Love @ First Site Page 26

  "Goodnight." He tilts his chin downwards and plants a soft kiss on the top of my head. "By the way, I really enjoyed tonight. Nice to have you back on form."

  "I really enjoyed it too," I murmur.

  But did I? As his breathing becomes more labored and he drifts easily off to sleep, a pounding, post-binge headache kicks in and prevents me from doing the same. As well as the thumping pain between my eyes, my mind once again fills with thoughts of Olivia, the rest of my family, and my unemployed state.

  All major crises in my life, all steadfastly swept under the carpet this evening because I didn't want to "spoil" the atmosphere by introducing them into the conversation. Instead, Simon and I had talked about his job, his family, last night's TV, and the latest movies we both wanted to see. Anything but drag down the mood with any mention of my harsh realities.

  So I didn't mention any of it and he, in turn, hadn't asked me anything at all about the sister he knows is seriously ill. Not even to ask in passing how she is. Is that normal? Is that how a relationship should be, regardless of whether it's long term or still in its fledgling stages? I don't think so.

  Suddenly feeling irritated by his presence, I slowly extricate myself from his embrace and edge my way out of bed. Grabbing my dressing gown from the back of the door, I turn and look at his sleeping form in the half-light, my hand resting on the handle.

  He's successful, funny, damned sexy, and bright and personable enough to take anywhere, I muse. Surely he's every girl's dream man?

  I silently shake my head at my own question. Yes, he's all of those things, but there's something vital missing, a comfort factor I now feel is crucial in a relationship. With everything I've been going through of late, my obsession with the sexual spark seems to have abated, to be replaced by a desire for something a little more meaningful, more solid. With the occasional frantic sex session thrown in, too, of course.

  Jess the people-pleaser is a thing of the past. I don't ever again want to pretend I'm something I'm not, just to make life pleasant for others. If I'm sad, I want to show it; if I'm happy, I want to believe and feel it.

  Light and shade are real. Constant brightness isn't.

  Closing the bedroom door quietly behind me, I know this is my and Simon's epitaph.

  Thirty Three

  Jess, darling, please don't tell me you're wearing that for Christmas lunch?" My mother holds the arm of my baggy black sweatshirt between her thumb and forefinger and wrinkles her nose. As usual, she is immaculately dressed in a pale peach cashmere top and tailored cream trousers.

  I raise my eyes heavenward. "Sorry, Mum, have I missed something? Is the Queen on her way?"

  She sighs indulgently. "Don't be facetious. There is such a thing as self-respect, you know."

  "Yes, and I have oodles of it, thank you very much. What I don't need is to sit through lunch in some uncomfortable outfit just because it pleases you."

  Now this little exchange may not sound like that big a deal to you, but to me, it's a major turning point that, at the grand old age of thirty-four and after a lifetime of people pleasing, I have finally found the courage to stand up to my mother's fashion fascism.

  It's a start, but clearly there's still some way to go as I'm now inwardly cringing as I wait for her reaction to my rebellion.

  She stares at me impassively for a couple of seconds, then says "Suit yourself" before disappearing off into the kitchen, leaving me rooted to the spot in astonishment.

  Such bravado is undoubtedly my very own symptom of Olivia's illness, a newfound set of priorities that have given me a low tolerance threshold on other people's little foibles. Similarly, or so it seems, my mother has reached the conclusion that when one daughter is battling a life-threatening disease, the ragbag appearance of the other isn't worth getting too agitated about.

  Speaking of which, there's Olivia right in front of me as I saunter through to my parents' kitchen in pursuit of everyone else. She's peeling potatoes at the double drainer and chatting animatedly to Dad as he does that crisscross thing with the bottom of the sprouts.

  Michael is sitting at one end of the table reading yesterday's Daily Telegraph, and Matthew and Emily are at the other playing a particularly noisy game of Snap refereed by Mum.

  It's quite the Hallmark scene of the traditional, nuclear family celebrating Christmas Day, and I'd like to be able to tell you that there's a gloriously happy ending to it all. But the last bit is still in abeyance, as Olivia is still only halfway through her course of chemotherapy.

