 Every Third Thought
Helen Simpson
It happened very fast, without warning. One day everybody started dying. First it was
Janey Glazebrook, she woke on a Tuesday in a flood of blood before the school run: bowel
cancer. She simply couldn’t believe it, she’d had no inkling before except for
feeling tired, which, as we all said, let’s face it, everybody does. This news, so
shocking, was met by talk of Philippa Meekin, Jasmine’s mother, who had that very
week had an operation to remove a brain tumour. Then Oliver Kitchen was diagnosed with a
primary liver tumour and Sadie went to pieces at the school gates, they’d got three
under nine and they’d just had the roof taken off for a loft conversion they really
couldn’t afford so it was utter chaos there. It’s like a plague, we all said, an
epidemic, a horrible sticky contagion.
‘Coincidence,’ said my husband Harry when I
told him the latest over dinner. ‘These things come in waves, you know, like buses,
none for ages then three at the same time.’ He’s some ten years older than
me—well, fifteen—so I tried to believe him, as if being older made him more of
an expert. I think he married me on the Picasso principle—however old and ugly I get,
with any luck I’ll still be less old and ugly than him. He’s very good at what
he does though I couldn’t tell you what that is. What I do know is, it takes a lot
out of him.
But after all Harry was protected from the bad news by
office life. I couldn’t even go to Waitrose without bumping into some fresh horror.
I’d never had any interest in the subject before, no interest whatsoever. I tend not
to dwell on things. Doom and gloom were never my cup of tea, but now they seemed to lurk
round every corner.
‘Have you heard about Karen Pocock?’ said a
voice from the other side of the freezer cabinet as I reached in for a packet of organic
peas.
‘Don’t tell me;’ I blurted, but there
was no stopping this bearer of bad news. Stephanie was to be in the thick of it for some
reason. She was always the first to know.
Anyway, this time it was Karen Pocock. ‘Karen
Pocock? You must know Karen Pocock! She was on the PTA the year they raised enough for a
climbing frame, she goes round with that funny expression on her face like there’s a
bad smell.’ Karen Pocock, it emerged, had just found out she’d got breast
cancer. Six months’ chemotherapy ahead of her, no secondaries but two lymph glands
involved.
‘Yes,’ said Stephanie, nodding vigorously.
And you’ll never believe this but that makes five cases of breast cancer now in
Heatherside Avenue.’
‘Five?’
‘Five,’ nodded Stephanie.
‘Including Karen’s next door neighbour, can you imagine, she went for tests last
week, nothing in her bones but the liver scan seems to show something.’
‘Five is a lot,’ I marvelled. ‘Do you
think it might be something environmental?’
‘What, ley lines?’ said Stephanie. ‘I
think not. Myself, I put it down to dairy. And the Pill. Cut out cheese and change to
condoms, that’s what I say! She had a miscarriage too, and they say that ups
your—’
‘Must dash,’ I said, moving away as fast as
I could. ‘See you at the book club. I’ve got to get Tillie from tae kwon do in a
minute.’
Harry and I have three girls: Chloe,
fourteen—she’s a worker, she’s started revising for her GCSEs already, a
year in advance; Anna, she’s eleven, nothing worries her, typical middle child, my
little couch potato; and Tillie, who’s seven. Tillie was crazed on the Narnia books
about then, I associate that time with Mr Tumnus and Aslan the lion. I remember reading
aloud the chapter where Lucy and Susan watch over Aslan’s dead body, and there was a
bit where it said, You know that feeling when you’ve cried yourself to sleep? I can
still see Tillie’s puzzled round face on the pillow, the way she said, ‘No, Mum,
I don’t know that feeling.’ How I beamed with satisfaction at
this—smugness, you might call it. Ah well, pride goes before a fall.
It’s an odd thing but when someone’s been
talking to you about breast cancer your own breasts start to fizz and tingle. I wanted to
cup mine in my hands right there at the checkout till, and I thought of my girls again.
There’s a lot of talk now about how it makes sense to go for pre-emptive surgery if
you’ve got a history of breast cancer in the family. You can have both breasts cut
off in case and the wounds covered with skin grafts from the back. ‘That would be
jumping the gun a bit,’ Harry said when I mentioned this to him. Still, his
grandmother and one of his cousins died of breast cancer. And his aunt.
