‘I’m not big on birthdays,’ said Gina. ‘I’m not twelve. And before any of you suggest it, it’s not a significant one.’
Nick made a pshaw noise. ‘That’s no reason not to treat yourself. Where’s that greyhound of yours? Did you bring him?’
‘He’s in the car.’ She hesitated. ‘I should let him out – it’s getting warm. Do you mind if I bring him round? He’s a bit wary of men. In groups.’ She glanced at Lorcan.
‘Ex-racer?’ His face was sympathetic, and she nodded.
‘I getcha. Listen, we’ll tidy up, then make a move. Monday morning, eh, Nick?’ Lorcan picked up his slice of cake and got to his feet. ‘And a happy birthday to you, Gina,’ he added, giving her a smacking kiss on the cheek. ‘May you have many, many more to come.’
Buzz seemed happy to be back at the Magistrate’s House, and strained on his lead as she took him round the gravel path to the back of the house, where the lawn stretched out like a green skating rink, as big as a couple of tennis courts together. Nick was already sitting on the stone steps with another cold Coke for her and a washing-up bowl of water for Buzz, which he thoughtfully placed on a step up so the greyhound didn’t have to bend down too far. Gina unclipped his lead, and let him stretch out by her feet, the white snowflake patches on his coat shining in the sun.
‘So, did Lorcan actually say the lead wasn’t coming for the roof until Monday, because . . .?’ she started, but Nick put a hand on her knee and squeezed it. Not in a sexy way, in a ‘please, no’ way. It was an easy, friendly gesture. He held it for just a second, but it was long enough for a tingle to run through Gina’s leg.
‘Can we not talk about the house?’ he asked lightly. ‘I’ve had a whole day with Lorcan discussing the pros and cons of recessed lighting, and a whole night arguing with Amanda about en suites. I just want to sit here with my cold drink and enjoy the garden.’
‘Isn’t whip-cracking what you pay me for?’ said Gina.
‘Like you said, it’s your day off. It’s your company I’m enjoying now, not your timetabling expertise.’
Before Gina could process the compliment, Nick chinked his Coke can against hers. ‘And happy birthday. May this year be considerably better than the last.’
‘That’s not going to be hard. I could get shingles and it’d still be better than last year.’
‘OK.’ Nick turned to her, and looked her straight in the eyes with his unsettlingly straight gaze. ‘May this year be the happiest year of your life, with everything you wish for, and some surprises on top. How’s that?’
Gina smiled, and the wish hung in the air between them until she broke the moment by glancing down. ‘It’s not been a bad first day so far,’ she said. ‘I’ve had cake, I’ve got a dog, I’ve had flowers and an apology from my ex . . .’
‘Oh?’
She nodded. ‘We had a conversation we should have had a long time ago. You were right about regrets. They’re unfair. I think we’ve drawn a line.’
Nick smiled. ‘Good. You look happier.’
‘Do I? I think maybe . . .’ She jumped as Nick made a sudden sideways movement.
‘Ssh,’ he said, and she thought he was going to touch her, until she realised he was reaching for the Polaroid camera sticking out of her bag.
Gina turned to where he was looking and saw that while they’d been talking Buzz had made his way down to the wide lawn, which was bathed in afternoon sunlight. He was trotting as if testing the grass. Then, as his paws hit the smoother surface, he began to run, faster and faster, until he was racing around the outer edge of the lawn, all four legs stretched off the ground, covering the distance with effortless speed.
Gina held her breath, overwhelmed with the beauty of it. She’d never seen Buzz run before, and the power took her by surprise. He was a machine of muscle and sinew, graceful and economical. How long had he been penning up that energy? How long had he wanted to run, and not dared?
And why now? Was it something in the design of the gardens, or did Buzz know, somehow, that he was safe with Gina, that he could finally run free and wouldn’t have to fear being abandoned again? Her throat closed.
I will never leave you, she thought fiercely. I could never leave something as beautiful and alive as you.
Nick caught one, then two, full-stretch bounds, but eventually he put the camera down.
‘I just want to watch him,’ he whispered.
