59
Day 1
Lizzie
The sweet unnatural fragrance of hairspray and deodorant clung to the air in the windowless dressing room. The scents clawed at the back of Lizzie’s throat. She drew in a shallow breath and stared into the camera. ‘My name is Lizzie Appleton, I’m twenty-nine years old, and I have three months to live.’
Lizzie’s words hung in the silence, bringing the enormity of her situation crashing down on her, and with it a fusion of colours that blurred the edges of her vision; blobs of reds and blues floating next to purples and yellows as if she was looking down the barrel of a kaleidoscope. Her head began to pound. What was she doing? Three months. 90 days. It wasn’t enough.
‘That was great, Lizzie.’ Caroline clasped her hands together from behind the camera tripod. ‘Let’s try it one more time with a bit more feeling, OK?’ Caroline pushed her glasses further up her thin nose as she bent over to watch Lizzie through the small, digital screen poking out from one side of the camera. ‘Remember that this is for the advert, so we really need to grab the viewers’ attention.’
‘More feeling? Are you serious?’ Lizzie asked, pulling at the black wool of her dress where it prickled her skin and wondering, not the first time, how it had come to this.
‘Just think of something that makes you sad,’ Caroline said with her usual pursed lip smile.
‘Because dying isn’t sad enough?’ Lizzie narrowed her dark-blue eyes and waited for the documentary producer to squirm inside her grey trouser suit. The producer had been an almost-permanent fixture in Lizzie’s life for the past seven days, and Lizzie was looking forward to saying goodbye to her at the airport in a few hours’ time. In the meantime, any payback Lizzie could give for the hours of listening to Caroline’s voice – which was always a notch higher than it needed to be as she encouraged and chided all in one breath – was worth it. Smile, but not at the camera. Be yourself, but without that sarcasm of yours. Wear comfortable clothes, but be presentable.
But Caroline didn’t squirm or flinch. Instead, she pushed her glasses onto the top of her nest of dark curls and returned the stare. ‘The sooner we get this done, the sooner I’ll be out of your way.’
Lizzie sighed. After their week together, her sarcasm no longer seemed to goad the producer. Lizzie tried to focus; she squared her shoulders, fixed her gaze on the camera, and stared at her reflection in the circular glass of the lens: the button nose and high cheek bones she’d inherited from her mother; the dark-blue eyes; and brown hair of her father, now cut short to accommodate the bare patch at the nape of her neck – a parting gift from the radiotherapy.
The throbbing in her head intensified. Images of her parents from the previous evening bombarded her thoughts. The shaking hand of her father, Peter, and the watery-grey eyes of her mother, Evelyn, which had begged the words her mum had been unable to voice: Don’t go, Lizzie. Stay here with us.
Both her parents looked ten years older than their sixty-one years, and had the lines on their faces of people who’d spent so much of their lives worrying. She’d done that to them. An ache spread across her chest. They deserved so much better than the hand they’d been dealt. But, then again, so did she.
‘Ready?’ Caroline asked, pulling her glasses back into place and brushing off an imaginary fleck of lint from her jacket.
Lizzie nodded. ‘My name is Lizzie Appleton, I’m twenty-nine years old, and I have three months to live.’
‘How does it make you feel?’
Lizzie’s eyes shot to Caroline. ‘I didn’t know you were going to ask me that. We … we haven’t practised that one.’
‘I didn’t want you to practise it,’ Caroline said, raising her perfectly shaped eyebrows. ‘I want to know how you feel. The viewers will want to know – how does it feel to know you only have three months to live?’
Panic swept through her body. What was she supposed to say? What did people want to hear?
‘It’s a mixture,’ she said, making herself look into the camera once more. Her voice sounded echoey and strange over the drumming of her heartbeat in her ears. ‘Relief and fear.’
Carline lifted her hand and drew circles with her index finger. ‘Keep going,’ she mouthed.
Lizzie thought of Little Women, and Beth giving her dying speech to Jo. She’d read the book once, maybe twice, but it was the film Lizzie was thinking of. Claire Danes and her shaking voice telling Winona Ryder that she was doing something first for once. She was the one having the adventure. If Lizzie could remember that speech, then maybe she could say that, but her mind blanked.
‘There’s a relief in knowing you’re going to die. Well, there is for me anyway,’ Lizzie said after a pause. ‘I’ve been dodging death all my life. I’ve survived brain tumours I wasn’t supposed to survive. It’s felt kind of like I’ve been on borrowed time, and now that time is up. But I don’t have to waste another second of my life in a hospital, or a waiting room. I don’t have to have any more treatments. I can live my life, and there’s a relief in that.
‘But if you’re asking me what it feels like to know that I’m never going to see another Christmas. That the trees are going to blossom this year, and I’m not going to see it. I’m never going to look out of another window and see a world of white and think it’s a late snowstorm, before realising it’s blossom flying off the trees. Or what it feels like to know that my brother is going to be competing in the next Olympics –’ Lizzie’s voice cracked, she swallowed hard ‘– the actual Olympics, and I’m not going to be there cheering him on. That fills me with a fear beyond words. So, I’m trying very hard not to think about that, and just to focus on the first part. The relief that I can live my life.’
Lizzie stopped talking and tried to smile. She glanced at Caroline and wished she’d been able to remember the speech in Little Women, rather than the jumble of confusion she’d just spoken. If Caroline asked her to do it again, she’d have to think of something better to say.
‘That was perfect, Lizzie, well done,’ Caroline said, flicking