‘Yes,’ she said, and her voice sounded strangled. She coughed. ‘What time?’
Nick was staring at her, already conscious that something wasn’t right. He frowned, silently asking what was wrong, and Gina turned away, unable to stop the childish rage at the wrongness of it. She squeezed her eyes tight shut, bowing her head to ward off the emotion crushing her as if it might go away.
Not now. Not now, she begged the universe. Not now she had just found this man, this incredible feeling of joy. Please, not the hospital.
‘Could you manage twelve o’clock?’
‘Twelve o’clock,’ she repeated mechanically. ‘And do I need to bring anything?’
‘No, that’ll be fine.’ The nurse carried on talking in her soothing manner, about tests and directions and car parks, but Gina wasn’t listening. The blood was roaring in her ears.
Further tests. At best, a new kind of cancer to carve out and scorch with chemotherapy. At worst . . . Her mind turned away from the bleak fact, which her eye had skimmed in so many leaflets, but she made herself think it. At worst, a recurrence of the old cancer, somewhere else. And there was no treatment for secondaries, only what the leaflets euphemistically called ‘management’.
Or it could be nothing, pleaded a lone voice inside. It could be nothing.
But Gina had been through this before: hope was more slippery to cling to, knowing what she knew now. ‘Nothing’ didn’t need immediate tests.
The phone slipped from her hand, and somehow she managed to catch it before it bounced on the stairs and cracked onto the wooden floor below.
‘Gina, what is it?’ Nick grabbed her wrist. ‘What’s happened?’
‘I’ve got to go in for tests.’ She corrected herself. ‘More tests. After my routine appointment.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow lunchtime.’ Saying it made it real, and Gina felt the ground lurch sickeningly away from her.
‘I’ll take you,’ said Nick at once, and something in his expression caught her, the instinctive way she’d caught her phone. She felt held. Safe with him. ‘What time?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t want you to take me.’
‘Really. What time? It’s fine. I’ve got nothing else I’d rather do. You can’t go alone. I can make notes, if you want. If you need someone there to ask questions.’ Nick reached for her but she pulled away. ‘What? What did I say?’
‘Nothing.’ Gina covered her face and tried to pull her racing thoughts together. Nick wasn’t Stuart, and she wasn’t the person she’d been that time around. This wouldn’t be exactly the same. It couldn’t be. For one thing, she knew what would happen next, one way or another. This time, she could do it on her own. She was a different person.
She took her hands away from her face and gazed straight into Nick’s eyes. ‘I don’t want you to feel sorry for me,’ she said fiercely. ‘I don’t want you to organise me, and I don’t want you to feel you have to be there because I’m sick.’
‘Not this again,’ said Nick. ‘Let other people worry about how they feel about you. You just concentrate on what you feel. What you want. I want to help you. You don’t have to let me, but I want to. What can I do to make the bit you have to do easier?’
Gina managed a watery smile, then it froze. ‘Will you look after Buzz?’
‘Tomorrow? Sure.’
‘No, I mean if . . . if they find something and I can’t manage? I can’t bear the thought of him going back into a rescue, wondering why I abandoned him. Just when he started to trust humans again.’
It was the mental picture of a miserable Buzz roaming the park searching for her after she’d gone, the eight years that George had said he had left of his better new life, that suddenly made it real for Gina. What if she didn’t have eight years? The tears came from nowhere. Nick wrapped his arms round her and let her sob into his shoulder, stroking her head and murmuring into her hair.
‘Why don’t we meet you after your appointment, in the park?’ he said. ‘Me and Buzz. It’s going to be a perfect June day. We’ll have a picnic ready, and we’ll wait there until you’re finished – we’re in no rush – and then we’ll drink cider in the sunshine and eat cake and look up at the clouds, and just enjoy being in the sun together. Whatever happens.’ He dropped a kiss on her head and Gina felt cocooned in a warmth that crept into all the cracks of fear in her heart. It didn’t make the fear go away, but it strengthened her.