Buzz seemed to be powered entirely by joy, flexing his racer’s muscles for the pure delight of running. No traps, no muzzle, no harsh handling, no deafening track noise. Just grass under his pads and sun on his back. The weeks of proper food, augmented by the odd tin of sardines, had brought a deep sheen to his brindled grey coat, and although he was slight, the power in his front legs was plain to see as he arched and stretched, his ears flying backwards and his almost prehistoric jaw open in a smile as he sprinted in wide, ecstatic circles.
Tears were slipping down Gina’s face. ‘I’ve never seen him run like that,’ she whispered, afraid the sound of her voice would distract him.
‘You never let him off the lead?’ Nick’s breath brushed her neck.
‘He never wanted to go.’
They watched the greyhound run until he slowed down to a gallop, like someone waking up from a dream. As Buzz turned the final corner he seemed to see Gina, and she stood up. Without taking his eyes off her, Buzz trotted over, panting heavily, his long pink tongue lolling out from the gap where he’d had his rotten teeth pulled out.
Gina crouched down to stroke him, and the greyhound reached up to her, laying his long head against her neck and closing his eyes. She could feel the power of the warm muscles, and the thud of his racing pulse, and the hot quick breath on her ear. Buzz suddenly chattered his teeth very close to her neck, and for a second she thought he was going to bite her, but instead he made a series of delicate, precise clicking noises.
It was something Rachel had told her about, on one of their walks around the park, something she’d only seen a greyhound do once.
‘It’s called nitting,’ she’d said. ‘They do it instead of licking. It’s a sign of affection.’
Gina put her arms around the dog’s neck and thanked someone somewhere for the best birthday present of all. Even anxious, scrawny dogs could still run for fun, when the sun was out and no one was watching them.
She felt Nick’s hand on her shoulder, and let herself absorb the moment as much as she could, with her eyes closed and her heart open. Gina didn’t want to see anything, or try to photograph it. She just wanted to remember what it felt like, inside her heart.
Chapter Twenty-one
ITEM: silver platform shoes that always make me (a) feel slim, and (b) want to dance
Longhampton Football Club Annual Dinner, August 2009
Gina peers at herself in the mirror and wants to cry. The green silk dress doesn’t look anything like it did on the model in the website. And the model wasn’t even a human being. Somehow this very expensive dress is managing to be too baggy and too tight at the same time.
But my shoes are fantastic, she thinks, staring at her feet, which look fabulous in the high platform sandals. The peep-toe reveals her metallic red toenails, little red jewels. Toenails, back to normal, at last.
It’s an effort to stare at her feet. Gina’s eyes keep flicking upwards to her chest, to see if her breasts look balanced in this dress, with its busy pattern, or up to her hair, which she still hasn’t made a final decision on.
Her hair’s long enough now to pass off as a radical cut, rather than the regrowth from her chemo. It’s ‘elfin’, with longer strands around her ears, exposing the skin at the base of her neck and framing her big eyes. Not that she’s feeling particularly elfin right now, thanks to the steroids – another side effect of cancer that no one likes to mention.
Gina runs a self-conscious hand through it, making strands stick up. It’s grown back coarser and straighter than before, and Naomi keeps insisting that she looks like Audrey Hepburn. She does
n’t, of course. She looks like Liza Minnelli during a fat phase or, more generously, Liz Taylor. But it captures an elusive thought that keeps floating round Gina’s mind like a stray white feather: I’m not the same person I was before this.
It’s not helpful, not when all of her and Stuart’s energy is going into getting everything back to where it was.
‘Are you nearly ready?’ yells Stuart, up the stairs. He’s trying to be patient, but this is a big night. ‘We’re going to be late!’
It’s the football club annual dinner and awards night. Gina doesn’t want to go. Her final treatment finished in February, and after a few weeks off to recuperate, she’s back at work. She’s still weary to her bones, but Stuart’s getting some award for most capped player, most goals and most valuable club contributor, and since he’s been the most amazing support to her, she wants to be there for him.
She’s well aware that everyone will be thinking that too. There’s Gina. Doesn’t she look great? Back to normal. All cured. How lovely, her and Stuart, such a supportive couple.
