Page 1 of A Midlife Gamble

PARTI

1

So now you know the full truth of it. And that makes a grand total of five. I haven’t told Helen. I’ve left that with Caro because it means they’ll have to talk to each other. Things haven’t been good between them since we got back from Cyprus, but that’s a long story. My worry is that they’re both Alex’s godmothers, and if they’re not even talking to each other, I don’t know how they’re going to be able to help him when…

Kay paused. Lips pressed tight together she tapped out the rest of the sentence…I’m gone.Her hand wavered over the keyboard as she read the words back.

I hope you’re well!Send my love to Cyprus. How I’d love to go back one more time.

Kay

She pressed send, closed her laptop and looked across at the clock on the mantle.

Three am.

Too far from midnight, not close enough to morning, and the only time that hadn’t mattered was when she had her baby pressed to her chest, him all wide-eyed and warm, her all exhausted and happy. Those days when the world still tilted at an angle that was scalable. When everyone she loved was alive and well and healthy. Which was all she’d ever needed but the truth of which, like oxygen, was only really evident when it had stretched too thin to be viable.

Her grandparents were gone. Her mother didn’t recognise her. Her marriage had ended in divorce and her son… Ah, her son.

She spread her hands on the arms of the chair and eased herself upright, picked up her still-warm cup of tea, and walked across to the window. Outside a silver web of frost had cloaked parked cars, creeping across the road like sparkling lava. She loved these early morning hours. The few occasions she’d been awake to see them, it had always felt to Kay as if she was looking at a map markedterra incognita.A wide-open space and time in which anything and everything was possible. Because these hours contained both the optimism of list-making, and the quiet of reflection, a time to slip your skin and press pause on life. A raft on an ocean, a clearing in a forest that offered welcome, but vague possibilities. These were the moments in which she gave serious thought to the idea of giving up teaching, and picking up… tap dancing? Of selling the house and moving to Scotland? Or more lately, Cyprus. It just wasn’t possible to entertain these ideas at three pm. Squashed in from all sides by the weight of commitment, three pm would have tossed her ideas aside as so much silly confetti. Its early morning cousin had always remained kinder, a more thoughtful listener to the internal workings of her mind.

Until now.

Her fingertips met around the cup, padding softly together as she sighed. What could this time of the new day reveal to her now thatterra incognitareally was full of dragons? What possibilities remained, that she couldn’t glimpse at any other minute, of any other hour? A new land in which her mother did not have dementia? A country in which Alex wasn’t destined for the lonely and financially difficult life she felt sure awaited him? A place where she did not have stage four skin cancer? Stage four being incurable. Stage four being, at some point in the not too distant future, terminal.

As if to banish her own thoughts, Kay shook her head. What was the point of hurting herself over and over with them? Dipping her chin she took a sip of tea and when she looked back up was almost surprised to see, within the darkened glaze of her front-room window, her reflection.Still here,she murmured,still standing, and her exhausted, haunted reflection looked back at her with sad eyes, and she thought, it’s wrong. Wrong how people always talk about the days:Those were the days!The days of our lives.Because what about the nights? All those nights she’d slept so easy, with Alex in the room next door and her parents along the road. What a gift they had been. What a precious gift! Even those nights when she hadn’t slept easy, she’d had nothing more troublesome to do than watch stars and consider a still benignterra incognita.Yes, those were the nights!

Now?

Now the terrain was mapped, nothing was unknown and all roads – every road – led back to cancer. The fact that it existed, was alive and growing inside her. The fact that it would take her away from Alex, who needed her. The fact that it would break her poor father’s heart. The fact that the day after tomorrow, the first stage of what was going to be an aggressive treatment process would start for real. An overnight stay in hospital following lymph node dissection, which should reduce the burden of the disease.Burden of disease.She was learning a whole new vocabulary. Bio markers, LDH Levels, laser imaging, imaging tests, dissection, systemic therapies, combination therapies, T-cell transfer therapies… all of which, at some point in time, would end up spelling the same word: death. Hers.

Her mug felt suddenly heavy. Either that, or her hands had become suddenly weak. She managed to get it back onto the table and, as she straightened up, she pushed her hands into the pockets of her dressing gown searching for the scrap of tissue that always lived there. When she found it, she used it to blot silent tears. Silent, because upstairs, through the thin ceiling layers of gypsum and artex, she could hear the low rumble of Alex’s snores and she would not wake him one moment before she had to. Not today. The day she was going to tell him she was dying. And where was the manual for that? The pages in the book of motherhood, no one had thought to write. On the mantle the clock ticked away sibilant minutes, and from somewhere far far away she thought she heard the crunch of wheels on the early morning frost. Life went on.

As the tissue fell apart in her hands, she used the last threads to blow her nose, shaking her head at the question that had unfurled, banner like, in her head the day she was diagnosed and had not folded since. How was she going to do it? How was she going to tell Alex?

