We don’t go immediately to Ruby’s nursery. We stop instead to drink wine at a pub on South End Green. I order a cheese-board and we lay into it with a single-mindedness that is probably unsettling to onlookers.
I can’t stop smiling, imagining the little smear of myself stored on a histology slide somewhere, free of invading cells, entered into a database and now forgotten. Even in the beautiful cellular imaging we have access to today, B-cell lymphoma cells look evil.
‘What are you going to do?’ Leo asks, smiling at me. He’s so happy. I’m so happy.
I ask what he means.
‘You said you had all these plans, if you beat the bastard cancer. All these things you wanted to do.’
I think about it for a while. Really, I just want to focus on loving him and Ruby. I tell him that.
He kisses me, and then kisses me again. I notice a much older woman at a corner table, smiling at us. I smile back. He’s my husband, I want to tell her. Older women are always smiling at Leo. I think it’s those outlandishly long eyelashes of his. Perhaps the way his mouth turns up naturally at the corners, as if he’s trying not to laugh at something.
‘I like your plan,’ he says. ‘But what about your crabs? Didn’t you want to nail them down?’
I smile. ‘Sure! I’ll just go up to Northumberland and find the colony, now I’m not tied to the hospital. Should be easy.’
‘Oh, behave,’ he says. He waves at the barman, gesturing for another two glasses of wine.
Nearly twenty years ago, when I was an undergraduate, I found a dead crab on a beach in Northumberland. I photographed it, sensing how unusual it was, but the beach walk took an unexpected turn and I finished the day in hospital. Several years passed before I found and developed the film.
When I did eventually hold the photo in my hands, I was studying for a marine biology master’s at Plymouth University. I took it straight to one of my tutors, a decapod expert.
She looked at it for a long time before taking off her glasses and saying, ‘Good Lord.’
There was a grapsid crab species, native to Japan, she told me, that had probably invaded Europe via the ballast water of a Japanese container ship. The first was found in La Rochelle in 1993. In the years that followed, it had spread along the French and Spanish coasts, eventually travelling north to invade Scandinavian waters.
‘But it hasn’t reached Britain yet,’ she told me. ‘Unless you found the first one five years ago.’
That crab was calledHemigrapsus takanoi. ‘But this one doesn’t really fit the spec.’ She frowned. ‘It’s got some very unusual features.’ She showed me howHemigrapsus takanoihad patches of bristles – setae – on their pincers, and spots of colour across the carapace. They also had three distinct spines.
‘But yours has four. Look! Four spines! The bristles cover the whole chelae, and the spots are red, which I’ve never seen before. This could be quite a significant finding.’
I was copied in on many emails between my tutor and her decapod colleagues around the world. Much of what they said was beyond my understanding, but there was one thing on which they all seemed to agree: it seemed as if I had unwittingly come across a new form, a different phenotype ofHemigrapsus takanoi. A phenotype so distinct, it was well on its way to becoming – or in fact could be – a new species.
Quite something, for a master’s student.
I returned to the Northumbrian coast soon after, and when I didn’t find anything I returned again, and again. Over the years I must have gone forty, maybe even fifty times, combing the sands of Alnmouth, Boulmer and beyond. My tutor had suggested that, if this really was a new species, the only way it could have evolved was in total isolation, away from the otherHemigrapsus takanoiin the North Sea. So I scoured every remote cove, every wave-beaten spur, every inaccessible rocky shore between High Hauxley and Berwick – but I never found another one.
I still go. When my mood is low, it’s what I do; Leo’s always encouraged it. I check into a tiny B&B in Alnmouth and I walk and search and walk and search. I’m conducting my own study at Plymouth, too – I won’t give up. I will find ‘my crab’, as Leo calls it. One day.
‘You’re right.’ I spear the final piece of Tunworth and offer it to Leo, who eats it straight from the knife. ‘It’s been ages since I went up there. Let’s work out when I can go again.’
I eat the last cracker, even though I’m full. ‘In fact, maybe we could all go together. Ruby wouldn’t survive my crazy walks, but you two could do beachy things.’
Leo swallows the cheese, kissing his fingers. ‘I’d love that. Let’s do it. In fact, sod it, let’s do it next week! I have to take some holiday before I lose my entitlement.’
‘I ... Well, maybe. Let me check with work. But if not next week, soon.’
He doesn’t notice my moment of panic. He’s far too happy.
Full of cheese, we collect our girl and take her up to our favourite summer spot on the Heath, where London tumbles away towards a dusty horizon and the long grass offers opportunities for endless three-year-old’s adventures. I tell Ruby I no longer need to go to hospital for special medicine and she tells me she is a beetle called Mr Cloris.
Leo takes several photos of us, although he’s been doing this since I was first diagnosed. On the Lymphoma Facebook group everyone complains about how their families won’t stop taking pictures of them, as if we won’t guess the subtext. But how can we object? If we die it’s them who’ll be left with only images to hold.
When Ruby goes to bed later on we have more wine, sitting out in the garden, and Leo tells me how relieved he is. I feel alive and precious and rather beautiful, which means I must be drunk. Leo strums quietly on his banjo, before sagging slowly into exhaustion. By five to ten he is lying face down in the grass, asleep. This happens a lot. He was asleep before 10.15 on our wedding night.
I message my friends and colleagues, Leo’s brother and parents, and my one-time housemate and oldest friend, Jill. I lie back and study the sky, tracking the orange bloat of light pollution until it fades into inky space, marked by a single star. Messages of relief ping into my phone. More stars appear, further and further way; distant smudges.