She breathed in the smell of the Magistrate’s House: the old plaster, the fresh new wood, the dust and beeswax, the years of human love and fear, the dogs and children that had run through the parquet halls since it was built. It had weak spots and decay but it still stood.
‘I know this isn’t ideal,’ Nick went on, ‘but something about it feels really right. Like this house did, the first time I saw it. Sometimes people come into your life at strange times, and you don’t know why, but then it turns out that they’re the exact right person for that moment. Don’t you think?’
Gina nodded into the soft linen of his clean shirt, then raised her head. I need to get into this picture, she thought. Not watch it, be in it. ‘I wish this was a better moment,’ she said. ‘But this is what we’ve got. I don’t want to waste it.’
‘Me neither.’
There was a long pause, then Gina leaned forward and kissed Nick, urgently and hungrily. He kissed her back, hands reaching around her waist, her hip, stroking and exploring her curves, and then they broke off, breathing each other’s hot, quick breath, their mouths only a hair’s breadth apart.
‘Here?’ whispered Nick. He didn’t need to explain; she knew what she wanted too.
Gina thought, then said, ‘No. Not here. My flat.’ She smiled, filled with a weird elation. ‘There’s nothing in my flat. No history. Just us.’
Nothing for the witch-ball to see.
Nick slipped her hand into his, and they half walked, half ran to Gina’s car, Buzz loping happily alongside.
Chapter Twenty-four
ITEM: a silver Mini Cooper on a key-ring, with two keys and a photo of Gina and Terry standing by her green Mini with white stripes over the bonnet, tearing up her L-plates, taken at a slight slant by Janet on Terry’s new SLR camera
Hartley, January, 1998
Gina’s stepdad Terry is doing something to the engine of the Mini, while Gina sits in the corner of the garage, pretending to make notes on Macbeth but really finishing a four-page letter to Kit.
Minnie’s nearly finished, she writes, already on page four. Terry keeps trying to explain how it all works and I keep nodding but it’s not really going in. I keep imagining me and you in it. It’s just big enough for the road trip. Not sure we could get it on the plane but I reckon we could get as far as Brighton. We’d have to talk in American accents and pretend Little Chef was Dairy Queen but . . .
She stops and looks at what she’s written. They have nicknames for everything: they call Kit’s car (nearly new Volvo, used to belong to his mum) the Beast, but Gina’s car so far hasn’t been named. Is Love Bug better than Minnie? Is Love Bug . . . too much?
Love still makes her stomach twist, sending silvery ripples through her whole body. Before Gina met Kit ‘love’ was just a word, empty and over-familiar like ‘house’ or ‘brilliant’, but now it’s unexpectedly bursting with magic and flowers and darker pleasures. Gina barely uses the word to refer to things like bands or cake any more. Her whole vocabulary’s been scaled down in its honour.
A surreptitious rustle of cake packaging means Terry’s helping himself to the last Bakewell tart.
Gina glances over at her stepdad, ready to tease him gently about his overalls splitting. Since Terry offered to rebuild the car for her, out of the blue, they’ve spent much more time together. Not talking, just . . . being. They’ve even developed a few in-jokes of their own.
The Mini came from the garage of the old lady across the road who’d died just before Christmas. Gina had spotted it on the drive, being photographed fo
r the small ads, and was struck by the Atherton-ish kudos of having an old old car instead of the third-hand Corsa Naomi’s dad had got for her to learn in. This car is a bit of the 1970s, which is maybe why Terry likes it. It had only 6,043 miles on the clock, and homemade cotton covers stretched over the seats, pink cartoon Martini glasses protecting green leather-look plastic.
‘It’ll be good for you to know how a car works while you’re learning,’ had been his exact words, but Gina wonders if actually Terry was looking for an excuse to spend time in the garage, in peace. Since then the pair of them have enjoyed many companionable evenings with a packet of Bakewell tarts and the local radio filling in the gaps between Terry’s occasional car-mechanics tutorials. Gina writes her long, emotional letters to Kit while pretending to revise, and Terry tinkers with head gaskets; the productive silence humming between them is so much nicer than the increasingly tense conversations her mum initiates about revision and university and why she’s spending so much time ‘with Naomi’ these days when Naomi almost never comes round to their house any more.