Time is pressing on. The cab will be here soon. She’s not delaying. She’s definitely not delaying.
‘If you’re trying to decide what to wear, I can make the decision for you!’ he yells up the stairs. ‘But hurry up. Whatever you wear you’ll look beautiful,’ he adds, as a slightly too late afterthought.
Gina glances at the clothes draped over the spare bed, a mess of hangers and tissue. She bought five different dresses in the summer sales, increasingly expensive ones, trying to find an outfit that will say, ‘I’m fine!’ for her. Something energetic and confident.
Apart from the extra stone, and the shorter hair, she looks the same from the outside, but inside Gina feels totally different. In the last year, she’s been scared, fearless, lonely, humiliated, bombarded with technical information that she’s absorbed in an instant: she’s heard a different voice talk to the nurses, to Naomi, to herself. That person is sharper than the old Gina, but right now, she’s very tired. Just for tonight, she wants things to be back to normal.
Stuart’s feet bound up the stairs and he’s there in the doorway of the spare room, filling it with his James Bond black tie.
The dinner jacket makes him look older, but sexier. Gina feels a burst of admiration for her husband, in his unfamiliar outfit. He’s like a film star tonight, freshly shaved and hair tousled, his smooth good looks a little tired round the edges with the after-effects of this long, long year. All the other WAGs will want to touch him, kiss that clean-shaven cheek. It’s just Gina who doesn’t.
‘Whatever you wear you’ll look . . . Oh.’ He stops. ‘Are you wearing that?’
‘Yes,’ says Gina, immediately on the defensive. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘Nothing.’ Stuart’s face clouds, as he struggles to find the words that will convey his thoughts without triggering a collapse of her precarious mood. ‘It’s just . . . Um, it’s a black-tie do.’
‘So? This is black tie. It’s Issa.’
‘It’s quite . . .’ He gestures around his neck, where his bow tie is. To Gina’s irritation, it’s not black silk, hand-tied, but a bright blue-and-white ready-tied job on elastic, the club’s colours. ‘High-necked?’
‘That’s the style.’
They look at Gina’s reflection in the mirror, and she realises how high-necked it is. How frumpy with the necktie that looks like it’s strangling her and the wild tropical print that she chose so her contours would be hidden. She looks like someone’s spinster aunt at a wedding, bundled up in a curtain.
‘Don’t you normally wear, you know . . .?’ He makes V-neck gestures over his pressed shirt front. ‘More plungy stuff? What about that nice red dress? You know how much I love that.’
Gina does. Every time she wore it, in the first year of their relationship, they never made it out of the flat. However, it doesn’t fit now, and she’s not sure she wants to wear it anyway.
‘I don’t really feel comfortable in low necklines,’ she says. ‘I feel like people are looking at my . . . me.’
‘They’re not, but OK,’ he says quickly. ‘That’s fine. Wear what you feel most comfortable in.’
Gina’s torn inside between wanting to wear something sexy and familiar so Stuart’ll fancy her again and, in doing so, wake up her narcoleptic libido, but she’s scared that if she does he’ll realise that that girl’s gone. Not just the hair, but the playfulness has gone. The confidence, the patience.
‘And are you going to leave your hair like that?’ Stuart adds, a beat too late again.
She meets his eye in the mirror and is seized with a sudden irrational fury that he can’t read her mind.
‘So what do you want me to wear?’ she demands. ‘That red dress, and a wig?’
‘Why not, if it makes you feel like your old self?’ He raises his hands as if he can’t see what the problem is.
‘Because I’m not my old self, Stuart!’
There’s a long pause, in which Gina can hear them both trying not to drop the tiny bombs that will blow up the last fraying links anchoring them together. What was there, she wonders, before the cancer and the house? What did link us together? The minibreaks?
It wasn’t the conversation, she thinks bitterly. There have been times when she’s tried to untangle the complicated feelings of guilt and fear that occupy her mind, but Stuart’s jumped straight in with a ‘think positive!’ or ‘don’t get all morbid’. The medical care was just the start. It’s not over. Not the way he wants it to be.
