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Get Published on Female First
Liz left me over the summer. Our daughter Caitlin still wanted to leave for university in the autumn. I was surprised, to be honest, but you can’t ask them to stay, can you? That would be like watching a tree grow in reverse, from a big blooming thing to just a seed nestled in the ground.
It’s Christmas now, and she’s home again. She is in the kitchen, stirring leftover Christmas turkey into a bubbling, fragrant sauce. I hear her turn the television on. The house used to be filled with music, before Liz left. Bob Marley, Mozart and even – much to my chagrin – Jay Z.
I am reading about the indicators for congenital heart disease in my study off the living room. The plasticky pages of the textbook stick to my fingers. Aortic stenosis: breathlessness, fainting, fatigue. Breathlessness, fainting, fatigue.
“Dad?” Caitlin says, poking her blonde head around the door and looking irritated.
“Yes?”
"No rice," she says.
"Oh no, I definitely bought rice," I say, and even to me it sounds vague. We walk together into the kitchen and I open the cupboard. Cookies, beer – the bachelor’s diet – but no rice. I open another cupboard and reach right into the back, pull out a battered packet of beef rice.
"Is beef rice ok?"
Caitlin stares at the fragrant Thai curry and back to the bright red beef-flavoured rice. I so want to hold her, for just a minute, but I think I would crush her, like a butterfly crumpled in my palm.
"We can do beef rice," she says.
The best before date was last year. My heart wrenches. I pour it in anyway. Nobody ever died from eating old packet rice. Caitlin’s phone goes and she leaves the room.
I prod the curry uselessly, my hand shaking slightly. I dip the wooden spoon in and out, in and out. Is that an anxious tachycardia I can feel, I wonder, massaging just left of my chest. Most heart attack victims dismiss it as something benign just before it gets them. I look at the wall, distracting myself. Caitlin impulsively stuck a photograph to the kitchen wall after Liz left. It is curled at the edges from the constant plumes of heat billowing from the cooker. In the photograph, Liz is on holiday maybe eighteen months ago, the sun is setting behind her, the sky a gingery-pink with little speckled clouds all over it like the footprints of a thousand toddlers. She’s smiling, she looks happy, and I suppose that’s why Caitlin put it up. But there is something in the way she holds her shoulders, in the narrowing of her eyes... She had that expression on her face for six whole months. And the rest: the rolling of her bright blue eyes when we spoke to friends, the passive-aggressive put downs. She left me long before she went, you see. Or rather, we left each other.
“We should do something,” Caitlin says, coming back into the kitchen in a burst of colour like an unexpected pink flower in the snow.
“Should we?” I say, smiling hopefully. We could play Scrabble or drink wine. I’d play her Crosby, Stills & Nash and she’d play me Rizzle Kicks.
“It’s the festive period,” she says. “Let’s… go late-night shopping! Or on a walk!”
At exactly that moment, my pager bleeps. I hate that bloody pager, and yet it’s my only link to the outside world, now. I told Caitlin I had been forced to switch to nights. But really, I’d do anything to avoid that bedroom between those torturous hours of two and five. It’s only been a few weeks, and it’s hell, but it’s better than lying there in that bed. Our bed. I read the message. “I have to go,” I say, limply. “Sorry…”
Caitlin looks at me then, and it’s the same look, the look that Liz had. I spread my hands wide, too aggressively, I know. “What can I do?” I say, “Quit my job, so we can go shopping?”
“Yes,” Caitlin says, I think sarcastically. “Because that’s your only alternative, isn’t it?”
She sounds so adult, sometimes. I remove my slippers and put on my shoes, and straighten up. As I do, my knees click. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Caitlin is looking at the washing up, just behind me. “In that case…” she says, “I was asked – to dinner with Matt and Lucy and everyone, earlier,” she says, waving a hand by her side. “Would you mind?”
The air in my lungs gathers in the alveoli and threatens to come out in a gust. I dispel it slowly instead, through my nose, nostrils flared, and I don’t think she notices.