Gina now associates the smell of oil and WD40 and instant coffee and artificial cherry flavouring with a deep sense of peace and, of course, Kit.
I’ve been looking at the gig guide for next month and we could—
‘You’ll be careful in this car, won’t you, love?’
Gina glances up from her letter, and sees Terry gazing at her with an awkward expression twisting his sandy moustache. He looks like a teddy bear who’s had his scarf nicked. She’s seen Terry’s worried face a lot lately. He’s always worried about something, but never likes to overstep the mark, on account of him not being her dad. ‘Course I will,’ she says cheerfully. ‘Anyway, the rate we’re going I’m not likely to be driving it till I’m forty, am I?’
He smiles, and Gina goes back to her letter, pleased she’s defused that one. She starts to sketch him – Kit’s really encouraging of her drawing, and thinks she should go to art college – but when she glances up, Terry’s still looking at her.
‘Why’d you ask?’ she carries on, determined to keep things jokey. ‘Are you scared I’ll make you take me out driving?’
‘No.’ Terry wipes the engine head. ‘I’m sure you’ll be as good at driving as you are at everything else, love. It’s just that I had a car like this when I wasn’t that much older than you are now. It’s bringing it all back.’
Gina says nothing, but gets the impression Terry’s trying to share something important with her, in his tentative way. The garage seems to bring out these unexpected revelations, like the bits of old newspaper she sometimes finds in the car itself. Normally they’re just nice little things about her mum, glimpses of a funnier, gentler woman than the one constantly on her case about teenage alcoholism, but this time Terry is looking at her, and she folds her book down, just in case he can see the letter.
‘And you weren’t very careful?’ she prompts.
‘No.’
‘I don’t believe that.’ She tries a smile. This is strange new adult territory they’re negotiating, very cautiously, over the Mini’s friendly rounded roofline. But then she is an adult. She’s seventeen.
Gina can tell this personal-advice business is killing Terry, but he’s determined to get it out. ‘Young men aren’t always careful. Even nice young fellas. And I don’t mean with cars, love. I mean with . . . people’s feelings.’
There’s a world of concern under those bushy grey eyebrows: concern and love and a hint that maybe Terry knows more about her secret relationship with Kit than he’s letting on. It checks her more than a million lectures from Janet, and a tiny grain of doubt creeps into the rosy glow that surrounds Kit.
‘I’m careful, though, Terry,’ she says, and they blush the same blush, as the other implication lands. He doesn’t mean what he thinks she thinks he means – cringe – he means, in general. And Gina wants to tell him that Kit is careful with her heart, careful not to make promises he can’t keep, although she’s quite happy to promise him the rest of her life because, as far as she’s concerned, she’s met the one. Straight away. No precious time wasted.
But she can’t tell Terry that. Because he’ll tell her mum, and her mum will go insane.
‘Don’t tell Mum,’ she says, without knowing why.
‘You’re very precious to your mother, Georgina,’ says Terry. ‘She might not tell you often enough, but it’s true. You’re precious to us both. Her, because you’re her little girl and me . . .’ He pauses. ‘Me, because, well, you’ve let me have a go at being a dad. In a way. We’re both so proud of you. You’ve got the whole world ahead of you.’
He looks mortified but proud as he says it, and Gina wants to hug him. The car, Terry, Kit, these winter revision nights . . . she has an instinct that this will feel warm one day, when she’s looking back on it. It’s all ahead of her, all ready to happen. Her car, Kit, her future.
But the Mini is in the way, blocking the small garage, and her English folder is on her knee. So she smiles, and says, ‘I know, Terry.’
Terry gazes at her, and Gina thinks he looks tired.
It’s on the tip of her tongue to add, I love you, but that’s really not his thing, so she blows him a kiss instead, and Terry pretends to catch it, just like he did when she was small enough not to be embarrassed.