  The bad news is that she's lost all her beautiful hair, but you know what? In a funny way, it really suits her. With my pointy chin and protruding ears, I'd look like an uglier version of the Dalai Lama, but Olivia's ears are perfectly petite and her scalp is nicely uniform and smooth.

  Initially, she took to wearing a wig, or one of a vast selection of hats bought by Michael at her behest. But now she's got used to it and is bald and proud.

  Emily, matter of fact as ever, had simply taken her mother's hair loss in her stride, asking just one question--where's it gone? Once told it would eventually grow back, she had cut off all the hair from her favorite Barbie, assuming that would grow back, too. Michael had already made a hasty visit to Toys "R" Us, and a replica was hidden at the back of the wardrobe, to be swapped with the follicularly challenged Barbie the moment Olivia's hair returns to its former glory.

  Matthew, by contrast, was very distressed when his mother's hair started to fall out in clumps. At first, he reacted badly and would shy away every time she tried to cuddle him, a particularly upsetting time for Olivia. Then, just as swiftly, he wouldn't let her out of his sight, hugging her as if his life depended on it and having little sobbing fits.

  At the absolute low point, Michael had to visit his son's headmaster after a fight had broken out in the playground. Another boy had called Olivia "an alien" and, defending his mother's honor, Matthew had punched him.

  The headmaster, an amiable man who placed absolutely no blame on Matthew's young shoulders, simply wanted Michael's permission to tell the other pupils during assembly that Olivia had cancer and it was not something to be joked about. Michael agreed, and Matthew was kept away from school for the morning so the deed could be done.

  Since then, things had settled back down for him at school, and he'd stopped treating Olivia like a china doll. She even told me that one day last week, when he'd been unbelievably cheeky to her, she and Michael had punched the air with joy behind his back, thankful to see normal behavior restored.

  So the loss of hair is pretty much the only bad news. The good news is that the doctors say she has responded extraordinarily well to the treatment and, so far, there's still no sign of any secondary site. She should finish the chemo at the beginning of March, then will move on to a short course of far less debilitating radiotherapy.

  And after that? Well, she'll be in remission and it will simply be case of watch and wait, returning every three months for checkups.

  I'm watching her now as she places the last of the peeled potatoes into a vast cauldron of water by her side. I'm always watching her.

  "Right!" She looks straight at me. "I'm going to leave you lot to it for a while and take a little head-clearing walk across the field. Fancy coming with me, Jess?"

  "Sure." I smile. "I'll just get my coat."

  It's bitterly cold outside, with that eery stillness unique to Christmas Day, when everyone is hidden away inside and you feel the world is your own. Wincing in the icy air, we trudge across the field towards the village, though quite what we expect to find there is anyone's guess. It's just habit that takes us in that direction.

  "So how's the new job going?" asks Olivia, kicking a stone with the toe of her Wellington boot. "Enjoying it?"

  "Loving it!" I enthuse, without one smidgen of exaggeration.

  After Kevin's friend had called to say he might have shift work, I had gone to see him for a quick coffee at Future, the sci-fi satellite channel where he worked as pr
ogram editor. Doug--that's his name, by the way--had told me I came highly recommended by Kevin and he'd offered me shifts almost immediately on the channel's new series Psychic.

  "Sadly, I'm not psychic and have no idea whether you're any good or not," he'd quipped, "so let's give it a month, and if you prove you're up to it I'll employ you full time as a producer."

  In the event, it had taken just two weeks of me working my butt off for him to call me in and make the job official. A serious, critically acclaimed channel with a couple of prestigious TV awards under its belt, it was the breakthrough I had always needed to get into something more serious than Good Moaning, as I now refer to it.

  Anxious not to cause them any extra worry, I avoided telling Olivia or the parentals about my walkout until after I had secured the shift work at Future. That way, I was able to make it look like a deliberate career move rather than the hot-headed, irrational risk it truly was.

  Like all good friends or relatives, they had responded to Good Morning's demise in my life the same way they would if a relationship broke down, muttering reassuringly: "It never suited you."

