump and some affected lymph nodes, all of which will be removed by Dr Khan at 3 p.m. on Friday.
‘. . . and then he said it was a positive factor that it hadn’t spread beyond those lymph nodes, which is something to focus on,’ Stuart continues, as if she hadn’t been there while Mr Khan was telling them exactly that. ‘And then I asked him about hormone treatment, and he said because yours was oestrogen receptive, you’d be able to have Tamoxifen . . .’
Gina lets Stuart carry on talking, neatly sidestepping the word cancer as he goes. Recapping stressful situations has always been his way of dealing with things. He likes to feel on top of the facts, owning the options when they come out of his mouth this time round. In a way it’s reassuring: being swept along on Stuart’s train of practicality gives her the secret space in her head for the wider implications Gina knows he won’t let her air.
How should she tell her mother? Janet gets hysterical in hospitals; she fusses like a demented hen, manages to make it all about herself. Better not tell her. Well, no, they’ll have to tell her something: it’d be hard to disguise the chemotherapy.
Gina watches the art deco fire station slide by outside her window. And time off work. When to tell them? When to write letters, in case . . . Well, in case. And her stuff. There’s so much stuff to sort out.
‘. . . brilliant that the lump’s so small. He said he didn’t think you’d need reconstructive surgery. Not that that matters . . .’
Darker thoughts press in like clouds. It’s not the size of the lump that freaks Gina out, it’s that it’s there at all. What has she done to get cancer? How did it start in her? Was it a trauma? Or stress? Has it always been there, waiting? Or has she caused it?
The Internet has not helped. Gina read some hideously judgemental blog about cancer being caused by suppressing emotions, forcing negativity down like coal, until it compacts into cancer. The words had felt as if someone had been yelling them in her head.
‘. . . I can take some time off work to go with you to chemo, or my sister can come, as she’s only a few streets away from the breast clinic . . .’
Stuart’s not leaving any space for her to say anything, but Gina doesn’t want to speak. It’s as though he’s talking about a friend, not her.
She mentally twirls around the spire of St Mary’s Church and realises she’s imagining herself flick-flacking from roof to roof of each house they pass, as she used to in the back seat of Terry’s car. Gina pushes a fingernail into the fleshy web between her thumb and her forefinger to bring herself back into Stuart’s car, into this moment. Into this new development that’s actually happening to her now.
‘. . . and you’ll be almost halfway through your chemotherapy by my birthday in September so maybe we could go somewhere, if you’re up to it . . .’
At last Gina’s blood freezes with realisation.
Naomi’s wedding’s in September. The apricot-and-cream-themed wedding they’ve been planning for nearly a year while Jason and Stuart have been at cricket nets and the gym, and she’ll be the spectre at the feast, the Bridesmaid with Breast Cancer, not even halfway through her treatment.
My hair, thinks Gina. My hair will have fallen out. Naomi will go mad. I’ll totally upstage her if I follow her down the aisle with a bald head. Maybe I can get a wig.
The thought of Naomi’s face when she has to tell her she’ll be wearing a wig to her wedding makes Gina giggle hysterically, and Stuart finally stops talking.
‘What did I say?’ he asks. ‘What’s funny?’
She glances across and notices, with surprise, how drawn he is. Stuart’s forehead is creased with concentration but there’s a vulnerability around his mouth that she’s never seen before, and she feels guilty: he’ll have to bear this too. The chemo, the appointments, the strain of not being able to do anything.
‘Is something funny?’ he repeats, more uncertainly.
Gina hesitates. Stuart probably won’t find it funny. But she tries. ‘No, I . . . Just that I might have to wear a wig for Naomi’s wedding. If my hair falls out.’
He frowns, then tries to smile. ‘Why not? Think positive. We can get you a gorgeous wig – we can go to London, if you want. Naomi’ll just be glad you’re there.’
‘She’ll maybe want me to get an apricot-co
loured one,’ says Gina, hearing Naomi saying just that, chasing away the dread with a silly joke. ‘To match the dress.’
‘What? Of course she won’t. And if she did, I’d tell her to get a bloody grip.’ His voice cracks, as if he’s about to cry.
He doesn’t get it, thinks Gina, but at the same time she’s reassured by exactly that, by Stuart’s solid presence with his facts and his determination to win. To beat things.
‘Oh . . . shit,’ says Stuart, and pulls into the drive-through McDonald’s.
They sit in the car park, saying nothing, and the tempting smell of chips floats into the car. Gina’s surprised that it’s still tempting. The radio’s been on in the background, and she hears the gloomy opening bars of ‘Chasing Cars’ by Snow Patrol.
Stuart lunges at the off button.
‘Don’t,’ says Gina, mildly. ‘I’ve never liked that song. Now I’ve got a reason to hate it.’
They really don’t know what to say to each other. There’s too much. Too much they know they don’t know. The car feels huge.
‘You’re going to be fine,’ says Stuart, eventually, and there’s a wobble in his voice, under the determination. ‘We’re going to beat this.’
Gina forces a smile onto her face. This’ll be the easier way, playing the part of the brave patient until she believes it. Until it feels real. ‘I know,’ she says. ‘One step at a time.’
‘Gina.’ Stuart grabs her hand over the gearstick and makes her look at him. ‘I want to bring the wedding forward. Marry me this month. Before the chemotherapy starts.’
‘But Naomi’s wedding . . .’ It’s her first reaction; she knows it’s stupid.
‘Sod Naomi.’ He looks outraged. It’d be funny, Gina thinks, if she could bear to laugh. ‘You’re the only thing that matters to me. I want to show the world we’re a team, you and me. I love you.’ Stuart gazes at her, handsome and resolute and only slightly scared. Knight-like. ‘I love you, Gina.’