Adrenalin was in the air. The usual worry, the good
old money worry, the mortgage and so on, was pushed to the back in favour of this fertile
new health worry. My next door neighbour told me she now cut out and filed all newspaper
columns and magazine articles on cancer—and there are an awful lot of them —just
in case. ‘It doesn’t do to dwell on things,’ I said to her. ‘You could
be run over by a bus tomorrow.’ But my heart wasn’t in it; privately I found
myself thinking, that filing business sounds rather a good idea.
‘How’s Oliver?’ I asked Sadie Kitchen
the next time I saw her. We were crouched on little wooden chairs waiting in a queue at a
parents’ evening. It was somewhere in the autumn term, the start of the new school
year.
‘Not good news,’ said Sadie with an unhappy
grin. ‘We took him into UCH last night. They said. They said, he probably won’t
last till November.’ Her eyes filled. She clenched her face in a horrible helpless
smile. I grimaced back and our brimming eyes swam at each other, uselessly.
‘They said his tumour’s the size of an
orange,’ she said, blowing her nose. ‘I’d just bought a net of oranges for
juicing and they went straight in the bin. I’m not touching oranges again,
ever.’
I do wish doctors would keep away from food when
they’re making their comparisons. A prostate gland is the size of a walnut, that sort
of thing. Funny what can put you off your food. Tillie wouldn’t touch spaghetti after
Anna told her it was really dead worms. I used to be crazed on Topic, that chocolate bar
with the hazelnuts, I had one on the way back from school every afternoon for years; until
there was a court case where a woman bit into one and found a mouse’s skull. That
completely took the pleasure out of hazelnuts as far as I was concerned.
Somewhere around this time I had to go for a smear.
The practice nurse did it, and once she’d finished digging around and had withdrawn
those metal salad servers, I realised how jittery I’d been feeling.
‘That didn’t hurt a bit,’ I said as I
got dressed. ‘Thank you.’ Then I told her about the last few weeks, Death abroad
with its scythe, and the state of mind this produced in my circle. If I was looking for
reassurance, I was knocking at the wrong door.
‘Don’t tell me,’ she said with feeling.
She glanced again at my notes. ‘Ah, you’re just the age that starts to happen.
I’ve been there. It was after a party, two in the morning, I found a lump. I was
banging on the door first thing in the morning demanding surgery. Nurses are the worst
because they see it all the time.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course.’
‘Then suddenly it was happening to so many
people. All at once. It’s quite a shock. I took out a really good life insurance
policy. It makes you decide to enjoy things.’
We both looked glum, faced with deserts of vast
eternity and the wailing of children left behind.
‘The only thing you can do is put your affairs in
order,’ she said, washing her hands vigorously under the tap. ‘Don’t leave
too much of a mess.’
‘But I’m only thirty-six,’ I said. She
shrugged.
* * *
After that, for some reason everything I watched
on television, every conversation I had with anyone seemed to zoom in on you-know-what.
Even the children were interested.
‘How old do you want to be when you die?’
asked Anna over dinner one night.
‘A hundred,’ said Chloe. ‘And I want it
to happen when I’m asleep.’
‘A hundred and ten!’ said Tillie. ‘But
I want to be awake to see what it’s like. As long as it doesn’t hurt.’
It must have been some time in October, I’d made
a recipe from the paper for pumpkin soup but—like so many pumpkin recipes—it was
disappointing, I could tell that from Harry’s face. He’s very keen on healthy
food, and no animal fats because of a man at his office having had a heart attack, though
I sometimes sneak in a bit of butter for the flavour.
‘And would you want to be cremated or
buried?’ continued Anna.
‘That’s not very cheerful, darling,’ I
said.
‘What’s cremated?’ asked Tillie.
‘Burnt in a fire,’ said Anna, ‘so
there’s nothing left except your ashes. Then they put them in a box and give it to
your husband to keep under the bed.’
‘No, your husband scatters the ashes,
retard,’ said Chloe. ‘Over the sea or from a private jet.’
‘I don’t want to be in the ground if
it’s like the garden,’ said Tillie. ‘I hate worms. But I’m scared of
fire.’
