Page 7 of Oyster

“You’re a bit late,” he observed. “I bumped into Max at the boulangerie. The tide came in a couple of hours ago.”

“Yeah, I… er… had some stuff to do.”

Stretching out my stiff legs on Florian’s narrow little bench, I sighed. Some secrets were designed for sharing with best friends to pore over and revel in them together. Like when our other friend, Jerome, was expecting his first baby with his girlfriend. Too soon to declare but bursting with pride. Others were a burden lightened; I’d offloaded a miserable one of those to Florian a few weeks earlier. Even though the sharing hadn’t changed anything, at least he now understood my tetchy behaviour and why our evenings in L’Escale had, of late, taken on such a joyless quality.

However, some enormous secrets, like the humdinger I’d unearthed a couple of hours ago, you didn’t dare let out.

“How’s your mum?”

I was glad Florian didn’t shy away from asking after her, unlike most people. And it wasn’t an insincere enquiry either, when the only right answer was afine thanks. If I launched into a two-hour monologue about my family, falling apart at the seams, and me, ill-equipped to repair the damage, he’d listen to every word and not interrupt. Because that’s how he was.

Of course, Florian's excellent listening didn’t make me an effusive storyteller. So, I shrugged, like it wasn’t too important. Like my dad wasn’t a perpetually hungover shadow of his former self and my youngest sister wasn’t bunking school and hiding in her room. Like my brother, Max, didn’t limit himself to four words a day and play mindless computer games half the night.Like this thing eating away at us all hadn’t taken its greedy fill already.

And like my mum’s ravaged body wasn’t going to be buried six feet deep under the rich island soil before the year was out.

“Okay, I guess. Good days and bad days.”

Cancer survivors. Cancer fighters. Battle winners. Cute pink ribbons and triumphant banners. Cancerchampions. I fucking hated that rhetoric. Running the gauntlet of it every visit to that blasted clinic, I always felt an urge to cover my mum’s eyes. Because when hope had been extinguished, what did that make her? A fifty-three-year-old, weak, and pathetic cancerloser? A cancercoward, a white-feather-waving pacifist, lacking the nerve to stand up and face the fight?

But riddle me this: how was a woman actually supposed to battle that fucking beast when it had nested and multiplied in her liver months and months before a gritty lump ever made itself known in her breast?

The women of our family carried a rare gene made up of lots of numbers and letters. An anagram rearranged to spell death. My mum’s sister—my aunt—was in remission, but for how long was anyone’s guess. My cousin too. It had already taken my grandma, and, for all I knew, it already had its evil eye trained on Zoë, my sister.

“She’s been started on a new drug. Shrinks the tumours in her liver and hip, according to the specialist. Better than the other one did. She felt okay for the first few treatments. Less so now.”

“How’s Zoë coping?”

Easiest question so far. “Badly.”

Three months ago, I’d given up the flat I rented with a mate and moved back home. My mum had asked; how could I refuse? My younger siblings needed me, she said. My dad needed me, she said. And, out of all of us, I was the one holding it togetherthe best, she said. Trust me—it didn’t always feel that way. Some days, I wished I’d stayed put. Now death laughed in my face every day, whereas living ten minutes up the road enabled me to dodge the reality for a few hours. And my mum had mistaken me for someone with the emotional skills to deal with shellshocked younger siblings and a father barely managing the bandwidth for tending to his sick wife and pitching in at work.

At least me, Max, and my dad had hard manual labour to keep us busy. I defied anyone to fight sleep after some of our long days, even more so now, when the quietness of the island tipped over into the annual spring and summer madness. Restaurants up and down the country bought sack-loads of our oysters all year round, but half our business revenue came from the island tourist season thundering down on us.

“Is there anything Charles or I can do to help?” Florian enquired. “You know you only have to say the word.”

Just let me forever have this peaceful moment.This unchanging oasis of ordinariness.

“No, I’m good.”

He asked me this question almost every day, and the answer was always the same. I appreciated the gesture, though.Sucking in a breath, I filled my lungs with pure, crisp ocean air, remembering countless happier times sat on this bench with him. Laughing, joshing, gossiping. Bitching about Jerome. Teasing about my latest one-night stand. Smoking cigarette after cigarette—although my mum’s cancer had put paid to that habit overnight. Mind you, my cravings for one had never been stronger.

“They say the new drug should give her some more time.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

I took a sip of my coffee. “I don’t know. The side effects can be devastating. Lots of people have to withdraw from it.”

Sometimes, I wondered if this existence in limbo hurt more than death. And then hated myself for wishing my mother’s life over. The drug would buy her a few more months, they’d said. But a few more months of what? Pain? Suffering? Trips to the shiny clinic? Teasing out the agony?

What was the point? What were we allwaitingfor?

CHAPTER 3

Two days later, my bedraggled drunk mermaid paid me a visit. In a way, I was glad to see her. The whole breaking-dawn episode had been outlandish, almost as if I’d dreamed it. And unfinished, because I had questions. The glaringly obvious ones, of course, but also more fundamental. Was she okay? What had she done after I left? Did she resume drinking? Should I have gone back later to check up on her? I’d contemplated it, but, mon dieu, Éti wasn’t some random woman indulging in a melancholic solo bender. She was really big fucking news. Who the hell did I think I was, sauntering up the garden path to pay her a social call?

I’d scoured the internet since, of course. The person the world thought it knew was everywhere, like,200 millionfollowers on Instagram everywhere. But drunk and lonely Éti, with her pretty white sundress, delicate bangles around her wrists, and slim bare feet with pastel-painted toenails, was nowhere to be seen. As far as social media was concerned, that young woman I’d helped along the sand, who’d kicked pebbles into the night sky and drawn rare laughter from me, might as well have been a ghost.

I didn’t notice her at first, which made it sound like I had girly groupies hanging around the oyster shed 24/7. If only. Don’t get me wrong, I was popular enough with the ladies. The whole tattooed, scruffy, rough-and-ready vibe going jived with plenty of local women and rich tourists alike. Even if, as Florian swore, I was moody as hell and forever spritzed ineau de dead poisson. Hence why very few made it past a second date.

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