“But you cooked!” I say.
“Only because you wouldn’t!” she says, mimicking my tone. It stings like an injection.
“Go; go,” I say, “that’s fine. This thing’d probably go off all the time anyway.” I point to my pager and fake a laugh.
“Fab,” she says, and her step is lighter as she goes to get ready. She’s relieved, I think guiltily, darkly. She’s been let off the hook.
That’s that then. I close the door quietly on my way out. The drive is glistening with snow and frost on the gravel, and I remember Caitlin whizzing down it on her very first bike, stabiliser rattling as she turned around to grin at me.
I – the locum – arrive at a small terraced house on the other side of town. It is sufficiently long after Christmas so that the lights look tacky and garish lining the streets, even in the hard, glinting snow. I did mean to put lights up myself. Well, it is definitely too late now. I ring the doorbell, which plays Auld Lang Syne. The patient is an elderly lady, sitting up in a chair. She looks quite well. She shows me that one of her arms has swollen up. It is rather strange. I take a brief history, and she tells me she had flu last winter and took a while to recover. She tells me about her type two diabetes, as well.
“Oh and the breast cancer,” she says. It feels as if somebody has thrown a bucket of cold water over me.
“Cancer?” I say.
She waves a hand as if swatting away a fly. “Breast cancer – 1982,” she says, “or was it 1983? I can’t remember – hang on,” she says, and reaches awkwardly up to the bookcase behind her, obscuring the dim lamplight. She is surprisingly tall.
“That’s fine,” I say, patting her arm. “A general time period is fine…”
She gets an old diary out and flicks through it anyway. “1982,” she says, “I was right.”
“Okay,” I say. I examine her arm, then. Her wedding ring is cutting sharply into the flesh because her hand is swollen too. Immediately, in my mind, I diagnose lymphoedema; pretty common if the cancer has come back and spread to her lymph nodes, which could then no longer drain excess fluid. If it’s not that, it’s a blood clot. Neither is good news. I try not to let this show on my face.
I examine her breast, then, and it is Liz’s flesh under my cool hands. I palpate the tissue, over and over, round and round. My heart speeds up again. Breathlessness. Liz didn’t want to leave me, you see. Not yet, anyway. And certainly not like that. The cancer took her. I feel my way from the breast tissue and up into her armpit, the skin papery and soft. The thing was, with Liz, she already had her diagnosis, one damp Tuesday morning at the breast clinic – from another doctor. I came home from work and she told me, sat on our sofa, not meeting my eyes. That’s what happens when you don’t see or touch your wife’s breasts for five years, I suppose. They morphed from two round orbs beneath a green bikini, firm nipples feeding Caitlin at 3:00am, to hidden, unknown moons I never touched, and then to medical specimens, one of them a visible red lump, the skin pulled tight above it, pock-marked, later, with chest drains and fat pink scars and then just a fold of skin, the flesh extricated and put in some medical waste bin in some lab. Was it worse, then, that it was stage three, and everybody presumed I had missed it, a negligent doctor? Or had they guessed I had never even seen it, felt them, a negligent husband? No, what was worse was this: our own selfish intimacy problems, our snide remarks, our rows over the dishwasher, got in the way of saving her. That’s the worst part.
The woman looks at me, now, her eyes brown and not the peacock-blue of Liz’s, as my fingers palpate a walnut-sized lump, hard as the compacted snow that fell last night. I think she knows.
“I think I can feel something slightly…” I say. “Obviously, this is only a precautionary measure, but I think it would be a good idea to get you a mammogram, pretty soon – just,” I say, “to rule it out.” The words fall off my tongue with such ease it is as if I am reading an autocue.
“I see,” she says, and bows her head, the lamplight just above her lighting up her white hair and the almost-bald crown of her head. Soon, another victim will be claimed.
