And they’ve been all right since then. A couple of ‘goods’, a couple of ‘mind-blowings’ – that’s the session not the whole thing – and a couple of ‘so darn amazings I couldn’t speak afterwards’.
What Noah and I have, though, is sex. It sort of needs to be said in a soft, sultry voice to emphasise how exquisite it is.
It’s beautiful. So beautiful I ache when I think about it. I feel echoey, as if the absence of him and us being physically together reverberates throughout my whole body, right down to the littlest skin cell. My body doesn’t feel right without him.
I think he feels that, too, by the way he takes my hand, kisses my neck, twirls my hair around his forefinger. We struggle without each other. Which is going to be a bitch because I’m not leaving Brighton. I can’t. And he’s just taken a huge contract for the next year based up in London. He can work remotely for a few weeks, but he needs to be in London. His whole life, his whole family are there. He’s a family man, and I left my family. I left my family to find my family.
Either way, Noah isn’t moving down here because some girl he met is staying here.
‘What’s going on in that whirling mind of yours?’ he asks. He strokes over my bare stomach and my body instinctively moves towards him, craving his touch. ‘I can almost see the wheels turning. What are you thinking through?’
‘You. Me. Us. What happens when I find out what happened to my mother. How soon afterwards you’ll move back to London.’ You see, that’s what makes this sex so different. It’s the honesty that comes with it. Before, it’s always been about playing that game, holding back, not being that girl. With him it was like that in the beginning, but now it is easy, necessarily honest.
‘Don’t be getting ahead of yourself,’ he says. ‘One day at a time until we know what happened to your mother.’
‘I can’t help it. I think I’m staying here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else now. You love London, don’t you?’
‘Brighton’s growing on me,’ he says. ‘I’ve been thinking about commuting.’
‘Living here and going up there?’
‘Yeah, I don’t see why not.’
‘You’d want us to live together?’ I ask. ‘Because I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’
‘No, I don’t think that’s a good idea, either. It’s been good, this, though. Being in this hotel together all this time.’ His hand moves lower and the ache becomes a pleasurable pain that yearns for us to hook ourselves together.
‘Let’s talk about this again when I know what happened to my mother,’ I say. His fingers are still working lower, reaching for me, my body is longing to be with him.
I’m blatantly ignoring the fact that I may never know what happened to her. Especially since nothing has happened with the investigation. They know nothing more than they did when I first got here, they have no new leads or clues. I get the impression they’re not looking very hard ’cos they think they know who did it.
I have two new phones and one new number. I turn on the phone with my old number once every day to get messages from my dad, the other phone is the one I use now. I still can’t talk to Dad. Maybe one day, but not at the moment.
The thing I have to get my head around right now, though, is finding the courage to go into the house where my mother was murdered.
Beatrix
Just a quick text to let me know you’re OK would be nice. Bea x
This café, a five-minute walk to the hospital, is rammed, the tables are crammed close together to get as many people in there as possible, and there are still people standing by the counter, lurking, waiting for anyone to move even a fraction so they can take their place.
We don’t speak, Tami and I. Those hand-holding chats I was sort of hoping for haven’t materialised. I have dinner with them, she puts the girls to bed, and I tidy up the kitchen. She goes to her office – yes, every time she opens the door I feel a trickle of shame – and stays there for hours. Well, at least until I have returned to my room. I have watched television, I have read the entire internet on my phone, I have tried to count the number of piles there are in the carpet. Anything other than think about Wednesday, today. Even if she could bring herself to speak to me, what would I say?
I can’t tell her I am scared. That’s not the person I am. That’s not my role in this drama I find myself in. In this drama, I am the scarlet woman. I am the marriage wrecker. I am the whore. I have no feelings beyond carnal, man-stealing ones, nor any right to any other type of feelings.
Everything that Tami says to me seems to be punctuated with the W word. I remember when Cora was first learning about reading, she would add silent letters onto words without your knowledge so I-Spy would become a game of randomness: something beginning with G could as easily be ‘table’ as it could be ‘glass’ because of the silent ‘G’. Tami does this with sentences: ‘Your dinner’s ready [whore]’. ‘Do you have any washing you want putting in [whore]?’
To be honest, her long-suffering betrayed wife act is starting to PISS ME OFF.
I’ve done wrong, yes, but I didn’t do it on purpose, I didn’t set out to hurt her. She really does need to start getting over it. I have bigger things to worry about. And I can’t focus on that because I’ve got Mrs Betrayed Wife sitting opposite me. As I become more agitated, more wound up, I start to stir the coffee in my cup a little more forcefully. A lot more forcefully, actually. Until I’m bashing the cup hard.
‘Is there a problem [whore]?’ Tami asks.
‘No, no problem.’
She returns her gaze to her cup. I return to abusing mine, satisfied when she raises her gaze again. ‘What’s the matter? You’ve clearly got a problem. Why don’t you share it and save us all the passive-aggressive crockery abuse [whore]?’
‘I’m … this is a really tough situation and you’re acting as if it’s nothing.’
‘How am I supposed to act?’
