Chapter Seventy-Three: Heidi
Epilogue: Kathleen
Keep Reading …
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Claire Allan
About the Publisher
Joe
They’ve told me I’m dying. A doctor in a white coat, and a blue shirt with a stripy navy tie that had a coffee stain on it, had perched on the end of my bed and adopted a very serious expression on his face.
A nurse – who I had heard give out to her colleagues about the lack of resources on the ward and how she was getting ‘sick, sore and tired of working her arse off’ for too much responsibility and not enough money – had pulled the clinical blue curtain around my bed to afford me some privacy.
Her sombre expression mirrored that of the doctor, although it was clear it was a front. It was almost the end of her shift. This was a life-changing moment for me – the moment I heard I was condemned to die despite all the chemotherapy and surgery that they had been able to offer. For Katrina the nurse, with her short brown hair and ice-blue eyes, it was just the end of another shift. And she was tired. She had to do this final grim task before she clocked out and went home. She’d get a cup of tea, or coffee, or maybe a glass of wine (she seemed the type). She’d kick off her shoes and watch something mindless on the TV. She might even laugh if it was funny.
I doubted she’d think about me and the fact that I was dying. That no more could be done for me. I was already in the past tense for Katrina.
I was feeling sorry for myself, but that was allowed, wasn’t it?
I wasn’t that old. This shouldn’t have been happening yet.
I didn’t deserve this.
I wanted to scream that I didn’t deserve this.
But it was like there was a tiny voice, or a chorus of voices, whispering in her ear that this is exactly what I did deserve. In fact, I deserved much, much worse.
Now
The back seat of my car is full to bursting. Lily is bundled up in her car seat, asleep and blissfully ignorant of the strained atmosphere between her fellow passengers. A weekend bag, filled with pyjamas and underpants to be laundered, a toilet bag containing a razor, toothbrush, soap and shaving foam sits beside her.
A plastic ‘Patient’s Property’ bag sits in the footwell. It’s loaded with boxes of medication, dressings, instructions that I will have to will my postpartum brain into reading and understanding once we are back at Joe’s house.
I won’t call it home. It ceased to be my home the moment my mother died – also from cancer. Unlike Joe McKee, the man who has played the role of my father for the past twenty-one years, she didn’t deserve it.
‘Did you lift my slippers?’ Joe asks as I help him ease his seat belt on. He is still sore – still tender from the operation to try to remove the tumour found in his lung. Except that they found it had company, all through his body. ‘Riddled with it,’ he said, sadly, when he told me.
‘Yes, I lifted your slippers. They’re in your bag, along with your pyjamas and dressing gown.’
‘There was a book in the locker. Did you …’
‘Yes, I lifted it as well. And packed it. Along with your prayer book and your reading glasses.’
He nods. ‘I wonder how many more books I’ll read,’ he says, to himself as much as anything.
‘You know what the doctor said,’ I tell him. ‘Take it one day at a time.’
‘Those days are still numbered, though, aren’t they? I doubt I’ll see the spring.’
He looks out onto the bleak, grey car park of Altnagelvin hospital, on the very outskirts of Derry, Belfast in one direction and the city centre in the other. The sky is almost as dark as the tarmac below us. Heavy and angry-looking. It seems apt.
Joe has always liked spring. More so as he grew older and found comfort in God. ‘A time of renewal,’ he would say as the evenings stretched and the temperatures crept up.
I know as well as he does, there’ll be no renewal for him this year.
‘You never know,’ I say, even though we do know. Odds are he’ll be gone before the seasons change.
He shakes his head slowly, looks ahead. ‘Some things you feel, Heidi.’
I switch on the engine, nudge the car into first gear.
‘It’s not a lot of time, is it?’ he asks. ‘To do all the things I need to do or to make things right.’
Joe McKee could have a whole other lifetime to live and it wouldn’t be long enough for him to make things right. There’s a time in a person’s life, if they are truly, truly wicked, when they move beyond the point of redemption.
I stay quiet. If he’s looking for some sort of absolution, he’s looking in the wrong place.
Ten minutes of a silent drive home later, we pull up outside his house. The house my mother owned, which in turn will belong to me when he is gone. This is where the first almost ten years of my life were blissfully happy. My mother created a loving, warm and magical childhood for me.
Then she died.
Even all these years later, there are times when that realisation hits me like a punch to the gut.
The world has never seemed fair or right since.
‘Will we get you inside?’ I ask Joe.
He nods. ‘I’m tired.’
He looks pale, his eyes red, dark circles around them. The effort of the short journey has worn him out. He looks wretched. It’s almost, but not quite, enough to make me feel sorry for him.
‘Sure, we’ll get you in and to bed then,’ I say. ‘Just let me take Lily in first. I don’t want to leave her here in the car on her own.’
He nods. ‘Of course not.’
I open the door, carry Lily, who is thankfully still sleeping, through to the living room in her car seat and allow myself a few seconds to take some deep breaths. I’m shaking, I realise, but it’s not from the cold. I count my breaths in and out until the shaking lessens. I tuck Lily’s blanket around her, stroke her cheek. Note how she is filling out, changing. Only five months old and already I can see shades of the little girl she will become.
I do not like being here with Joe. Even in his frail condition, I still feel scared to be close to him.
I’ve tried to have as little as possible to do with him, especially after I moved away to university at eighteen. But somehow, and much to my shame and self-hatred, I still find myself unable to cut him from my life entirely.
It will be nigh on impossible now, not without appearing to be cold and uncaring. Not without telling people all the things that happened. The things I’ve tried so hard to bury.
The thought of how much he will rely on me over the coming months make me feel sick to my stomach.
‘It must be nice in a way,’ the nurse at the hospital