I drive back home, having offered nothing but a morbid diagnosis, and pour myself a whiskey. It is only seven o’clock and Caitlin’s already left, the Thai curry and beef rice turned off and sitting like sludge in the wok on the hob; a metaphorical goodbye note. I think of Liz, wandering the plains between Earth and – well, whatever’s out there. I wonder if she looks the same, or older, or even twenty and sparkling like she was when we toasted the new year forty years ago, her eyes the exact colour of the blue balloons behind her. I wonder if she still unconsciously fingers her breast, checking, checking the flap of skin. I think of January and February and all those months to come. Wake, dinner, work, sleep. Breathlessness, fainting, fatigue. My journey wasn’t supposed to be this way. We’d grow old together, hold hands at the bus stop in the rain. Caitlin would visit us for roasts and we’d do her ironing, hearing that distinctive hissing; the steamy smell of Sunday afternoons. We’d argue about who to invite to our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Liz would want to set off Chinese lanterns to float into the pink sky and I’d worry they’d set fire to the neighbour’s garden.
I look at the picture above the knife rack. Liz had no idea then that she would be dead a year later, despite what I read in her blue eyes now. Is there a photo of me floating around somewhere with my expiry date stamped across my features that someone will mourn in a year’s time? Or less?
I remember our home when Caitlin was still tiny and would thrash around in her high chair, shrieking delightedly as she smeared bourbon biscuits all over her high chair tray. We were at the beginning of our journey, then. Newborn-Caitlin is gone, Liz would say, with tears in her eyes as we watched Caitlin-the-toddler stamping in puddles in the rain, the droplets of water sprinkling upwards in chaotic arcs around her. And now the toddler has gone too, Liz would say, nostalgic for Caitlin’s tiny hand in hers on the school run. I see what she means. I think of all of the Lizzes I knew before – the university student in bell-bottoms and John Lennon glasses, the twenty-something eating five slices of toast in a row, her rounded pregnant belly illuminated by the light of the fridge, the harassed thirty-something, rushing from doctor’s appointments and sewing name tags in school uniforms at midnight. I think of the Lizzes I’ll never see; the sixty-something, hair sprinkled white like it was when we painted the hallway white and it got everywhere. The seventy-something; naughtily buying a grandchild Percy Pigs in Marks and Spencer. I think of the Lizzes and Caitlins gone by: newborn Caitlin, skin-to-skin on Liz’s chest, lost forever.
I walk to the table and set my drink down. I can almost see their shadows here, still dancing, still laughing. I hear the door, and I think for a moment that it is Liz bustling in with a bottle of wine and a reduced offer Christmas pudding from M&S, then, with an awful start, I remember. I imagine for a moment we are divorced, and she alive, and I can still see her on the pretence of sorting out the junk in our garage, or Caitlin’s Christmas presents.
I begin to cry, great, dry, lonely sobs. I push my fists into my eyes as I remember rolling away from Liz in bed, night after night. I should have held her. Our journey, our life together. Its bitter end.
“Dad,” Caitlin says, her footsteps sounding like marbles being dropped onto the wooden floor. “Didn’t fancy dinner out.”
I jump, and look at her; she sees my tears.
“Oh, Dad...” she says. “I thought you never...” And she wraps her arms around me, my butterfly, and we cry and laugh self-consciously together while more snow falls outside. We stay there for a long time. The heating clicks on and I hear next door leave, off to some festivity no doubt. All the while I hold my Caitlin, and she holds me. She smells of cheap perfume and Thai curry and her hair sticks to my beard. My breathing slows. She shifts her head and I look at my shoulder: it’s damp and smudged black with her mascara.
I wipe the black from underneath her eyes with my thumbs.
It’s a start.
I serve the curry and rice and we eat at the kitchen counter, Liz’s photo opposite us.
“Dad,” Caitlin says.
“Mmm?” I watch her eat, a rim of sauce lining her lips just like when she was little.
“This rice tastes like shit.”
I laugh. “Shall we go late-night shopping?” I say. “Buy some proper rice?” Caitlin nods and wraps her hand around mine.
I turn my pager off on the way out. And, I leave a light on for Liz.