  Olivia, her woolly hat pulled so far down that it nearly reaches the bridge of her nose, clambers over the stile that leads onto the main road through the village. I follow and we stand still for a few seconds to catch our breath.

  "So do you think you'll stay a long time at Future?" she says eventually.

  I shrug. "I hope so. But television isn't like other professions; it's far more fickle and transient. Most of the time, you get a contract that lasts only as long as the program you're working on, so I'm very lucky to have been given a full-time job." I start walking in the direction of the shop and she follows me. "I just have to hope I like the next series they assign me to as much as I'm enjoying this one."

  Apart from the wisps of smoke snaking out of several chimneys, the village could have been abandoned years ago. Not an animal stirs, not a curtain twitches. The shop's shutters are down and a note on the door reads "Open again on December 27. Merry Christmas."

  Olivia stands in front of it and smiles ruefully. "I know I can tell you this without getting told off, but you know what? There was a time, at the beginning of all this, when I wondered if I would actually make it to Christmas."

  "Really?" Although I too had wondered many times whether Olivia would survive, it had never crossed my mind she might have died this soon. "Did you seriously think you could be that far gone?"

  She purses her lips. "Not seriously, no. And of course I was surrounded by doctors telling me that I'd caught it early and hopefully everything would be fine." She lets out a long sigh, her breath turning white in the cold air. "It's really hard to describe, but when you're told you've got cancer everyone looks at the physical signs . . . you know, the mastectomy, the effects of the chemo . . . but for me, the hardest thing of all was, still is to a certain extent, the psychological side. It feels like there's a time bomb inside you, ticking away, possibly getting bigger, possibly spreading undetected to somewhere else . . ."

  She jerks her head towards the other end of the village and starts walking. "You want to believe the doctors are on top of it, but there's that nagging doubt in the back of your mind that they've missed something." Pausing, she turns to look at me and raises her eyebrows questioningly.

  "Surely it's entirely natural to feel like that?" I say, knowing that if I was in her position, I'd feel it tenfold. "But you have to look around at all the women who've survived breast cancer and tell yourself that you're going to be like them."

  "And what about the ones that die?" she says quietly. "What if I'm going to be like them?"

  I make a loud tutting noise. "Now I am going to tell you off for being so negative. You've headed it off at the pass with the operation, and the chemo is going well. There is absolutely no suggestion from any quarter that you're not going to beat this."

  "You're right." She closes her eyes for a few seconds and takes a deep breath. "Come on, Olivia, snap out of it and put on your happy face. It's Christmas." She opens her eyes and puts on a deliberately fake grin.

  I roll my eyes heavenward. "Oh, very convincing. Come on, let's head back, it's bloody freezing."

  As we approach the stile, she stops in her tracks and raises a forefinger in the air to catch my attention. "I know what will cheer me up!"

  "What?" I pause, one leg hooked over the stile.

  "An update on your love life. That's always good for a laugh."

  "Gee, thanks," I say flatly. "Actually, mere mention of it is likely to send us both running for the Prozac."

  "That bad, huh?" She follows me over the stile and we start to walk back to the house.

  "If bad means nonexistent, then yes. Mind you, I've been so busy with my new job that it's probably a good thing not to be distracted by matters of the heart."

  Olivia looks doubtful but doesn't contradict me. "Have you heard any more from Simon?"

  I shake my head. "Nah. I sent him the e-mail I told you about . . . you know, saying that I didn't think things were going to work between us . . . and he replied with something huffy along the lines of 'Oh well, your decision,' and I haven't heard from him since."

  "Were you hoping to?"

  I think about the question for a moment. "No, not really. Even though I found him very attractive, I knew by the end of our last date that it wasn't going anywhere. The old me would have carried on seeing him, just enjoying the sex . . ."

  Olivia laughs. "There's a lot to be said for that, you know . . ."

  I wrinkle my nose. "There's less than you'd think. For me, anyway. I've changed quite a lot in recent months."

  "Anything to do with my Big C?"

