She brushes her fingers lightly over the back of her daughter’s hand, careful not to disturb the cannula piercing her skin. Every afternoon when she arrives the nurses remind her that Zoe needs rest, as though Audrey might have forgotten it during the previous twenty-four hours. If rest could cure her, Audrey would happily let her sleep for a year, for ten years, for however long it might take, like a princess in a fairy tale.
She sits beside Zoe’s bed, wishing she could lift up the stiff hospital sheets and climb in beside her, wrap her arms around her and hold her close until the warmth of their bodies has dissolved the space between them. She wants to feel Zoe’s skin against her cheek, feel her breath hot against her neck, sing her favourite songs – ‘Edelweiss’, ‘Castle on a Cloud’, ‘Dream a Little Dream of Me’ – just as she has done for the past ten years.
Audrey’s throat narrows and her hand tightens around Zoe’s fingers.
Ten years she has had to love her little girl; to protect her, comfort her, laugh with her, take pride in her. Ten years to wipe away her tears, sing her to sleep, kiss her scraped knees, bathe her fevered brow. Ten years to teach her to walk, talk, run, jump, paint, draw, sing, skip, read, write. But now a rogue collection of blood cells over which Audrey has no control is stealing her away.
Ten years: a lifetime and yet the blink of an eye.
Zoe’s eyelids flutter and the muscles pull taut across Audrey’s chest, a feeling she once thought might have been hope but which she now understands is simply love.
She remembers how, when Zoe was younger, she had always wanted to climb trees that were too tall for her. I can do it, Mummy, I know I can. Audrey had always capitulated eventually, letting Zoe climb a little way up, hovering underneath, her hands outstretched ready to catch her should she fall. And then, when the girls were older, it was always Zoe – not Lily or Jess – who climbed the highest: fearless, athletic, nimble Zoe. The child Audrey had once believed to be invincible.
Audrey glances at the clock on the wall: a quarter past six. She has promised to collect Jess from Emily’s house before seven and she is already at risk of being late. But she does not want to leave before Zoe has woken up.
Audrey is grateful to be here alone today. Most days Jess accompanies her and sits by the bed of her twin sister, reading to her or relating anecdotes from school, the resemblance between the once-identical girls now just a faint echo. It has become a strange after-school ritual the three of them share, one that Audrey worries may not be good for Jess, but the girls have been inseparable for a decade and it is painful enough that they no longer share their days, their nights, their hopes and dreams without denying them this hour each afternoon too.
All three sisters had been so close, once upon a time, before Zoe’s frequent spells in hospital cut short their childhood. Her three musketeers, Audrey had called them. On Sunday afternoons they would perform musicals for her and Edward – Annie, The Sound of Music, Bugsy Malone – all under Lily’s careful direction, seeking out costumes from the dressing-up box or the back of Audrey’s wardrobe, outfits she hadn’t worn for years and couldn’t remember buying. Jess would invariably forget the words or the choreography and Lily would get cross with her until Zoe would leap to her twin’s defence, point out that it was supposed to be fun, tell Lily to stop being mean. But to Audrey it was perfect whether or not they were in tune or in time.
Had Audrey known what would happen later, she’d have recorded every single minute of it on film.
Audrey looks down at her daughter lying under anonymous hospital sheets and wonders, not for the first time, how it is that the fate of a life – the fate of a family – should swing on an imperfect collection of blood cells, invisible to the naked eye.
The parcel rustles in her lap and Audrey looks at the present wrapped in shiny silver paper decorated with tiny stars. Zoe has been fascinated by stars ever since she was little. Whenever she has been asked what she wants to be when she grows up, she has always replied that she plans to be an astronomer, to uncover the mysteries of the universe, as though such an ambition is entirely within her grasp. Now people no longer ask Zoe the question.
Audrey wonders about putting the gift on the chest of drawers next to the Walkman that gets less and less use as the days go by. The present is a double cassette of Now That’s What I Call Music! 11 and Audrey hopes it will help turn up the brightness behind Zoe’s eyes.
She thinks back to the previous week, to how brave Zoe had been as the nurses had hooked a bag of medicine to the tall metal stand, as drugs had dripped through the transparent plastic tube into her vein to engage in yet another battle against Zoe’s defective bone marrow. Audrey thinks about the dozens of times Zoe has had to endure this process: all the times she has vomited into disposable cardboard bowls, all the times she has been unable to lift her head from the pillow because it makes her stomach churn, all the times she has looked down at her arms, her legs, her jutting hip bones and questioned the bruises that seem to materialise overnight. She thinks about all that Zoe has had to withstand and her heart strains with the injustice of it and with the guilt that she is unable to take away Zoe’s pain. Keeping your child safe, keeping her free from harm: these are a mother’s primary tasks and Audrey has failed to fulfil them.
How many more times do I have to have that done, Mummy?
Zoe’s words haunt Audrey as she remembers how, at the end of last week’s chemotherapy session – as Audrey had wiped traces of vomit from her daughter’s lips, shortly before Zoe had begun to throw up again – Zoe had looked up, her expression fixed with a determination not to complain, and asked Audrey the question.
Not too many more, my love. Not too many more.
The ambiguity of her reassurance had grasped at Audrey’s throat.
She runs her fingers gently across Zoe’s scalp where once her hair had been. An image slips into her head, which she feels should belong to another era but which she knows belongs only to the recent past. An image of Zoe, twelve months ago, soon after her second chemotherapy session, scratching her head and pulling back her hand to discover a clump of her beautiful dark, wavy hair in it. The confusion on her face, and then the horror, before the tears had welled up and tipped over onto her cheeks. The strength Audrey had needed in order to hold back her own tears, to clasp Zoe in her arms, to whisper into her ear that it was all going to be OK, that Mummy was there, that she would take care of her.
She thinks about how she has watched Zoe accept this most ignominious of side effects. She has observed the stoical resignation that has followed the flash of panic as Zoe has raised her head from her pillow in the morning to find it covered with hair no longer attached to her head. She has seen, through a gap in the bathroom door, Zoe run a brush through her hair and stare with disbelief and distress at the contents of the bristles after each stroke. On better days, during better weeks, Audrey has accompanied Zoe through the fabric department at John Lewis, picking out material to fashion into headscarves, watching Zoe smile reassuringly at shop assistants in response to their expressions of shocked, uncomfortable sympathy.
Now only a few stubborn tufts of Zoe’s hair remain.
Audrey has an envelope of Zoe’s hair at home, tucked away in a wooden box at the bottom of her wardrobe. She cannot let Edward know it is there: he thinks it ghoulish, macabre.