I shrug. Not like this. Not like I’m evil, I think.
‘If you don’t know, how am I supposed to? The thing is, I can’t give you absolution and make you feel better about the choices you made.’
Am I asking for absolution from her? I don’t think so. I just need a friend. People drift like clouds in your life, they may stay around for a while but slowly and surely they drift out again when your life experiences don’t match up.
I do not need absolution for falling in love with a man who fell in love with me. I just need a friend. And Tami is it because she hasn’t drifted out of my life.
‘I don’t want absolution, I just need a friend.’
‘You’re not sorry at all, are you?’ she says.
‘I am sorry I hurt you, but I honestly didn’t mean to,’ I reply. I am sorry for the pain, for the disruption, but I am not sorry for falling in love. How can I be? You can never be sorry about falling in love. ‘I couldn’t stop myself from falling in love with him. You really can’t help who you love.’
‘No, you can’t help who you love. But you can help how you behave,’ she says, the incredulous look hasn’t left her face. ‘You really aren’t sorry for what you did at all.’ She shakes her head again. ‘What am I doing here? I must be insane.’ She offers me a close-lipped smile and stands. ‘I hope your appointment goes well.’
I’m not going to beg her to stay. I’m not going to let her blackmail me into being here with me. If she can’t get over it, she can’t get over it. But I need calm and stability right now, not drama and tantrums. I need Tami.
She knows that. She knows I need someone who will stay level-headed as they explain what comes next to me. As they put items into my body, take tests, take samples, prod and poke and practically drain me. I need someone to sit with me. To tell me, even if it is silently, they will be there. My body is not my own any longer. It has been taken over by cancer. Cancer. It is about to be invaded by the people trying to stop it spreading. I am on the side-lines, watching, learning, trying to understand. I am a woman wandering around in the dark
wilderness who needs a guide, or at least a companion who will not panic, who will be there as I start this journey.
I do not understand much of what is happening to me. I do not understand much of what is going to happen to me. I do know that I do not want to go through his alone.
I need Tami. She knows it. She’s going to use it.
But is she? Tami’s not like that. The fact she has spoken to me at all, has come here with me today, is testament to her not being like that. She didn’t have to come. I stare at the café door through which she left. She didn’t have to organise a taxi, pay for it and then sit here with me, a few hundred yards from where I am about to become a cancer patient.
I was an ordinary person, now I am about to become a cancer patient.
I need Tami. It’s selfish and it’s wrong, and I shouldn’t have hurt her. I shouldn’t have betrayed her trust. I shouldn’t have even asked her without asking her to be with me. But I need her. The cloud that would not drift away.
A man in a navy blue suit darts across the space from the counter to our table and takes the seat she was sitting in. He smiles sheepishly at me. I glare at him return. He responds with a half shrug and sips his coffee while avidly reading his mobile screen.
My eyes go back to the door and I watch her weave her way through the tightly placed table and chairs as she comes back to me. The cloud that will not drift away.
She stands above the man in the navy blue suit sitting in her seat and glares at him, too. He looks up at her, then at me, and decides the seat is not worth it. As quickly as he appeared, he is gone again. Tami pulls her chair away from the table and faces it away from me. ‘Don’t speak to me,’ she says. ‘The moment you speak to me is the moment I’m gone for good.’
The relief brings tears to my eyes. I’m not going to be alone. Not speaking is a small price to pay to not be alone.
Beatrix
I’ve gone into shock again.
I am sitting here, listening to this doctor talk, and my mind is not grasping onto anything for very long. He has talked about numbers and stages and gradings. He has talked about surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Most of the words slip in and out of my head straight away, like I am trying to hang on tightly to wet soap – impossible to grasp for any length of time.
It’s the word ‘chemotherapy’ that sticks in my head. It’s that which I know about with the word cancer. Your hair falls out. I know that. You have to wear wigs or scarves. I’ve never really looked that good in a scarf. That’s a stupid thing to think right now, isn’t it? When I have so much more to worry about, to think about, to prepare for, I focus on that. Which proves what I’ve thought all along: I’m not grown up enough for this to be happening to me. I need a few more years of life, experience, before I am forced to face this.
I haven’t heard the other word, yet. The word that you always associate with the words breast cancer. I have been waiting for it, I think. Waiting, expecting. It’s coming soon, I can feel it. Like I felt this was not going to turn out to be a cyst, I feel that other word coming.
My heart leaps in fright when I feel a hand around mine. I look down and it’s her hand. She has carefully encircled my hand with hers, and now is slipping her fingers between my fingers. I stare at our hands. Linked. Together. She hasn’t even looked away from the man who is still talking. On the other side of me is sitting the specialist nurse from the other day. She sat with me for a long time replying to questions I didn’t know I needed to know the answer to. I haven’t actually remembered the answers to any of them. The only thing that stuck in my mind was that I had an appointment today at ten o’clock. Everything else was white noise.
‘There’ll be no need for a mastectomy, then?’ Tami asks. My head turns to her.
‘No. We think a wide local excision will be sufficient.’
