Эндрю Миллер - Oxygen

How wonderful if she could believe she’d see him again ‘on the other side’; some celestial cocktail party where everyone was young and interesting and Nat King Cole was singing ‘When I Fall In Love’. But she didn’t believe it, didn’t believe in the other side at all. The last of her faith had ebbed away during the chemo. A night on her knees by the side of the bed vomiting into a bucket, and above her just miles of emptiness. No gentle Jesus. No saints or angels. Religion was a night-light for children – Stephen had been right about that. Eyewash. Osbourne was harmless. One of the old fashioned type. ‘Black cloth a little dusty, a little green with holy mildew.’ She could tease him, and he had always been nice to the boys. Rather fancied her once, when she was first a widow. Popping round for glasses of sherry, offering to do the lawn, carrying out the black bin-bags of Stephen’s things for the charity shop. Did he mean to try to catch her at the end? Run across the meadow with his box of tricks when he heard she was going? She would have to speak to him. No mumbo-jumbo, Dennis, dear, when I’m too weak to tell you to get lost. He could say what he liked when it was over. Whatever made it easier for the others.

But did nothing last? Was the ‘she’ who thought all this just a brain that would die when the last of the oxygen was used up? Surely there was something inside, some inward shadow, the part that loved Mozart or Samuel Pinedo. Didn’t that go on, somehow? Or was the afterlife just others remembering you, so that you died, truly died, when you were truly forgotten?

The children at school would remember her for a year or two. They had made a ‘Get Well’ card for her, with a picture of the school on the front, and each of them had written his or her name inside with great care, and some had put an X for a kiss. ‘DEAR MRS VALENTINE WE HOPE YOU GET WELL SOON.’ Row upon row of scrubbed faces gazing up at her at morning assembly. Mr Price thundering away at the upright. All good gifts. Morning has broken. The extraordinary thing was that Brando’s son had been one of them. She would have been a form mistress then but she thought she remembered him, a good-looking boy about Alec’s age. A doctor like his father now. Another doctor! In the end they were the only people you knew, though at least Brando was human. She could vouch for that. And what a relief when he took over from Playfair, that pompous little man who talked down to her because she was a woman. Thought himself so clever, but he knew nothing.

On the visits she made to Brando before feeling ill again, the check-ups, they used to talk more about the children, or about themselves, than about the cancer. His father had been an Italian POW in a camp somewhere in Somerset, married a local girl, then opened a little restaurant in Bristol that some nephew still owned. He said that in dreams sometimes he could smell his father’s home-made polenta pie, and she’d told him, laughing, that sometimes she dreamed of her mother’s chutneys, and of chutney-making day, when the kitchen was full of steam, a little sweet, a little savoury, that hung about the house for days.

Of course, she had seen that he was upset when she went to collect the results of her tests. The way he met her at the door and led her to the chair by his desk, then sort of perched on the corner, leaning towards her. She had said something like, it’s not good news, is it, and he said no, he was afraid not. The tumours in her chest had come back, and there were mets, secondaries in the brain. The brain, not hers. Not your brain, Alice. The brain. He asked her whether she wanted to see the images but she said she would take his word for it. After all, there was nothing very surprising. She had known perfectly well that something was wrong, something serious. Headaches that lasted two or three days. Squiggly lights at the edge of vision. And she had read the literature, she could practically recite it. Small-cell cancer was ‘aggressive’. It did not rest. She was lucky to have had the last two years.

The books all recommended that the patient have a list of questions to ask, a written list so that you didn’t get in a muddle, but she didn’t have one, and all she could think to ask was what everyone asks. How long? Such a silly question because doctors are not fortune-tellers and cancer doesn’t run to a timetable, but Brando had nodded and paused as though doing calculations in his head, some sort of algebra, and then said she should enjoy the summer as fully as she could. Get out in the sun, he said. I know you have a lovely garden. It took her a moment to work out what he was saying, to realize that he meant there wouldn’t be any autumn, yet alone a winter. She went deaf for a minute and had the curious sensation that it was the words and not the tumours that would kill her. When she could hear again he was explaining the treatment she could have. Surgery was not an option, but they could start her on another course of chemo in combination with radiation therapy, retard the spread of the disease a little, reduce the swellings. Think it over, he said. No need to make up your mind today. He said he was very sorry and she knew that he meant it. She asked about his son and he asked about her boys. He knew all about Larry and the show, and how there had been artistic differences. She told him that Alec was outside in the carpark waiting for her in the car, his old Renault, and did he know the type with the gear-shift on the dashboard, a great hook of a thing, and she couldn’t imagine why they had it there when in every other car in the world the shift was on the floor, which was the obvious place, and how typically French it was, always wanting to be a little different. She was still talking, babbling on, when the tears started. She was powerless to stop them because no one can be ready for such a moment and there was a violence to it that took her unawares. What else do you have but your life? Where else can you go? And then to find yourself in someone’s office with the sun squinting through the blinds and everything theatrically normal and twenty things to get done that day, and it’s all over. Finished. Ground out. And so she had wept, intemperately, cried so that she felt the seams of her face would break open, and Brando had reached for her and hugged her. No awkwardness in it. Just pressing her face gently against the cloth of his suit as though he were taking into himself some portion of her grief. Playfair would rather have eaten his stethoscope. He would not have been physically capable of hugging. Plenty of people weren’t and that was the pity of the world. Larry could, Alec couldn’t. Samuel, but not Stephen.

There was a box of tissues on the desk. She blew her nose and dabbed at her eyes, carefully, so as not to smudge her eyeliner. She was quite in control of herself by the time she reached the carpark. That’s that, she thought. She told Alec on the way home. Gave him the gist of it, very calmly, as though talking about someone they both vaguely knew, a neighbour. It was almost comical. He stalled the car three times at the traffic lights at the end of Commercial Road, and for a moment she was afraid he was going to have some sort of collapse, a ‘wobble’, like the one he had before, when the police found him wandering along the beach at Brighton in a perfect daze. But they got home somehow, teatime, six o’clock perhaps, and she went into the garden to find that the first of the lilac was out, and she had cried again, sitting on the bench by the summerhouse, fronds of honeysuckle round her head, crying for joy at so much beauty and wanting to float up over the potato fields like the heroine in one of those South American novels, Alec waving to her with a white handkerchief from an upstairs window. It hadn’t lasted, of course. A week later she was so low they started her on the Paroxetine.