We will go but I cannot follow

My alarm wakes me at 6am. I lie in bed for a minute waiting for my brain to catch up. Eyes flicker and adjust to the darkness. It’s cold. I rise and shuffle to the door.

The hall light is already on, mum’s been up for an hour or so getting ready. Her brown overnight bag is packed and sits fat and contented by her bed. The room is empty. I turn around and see a light shining under the bathroom door.

I call out and ask her if there’s anything she needs. She says she’s waiting for Will to bring the car around, but can I carry the bag down for her? I take Fat Brown down the stairs with me and put it beside the table where her X-rays and handbag sleep. The house is quiet, she’s turned all the lights on so it looks like night, like dinner-time.

The cats mill around my ankles wanting food.

Mum comes down the stairs slowly. Her hands skim the wall as she steadies herself, placing her feet carefully with each step. I ask her if she’s hungry from fasting the night before. No, she’s fine.

I snap the cans open and give the cats their breakfast.

Their collars fall against the edge of the bowls as they eat, sending out little clunks like a boat knocking at its moorings.

Trainers up the back-step, they bite into the brick. Will’s arrived. The grown-up in our dysfunctional mess, my brother strides in and opens the drawer to look for the car keys. I stand beside mum in the kitchen, check she has her tablets and handbag, I say she’s going to be fine.

She says she’ll see me when she wakes up.

We hug for a minute and then she leaves. Will takes her up the drive to the car, and they make their way to the hospital for check-in.

I close the door and look at the clock; I still have forty minutes until I need to get ready for uni so I go back upstairs to sleep. I pass James’ room – the eldest, his door is closed, the light is off. He slept through.

It’s been two and a half years since remission. I can’t remember the exact day she got the news it was back, but I think it was cold then, the mornings were dark and for a time I got nose-bleeds and fainted in the shower a lot. Then there was the bad news. The doctor read her scans and X-rays – the ghostly smudges of grey and white that look so much like death, a skeleton of a person you knew, their soul sucked out, still but with that blurry edge that makes you think the thing in the picture was moving. It was back. The cancer was back and it had spread. Little black settlements dotted her bones and lungs, whole fat, slug-like cities sat at the top of her spine, in her brain. All the boxes ticked. She was fucked. We were fucked. “Not again” you think, and your heart sucks up and swells to lodge in your throat. “Not again” you say. Then come tears, hot and thick, bullets falling from your eyes, bigger than rain. The black and white squares on the linoleum floor begin to flood.

We stood by the fridge for a while, asking questions like it were a job – Where is it? How much? What did he say? What’s the next step? What do we do? What about the drugs? When do we start? Mum, Will and I, we looked like old board wax that melted in the sun. Everything tasted like salt.

We propped each other up like a sagging fence. Talked the whole way through dinner – making bad jokes, trivialising the invader carving up her body – we were terrified and the noise created a cavern we could hide in. We had eluded the cancer for so long I guess we assumed it dropped off to chase someone else but here, six years later, it fronted the door.

So we shouldered mum up, filled her glass with champagne and got drunk together because there was nothing else we could do. We’d just have to go again.

When the plates were cleared and the lights extinguished we retreated to our rooms to be alone. Tears rained silently in each quarter of the house as we thought about what would come. James came home later after finishing his shift at the restaurant. Parallel he crossed by us, unaware of the news until morning.

Treatment began the next week – radiotherapy, chemo and the drugs. Because she was getting her head zapped, mum had to wear a tight metal mask over her face; I envisaged this was to save her skin from burning off like a horror movie. We used to tease her that it was like being the man in the iron mask – one of our many sick jokes, not that funny, but sure to make other people in the room extremely uncomfortable – but she never laughed at that one, she’d just go quiet and strain a smile as the light behind her eyes fell away. It scared the shit out of her. On her last day of radiotherapy the nurse asked mum if she wanted to keep the mask as a souvenir – she politely declined. Now it’s returned and she’s got to put the mask back on – tight and oppressive, the sound of her breathing filling up the spaces where it doesn’t skim her face – a funeral mask. The nursing staff lay her flat on the table before retreating behind a thick glass wall so the radio can begin.

This went on for a few months, though the finer points I do not know – mum doesn’t like to tell me the details of the treatment and procedures she has to endure. Doesn’t want to upset me or distract me from my work or uni. So I carry on in this half-light, doing the menial tasks to help her as much as I can. Feed the cats, make the tea, do the washing. Make the bed, go to the shops, help open a can she can’t manage. Carry Fat Brown down the stairs before her operation. And she protects me from the ugly things I can’t handle; the pain, the odds, the end.

When you hold onto something so tightly your knuckles whiten, your hand is frozen in a violent fist. The tendons are raised and flicker under your skin, your veins throb and grow bigger, pressing against the surface. But the longer you hold the fist, the longer you hold onto that thing, tighter and tighter, knuckles white – you start to feel a tingle, a trembling. It feels like a party sparkler – the light leaps off the burning metal wand and splashes back onto your hand like little thorns. Distracted by the tingle you loosen your hand ever slightly so you can get a better look. Your fist is hollow. It slips through.

After forty minutes, my alarm sounds again and I have to get up for uni. I rub my eyes and shove my feet back into my slippers. Getting ready, I waste time fiddling with my hair that always winds up looking much the same.

Miss the first ferry, make my way to the next one before I’m too late.

Fumble with my ticket at the gates, I slide through and find a seat as the ferry rumbles and begins to move out. I can feel the bolts fastening the cushion to its metal frame.

Kill thirty minutes staring at the sticky laminate wood-grain floor. A cockroach runs beneath me in confused circles, climbing into a forgotten coffee cup.

Leaning back, I stare at the line of lights above. They flicker constantly.

Go to uni. A lecture I care nothing about where I can quit my brain for two hours. Get out and call Will for an update. She went into theatre at twelve, doctor says it should be three to four hours; he’s going to wait at the hospital ‘til it’s over.

I get home at six, Will calls to tell me she’s just been brought out. A six hour surgery. She’s okay, they got ninety percent of the tumour from her spine and she can move all her limbs. Good. She’s in Intensive Care now; in pain but still managed to ask Will if he had any lunch today. We laugh and the feeling rushes back to my face like the tide.

I think about mum in the ICU – alone, her little body drowning in the size of the bed, under the weight of the plastic pipes and tubes that travel in and out of her. I remember the jokes we made a few nights before, that they’d cut off her head to get to the C4 vertebra then sew it on backwards by mistake. I think about the hospital smell I hate so much, the toy elephant we got her the first time she had cancer and how it still smells so much like hospital I can’t sit near it in her room. I think about her travel bag and know the best I can do for mum is help carry Fat Brown to the car each time.