It wasn’t often that she visited me in London, even though we kept in touch every few weeks by phone. Her job in the north kept her busy and of course her boyfriend Dave – fiancé, I mentally corrected – lived there too and quite rightly occupied most of her free time. I’d suspected what was coming when she had invited herself down for the weekend, and so saying no hadn’t been as difficult as I’d imagined, when I’d had sufficient time to rehearse it.
‘Oh Rachel, please think again,’ she had implored and she’d sounded so crestfallen that I had actually felt myself wavering. ‘There’s no one else in the world I want as a bridesmaid except you, please say you’ll do it.’ And when I’d shaken my head, not quite trusting myself to speak in case she heard the chink of doubt in my resolve, she had inadvertently asked the one question that allowed me to abdicate from the role without her pursuing it further. ‘But why won’t you say yes?’
And it was then that I’d taken the coward’s way out; answering her question by lifting away from my face the heavy swathe of hair I wore in a side parting and revealing the silver forked-lightning scar that ran from my forehead to my cheek. She’d pursed her lips and sighed, and in that moment I knew she had conceded defeat.
‘Ah, so she’s pulling the old disfigured face card again, is she?’ I’d smiled in response. Everyone else I knew pussyfooted around the issue, but Sarah was the only one who had the courage never to dress up her words in anything less transparent than the truth.
‘Well, if that’s what it takes to keep me firmly seated in a back pew and not wearing some frothy pink creation up near the altar, then yes.’
She’d looked at me mulishly for a second, and I thought she was regrouping her argument for another try, but she then appeared to reconsider and backed down, only murmuring in her defeat, ‘I wouldn’t have made you wear pink, you know.’
I’d hugged her then, knowing I’d let her down in a big way and loving her because she had let me do it.
Before closing the case, I reached over to pick up the small brown bottle of pills on the bedside table, intending to add them to my toiletry bag. I frowned when I felt the weight of the container, holding the bottle up to try and count the contents by the weak light filtering through the window from the overcast December day. There were fewer there than I’d thought, barely enough to last for the next few days. That couldn’t be right, could it? I checked the date on the front of the prescription label. It was only ten days old. I knew the headaches had been getting worse but I hadn’t realised I’d gone through this many painkillers so quickly. A cold tremor meandered down my spine. This wasn’t good. And while I could lie to my dad when he asked how I was, and even (stupidly) had tried lying to the doctors when the headaches had first started, I knew that sooner or later I’d have to face up to the truth. This was the warning sign they had told us to be on the alert for all those years ago. This was the reason why every phone call from my dad in the three years since we lived apart would follow the habitual pattern of ‘How are you? No headaches, or anything?’ And I’d been happy to report for the first two and a half years that I’d been fine; but for the last six months I’d been lying and saying I was still fine. Eventually I’d made an appointment to see the specialist I hadn’t had to visit since my early days of recovery from the accident. He’d seemed concerned when I had told him about the headaches and their frequency, and I was concerned because I’d actually played down their severity quite considerably. The pills he’d prescribed were not the answer and he had urged me to make an appointment to go back to hospital for further tests. I’d taken the prescription but not his advice and had put off making the appointment I knew that I could no longer avoid.
And all of this I had kept from my dad. He had enough to worry about with his own health problems. He needed this time to try and get well, without concerning himself over me all over again. He’d done far too much of that already. However bleak the outcome of his consultation with his oncologists were, he always would end by saying, ‘But at least you are all right now, thank God.’ I didn’t have the courage to take that away from him.
I’d sometimes wonder exactly how many mirrors we must have broken, or how many gypsy curses had been hurled our way to account for my family’s unfortunate history. First Mum; then my accident; then Dad’s illness and now these headaches. It made me wonder if there was some family out there who had been blessed with twenty-odd years of good health and luck, because we seemed to have been given their share of dark misfortune as well as our own. And it didn’t matter that Dad said that no one was to blame for his illness, because I knew that he’d only begun smoking again after my accident. It had been his way of coping with the stress. And if he hadn’t been doing that, then he probably wouldn’t be ill now.