“He’s not great. I’ve been trying to get him out for a few pints, but he says he can’t be arsed. You ring him. He’ll do it for you.”
I rang Dec, but he didn’t answer. I left a voice message: “Hey, you fucking idiot. Please tell me you’re not in the middle of a makeup shag. I’m at my uncle Hugo’s. Sean says he’s going to call round next week. You should come too. Give me a bell.”
I like to imagine that, if things had gone differently, Melissa and I would have stayed and stayed, at least as long as Hugo was alive, maybe longer. Sean and Dec would have come down for that visit (Hugo blinking and smiling, My goodness, both of you all grown up, I’ll have to stop thinking of you as scruffy teenagers with an overdeveloped sense of mischief—although I hope you’ve still got that . . .) and stayed for a long leisurely barbecue, all of us stretched on the grass, slagging Dec about that time back in fifth year when Susanna’s friend Maddie spent an entire evening hitting on him and he never even noticed. The steady aplomb with which Hugo was facing death would have raised me to some kind of enlightened state wherein I would have realized that what had happened to me was not only survivable but surmountable, just a rough grain of sand in the ocean of life. My cousins and I would have got each other through the tough times—black humor, arms around shoulders, long drunken late-night talks—and come out the other end sadder but closer, our old childhood bond reforged and bright again. Melissa would have coaxed me into going to physical therapy. At some point I would have got my hands on a ring and gone down on one knee among the Queen Anne’s lace, and we would have run up to the house hand in hand to give Hugo the news, a star of promise in the encroaching darkness, the line continuing, irrepressible life spinning on. And in the end I would have hired some estate agent to sell the apartment for me, without ever setting foot in it again, and headed off to that white Georgian house on the bay. Of course it didn’t play out that way, at all; but sometimes, when I badly need rest, I like to pretend that it could have.
* * *
?As things turned out, this lasted for just under four weeks. On the Friday morning I was in the garden again, having a smoke under the trees. It was starting to be autumn, yellow birch leaves trickling down to land in my lap, elderberries turning purple so that small birds flew over to give them experimental pecks, a cool clean tinge to the blue sky. Someone was using a lawn mower, far enough away that it was just a comfortable homey buzz.
When the shape caught my eye I nearly jumped out of my skin: a lopsided bulk blurry amid the slanting light, coming towards me slow and inexorable as a messenger through the tall grass. It took me a second to realize it was Hugo, leaning heavily on his cane. I jammed out my cigarette and swept some dirt over it.
“May I join you?” he asked, when he reached me. He was a little out of breath.
“Sure,” I said. My heart was still hammering and I wasn’t sure what was going on. Hugo never came out to me in the garden; catching me smoking would have violated one of the unspoken pacts that kept our delicate balance working. “Have a seat.”
He lowered himself jerkily onto the grass—biting his lip and bracing himself with the cane, one sharp shake of his head when I held out a hand to help him—and arranged himself leaning back against an oak tree, legs out in front of him. “Give me a cigarette,” he said.
After a startled second I fished out my packet, handed him a cigarette and flicked the lighter for him. He inhaled deeply, eyes closed. “Ahhh,” he said, on a long sigh. “My goodness, I’ve missed that.”
“You used to smoke?”
“Oh God, yes. The hard stuff: Woodbines, a pack a day. I quit twenty years ago—partly because you lot had started staying here and it didn’t seem like a good example to set, but mostly for my health. Which turned out to be the wrong call, didn’t it?” I couldn’t tell whether the twist in his half smile was bitterness or just the drag at the side of his mouth. “I could have spent those twenty years happily smoking my head off, and it would have made no difference to anything at all.”
Another pact broken: we never talked about the fact that he was dying. I had no idea what to say. This conversation felt bad, threatening in ways I couldn’t catch hold of. I lit myself a new cigarette and we sat there, watching sycamore helicopters spin through the air.
“Susanna rang,” Hugo said, eventually. “Her Swiss specialist fellow had a look at my file. He agrees with my doctors: there’s nothing more that can be done.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, flinching. “Shit.”
“Yes.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“I really believed I wasn’t getting my hopes up,” Hugo said. He wasn’t looking at me; he was watching the smoke of his cigarette curl out into the sunlight. “I really did.”
I could have punched Susanna. Selfish little bitch, so in love with her seat on the high horse, her self-righteous victim bullshit about evil doctors, she had put Hugo through this when anyone with half a brain would have known it was pointless— “That was a shitty thing for Susanna to do,” I said. “A fucking stupid fucking shitty thing.”
“No, she was right. In principle. The specialist said that, in around three-quarters of the cases that come his way from these parts, he actually does disagree with the original doctors and recommend surgery—mostly it isn’t a cure, the cancer comes back sooner or later, but it gives people an extra few years . . . I just happen to be in the wrong quarter. Something to do with the location of the tumor.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said again.
“I know.” He took a final deep drag on the cigarette and put it out in the dirt. His thick locks of hair shifted as he bent, showing the bald spot on the side of his head where the radiotherapy waves had gone in or out. A blur of leaf-shadows and sunlight whirled over his thin-worn shirt. “Could I have another one of these?”
I found him another smoke. “I should try everything,” he said. “Speed, LSD, the lot. Heroin. There wasn’t much of anything around when I was young; I smoked hash a few times, didn’t really take to it . . . Do you suppose Leon would know where to get LSD?”
“I doubt it,” I said. The thought of babysitting Hugo on an acid trip was mind-boggling. “He probably wouldn’t know anyone in Dublin.”
“Of course not. And I probably wouldn’t take it anyway. Ignore me, Toby. I’m babbling.”
“We’d like to stay here,” I said. “Me and Melissa. As long as . . . as long as we’re any use. If you’ll have us.”
“What am I supposed to say to that?” A sudden harsh burst of bitterness in Hugo’s voice, his head going back— “I know, I should be thanking you on my knees—yes, I should, Toby, the thought of leaching away the last of my life in some hellish hospital— And of course I’m going to say yes, we both know that, and of course I’m grateful beyond words, but I would have liked to have a choice. To invite you to stay on because I love having you both here, rather than because I’m in desperate need. I would like”—voice rising, the heel of his hand slamming down hard on a tree root—“to have a bloody say in some of this.”
“Sorry,” I said, after a moment. “I didn’t mean to . . . like, force your hand. Or anything. I just thought—”
“I know you didn’t. That’s not what I’m talking about. At all.” Hugo rubbed a hand over his face. The surge of energy had ebbed out of him as suddenly as it had come, leaving him slumped against the tree. “I’m just sick and tired of being at the mercy of this thing. Having it make all my decisions for me. It’s eating my autonomy as well as my brain, eating me right out of existence in every way, and I don’t like it. I would like . . .”
I waited, but he didn’t finish. Instead, when at last he took a breath and straightened: “I would love to have you stay on,” he said, clearly and formally. He was looking out at the garden, not at me. “You and Melissa both. On condition that you promise me you’ll feel free to change your minds. At any point.”