“Oh, it’s okay. I’m dying, you see. I’ll sign something if you want.”
He looked at Annie, who shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry, she’s really sick, and—”
“You’ll have to get her out or I’ll arrest her.”
“Are you actually a police officer?”
“Well, not exactly, but I know some.”
Annie had a feeling that right this moment was a very important turning point for her. She could stand back and let him stop Polly, who after all only wanted to paddle in a public fountain before she died, or she could...
“What are you doing?” the man said, looking panicked. “Stop that—stop it, ma’am!”
Annie was pulling off her boots, and then, shuffling around under her skirt, her frumpy woolen tights. Then she, too, was plunging over the edge, wincing at the cold. “Jesus!”
Polly laughed, clapping her hands. “Go, Annie, go, Annie!” People were starting to take pictures, nudge each other. Annie cringed. Polly took her hands. “Can I have this dance, Ms. Hebden?”
“Oh, God, Polly, I really can’t—”
“Come on! The idea is to dance in fountains, not just wade around in them.” She yelled to the crowd. “Play us a song and we’ll do a turn for you!”
“Oh, God, no, don’t...”
Someone’s phone started playing a tinny version of “New York, New York.” “It’s the wrong city!” shouted Annie.
“Never mind. Come on.” Polly had her arm around Annie, high-kicking. Annie joined in halfheartedly, spraying no-doubt-infected water all over her skirt. There was a plop, and someone else slipped over the wall—a group of foreign-exchange students, jeans rolled up the knees, laughing and swearing in Spanish. Then parents started lifting in their kids, and the air filled with splashing and shouting and screaming. The song swelled to its end, people now singing along—“New York, New Yoooooorkkk!”
Polly bowed, breathless with laughter. “Oh, my God. That was hilarious.” People were dispersing, clapping and laughing, the moment gone. A mere minute, two minutes, where Londoners had connected instead of going on their way. It had felt like an eternity to Annie.
Polly was still gasping for breath. “Are you okay?” Annie said, worried.
She coughed, nodding. “It was worth it. That was brilliant.”
“Well, why don’t we get you inside into the warm? Tea and cake?”
She coughed again. “Tea and cake...sounds...amazing.”
*
“Are your feet dry now?”
Polly held up one bony foot, which was plastered over in paper towels. “I look like I’m peeling.”
“Just let me know if you get too cold. Dr. Max said you had to be careful.”
“I’m fine! Cheers.” Polly raised her teacup. “You know, I wish I’d eaten cake every day of my life, too. All those salads and goji berries I choked down, and I’m going to die at thirty-five, anyway. What a waste, Annie. I swear those uneaten cakes are going to haunt me. From now on, at least two cakes a day. Working on my Boucher bottom.”
Annie nibbled on a fondant fancy, iced in a silken pale pink that was almost too pretty too eat. “I’m the one who doesn’t even know if she’s been to the National Gallery before or not,” she said. “What was I doing with my life? I can’t remember the last time I even did something like this, just had tea with someone.”
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. Where are your friends, Annie?”
She blinked. Polly’s frankness took some getting used to. “I used to have some. From school, you know. But I guess I sort of let them drift.” When everything burned to the ground with Jane, her other friendships had been sucked into the fire, too. At the time, she hadn’t cared. It was like mourning a village when a city had been flattened. But she felt the loss now: every Saturday she stayed in alone, every time she thought about taking a holiday and balked because she didn’t want to be that solo traveler on the Sad Single Women’s painting trip. “Anyway, what about yours?” she countered. “I’ve not met any of your friends yet, either.” Maybe Polly was ashamed of her.
“Well. To be honest, I’ve sort of been avoiding them.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because when I look at them I see how much I must have changed. And they treat me differently—like I’ll break or something. I sort of wish they’d take me aside and tell me my outfit doesn’t match or something, like they would have before. It just feels a bit...awkward.”
“I’ve been avoiding my friends, too,” Annie admitted. “For a long time now.” So long she doubted they were even friends anymore.
“You’ve got time.” Polly closed her eyes briefly in bliss as she swallowed a pistachio-green macaroon. “That’s what this is all about, you see. I don’t have much time left, so I want other people to do the things I didn’t manage. Stare at art. Eat cakes. Oh, and this.” She reached into her bag—which was sewn all over in little mirrors—and pushed a ticket over the table.
Annie read it. “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. What’s that?”
“Only a concert of the most amazing piece of music ever. Something for our ears as well as our eyes. Can you come?”
“Oh, I don’t know...”
“Cancer card,” Polly mumbled around a bite of Victoria sponge. “Please. I really love it, and this might be my last chance to hear it.”
“Oh, all right, then. But you have to let me pay you back. Honestly, I feel bad.” She thought of George’s complaints about freeloaders.
But Polly just pulled a face. “Annie, I can’t take this money with me when I go. I may as well use it to have a nice time with my friends, don’t you think?”
Friends. All the while Annie had been thinking of lost ones, and now she’d found one instead. She’d thought this would never happen again—how would she make more friends at thirty-five?—but it seemed it had, in the unlikely setting of the Lewisham Hospital Neurology Department. “All right, then,” she said shyly. “But you have to let me do some things myself, too, okay? I can’t just keep tagging along on your happy days.”
A bright smile lit Polly’s face, and Annie suddenly realized she’d played right into her annoying life-changing hands. “Maybe you could start by looking up an old friend. After all, I won’t be around forever.”
But Annie didn’t want to talk about that now. She wanted to stay in this moment—happy, relaxed, feeling like a real friend sat across the table from her. A real friend who wasn’t already half-gone from her. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
DAY 17