Wronged Sons, The (30 page)

Now history was about to repeat itself and I was going to be forced to see the love of my life slipping away. The only way I could prevent his victory was to do what I knew best – and run. And when I was miles and miles from her failing body, I would remember with fondness her love - and not someone locked into a death sentence.

Our house had not been built of brick as I’d thought, but of feathers. A wind I couldn’t harness would destroy it whether I was present or not.

***

Northampton

February 18, 11.25am

“I’m sorry to tell you this Mrs. Nicholson, but the scans suggest you have an intracranial solid neoplasm, or brain tumour, on the left hand side of your temple,” explained Dr Lewis, as sympathetically as he could.

Four days after my last attack, I had yet to leave the hospital. When Dr Lewis came to my room with the results of MRI scans and blood tests, I wished I’d not insisted Emily left her bedside vigil and sent her home to rest, so that I had somebody’s hand to hold.

“We will need to operate as soon as possible to take a sample then test if it’s malignant or benign,” Dr Lewis continued. “I’d like to arrange it for first thing tomorrow morning if that would be convenient?”

“Is it going to kill me?” was all I could think to ask.

“Once we get the results of the biopsy we can decide which approach to take. The tumour is most likely the cause of your headaches – bloody vessels in your brain bursting under the pressure as it grows.”

“You haven’t answered my question,” I repeated. “Is it going to kill me?”

He paused. “We’ll know its severity once we do the biopsy. Then we’ll talk again.”

“Thank you,” I replied politely, and picked up Emily’s iPod, put the headphones into my ears, closed my eyes and blasted George Michael’s ‘Praying For Time’ as loud as I could.

***

Monte Falco

February 20, 9.50am

I walked away from her with only what I’d brought with me – the clothes on my back and an uncertain future.

I knew starting afresh would be a much harder task as my years were more advanced than when I’d last decamped. Nevertheless, my mind was made up.

I waited until Luciana was alone at a doctor’s appointment and the children were at school before I packed my old rucksack with the bare essentials and began the steep walk downhill to the village in the shadow of the villa.

I planned to make my way up to Switzerland and then though Austria before exploring the eastern block. According to the bus stop timetable it would be another hour before my ride arrived. So I sat by the side of the road and began the process of putting the life I had cherished so much, out of my mind.

Only I couldn’t.

The boxes were open and waiting, but the beautiful spirits I loved so dearly were too large a presence to be contained. I had left my other children when they were too young to be affected by my absence. I’d only left you when you were finally well enough to cope with it.

But Luciana, Sofia and Luca were different - and now so was I. They had made me a better man. I thought about how through your sadness, I’d learned to tend to fragility and incite a person into believing that against all hope, there was always hope to be found if you just kept searching.

I couldn’t find that hope in Luciana, so she would need me more than you ever did. I’d spent half my life running away from my responsibilities and I was an idiot for thinking I could do it again. And if I stayed, I’d need to muster up all my strength to help the three of them and the four of us.

I couldn’t allow myself to shed a tear or feel an ounce of self-pity until she surrendered to the inevitable. It would be our cancer, not just hers - we would both take ownership of it.

By the time my bus appeared, I was already half the way home. I didn’t hear the car pull up next to me until its rear door opened. Inside sat Luciana. She looked at my sweating brow and my rucksack and she knew instantly what I had planned. She saw the coward in me. But her eyes softened when she understood I was walking towards our life and not from it.

She stepped out of the car, closed the door, entwined her arm through mine, and we climbed the steep hill together.

***

Northampton

March 1, 9pm

All of my children were sat around my hospital bed when I came round from my operation. Even though they were normally scattered far and wide across the country and beyond, they’d always remained a close-knit bunch, phoning and texting each other to keep up to speed. I wondered if they’d have been like that had we not been forced to close ranks after you deserted them.

Emily and Daniel’s wedding four months earlier had been the last time we’d all been together in the same room. Giving my daughter away was one of the proudest moments of my life, and I pitied you for throwing away your chance to be in my place.

Emily broke my news to the boys earlier that week despite my pleas not to worry them. Robbie drove up from his flat in London and James flew back from Los Angeles where he’d been recording with his band.

I kept my eyes closed at first just to listen to their chatter. Then the urge to vomit took hold as my anaesthetic wore off. The first words they heard their post-op mother mumbling were ‘I’m going to be sick,’ followed by the act itself, all over the bed sheets. Charming.

*

The morphine either knocked me out or left me barely conscious for two days. Even in sleep, my headaches were constant, but because of the operation, not the tumour, Dr Lewis explained. A few days later, he was back to remove my bandages and check on my healing.

“Can I take a look please?” I asked tentatively.

I held my breath as he passed me my mirror from the bedside table and I slowly examined from all angles what looked like a machete wound. The hair had been shaved on the left side of my still swollen head, leaving me with a three inch, crescent-shaped scar, pinned together with large black staples.

There was also a prominent concave dip in my head and I wondered for a moment if it was deep enough to catch rainwater. I tried really hard to take it on the chin, but my emotions were as raw as the cut. When I was alone I couldn’t help but pick up the mirror and stare at my grotesque self. All I needed was a bolt though my neck and Dr. Frankenstein could have claimed me as his own creation.

*

My brain, in its own infinite but damaged wisdom, decided to filter out what Dr Lewis was explaining. Once he’d confirmed the remains of my tumour were cancerous, there was very little else I wanted to hear.

I saw him almost every morning during my hospital stay. His skilled hands had tinkered around my brain like the engine of an old jalopy. But I still didn’t know a thing about the man who’d seen a part of me that no one else ever had. So instead of listening to his words - which I knew early on were going to make me unhappy - I focused on the man delivering them.