‘And you think it is a stage one, grade one cancer at the moment given its size and location?’
‘Yes. We will be able to find out after the surgery which stage it actually is and whether it has spread to the lymph nodes in the armpit, by carrying out a sentinel node biopsy. If this proves to be positive we will remove those nodes during the same procedure.’
‘After the surgery, what happens then, treatment-wise?’
‘A lot of that will depend on the actual stage and grade of the cancer, as well as whether it has spread or if it has remained localised. We will also be able to determine whether it is oestrogen-receptor positive or not. If it has receptors it will most likely respond well to hormone treatment. Once we have all these pieces of information we will be able to map out the best course of treatment.’
Tami is talking because I can’t. She is asking questions, essentially asking the doctor to repeat information he has already given so I will maybe hear it this time. I will take it in. I will understand that this is really happening.
Every night I pray: Dear God, Please don’t let this be happening. Thank you. Bea
‘Ms Carenden, you are a fit, healthy young woman and it seems we have caught this at a very early stage. All these factors will count in your favour. You will need to undergo more tests and preop prep.’
He’s talking to me again. He is talking to me and I am listening. For the first time since this started, I am listening and I am listening properly.
She has anchored me here by taking my hand. She has stopped me from floating away, from retreating into denial and pretending this is not happening.
‘What will my breast look like after the surgery?’ I ask and she, my friend, my anchor, tightens her fingers around mine.
Tami
‘I’m sorry I hurt you, Tami,’ Beatrix says to me in the taxi home.
She is not apologising for real, she is engaging in Beatrix Doubletalk. What she really means is: ‘How did you know to ask all that stuff? How did you know that if you got the doctor to repeat it some of it might sink in? Why did you hold my hand?’
The answer is clear: I know her. She may have been faking it all these years, befriending me to try to steal my life, but I wasn’t with her. I know her. I know she has been in denial and won’t have found out any information because she’s trying to believe it’s not happening; I know that with Beatrix it takes several goes to get most messages across; and I know that physical touch grounds her. It’s what she constantly craves to make her feel real. Sometimes Beatrix thinks that if she isn’t held then she will disappear, that no one will believe she is real.
‘I thought I told you not to talk to me,’ I say.
Tami Doubletalk: ‘I know you. Even though you’ve done this terrible thing, I still know who you really are.’
If I had trusted myself enough to believe Mirabelle, to accept that I knew her just like I knew Beatrix, Mirabelle might not be … And I might not be stuck in this wasteland of waiting for the next piece of the jigsaw of my memory to reveal itself and tell me exactly what I did that night.
‘Sorry,’ Beatrix mumbles and returns to staring out of the window at Brighton and our way home.
Fleur
From The Flower Beach Girl Blog
The thing I’m most afraid of:
Many things scare me. I’m not a person who is scared of everything, scared of the world, but I do have a healthy fear of rats, big-arse spiders and being trapped on the Tube.
The thing I am most afraid of is love. When you say you love someone you are giving them licence to hurt you. That sounds cynical and bitter, but think of all the bad things people have done in this world that are because of love. Think of all the people you have loved that have hurt you. Love is like the emotional equivalent of a free pass to bad behaviour. People think they can hurt you and it’s OK because they did it out of love. Or they think they can lie to you because they love you and wanted to protect you. Or they think they can leave in search of love and never come back.
Love scares me. It terrifies the life out of me. Think about this, yeah? Who would you hurt in the name of love?
Noah told me last
night that he loved me. He whispered it into the nape of my neck before he fell asleep. I pretended to be asleep and not to hear. I don’t want him to say it again. I don’t want to be afraid that now he’s said it that will be it. He’ll hurt me and I’ll have to accept it because he loves me.
Beatrix
She was here when I stayed in the night before surgery, she was here before they took me down, and she was here when I woke up. She had food, an iPod with movies on and a card drawn by Cora and Anansy, covered in hearts and orders to ‘get well soon, Bix’ in what looks like every colour crayon they own. They’ve also stuck on the inside pictures of the three of us in the park, at the beach, in their living room at the house. It is a behemoth of a card, and sits propped up on the bedside cabinet because there is nowhere else to put it.
I have red hair in those pictures, and one of them was taken when I wasn’t sleeping with their father.
The lymph nodes were clear, apparently, so again, another plus point. Another sign that everything is going to be OK. The surgeon described to me that day I first came with Tami what my breast was likely to look like afterwards and he described it to me again before I went under. He said it would look like I had a very slight dent on the left side of my cleavage.
It’s done, there is a piece of me missing, taken to save my life. I used to be whole and complete, now I am missing a piece.
I should be grateful that it wasn’t a bigger piece. I should be grateful that it looks like it will be a stage one, grade one cancer and I may not even need chemo and radiotherapy.
I should be grateful for all these things. And I am. But … Why me? I am not supposed to ask that, I know. I am supposed to look on the positive side and stay strong. I am supposed to look this thing straight in the eye and tell it I’m going to kick its butt. I am scared. How am I supposed to deal with this fear?