“Okay.” Polly didn’t move.
“I mean, only one person’s allowed at a time. So I better just...” Why wouldn’t she go? If she didn’t leave soon, then she might see—
“Hello. Hello!”
Annie flinched at the high, nervous voice of the woman tottering toward them in a hospital gown. She was pointing a bony finger at Annie. “You. Miss. Are you the nurse?”
“So sad,” murmured Polly. “Can we help you, madam?”
Annie tried to block Polly off. “I don’t think we should—”
“I’m looking for the nurse.” The woman was barely sixty, but looked eighty. Her face was sunken, her hair gray, and under her hospital gown her legs were bruised and wasted, one wrapped in a bandage. “I need—oh, I don’t know what I need!”
“I’m sure it’ll come to you. Shall we go into the ward?” Polly was taking her arm, which was mottled with scars that never seemed to heal.
“I don’t think you should do that.” Annie wanted to scream.
“Oh, come on, Annie, she needs help.”
“Just leave it, will you?” snapped Annie. “Go to your own bloody appointment!”
The woman was staring at her. “You. I know you, don’t I? Are you the nurse?”
“I, uh...” Annie’s voice was dead in her throat. Polly was staring, too, her forehead wrinkled. “No, I’m—”
At that point a harassed-looking nurse dashed out from the ward. “Maureen! Come on, back to bed now. You can’t walk on that leg.”
But she wouldn’t leave. She was still staring at Annie. “I know you. I know you!”
Too late to pretend. “Yes. It’s me, Mum. It’s Annie. I was just coming to see you.”
Charity—one of the nicer nurses, even if she did insist on praying over the patients—gave Annie a sympathetic look. “Come on now, Maureen. Your daughter will be in to see you soon.”
As the ward doors swung shut, Polly looked at Annie. “That’s why you were here? You’re not sick yourself?”
“No. Mum, she—well, she has dementia. Early onset. She had a fall at the weekend, trying to get a chip pan out of the cupboard. Even though she hasn’t had a chip pan since 2007. But they’ll probably discharge her soon and then—I don’t know what then.” Annie took a deep breath.
Polly’s expression hadn’t changed. Interest, understanding, but no pity. “I guess that explains your attitude of barely suppressed fury.”
Something broke inside Annie. “Look. I don’t know you, and you’ve got no right to say that. My mum’s not even sixty and she has advanced dementia. Why wouldn’t I be furious? I should be furious. So why don’t you just butt out of my life, okay? What gives you the right to...to...come to my house, and interfere and...” The rest was drowned in sudden, inconvenient tears.
Polly reacted strangely to this tirade, which left Annie gasping for breath. “Come with me,” Polly said, grasping her hand. Hers was cold, but surprisingly strong. She dragged Annie down the corridor.
“What? No, I don’t want to—Let go of me!”
“Come on. I want to show you something.” They’d reached a door with a sign on it that read Dr. Maximilian Fraser, MD FRS. Consultant Neurologist. Underneath it someone had Blu-Tacked up a sign in green ink: No, I Am Not a Supplies Cupboard. Polly threw open the door. “Dr. McGrumpy! It’s your favorite patient.”
A voice from the dark said, “Come in, Polly. It’s not like I’m in the middle of a highly confidential patient review or anything.”
“You’re eating a Crunchie and watching cat videos on YouTube,” said Polly, which was true. The room was tiny and gloomy—not much bigger than a cupboard, in fact—and one wall was covered in dark glass. Behind a computer sat a burly man in scrubs, his thick dark hair sticking up as if he’d been running his hands through it, several days’ worth of stubble on his chin.
“What do you want now?” He had a Scottish accent. Annie saw his eyes rest on her, so she looked at her feet in their shabby black loafers.
“I want to show the scan to my new friend Annie.”
“Not again. Do you think I’ve nothing else to do, is that it? You think hospital funding is so luxuriant I’m basically your personal AV monkey?”
“Come on. You know I’m your best patient.”
“He’s my best patient. No hassle.” Annie saw he was nodding to a glass jar that held a floating human brain. “Go on, then.” He sighed. He clicked his computer and the wall screen glowed into life, revealing another brain, the ghostly image of one this time. White, spongy. One side of it was darker, tendrils of black curling through it.
“That’s my brain,” Polly said proudly.
“Oh,” Annie said, not sure what she was seeing.
Polly went over and tapped the glass. “Fingerprints,” grunted the doctor. She ignored him.
“That’s my tree. Glioblastoma—it means ‘branches,’ see.”
Annie looked at the doctor for guidance. “No one knows what that word means, Polly,” he said.
“Well, let me explain. That’s my brain, and this lovely treelike growth here—well, that’s my brain tumor.” Polly smiled. “I call it Bob.”
*
“Take deep breaths.”
Annie sucked in air. She was sitting on the doctor’s wheely chair. He was kneeling in front of her, peering into her eyes. His were brown and intelligent, like a kind dog. “Can you follow this?” He held up a finger.
“Of course I can,” she said irritably. “I’m fine. I didn’t even faint.” She didn’t understand why she’d freaked out. She barely knew Polly, brain tumor or not.
Polly had gone to get “hot sweet tea,” as she’d brightly announced. “Isn’t that what they did in the war?”
The doctor said, “You didn’t know, I take it. You never wondered why she’d so many appointments?”
“We only met yesterday. And she’s acting like we’re, I don’t know, teenage pen pals.”
“That’s Polly. It’s quite hard to avoid being friends with her.” His accent rolled hard on the r’s. He sat back on his heels.
“So...she’s sick.”
“Very sick.”
“Can you...do anything?”
He stood up again, wincing. “Christ, I’m getting old. I shouldn’t really tell you. Confidentiality. But since you just saw her brain scan I guess I can take that as patient consent. Because of where Bob is, there’s a strong chance removal would damage her brain.” Annie remembered what Polly had said. About the brain being everything we are. “She’s had chemo, which bought a bit of time. We’re keeping an eye on it. Lots of MRI scans. Costing a bloody fortune. If it goes near the front cortex, well, that’s game over, and it’s very aggressive. Quite advanced already.”
“If?”
“When.”
“How long?” she asked.
He scrunched up his face. “For the record, doctors really hate that question. We’re not clairvoyants. But we’ve told her about three months.”
Annie gaped. So little. An academic term. A financial quarter. A season of an American TV show. Imagine if that was all you had, to cram a whole life into. “Oh,” she said. In the circumstances, it was all she could think of.