‘Maybe you should go without me,’ she says. It comes out more martyred than she’d intended it to; she genuinely thinks it might be better if Stuart went on his own, had fun, instead of worrying about her all night. He’s done nothing but worry about her for months. He deserves a night off, and she deserves a night off from being worried about.
‘You don’t want to be there?’ He turns away, then glares at her. ‘Why didn’t you say something before now?’
If Stuart understood me, Gina thinks, he’d laugh away this irrational, frightened mood that’s got into me. He’d find a dress that I liked and he liked, flatter me into it and promise we’d leave by eleven. He’d make me feel it didn’t really matter if I stayed and had a bath but it would make his night to have me there.
If I understood him, she thinks, I’d be able to make him see all that. But I don’t know how to without him feeling I’m criticising, or that I think he’s not doing enough. We don’t know each other at all, and we don’t even care.
This isn’t how it was supposed to turn out.
A car honks downstairs: the minicab. Not any old minicab: Gina’s surprise for Stuart is that it’s the best minicab in Longhampton – a Bentley.
He looks at her. ‘Are you coming, then? Yes or no. Decide now.’
It would have jolted her into a yes before. Now, she feels resentment answer for her.
‘No. Go without me. You’ll have a better time.’
‘For God’s . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Fine. I won’t be late.’
Gina begins to tell him not to leave early, but he’s already thundering down the stairs.
Slowly, she takes off the four-hundred-pound Issa dress, still with its tag attached, and puts it back with the other four in the box, then shoves it on top of the wardrobe.
‘Oh, you’re not selling that, are you?’
Naomi pointed in amazement at the green silk maxi dress Gina was arranging on the tailor’s dummy, ready to be photographed. It still had the swing tag on it and she winced at the price.
Gina had ordered and returned a lot of clothes in the months after her final radiotherapy sessions. Her old clothes didn’t fit, thanks to the weight she’d put on, and in any case, she wanted to see something different when she looked in the mirror. The trouble was, she didn’t know what she wanted to see so most of her impulse buys ended up going back. The Issa one, the one that made her want to burst into tears, had stayed on top of the wardrobe and when she found it
again, it was too late to get a refund.
Gina tied the pussycat bow, stood back and took a photo of it on her phone. ‘Yup. I’m never going to wear it.’
‘Aren’t you? Why not?’
She looked at Naomi sardonically. ‘Because I’m unlikely to take up ballroom dancing now, and I can count the number of black-tie dinners I’ve been to in the last year on the fingers of one finger.’
‘Fine.’ Naomi sighed, then touched the sleeve reverentially. ‘But it’s gorgeous. You’ve got such a great eye for colour. You sure I can’t offer you . . .’
‘It’s two sizes too big for you! No. Just get on with writing it up, please.’
It was a Sunday. Jason had taken Willow to visit his parents in Worcester, and Gina and Naomi were finally going through the pile of clothes Gina had set aside to sell; the money would go on insurance and general greyhound-owning gear, of which there seemed to be a limitless supply. So far that morning, Gina had photographed two black Vivienne Westwood dresses, a complete ski suit Stuart had encouraged her to buy for a skiing holiday they’d never had, and several wool coats.
It was odd, seeing her clothes in isolation. Even odder, hearing the descriptions Naomi was coming up with for them. It made Gina sound like a very different person. The sort of person who apparently went from office to black-tie function on a regular basis, accessorising all the way.
Naomi was still looking at the dress, playing with the tie. ‘If I’m being honest, it’s not your usual style, this. Did you buy it for something in particular?’
Gina sighed. ‘It was that weird time after my treatment finished. I thought that if I bought enough dresses I’d want to go out. I wanted Stuart to see me as an independent person again, not the pukey, crying, moody invalid we were both getting a bit sick of.’
‘Oh, Gina. He never thought of you like that.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Gina. ‘It’s just a dress. It wasn’t a few months ago. It was a huge guilt trip. But now it’s just a dress. And it’s a dress I can turn into dog insurance. So, come on. Work your sales magic.’