  "Very much so." I nod. "It's taught me that life's too short to fart about being halfhearted about your relationship and your job."

  "So, sex aside, what was so bad about him?" asks Olivia, stopping briefly to readjust her trouser leg.

  "There wasn't anything bad as such, there just wasn't much to him beyond having a laugh. There wasn't any depth."

  Olivia frowns at me. "Aren't you expecting a little too much so early on? You'd only just started seeing each other."

  I laugh. "Yes, that did sound a bit wanky, didn't it? What I mean is that our conversation didn't flow easily, not about serious stuff anyway, and I don't think that's something that develops with time. It's either there at the outset or it isn't."

  Olivia shrugs. "Well, you know best what you feel. So are you back on the dating circuit again?" She reaches our parents' gate and pushes it open.

  "Nope. I deleted my ad after that, and haven't had the urge to browse." I follow her down the driveway and we both linger by the door, removing our boots. "Funnily enough, there is one bloke who'd seen my ad back in the beginning and finally got round to e-mailing me last month. We've struck up quite a friendly dialogue, strictly through the computer though."

  Olivia lifts her left leg for me to help tug off her Wellington, and I duly oblige.

  "Do you know what he looks like?"

  I nod. "Yes, he sent a photo over a couple of weeks ago. He's quite pleasant-looking, nothing exceptional. But he seems really nice and down to earth. We chat about all sorts of things and seem to have a lot in common. He's called Seb," I add as an afterthought. "It's funny, but although I haven't met him, I've told him so much about my life, about you, about Matthew and Emily and so on . . . I suppose the anonymity almost makes it easier."

  She lifts her other leg. "So are you going to meet up?"

  I shrug. "He hasn't suggested it and neither have I. To be honest, I'm happy to leave things as they are, particularly as I'm so busy with my job."

  I go to push open the front door, but Olivia places a hand on my forearm to stall me. "I know you've got heaps going on in your life, what with your new job and everything that's been going on with me," she says quietly. "But don't lose sight of the bigger picture."

  "What do you mean?" I frown.

  "Your job doesn't keep yo
u warm at night." It's one of her favorite phrases.

  "Yeah, yeah." I sigh, raising my eyes heavenward. "And the graveyards are full of people who thought they were indispensable to their companies."

  "And no one ever lay on their deathbed and said 'I wish I'd worked harder.'" She laughs. "You may well scoff at the cliches, madam, but they're all true."

  "And your point is?" It's absolutely freezing now and I'm anxious to get inside.

  "That you're thirty-four and have only a limited amount of time if you want to meet the right man and have children, which I know you do. Keep searching." She lets out a long sigh. "I like my job, but it meant fuck all when I found out I was ill. It was having Michael and the kids that meant everything."

  I slap a gloved hand against my open mouth. "Oooh, I'm telling Mum you said 'fuck,'" I tease, stepping into the house.

  "Don't care," she replies in a singsong voice, following me into the hallway. "Fuckety, fuckety, fuck fuck!"

  Thirty Four

  It's midnight and all's hell!" bellows Richard, throwing his arms around me as the chimes of Big Ben resound around Tab's packed living room. "Happy New Queer, sweetie!"

  "Ditto." I smile, then think to myself, Let's hope the next 365 days are more cheerful than the last lot. I step to one side to embrace Lars just as the familiar strains of "Auld Lang Syne" boom out of the CD player. "Oh no," I groan, instinctively crossing my arms in readiness. Richard grabs one of my hands, and a man I don't know but recognize as one of Will's rugby friends grabs the other. They both start pumping my arms in time to the music. Automatically mouthing the words, I'm smiling broadly as an instinctive reaction to all the beaming expressions in the circle around me. There are plenty of faces I don't know, but it feels good to be celebrating with all the old ones, anyway.

  It's Tab and Will's party, so naturally they're here, and you already know about Richard and Lars. Then there's Madeleine over there, flirting outrageously with one of the rugby players, and Ben's here, too, having persuaded Anne and Ralph to keep an eye on things at Sunshine House for the night