‘Let’s change the subject,’ I said.
‘There’s this cool new company,’ said
Chloe, looking at me from under her eyelashes. She has beautiful green eyes. She knew she
was winding me up. ‘—this company, which packs your ashes into a giant firework
and then you go up into the sky and give a lot of people pleasure at the same time.’
‘Nang!’ said Anna. ‘I’m choosing
that one.’
‘That’s enough,’ said Harry,
putting the paper down at last. ‘Didn’t you hear your mother?’
The book group was no better. There was one meeting at Stephanie’s house, I remember,
which started with her description of Cheyne-Stokes respiration as she poured the wine.
‘It comes on just before the end,’ she
cried. ‘Long gasps of not breathing at all then snorting back in there for a
while.’
‘None for me thanks,’ I said.
‘I’ve put on weight over summer.’
‘Ah but is it good fat or bad fat,’
asked the woman who was holding out the bowl of nuts to me.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘It’s
about half a stone.’
‘Susan’s married to an actuary,’ said
Stephanie proudly. ‘We were saying the group needed new blood and she’s
it!’ This introduction was met with a buzz of welcome and interest.
‘I used to think actuarial work sounded really
boring,’ said Susan modestly.
Not at all, we assured her; it was fascinating. She
came under a barrage of excited questions. All I can remember is that it pays to eat
sunflower seeds, and that the riskiest decade for tumours starts at the age of forty-five.
‘Alan always says that once you reach your
fifty-sixth birthday you can breathe again,’ she laughed, flowering in the sun of our
interest.
‘Well it certainly starts earlier than that round
here,’ cried Stephanie, filling her glass. ‘Have you heard the news about Polly
Tulloch, girls? She went along to the doctor a bit embarrassed because her wee was looking
like beer, very dark, and her pooh had gone white.’ She paused. We waited.
‘Turns out she has pancreatic cancer,’ she concluded, turning down the corners
of her mouth like a Greek tragedy mask.
‘Who’s Polly Tulloch?’ I murmured to
Juliet, sitting on the sofa beside me.
‘I think she does a yoga class with
Stephanie,’ she whispered back, and I was overtaken by a terrible urge to giggle. I
pretended to be coughing on some crisps.
‘Is it true what my doctor told me?’ Juliet
pestered the actuary’s wife. ‘That three out of four get it?’
‘I heard two in three,’ added Stephanie.
‘Well, but lots of those are over ninety,
surely?’ said Sally. ‘A hundred. Then it’s just a case of Anno
Domino.’
‘Did anyone read the book?’ asked Tricia,
‘Not to change the subject or anything.’
‘Wuthering Heights,’ said Stephanie
witheringly. ‘Didn’t do a thing for me.’
‘Oh no!’ cried Tricia. ‘Didn’t you
like Heathcliff? I thought Heathcliff was amazing.’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Stephanie.
‘Anyway, he dies, for no good reason I could see. What sort of hero’s that? More
wine, anyone?’
But since she’d already told us earlier that our
risk of breast cancer rose by 6% for every glass we drank, we all said no.
* * *
‘No they
couldn’t get it all out,’ said Philippa. Her face was steroid-puffy and
she’d just been showing me the scar on her part-shaven scalp. She’d kept the
staples from her head and held them out to me in a little Murano glass dish.
‘It’s very aggressive, apparently,’ she
said. ‘I’m trying to get Greg to see what’s happening but he’s finding
it really hard to, um, take it on board.’
I sipped my coffee. I didn’t say anything.
‘It’s difficult for him,’ said Philippa.
‘But it’s even more difficult for you,’
I blurted.
‘Oh I don’t know,’ she said casually.
‘I’m fed up with it. There’s been a flood of people I haven’t seen for
years wanting all the gory details. Stephanie popped by for coffee twice last week, which
is as good as having the plague cross painted on your door. I really don’t feel up to
them.’
‘I was wondering whether Jasmine and the twins
would like an overnight on Friday,’ I said. ‘That way they can come
trick-or-treating with Tillie.’
‘Hallowe’en,’ she shuddered, and
flashed me a ghastly grin.
‘All Saints,’ I said feebly.
