CHAPTER 43
Terry was standing just inside the door.

“It’s odd, Jill. He’s always been easier with women. Less threat, I suppose”

I kissed his cheek. More evidence, if I needed any, of my acceptance.

“Thought I’d leave them to themselves for a while, like”

He nodded. “How’s her dad? Oh shit, mate, I’m sorry”

My face had clearly given me away. “Aye, Terry. Not good. They’ve got something new they want to try, but, well…”

No tears. Not tonight, not in front of the girls. Later, most definitely, wrapped up in my wife, my lover, then I would cry, but not just then. Larinda appeared on cue, and squeezed my hand, raising an eyebrow, which allowed me to return to the earlier topic.

“They’re outside, pet, having a bit of quality time, like. They’re happy, so I thought I’d leave them to it”

“Been talking to Eric, lover”

So much for getting off that subject. “What’s he say?”

“Apart from ‘I am not a doctor’? Just, well, he’s seen some mixed results, but when it works it works well. Apparently he had a word with Ian, get round all the patient/doctor shit”

“What do you mean?”

“Your brother, he says he don’t want to wait while things go backwards and forwards and the doctor decides what he wants to tell, yeah? And he asks Eric if he could just tell him direct. So Eric covers his arse with a signed note”

She paused. “He likes your bro. I says to him, what about contracts and shit, and he just says nobody needs to know but us, and friends trump contracts”

With a lurch in my guts I realised what Ian was planning. A little extra notice if it went wrong, and then thank you, good night. He would leave us in a way and at a time of his own choosing. We were more alike than I had realised. I collared him during a drinks break, and he looked a little embarrassed.

“Least I could do, Jill”

“You do know why he wants the extra notice, don’t you?”

His face tightened. “Yes. Pretty obvious. I… I think I would be looking at the same thing, if it were me in his shoes. Shit, we know people who have done it, or tried to, for other reasons, and this…”

He looked away. “I don’t see it the way the medical staff do, you know that. I just do the lab work. And after a while the bloods and other stuff stops coming in, and we move on, to another poor bastard. But I talk to the nurses, yeah? After they’ve turned the analgesia up to eleven, and the feeding to zero, and they’ll never admit it, but they give just a little push every now and again, just to get it over with, and someone goes from heart failure or pneumonia, but it’s really starvation, but we call it something else, and in the end it’s a soft way to go. Better than…”

He looked at me again. “Let’s just say I couldn’t do their job”

It was a conversation that simply died, as my brother was already doing. In the end I just hugged him, of course. That night I lay with Larinda, neither of us speaking, no need for words. The tears were there, from both of us, and all I could feel was futility. I could do nothing, absolutely nothing, to help him apart from look after those he left behind.

Bethy was up first the next morning, and I came down to the kitchen to find her singing as she made toast and a pot of tea.

“Good night yestere’en?”

She blushed at my grin. “You were, like, looking?”

I hugged her. “Only just to see where you were, that you were safe, aye? He’s a very special boy is James”

She nodded. “Yeah, and not just cause he is well fit. It, like, took me a while, but he talks sense, yeah, just does it, like, ODD”

“You have to tune your thinking a bit, pet, most definitely”

“Yeah, but what it is, he says something, and it’s like he’s been, like, thinking for AGES about it, and it’s odd words but it’s well right what he says, yeah?”

I remembered his words about the pain of taking off what he called my Robskin. “Aye, pet. He’s a very deep lad. Takes a while to get to know him, work him out. Oh, and is he a nice kisser?”

“AUNTY JILL!”

For just those moments before the two girls were out the door, life was fine, how it should be. My own work kept me on track a little longer, and it was back to family life in the evening. Tea, the call to or from Ian, similar chats with Mam, and always that subject avoided. The nights, though, just the two of us and the demons in the darkness, the nights were hard.

The start of February saw the change. Ian arrived in Von’s car, looking like some freed inmate of Belsen or Auschwitz, Each time, despite what I already knew, it was a shock. Each time we went through the same routine, except for the pub.

“I can’t take the beer these days, pet. Cup of tea’ll do us. I feel the cold a bit, like”

And off to hospital the next morning. That time, however, it would be different, with the new therapy, and while Ian was still doing his best to maintain his mask of courage, I knew this was the crunch for all of us. Either it worked, or nothing did, including Ian. The day after he went in, we had Eric, Annie and Darren round for dinner. We had to avoid some questions, of course, but Eric did his best to explain the treatment to Bethy.

“What you have to understand, love, is that I just run the labs. I am not any sort of medic. I have a bit of an idea, but don’t take me as gospel, yeah?”

Bethy nodded, and Eric took a sip of wine.

“What it is with cancers is that they are like part of your body decides to grow, but the wrong way. That’s what tumours are, and they can sometimes make other bits of you go wrong. When it’s the sort of thing that’s got your dad it gets a bit more complicated. It’s not just that a bit of him grows wrong, but also that what goes wrong means he doesn’t get other things that his body needs. So we have to give that back, and that’s what they are trying to do. The doctors are using a sort of cell that can be made into what he needs, and they are trying to poison the bad ones”

“Will it work, Mr Johnson?”

I watched him weigh up his answer. In the end he sighed.

“Real answer? We just don’t know. Sorry, love. I can’t give you good news just now. We just have to wait and hope”

Wait we did, over two weeks as he cried in his bed or sat listlessly in his armchair with the other dying men. Each visit left the girls shredded, each night left me staring into the darkness wondering which way the coin would land.

Three days after Valentine’s, Ian’s card had still been next to his bed, Von making no secret of sending it. Doctor Chao called us to his office, and another of the amazing medical team brought in a tray of tea. The doctor went straight to the point.

“I know Mr Johnson is giving your brother early notice of the results, as he came and spoke to me about it, so no secrecy here, yes?”

He held up a hand. “Perhaps the girls might want to take some tea to their daddy?”

Once they had gone, he looked down at the bulky folder on his desk.

“I know why Ian asked for that information, ladies. It is not uncommon. I will not enter into any discussions about death with dignity, euthanasia or any such thing, and, well, in this case I am hopeful we need not consider such a course. It seems, for once, as if the little drops of goodness we are putting into him are starting to do what they should. He is, well, stabilising is not exactly the right word in this sort of thing, but it will have to do. He’s not going downhill just now. He isn’t coming back up, yet, but for now we have, it seems, arrested the plummet. We have space for breathing, for attacking the cancer rather than just his body as a whole”

There was a hoarse sound from Von, and a whimper from Larinda, but I was making my own noises, and they were just as undignified. The doctor passed me a box of tissues.

“Not wonderful news, Jill, not recovery, not yet. But it is the best news he has had in a long time. Now, well, we just try and steer him uphill again. I believe he has a wedding to attend in a few weeks? He will be there. Trust me on this one”

I did. What other choice did I have?