Katy Carter Wants a Hero (14 page)

Eat your heart out, J. K. Rowling!

Millandra buried her face in her pillow and wept bitterly. It had been three long weeks since Jake had ridden away and not a word since. Every morning she would walk in the gardens, her velvet cloak drawn tightly about her slender body, and climb to the brow of the hill. There she would wait in the billowing mist for his ebony steed to come galloping into view.

Surely he loved her still?

But why didn’t he come?

Treading water at the deep end, I realise that I haven’t a clue why Jake is avoiding Millandra, and I’m probably the last person on the planet to be able to offer an insight. While Millandra weeps into her lacy pillow, Jake’s probably out on the piss somewhere, chatting up tavern wenches and test-driving the latest turbo-charged horse. Who knows how the male mind works?

Not me. That’s for sure.

‘Out you get.’ Ollie holds a towel while I heave myself in beached-whale fashion out of the pool. ‘That was better today. Do you feel good?’

‘Fantastic,’ I mutter, wrapping myself in the towel. I’m wet, exhausted and teaching Year 11 in approximately thirty minutes. Oh yes. My cup runneth over.

‘Great!’ he beams. ‘Same again tomorrow?’

‘Can’t wait,’ I mutter darkly, collecting my bag from the seating area and swiftly checking my mobile just on the off chance James might have called while I was in the pool. The screen remains stubbornly blank. No surprise really. He’s probably shagging Alice somewhere.

‘Stop sighing,’ orders Ollie from the locker area. ‘And you’d better not be checking that bloody phone.’

‘Of course not.’ I hastily tuck the mobile down into my bag.

‘Better get a move on,’ he says. ‘Coming for a coffee?’

‘I want to grab a shower first,’ I say. I might as well make the most of having a wash that doesn’t necessitate moving a beady-eyed Pinchy. Is it my imagination or does he look a bit too closely when I take my kit off?

‘A Pinchy-free shower,’ Ollie nods. ‘Good idea. Actually, we ought to think about taking him down to the coast fairly soon. I can’t afford to keep him in sea salt and fish food for much longer.’

‘We ought to buy a pump really. The water needs bubbles. That’s what they have at the lobster hatchery in Padstow.’

‘Bubbles?’ Ollie fishes his keys out of his Quiksilver rucksack. ‘It’s a lobster, not Joan Collins in her
Dynasty
years. The sooner we get it into the sea the better.’

‘I’ll visit Maddy soon,’ I promise. ‘I’ll take Pinchy with me. And then I’ll get sorted, Ollie, find somewhere to live. Jewell says I’m welcome to stay at hers.’

Ollie ducks his head round the lockers. ‘Don’t be daft. It’d take ages to travel from Hampstead to Ealing every day. Stay at mine as long as you like. There’s no hurry, Katy.’

But he’s wrong; there is a hurry because Maddy has a point. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, which is just as well really, because I don’t think my main performance would be up to much. Besides, I don’t think I can take much more of Nina’s thinly veiled irritation. Two’s company and all that.

As I run the shower, I think about how weird things are at the moment. I’m in a no-man’s-land. No home of my own, no partner, no plans for the future. I feel like a tiny boat adrift on the sea when the tide is high and the night is dark. Even Jake and Millandra have deserted me. They don’t seem to like the laptop.

Whoever thought laptops were a good idea never had to lug one from one end of Sir Bob’s to the other. Wayne Lobb’s exercise book was much more practical. It didn’t weigh about ten stone, nor did it bash against my legs when I ran for the bus. But hey! This is the twenty-first century, and if I’m going to be a bestselling author it seems that I’ve got no choice but to get to grips with one. Like the rest of my colleagues I now shuffle around Sir Bob’s with my laptop slung over my back like some kind of hi-tech tortoise. And like the rest of them I’ll be suing the education authority in ten years’ time when my poor old back gives out.

‘Something has to change,’ I say to myself. ‘Something has to happen, something that will change my life.’

And then it does.

But not exactly in the way I expected.

When I said that something had to happen to change my life, what I actually meant was something good, like a major lottery win or going downstairs to find Brad Pitt naked in the kitchen, or some publisher paying me millions for
Heart of the Highwayman
. That was what I meant.

Something good for once.

What I hadn’t expected was that I would find a lump in my breast.