‘I was in Mexico once for the Day of the
Dead,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘November the first. The family I was staying
with took me for a picnic to the graveyard where their relatives were buried and we sat
around on tombstones eating little iced sponge cakes baked in the shape of skulls. Keeping
them company. Everybody does it there, it had a real party atmosphere.’
‘You look tired,’ I said. ‘Why
don’t you have a nap? Agnieska’s got them till one, hasn’t she? How’s
she working out?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Philippa.
‘There seems to be a lot of screaming and shouting but I can’t... We’ve not
been an au pair family before. I don’t know how to do it. Still, I’m sure
I’ll learn.’
The doorbell rang. It was her next door neighbour with
a batch of flapjacks and a request to cut down some overhanging branches from
Philippa’s cherry tree.
‘Absolutely,’ said Philippa. ‘Blocks
the light to your kitchen window as it is.’
‘I must dash,’ I said. ‘Got to collect
Tillie from her violin lesson.’
‘I can’t think what I want to be most,’
said Tillie on the way home. ‘A skellington. Or a witch. No I don’t want to be a
witch, all the girls are being witches.’
‘Jasmine and the twins are coming
trick-or-treating with us,’ I said. ‘That’ll be nice, won’t it. I bet
they’re witches, if they wear the same costumes as last year.’
‘I might go as a grim reaper,’ said Tillie.
‘Not a grim reaper, darling,’ I
corrected her, turning into our road. ‘The grim reaper.’
After this, bad news flew in like iron filings to a magnet. One of Anna’s teachers
went off on compassionate leave when her beautiful student daughter was killed in a car
accident. The teenage son of Harry’s secretary Paula dropped dead of a heart attack
during a Sunday morning football match. The woman in the dry cleaner’s told me about
her husband’s seventy-year-old mother who had hanged herself from the banisters after
her daughter’s slow death from cancer.
It was unbearable. I felt wild with fury when I heard
such awful things. I thought, that’s just not on. It’s one thing if you’ve
had a good innings but Philippa hadn’t had a good innings or anything like it,
and neither had most of these people. We’d been led up the garden path. We’d
been living in a fool’s paradise. I wanted to make a complaint, write a letter to the
manager in no uncertain terms.
Stephanie rang to let me know what she’d chosen
for the next book club meeting. It was about a man who had been left paralysed by a stroke
but had managed to write his life story by blinking at an amanuensis.
‘What a survivor!’ said Stephanie
admiringly. ‘Though of course he died. Now, are you going to Oliver Kitchen’s
funeral on Saturday?’
‘I think we might be away,’ I lied. Harry
would be working at the weekend and I didn’t want to take Tillie and Anna to a
funeral. Anyway, I don’t like it when they say they’ve just gone into the room
next door,’ I added. ‘Or that they’re having a nice cup of tea with their
loved ones in heaven. Sorry, are you religious, Stephanie?’
‘I wouldn’t say I was overtly religious.
I mean, I don’t feel the need to go to church every Sunday or anything like
that.’ There was a pause; then, ‘I believe in something to rely on,’ she
said, rather stiffly.
‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I said.
I suppose I could have gone to the doctor for antidepressants or something to cheer me up,
but, well, it struck me that it wasn’t me that things were the matter with. It
was all the rest of it, all these dreadful things happening all over the place. It was the
whole set-up. That was what was the matter. But I did go to the doctor about
something else, round about that time.
‘When I wake in the night,’ I told her,
‘I lie there and I can sometimes feel my heart miss a beat. Quite often.’
‘Can you describe it a bit more?’ she asked,
rubbing her eyes and glancing at my notes up on the screen beside her. ‘It’s
like being in a lift and suddenly it plunges down. It’s like falling down a lift
shaft,’ I mumbled. I almost added that it felt like a premonition, but stopped
myself.
‘That sounds perfectly normal,’ she smiled.
‘Nothing to worry about, it won’t do any harm at all. It’s called an extra
systole but really it’s nothing to worry about.’
‘Oh good,’ I said. ‘I thought I might
need a triple bypass or something.’
‘There’s about as much chance of you needing
a triple bypass as of your being run over by a bus,’ she scoffed. ‘You could try
cutting out coffee, see if that helps. Now, anything else?’
