Gallery Whispers

13

'Here, take this. You look as though you need it.'.Bob handed his wife a huge vodka and tonic, ice and lemon fighting to break the bubbling surface near the brim of the crystal tumbler.

'Oh I do, my love. How do I need it.' Barefoot, she leaned back against the kitchen work-surface, and took a mouthful of the strong mixture. 'Are the boys asleep?'

'Jazz is. Mark's reading.' He took a deep breath, reading her silence.

'Bad, is it?' he asked at last.

She nodded, and sipped again at her drink. 'It's bad, all right. Poor Olive. Poor Neil. Poor kids. Olive has lung cancer, with at least one secondary, in her lymph glands. They'll give her a scan at the Oncology Clinic to determine whether it's spread any further than that.

'Honey,' she said, bitterly, 'it's at times like this I feel thankful that I work in pathology. I don't think I could cope if I had to hand down death sentences on a daily basis.'

He threw back his head, exhaling a great gasp of air. 'Oh dear Christ,' he exclaimed, filling up with blind, helpless anger. 'Olive and Neil Mcllhenney are as nice a couple as you'll meet in a day's march.

They adore each other, and those kids of theirs are a pair of wee gems.

What the fuck have they done to deserve this? 'Does she have any hope?' he asked.

'Depends on what the scan shows. If there are no other metastases, then clearly her chances will be better. I'm no expert on current treatments, but I do know the stats. They show that the great majority of people with this type of cancer, at this stage of development, die within a couple of years.

'However, being as positive as I can, the available figures only show the position as it was about five years ago. That's how long it takes for the statistical picture to emerge. Against that, the oncologists, the drug companies and the clinical researchers are re-writing the book on cancer every day. I dare say I could connect to the Internet right now and find a whole list of treatments for lung cancer that I've never heard of before.'

Bob turned down the heat on the rice and on the marinera sauce, crossed to the fridge and poured himself a drink as big as the one he had mixed for his wife. As an afterthought, he topped up her glass with vodka.

'Is there anything we can do to help them?' he asked.

'You can give Neil tomorrow afternoon off, for openers, so that he can go to the clinic.'

'Jesus, I'll send him on compassionate leave as of this minute.'

'No,' said Sarah quickly. 'He must be the judge of that. Olive's teaching career will be on hold for a long time, at the very best, but it's important for them both, from a morale point of view, that he continues to work as normally as he can. Neil picked that up right away.

'One thing did occur to me, though. Do you know what the grandparent situation is?'

His forehead furrowed, characteristically, as he thought. 'Neil's father's dead. His mother has pretty bad arthritis. She lives in a sheltered flat. Olive's mother isn't around any more. She went off to England with another bloke years ago. Her dad's a civil servant; works in the Benefits Agency up in Aberdeen.

'Brothers and sisters?'

'Olive has a brother; he's a soldier, based in Aldershot. Neil has a brother called Charlie and a sister called Mavis. He's in Australia and she's in Canada.'

'Right. In those circumstances, the most helpful thing that we could do for them is to look after Lauren and Spencer as the need arises. If this disease is treatable, it'll be done mostly on an outpatient basis, and Olive could be pretty sick for a day or two after each session. It'd be best if the kids didn't see that. So if there are no handy relatives, why don't we offer to put them up?'

'Absolutely.' He turned back towards the hob, and their supper.

'Life can be a bitch, Sarah, can it not,' he said quietly as she came to stand beside him. 'Until ten minutes ago, I was getting quietly worked up about my daughter putting her career before her relationship with Andy.

'Something like this puts that well in perspective. It makes me feel guilty, too, about how lucky I am. If everyone got what they deserve, then how would my life have panned out, and Neil's…'