My hand skims over the slippery flesh, soap suds oozing between my fingers, and despite the warm water I feel horribly cold. I’m imagining it, I tell myself sternly, I’m being dramatic. Everyone’s breasts can be a bit bumpy, right? And that’s all I can feel: a little knobbly bump. If I take my hand off and then try to find it again, the chances are I won’t be able to.

So I move my hand away and count to five, then to ten just for good measure. Actually, let’s make that twenty. Slowly I move my fingers back, just to the underside of my right breast and, eyes screwed up tightly, give the soft flesh a prod. Sure enough I feel it again. A hard little lump, maybe no bigger than an elongated marble, but definitely there, lurking beneath my skin where it has absolutely no right to be.

‘Ugh!’ I cry, whipping back my fingers. The lump feels slithery, as though it is ducking and diving beneath the flesh. Still unable to believe it, I prod and poke a bit more, feeling sick when the mass moves of its own accord, until I can no longer pass this off as imagination.

I really do have a lump in my right breast.

With shaking hands I turn the shower off and stand dripping for at least five minutes. It doesn’t matter that my skin now resembles a plucked turkey or that I can hear the bell ringing for morning registration. Normally when that bell goes I give Pavlov’s dogs a run for their money.

But not today.

If this is just my imagination I will never, ever moan about anything again. I’ll never whinge about Ollie leaving his socks by the sofa, or bitch about Nina, or moan because my stomach isn’t flat. I’ll do all my marking, give money to charity, be nicer to my parents, go to church, not be mean about Richard…

Anything, basically.

It seems like a good bargain, a fair trade.

I prod again.

Apparently not.

The lump swims beneath my touch. It’s nebulous and elusive but very definitely there. I may have a fertile imagination, but it’s not this good. Highwaymen and corseted heroines are more my style, rather than medical dramas. I’m so not into those. Just ask Ollie. He can only watch
Casualty
when I’m out of the room.

So I’m not exaggerating or being hysterical. There really is something lurking
Alien
-style beneath my skin, a strange little lump nestling inside the flesh, quietly waiting to see how I react.

Well, guess what? I don’t know how to react, because this just doesn’t feel like it’s happening to me. Stuff like this happens to other people. Women with bald heads and pink ribbons. Brave people. Old people. Other people.

Somehow I get myself dressed and then realise that I haven’t bothered drying first. My tights glue themselves to my legs and my feet slither around in my shoes. My hair drips icily down my neck. Without quite knowing how I’ve got there, I find myself outside the leisure centre clutching my bag to my chest and standing still while crowds of hooded teenagers dart past like shoals of fish. I ought to be shouting at them to get a move on to lesson one, to take off their trainers and spit gum out; you know, all the really useful things that teachers have to do in between lessons, but something inside me has broken. I’m like one of those dolls that speak when you pull a string in its back, only my string has snapped.

The world has shifted.

It looks the same but it feels different.

I have to talk to someone. I
need
to talk to someone, someone who loves me, someone who cares.

If only Maddy was still in Lewisham to make me gallons of tea and stuff me full of biscuits. Mads wouldn’t panic. She’d go into vicar’s wife mode and sort this out for me. She’s bound to know somebody who’s been in the same position and who’s been OK, because Mads is an optimist. While I’m seeing visions of chemo and pink ribbons, she’ll be quoting practical statistics and buoying me up. I could go and find Ollie, but I don’t really want to discuss my boobs with him.

I want to talk to James.

It has to be James. James knows my body inside out. He’ll know if there was a lump there before. Even if we’ve split up we can still be friends, can’t we?

I scroll to his number and press the green button. The phone rings and rings and somewhere in the City the tinny tones of Bach are becoming ever more insistent.

‘Come on,’ I mutter. ‘Answer it!’

‘Welcome to the Orange Answerphone…’

Blast. I’ve left so many messages lately with this polite voicemail woman that I’m surprised we’re not on first-name terms. I’m probably on her Christmas list. Maybe James is at home? Sometimes he does like to work from home. Maybe he’s there now in the remains of the office that Sasha didn’t destroy. I can just picture him, hunched before the computer, tapping away furiously and tutting in annoyance at any interruptions (usually me) that distract him. Knowing James, he’ll have his headphones on too and won’t even answer.

