Page 13 of All the Things We Never Knew

‘It’s lovely to see you, Laurel.’ He smiled, and the smile made him look almost normal again – made me feel almost as if this was normal, just another of our snatched, precious meetings. Except it wasn’t. Things would never be normal again, and I didn’t know how many of these meetings we would have left.

‘You too. I’ve missed you. So…’ I began, taking a sip of my tea. ‘How did it go?’

‘They saw me quicker than I expected, so that’s good. But it was the gastro people again, and they went over pretty much the same stuff they did in Gloucester. But they’ve referred me for another thing – an ESU, or something.’

‘EUS,’ I said. ‘Endoscopic ultrasound.’

‘Where they stick a camera down my gullet? That’s the badger. And then we’ll know what we’re dealing with here.’

I nodded. ‘I guess depending what they find, they’ll take a biopsy and refer you straight to oncology.’

‘Correct.’ He picked up his cup and looked inside it, like a fortune teller reading tea leaves. But there were no tea leaves there, just a few spent coffee grounds and the scum left by frothed milk.

‘Did you speak to Anna?’ I asked.

‘Yup.’

‘And how’s she – is she okay?’

He shook his head. ‘About as okay as anyone would be if they found out their husband’s maybe terminally ill and definitely cheating on them. But she’s bearing up. She’s gone all positive. She’s decided that whatever it is, I’m going to get better.’

I’d seen that before, in the partners of patients with frightening diagnoses. It was better, in many ways, than the alternative.

‘She’s been googling like crazy,’ he said. ‘She keeps going on about something called a Whipple procedure’ – I nodded – ‘and chemoradiotherapy and all kinds of other stuff.’

‘She probably knows more than me already,’ I joked feebly. ‘It’s not my area. But there are lots of treatment options, Gray, if the diagnosis is – what we think it might be. It’s not all doom and gloom.’

He went on almost as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘So I went and did some googling myself. And Dr Google tells me that before you start chemotherapy, you’ve got to have a kidney function test.’

‘That’s standard, I believe,’ I said, feeling a cold trickle of dread creep down my spine.

He knows, and he knows I know.

‘And that could prove problematic in my case,’ he said.

I reached across the table and took his hand. ‘Yes. Because you’ve only got the one kidney.’

EIGHT

ORLA

8 March 2024

I have slept badly, a sleep full of troubling dreams, and now that I am awake – the sky still dark, the promise of spring elusive on this icy morning – I remember why, and I feel the need to record what I learned yesterday.

I was returning home from Imran’s shop, where I still go almost every day to pick up a copy of the Guardian and a pint of milk if I’m running low, as well as to catch up on whatever local gossip he is able to impart, when I saw Anna sitting alone on a bench in the square.

It’s strange how – although our houses have their own gardens and ample space indoors – that place, with its regularly spaced benches and iron railings around its perimeter, seems to offer a sense of privacy. I’ve spent many hours there myself, tending to the roses or simply sitting beneath the trees and thinking, when I feel the need for solitude.

Anna’s children would have been at school; her husband, I presumed, was out at work, and yet she had chosen this public space to come and sit alone, hunched against the late-afternoon chill, her coat buttoned and her woolly hat pulled down over her ears.

But I saw that she was crying, and so, after hesitating a moment, I decided I could not bear to leave her to her solitude.

I didn’t need to use my key to open the gate; it was standing ajar as she must have left it. I approached her slowly, clearing my throat.

Anna, I said, not sitting down just yet in case my presence was unwelcome. Are you all right?

She looked up at me, her skin bone-white and her eyes red, and she said, No. No, I’m not.