And because she was no closer to finding the answer now than she had been at the beginning, she picked up her cup again and turned to the window, sipping tea, looking out at the street she had lived upon for so long. At old Mrs Newall’s driveway, at the 30 mph speed sign, at the pothole that she’d probably never live to see repaired. The thought made her smile. Well, as long as her sense of humour was still intact. And now she was turning, scanning the room. What to do? What to do? Her eyes lit upon the TV cabinet. She walked over and, using an armchair for support, lowered herself to the floor, knees creaking so loud the sound echoed. Five minutes later, she’d pulled out every last CD and VHS tape that had ever taken refuge in the rarely opened bottom drawer. Her wedding tape, its pencilled label almost as erased as the marriage.Alex: first year.Kay held the tape up. How long had she been meaning to get someone to transfer this onto something more modern? And this one: her mother’s retirement party. Ditto. On she went, box sets ofFriendsandColumbo, piling up beside her.

By the time she’d finished, the blackness of night had begun to break apart. Streaks of grey and deep violet reaching from the east. On the kitchen shelf were stacked two piles of VHS tapes and DVDs, notes beside them:Get sortedandCharity.So, what to do now? Hands on hips Kay looked around. There was nothing to do. Last weekend, she’d sorted the cupboard under the stairs. Saturday night/Sunday morning it was her cleaning cupboard under the sink, all sorts of wire-wool and opened packets of Wash-it-White thrown away. The week before she’d done the shoe polishes. Worry equalled insomnia. The only upside being that, when the time came, she’d be leaving a house ruthlessly in order. More so, she thought wryly, than it had ever been. She picked up the top DVD from the charity pile.Think Yourself Thin; it was still in its cellophane. Then, dropping it back down, she moved to the sink, rinsed her cup, left it on the drainer and went upstairs. Her wardrobe. She would start on her wardrobe, eighty per cent of which hadn’t fitted her since 1995.

The surge of enthusiasm carried her easily through a swathe of misshaped, worn out navy and black. Everyday stuff that was easy to sling, because every day was every day and there were still everyday days left. It was her silver jacket that threw the sucker punch. Her Vegas jacket. Bought for a honeymoon trip that had been promised by a man who had, in the end, disappointed. Wheeled out from then on for various special occasions, the last being Helen’s fiftieth. She reached for the sleeve, holding the fabric as tenderly as she’d once held Alex’s hand. Was that it then? Was Helen’s fiftieth destined to be thelast,last time? And then how many otherlasttimes had she already missed? How many had passed without her even noticing? Thelast, last time she swam in the ocean? Got soaked in the rain? Laughed until she cried? And for the second time since three am, Kay smiled. Because this, thank goodness, she could remember. It had been in Cyprus, with Caro. The afternoon Lawrence had turned up and they’d set about trying to warn Helen. Laughing, like schoolgirls, yes until she’d cried.

Slowly she slipped the jacket off its hanger and onto her shoulders, and as outside her window dawn stretched itself into neon orange rays, Kay turned to look at herself in the wardrobe mirror. A hundred years ago, as a bride-to-be, an irresistible impulse had carried her from street, to shop, to changing room, where she’d stood in the reflected light of a thousand silver sequins, listening to their whispered possibilities… Which had all come to nothing. Despite all the talk, first as a child with her father as they’d played Sunday afternoon card games, then with Martin her ex-husband, she never had made it to Vegas, and now she never would. She had, after all, only been playing dress-up.

A shrill bleep cut across her thoughts, sharp as a knife. Before she could catch a sense of where it had come from, the sound repeated. And again.

Alex’s alarm. Dazed, Kay turned to her own bedside clock. The digits flashed 07:00. It was time. She could put it off no longer.

In the kitchen,Kay filled the teapot, pulled on a knitted tea-cosy and waited for Alex to come downstairs. Running her fingers over the bumpy wool, she was thinking of her mother who had knitted the cosy especially for Alex. Blue and yellow he’d asked for, his favourite colours of the time. Like the sun and the sky. He wouldn’t touch it now. Over the years it had stained, which Alex equated with dirty, saying as much to his grandmother. Her mother’s thin-lipped smile, Kay had known, had hidden the hurt. But this was Alex. Unable to follow, let alone forge, the delicate web of everyday conversation. The distortions and dissembling, economies of truth, exaggerations. All of which, she feared, was going to make what she had to say so much harder. Not for Alex, for her.Because, where much of the world was obligingly content to have difficult truths fudged, Alex, she knew, wouldn’t be. Everyone she’d told, for example – and here she meant the bare necessities of the situation – had nodded seriously and said nothing at all… until she’d offered them the escape route they’d been desperately looking for from the moment she’d started talking. Without fail, as she had shown them the door with vague statements such aswell, the treatments these days,orwe just don’t know at the moment,they had grabbed that nebulous thread, as if it were steel cable. But Alex? The irony was that the person it was going to hurt her the most to tell was the person best equipped to take it. She could have laughed, or cried, but whatever she did, shehadto tell him.

A minute later,he came into the kitchen, his head buried in the work sweatshirt he was still pulling on. Kay had an urge to step forward and run her hand through his mop of unbrushed hair, as his head popped clear, but those days were long gone. The closest she got now was an awkward standing to attention, if she dared to give him a hug. If she was lucky she might get an awkward pat on the back in return.

‘Cup of tea?’

Alex picked up his keys. ‘I have to go.’

‘Oh.’ She glanced at the clock. He didn’t start until eight. ‘You have time, don’t you?’

‘I wanted to get in early today. We’re clearing space for the first delivery of Christmas trees. They’re coming next week.’

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