The Girl Below(41)

When Leon tried to kiss me, I rolled away. “Wait until we get to side two. It’s more romantic.”

“Yeah, side two blows my mind,” he said.

But when side two came on and Leon tried again, I found I preferred listening to the music without his tongue in my mouth. He started tugging at the hem of my shirt and I was petrified he would expect another hand job that I didn’t know how to provide. “I’m starving,” I said, pulling the needle off the record halfway through a song. “Would you like a ham sandwich?”

Having a boyfriend felt more like homework, a thing to get through and endure rather than the state of nirvana I had imagined. Most of the time Leon was there, I daydreamed about being by myself. I wondered if other girls felt the same way, or if I had just picked a dud.

I wanted to ask my mother if it was normal to be asked out only by boys you didn’t like, but before I did that, I’d have to admit to her that I had gone out with one. It was a conversation that felt long overdue, and I made up my mind to tell her on my next visit to hospital. She had been in for ages this time, but had reassured me this was a good thing, that she was finally getting the right sort of treatment. On that next visit, I was peering at Mum through the door to the oncology ward, thinking of the best way to tell her, when I was blindsided by the odor of rotting fish. Mum was sitting up in bed, waiting for me, and when she saw the look on my face she reached for a can of room freshener that was on the cabinet next to her. “I’m sorry about the smell,” she said, spraying her cubicle so much that particles of the stuff settled briefly, like a sleet shower, on our heads. “It ought to be gone in a day or two.”

I thought the smell was her leftover dinner, that she’d had something unappetizing to eat, but a few minutes later a nurse walked in with a tray and removed a plastic dome from over a plate of steaming roast meat and vegetables. While Mum was eating it, the fish smell came back, and put me off telling her about Leon. I felt disgusted by her, then ashamed of those feelings, then angry and frustrated at her for not being a normal, healthy mum. Round and round the feelings went, driving me from her bedside.

On subsequent visits, I tried to be more sensitive, but I was hopeless at gauging how ill she really was. I was so used to her puffy, sallow complexion, her bloated thinness, that I couldn’t tell if she looked better or worse than the day before—if she was deteriorating or on the mend. What had she even looked like before she got sick? Would she ever not have cancer? Once or twice my mind roamed forward to another possibility, to a future without Mum in it, but the concept was so alien that I couldn’t even hold the thought. So long as my mother was in front of me and breathing—however labored or wheezy that breathing was—she had vitality enough to anchor my world.

I turned seventeen then eighteen, stumbled through A levels, finished school. Mum got better then worse then better again. A pile of university prospectuses, still in their envelopes, crowded the side table in the living room. I had decided to take a gap year, but as the summer ended, nothing came along to fill it. I thought about getting a part-time job but didn’t know where to start looking.

Autumn arrived, and the pavement outside the cinema filled up with dry, brown leaves. I still spent an unhealthy amount of time there, soaking up the atmosphere, living for Thursday when the new releases came out. One Friday night, Mum and I went to the Shepherd’s Bush Odeon to see Sneakers, starring River Phoenix, my choice. By then, my crush on him had waned, but like a lapsed member of some brainwashing cult, I still went to see all his movies. Halfway through the film, Mum said she had to leave and would meet me afterward in the lobby. I thought it was because she didn’t like the movie, and wished, after she had slipped out, that I’d let her choose something better.

But I was wrong. The film wasn’t it. She didn’t feel well; she had chills. She’d had that symptom before, but I should have known something more was up from the way she behaved, later that night, as if she was packing to leave the country. She made lists of bills that needed paying—the electricity was on its final red warning—and signed a couple of blank checks. She inventoried the fridge, threw out everything that had gone off, or was about to, and started to tidy the kitchen cupboard. Midway, she gave up, leaving packets of rice and noodles in disarray on the table. Lazy and distracted by a breakout of pimples, of all things, I remember that I watched all this but didn’t help. We went to bed early. Mum said she was tired.

She must have called the ambulance sometime in the night, but because she had called it herself, I was lulled into thinking it wasn’t an emergency, just an easier way to check in routinely to the hospital. I climbed into the vehicle next to her, half asleep, while Mum surrendered to the gurney as if she was sinking into her seat on the last flight out of town. The ambulance pulled out onto the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout. There was no traffic, but the siren switched on, loud and urgent, and that’s when I was gripped, finally, by a funguslike dread.