I’ll give it a try anyway. I scroll to ‘home’ and feel a pang. I guess I’ll have to change that, now that I don’t officially have a home.

‘Hello!’

I’m taken aback by a breathy female voice. Then I feel a huge surge of relief. I’ve called Millwards by mistake! I recognise that breathless squeak. James’s PA Tilly, a Sloaney blonde with a brain like Aero, always gasps into the phone.

‘Sorry, Tilly,’ I say brightly. ‘I was looking for James. It’s Katy. I must have the office by mistake.’

‘Oh!’ squeaks the voice and then goes very quiet. In the background I hear the unmistakable and grumpy tones of James demanding to know who’s calling him at home.

At home? Not Tilly then. Alice sodding Saville.

‘Listen, Alice,’ I say briskly, jamming the phone under my chin and rummaging in my bag for my emergency cigarette supply. ‘Put James on, will you?’

‘He’s pretty busy,’ squeaks Alice.

‘Can you tell him it’s really important?’ I drop the lighter because my hands are shaking. I delve into my emergency cigarette pack only to find that it’s empty. Bloody Ollie! I’m going to
kill
him. Lobsters and cacti I can just about forgive, but nicking my cigarettes? That is punishable by death.

Down the phone line there’s the echoey sound of footsteps on the wooden floor.

‘For Christ’s sake, who is it?’

‘Nobody,’ Alice says quickly. ‘Wrong number, darling.’ And then she hangs up on me. Bloody cheek of it!

A tear runs down my cheek and plops on to the concrete floor. My feelings are swinging from wild dangerous rage to bleak despair. Much as the angry and hurt part of me wants to cut James’s nuts off with blunt scissors, the bigger part is reeling with disbelief at being replaced so quickly. This is what I get for washing his socks for four years, is it? This is the thanks I get for being a loyal girlfriend.

And, says a quiet voice, for being a total doormat.

Well, bollocks to him.

I stomp across the playground towards school and head straight for the girls’ toilets. It’s ten past nine and all is still. Inside the loos there’s the faintest smell of smoke, and I throw out two stroppy Year 9 girls trying to hide in the furthest cubicle. Once they’re safely gone, I climb up on to the toilet seat and, with an almighty stretch that’s worthy of a yoga guru, push hard against the ceiling tile. Bingo! Cigarettes, papers and lighters rain down around me in a tobacco-scented shower.

Don’t you just love teenagers? They are so predictable.

Scooping my loot into my bag, I scuttle past my classroom and hotfoot it to the boiler room, the last known gathering place of the secret smokers at Sir Bob’s. One emergency cigarette, one last weep about James and some serious worrying about the lump is the order of the morning.

Safely ensconced in the boiler room, I take a huge drag on the cigarette, but even the lovely nicotine rush fails to lift me. There’s just too much to deal with for one morning. Too many thoughts and far too many questions that I’ll need to find answers for. And there’s one question that is looming far larger than any other.

I flick ash on to the floor and square my shoulders. What on earth is this lump all about? Should I ignore it? Or do I do the sensible thing and get it checked out? That’s what all the women’s magazines would advise. Nine out of ten breast lumps are benign. I know all that stuff.

But what if mine’s that one out of ten? The way things are going for me lately, it would hardly be a surprise.

Is not knowing it’s cancer worse than finding out something awful? Would I rather know that James has installed a new, slimmer, more beautiful girlfriend in the flat than just bibble about in ignorance? Is it better to know I really do have a lump than to pretend that I never found it, wander into the staff room and as usual fritter away my free lesson drinking coffee and surfing the internet? Should I ring the doctor and do the sensible thing?

The trouble is, I’ve always been crap at being sensible.

Maybe now is the time to start.

The doctor’s surgery is overflowing with patients, all of whom are spluttering and snuffling, and the phone rings endlessly. We’re all crammed into a small room lined with very narrow chairs, and some patients even have to lean against the walls or wait over by the reception area. It’s like there’s an attempt to beat the world record for the highest number of sick people shoved into one small space; all we need is Roy Castle to appear and we’ll probably do it. Somebody is sniffing meatily. Someone else has a hacking cough and I can practically see the germs multiplying and squabbling over who they get to land on next. This little surgery in West Ealing could be a very successful weapon should Britain ever decide to use germ warfare. I’ve only been sitting here for half an hour and already my throat’s sore.