‘I’m sorry to tell you this, Mrs Nicholson, but the scans suggest you have an intracranial solid neoplasm, otherwise known as a brain tumour, on the left-hand side of your temple,’ explained Dr Lewis, as sympathetically as he could.
Four days after my last attack, I had yet to leave the hospital. When Dr Lewis came to my room with the results of the MRI scans and blood tests, I wished I’d not insisted Emily leave her bedside vigil and go home to rest, so that I had somebody’s hand to hold.
‘We will need to operate as soon as possible to take a sample, then test if it’s malignant or benign,’ Dr Lewis continued. ‘I’d like to arrange it for first thing tomorrow morning, if that would be convenient?’
‘Is it going to kill me?’ was all I could think to ask.
‘Once we get the results of the biopsy we can decide which approach to take. The tumour is most likely the cause of your headaches – blood vessels in your brain bursting under the pressure as it grows.’
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ I said. ‘Is it going to kill me?’
He paused. ‘We’ll know its severity once we do the biopsy. Then we’ll talk again.’
‘Thank you,’ I replied politely, and picked up Emily’s iPod, put the headphones into my ears, closed my eyes and blasted her music as loud as I could to drown out my fears.
SIMON
Montefalco
20 February
I walked away from Luciana with only what I’d brought with me – the clothes on my back and an uncertain future.
I knew starting afresh would be a much harder task, as my years were more advanced than when I’d last decamped. Nevertheless, my mind was made up.
I waited until she was alone at a doctor’s appointment and the children were at school before I packed my old rucksack with the bare essentials and began the steep walk downhill to the town in the shadow of the villa.
I planned to make my way up to Switzerland and then through Austria, before exploring the Eastern bloc. According to the bus stop timetable, it would be another hour before my ride arrived, so I sat by the side of the road and began the process of putting the life I had cherished so much out of my mind.
Only I couldn’t.
The boxes were open and waiting, but the beautiful spirits I loved so dearly were too large a presence to be contained. I had left my other children when they were too young to be affected by my absence. I’d only left Catherine when she was finally well enough to cope with it.
But Luciana, Sofia and Luca were different – and now so was I. They had made me a better man. I thought about how, through Catherine’s sadness, I’d learned to tend to fragility and incite a person into believing that, against all hope, there was always hope to be found if they just kept searching.
I couldn’t find that hope for Luciana, so she would need me more than Catherine ever did. I’d spent half my life running away from my responsibilities and I was an idiot for thinking I could do it again. But if I stayed, I’d need to muster up all my strength to help the three of them and the four of us.
I couldn’t allow myself to shed a tear or feel an ounce of self-pity until Luciana surrendered to the inevitable. It would be our cancer, not just hers – we would both take ownership of it.
By the time my bus appeared, I was already half the way home. I didn’t hear the car pull up next to me until its rear door opened. Inside sat Luciana. She looked at my sweating brow and my rucksack and she knew instantly what I had planned. She saw the coward in me. But her eyes softened when she understood I was walking towards our life and not from it.
She stepped out of the car, closed the door, entwined her arm through mine and we climbed the rest of the steep hill together.
CATHERINE
Northampton
1 March
All of my children were sitting around my hospital bed when I came round from my operation. Even though they were normally scattered far and wide across the country and beyond, they’d always remained a close-knit bunch, phoning and texting each other to keep up to speed. I wondered if they’d have been like that had we not been forced to close ranks after their father deserted them.
Emily and Daniel’s wedding four months earlier had been the last time we’d all been together in the same room. Giving my daughter away was one of the proudest moments of my life, and I pitied Simon for throwing away his chance to be in my place.
Emily had broken my news to the boys earlier that week despite my pleas not to worry them. Robbie drove up from his flat in London, and James flew back from Los Angeles where he’d been recording with his band.
I kept my eyes closed at first just to listen to their chatter. Then the urge to vomit took hold as my anaesthetic wore off. The first words they heard their post-op mother mumbling were ‘I’m going to be sick’ followed by the act itself, all over the bedsheets. Charming.
The morphine either knocked me out or left me barely conscious for two days. Even in sleep, my headaches were constant – but because of the operation, not the tumour, Dr Lewis explained. A few days later, he was back to remove my bandages and check on my healing.
‘Can I take a look, please?’ I asked tentatively.
I held my breath as he passed me my mirror from the bedside table and I slowly examined from all angles what looked like a machete wound. The hair had been shaved on the left side of my still swollen head, leaving me with a three-inch, crescent-shaped wound, pinned together with large black staples.
There was also a prominent concave dip in my head, and I wondered for a moment if it was deep enough to catch rainwater. I tried really hard to take it on the chin, but my emotions were as raw as the cut. When I was alone I couldn’t help but pick up the mirror and stare at my grotesque self. All I needed was a bolt though my neck and Dr Frankenstein could have claimed me as his own creation.
Dr Lewis came to see me a few days later. But my brain, in its own infinite but damaged wisdom, decided to filter out what he was explaining. Once he’d confirmed the remains of my tumour were indeed cancerous, there was very little else I wanted to hear.
I saw him almost every morning during my hospital stay. His skilled hands had tinkered around inside my brain like it was the engine of an old jalopy. But I still didn’t know a thing about the man who’d seen a part of me that no one else ever had. So instead of listening to his words – which I knew early on were going to make me unhappy – I focused on the man delivering them.
I placed him in his mid-fifties. He was blessed with a thick head of greying hair. His teeth had been capped but the wrinkles etched on his forehead from years of puzzling over cases like mine showed he wasn’t vain enough to use Botox. He reminded me of a slightly less swarthy Antonio Banderas.
He didn’t wear a wedding ring, so he was either eligible or just one of those men who wasn’t comfortable with jewellery. And when he spoke, I couldn’t decide if I was attracted to him because every girl loves a doctor, or because he was the only man I’d ever met who could really see inside a woman’s head.
‘Catherine?’
Suddenly I was back in the room.