Gina’s appointment was midday, and at Nick’s insistence, while he was getting breakfast croissants from the deli over the road, she called Naomi and told her.
‘I want to come,’ Naomi said at once, in her determined voice. ‘No buts, Gee, I’m coming. I’ll be there at the hospital at ten to, and I’ll wait for you. It’s like church weddings: they can’t throw members of the public out.’
‘Fine,’ said Gina. She didn’t have the heart to argue, and secretly she was relieved.
‘Happy now?’ she added to Nick, when she put the phone down.
‘Almost.’ He put the bag of pastries on the counter and flicked on the kettle. ‘Did you phone your mum?’
Gina started to argue but, deep down, again, she knew he was right. This time – if there was going to be a ‘this time’ – it would be different. This time she was going to be honest about it all.
Janet sounded surprised to hear from Gina outside their usual calling times and happily agreed to a morning coffee, on the condition that Gina didn’t mind leaving by eleven thirty, as she had a Gardeners’ Club lunch in Chippenham Avenue.
‘Now drink this,’ said Nick, pushing a cup of coffee at her. ‘And eat this. Or at least pretend to eat it, and feed it to the dog while I’m not looking.’
Buzz watched them anxiously from the basket. He hadn’t touched his breakfast. Gina tried not to read his subdued body language as being any kind of sign, and failed.
‘Let me get my things ready first.’ She checked she had her phone, purse, lipstick. Everything ready to put her face back together afterwards. She needed to keep moving, keep her hands busy so her brain wouldn’t think. ‘You just be there with the picnic this afternoon. I’ll text you to let you know when I’m leaving.’
‘I can take you to your mother’s if you want.’ He checked his watch. ‘I don’t have to be there for Lorcan, he knows what he’s doing . . .’
Gina stopped packing. ‘No. No, for that I really have to go on my own.’
‘Fair enough.’ He got up and kissed her on the forehead. ‘I know you’re in safe hands with Naomi. And we’ll be waiting. There’s no rush.’
Gina noticed all the flowers on the way to her mother’s house. The poppy splashes in front gardens, the very late bluebells banking the roadside. The black-and-white house on Church Lane was ripe with pink fuchsias; the new owners had invested heavily in hanging baskets, something, Gina thought randomly, that would please her mother, although the fuchsias inside them wouldn’t – they’d always been on the ‘common’ list, along with red-hot pokers and pampas grass.
Little shards of memories were whirling back to Gina all the time, as if she had to re
member them before it was too late.
Janet had the kettle boiled ready when she walked in, and for once Gina was glad. There would never be enough time for this, but she knew she had to get away before her nerves went.
‘It’s lovely to have a surprise visit from you, love. Did you see the hanging baskets on number seven Church Lane on your way over?’ Janet called over her shoulder, as she tiled the biscuits. ‘What did you think? I’d have thought some nice white trailing sweet peas would have been more in keeping.’
She sounded so unusually jolly that Gina felt even worse about what she had to say. Do I have to tell her now? Can’t it wait another half-day? In case it’s nothing? Terry would tell her, she thought. Terry understood that things had to come out eventually.
‘Mum,’ she said, gently. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about. I’ve been up to the hospital this week.’
Janet turned round, and her expression was hopeful. ‘Is this about that egg business?’
‘No.’ Gina motioned to the kitchen table, where she was sitting with her cup of tea. ‘I went for my annual check-up on Monday. They called me in again today to run some more tests.’
The moment stretched out into a silence. Janet’s eyes didn’t leave Gina’s but they grew slowly more round.
‘Mum,’ she prompted. ‘Come and sit down.’
Janet clutched the plate of biscuits and walked stiffly to the table. The ring of chocolate digestives sat between them like a sort of talisman. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, does it?’ she said. Not a question. A statement. ‘They’re always mucking things up. They had to do my blood-sugar tests three times before they got a proper reading. This’ll be like that, won’t it?’
‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t call me in if they weren’t worried about something. I’m not saying there is something but . . . I think it’s better to be prepared. They’ve promised to get back to me as soon as they possibly can about the results. I should know after the weekend.’