I considered asking about my hot knees, a mysterious
new ailment which, according to the medical encyclopedia meant either Lyme Disease (though
I’d been nowhere near deer) or chlamydia (which would be unlikely at this stage)
or— my personal favourite— rheumatoid arthritis. But I decided against.
‘No, I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Now that
I know it’s only an extra systole and I’m not just slowly dying.’
‘Oh we’re all doing that,’ she
laughed; and so we parted, on a gust of mutual hilarity.
Extra systole or not, I was still having trouble sleeping. That night I gave up and went
downstairs, turning on late-night television only to see real-life surgery and the
grey-pink gleam of entrails. When I flicked channels the latest brutal massacre leaped
onto the screen, as if there wasn’t enough carnage around already from natural
causes. So I went up to bed again and lay there, full of chewed food, a great useless
carcass, a lump of flesh full of lumps of flesh. At five in the morning I woke up
shouting, ‘It’s a charnel house!’ ‘What?’ said Harry blearily.
‘I’m so sorry for everybody,’ I
moaned.
‘Worse things happen at sea,’ grumbled
Harry.
‘At sea?’
‘Go back to sleep.’
Good cheer and spirits and a smiling face turned
to the sun all looked simply foolish, I decided the next day, sitting at the front of the
bus upstairs looking down over a crowded pavement. Childish. Like believing in fairies.
Look at all those people. Why weren’t they more worried? Particularly the old ones.
Why weren’t the old ones all tearing round in a panic? Instead they stood there
fussing over three pence change.
I was on my way to visit Harry’s mother in the
Hawthorn Nursing Home, which is on a dual carriageway, making it impossible to park. Hence
the bus. When I got there she was sitting feeding peanuts into her cup of tea, traffic
whizzing past the window, her wizened silvery arms like birch bark.
‘Hello, Eunice,’ I said. ‘I’ve
brought you some some African violets.’
‘Do you like beards on men?’ she replied.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I think they hide double chins.’ There was a pause and
a cold old blue-eyed stare.
‘You know it all, don’t you?’ she said,
and smiled in some version of triumph.
Then she started feeding peanuts into her tea again.
‘What’s the matter?’ she said when she saw me staring. ‘Haven’t
you seen this done before?’
‘Old people,’ I said to Harry in bed that night. ‘How do they do it? They
just go on and on. Your mother’s eighty-seven. And there’s Sadie’s husband,
forty-one, he went running every morning before work and now he’s dead.’
‘It’s just the roll of the dice,’ said
Harry, rolling over. ‘Go to sleep.’
‘But . . .’ I protested.
‘You could be run over by a bus,’ he
grunted. ‘Why not worry about that.’
Then, about a week later, I was run over by a bus.
I’d just dropped Tillie off at school and I was on my way back home. I’m glad
she wasn’t in the car when it happened, it was quite enough of a shock for the girls
as it was. Anyway, I was pottering along at about twenty-five thinking about how I ought
to stop off at the garden centre for some hyacinth bulbs when there was an almighty bang
and the next thing I knew I was looking up into a nurse’s face and wondering why.
The bus driver had fallen asleep at the wheel; rather
extraordinary, that, at nine in the morning. It made the front page of the local paper.
The bus had been going downhill, picked up speed, shot a red light and hit my car
broadside on. He’d had a big night out, the driver, and he hadn’t bothered going
to bed before starting his early morning shift.
The interesting thing is that, though it was rather
awful losing a leg like that, I was back to my old self otherwise. Some sort of cloud
lifted and I was out of the woods. Amazing, really. No more doom and gloom! I mean, of
course there were times when I felt sorry for myself, very sorry for myself, hobbling
round in rehab being one of them, but I was always able to snap out of it. It could have
been worse. As Harry says, all the important bits are still there.
I’ve recovered my natural reluctance to dwell on
things, thank goodness. You hear people say, ‘I think about death every day,’ as
if that’s something to be proud of, but I can’t help thinking, so what?
We’re none of us going to get any further on that subject until it’s our turn. I
try not to dwell on how my friend Philippa died, because that still makes me cry. It
wasn’t easy. It was no fun at all. But Karen Pocock got better; I recognised her name
when she joined my mosaic class, and now we get on like a house on fire.
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