I placed him in his mid-fifties. He was blessed with a thick head of greying hair. His teeth had been capped but the wrinkles etched on his forehead from years of puzzling over cases like mine showed he wasn’t vain enough to use Botox. He reminded me of a slightly less swarthy Antonio Banderas.

He didn’t wear a wedding ring; so he was either eligible or just one of those men who wasn’t comfortable with jewellery. And when he spoke, I couldn’t decide if I was attracted to him because every girl loves a doctor or because he was the only man I’d ever met who could really see inside a woman’s head.

“Catherine?” Suddenly I was back in the room.

“Do you need a minute Catherine?” he asked.

“No, I’m fine, please carry on,” I replied in an exaggerated, cheerful way.

“On a positive note, we know it’s not a secondary tumour, so there’s no cancer elsewhere in your body. We managed to scrape much of it out, but because of its awkward positioning, we couldn’t remove it all. So the next course of action will be radiotherapy to try and prevent it from destroying any other parts of the brain.”

“Okay then, well, thank you very much,” I chirped.

I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to shake his hand like we’d just completed a business deal.

***

Monte Falco

March 18, 9pm

Breaking the news to Luca and Sofia that their mother wasn’t immortal was the hardest illusion I’d ever shattered. I took them to lunch at a restaurant near Lake Trasimeno, a place where I’d often brought them as children so we could pretend to fish.

Luca, at fourteen and Sofia at almost sixteen responded to the news with tears, disbelief and denial. They were angry with their father for failing to protect their mother, at her doctors for not repairing her, and at Luciana for instilling a time limit on their relationship.

But I made them promise to take their distress out on me and not her. Instead they gave her cuddles; picked her flowers from the gardens and filled her iPhone with music to listen to after her first operation.

The fog of her illness had never brought four people closer together than it had us.

***

Northampton

March 18, 9pm

Telling the children my tumour was cancerous was almost as hard as when I explained you weren’t coming home and were probably dead.

But like mothers do, I reassured them everything was going to be okay, even though I wasn’t sure it would be. Emily responded practically, by planning care rotas and making sure I never went for treatment alone.

Robbie drove home every Friday night to stay for weekends and help out where he could around the house and James promised to call every day no matter where in the world he was.

Shirley, Annie, and Tom’s new bride Amanda could have given the contestants on The Great British Bake Off a run for their money, filling my freezer drawers with a never-ending supply of hot pots, pastries and casseroles. Selena was already responsible for area-managing my boutiques so it made sense for her to take the reigns and oversee the rest of the business too.

It was only when the fuss died down and I was home alone that the seriousness of my situation hit me. I wrote a card for Olivia’s fourth birthday and wondered if I’d be around to see her next one, then I couldn’t stop myself from crying my eyes out.

I hadn’t sobbed that hard since we’d found Oscar’s lifeless body in his basket a decade earlier. I remembered how each one of us took it in turns to hold him, stroke him and brush his ginger and black wiry coat and tell him how much we’d miss him. Then I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to the bottom of the garden where Robbie had dug a hole as deep as his arms could stretch under the crab apple tree.

We gently placed his body into the ground and lay your running shoes by his side, before heaping soil and tears on his final resting place. I smiled when I wondered if that’s what the kids would do to me too.

At an age where I should have been thinking about taking my foot off the accelerator, I was desperately trying to stay in the car.

***

Monte Falco

April 17, 8.45pm

“Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped on a conveyor belt but if I try and get off it, I’ll die,” Luciana muttered.

I stroked her arm as she floated on a glorious cloud of morphine above her sterile hospital bed.

“I know darling,” I whispered, “but if it means the kids and I get to share more time with you, then it’s worth it.”

“Remind me of that after the chemotherapy begins,” she replied, before closing her eyes and setting sail for the skies again.

It’s difficult to reconcile the knowledge there’s something feeding on your body when you can’t see it or swipe it away. Only when the physicality of its damage becomes visual does it make it real. In Luciana’s case, it was having her breast removed when the gravity of her situation hit home. While it wouldn’t cure her, it might give us more time.

She had shied away from examining her altered appearance in the hospital room, preferring to do it in the cosiness of our home. She stood before our bedroom mirror, unbuttoned her loose-fitting blouse and carefully unravelled the zigzag of bandages that covered her torso like an Egyptian Mummy. A six-inch horizontal scar lay beneath, lip-red and raised. At a glance you’d be mistaken for thinking it had been clumsily hacked off with pinking shears.

“I once kept a roof over my mother and my heads with these,” she lamented. “Now I’m a monstrosity.”

I wrapped my arms around her waist but she tried to edge away. So I held on tighter. And looking her reflection in the eye, I tenderly traced her scar from right to left as she steadied her shaking hands on my arm.

“I hate it,” she continued.

“I don’t,” I replied. “Your loss is my gain. It’s a beautiful scar because it means I get to keep you longer.”

***

Northampton

April 18, 1.30pm

Information and a positive mental attitude were the most powerful weapons I could have in my armoury. At least that’s what the Internet told me.

I began my fight by taking the laptop to my bedroom, placing it on my knees and learning about the enemy within from the comfort of my own duvet. I searched Google for survival statistics, then message boards and forums, asking questions and weeping at stories written in memoriam about those who’d lost the fight.

No matter how many positive things I read, it was always the negative ones that stuck in my head. And sometimes I’d have rock bottom moments where I thought ‘sod it’ and wonder how much easier it’d be if I gave in and let nature take its course. But there was still so much of life I wanted to experience; so many places I hadn’t travelled to and business opportunities I wanted to explore. I wasn’t ready to give up.

I drank cup after cup of herbal tea and munched on snacks high in anti-oxidants while researching complimentary treatments and holistic remedies.