Best of Friends (36 page)

Ladysmith cosmetics were Irish made, cruelty-free and the future of beauty products, the ad promised. Lizzie phoned up and discovered that working three evenings a week she could, incredibly, match the money she made in the surgery—if she sold enough Ladysmith products, of course. She’d also have to go on a short training course and buy her own starting kit for the beauty demonstrations. She was sent the registration form, then lost her courage and put it on the mantelpiece. She’d economise for a while to see if that helped and then, if necessary, she’d sign up. Lizzie didn’t really want to have to work nights too, but unless she found some other way to save money, she might have to. It seemed like another symptom of how badly she managed her life.

One glorious morning, the second week of June, Sally and Steve Richardson met Sally’s oncology team to hear what they already knew in their hearts: her bone cancer was frighteningly aggressive and spreading rapidly. Pain management and palliative care were all they could offer her now. Sally’s favourite oncologist, the dapper Mr. Patel, was so very sorry but he knew she appreciated hearing the truth. She would not recover.

Leaving the hospital arm in arm with Steve, Sally decided that Jack and Daniel needed a paddling pool. She also wanted to get new tapes for their high-tech video camera. She’d been writing a diary for when the children were older, and it was nearly finished, and yet she still felt there was so much she wanted to tell them. About how much she loved them, how she adored their father, how she’d enjoyed life and, oh, so many other things. A video recording suddenly made perfect sense, because then the boys would see her smiling face and they wouldn’t just see the tear-stained diary and imagine her sobbing with grief at leaving them. She didn’t want their memories of her to be steeped in misery. If they had video tapes, her face, smiling and full of love, would stare at them from the screen and they’d remember the real happy Sally, their wonderful mum.

As they walked to the car, she broached another difficult subject. She and Steve couldn’t hide her illness from the children anymore. There was a therapist who specialised in bereavement counselling for small children. There was also, she added gently, a therapist from the same practice who specialised in adult bereavement counselling. Steve gripped her arm more tightly. He might think about it later for the children, but he didn’t need it, he said.

Wouldn’t a weekend away be nice? Just the four of them, somewhere romantic with babysitting services so that after the boys had gone to bed they could gaze into each other’s eyes over dinner and talk.

It sounded wonderful, Sally said.

They went to a child-friendly hotel in Connemara and had a glorious weekend.

“No amount of counselling could improve on this,” Steve told his wife as they walked along the coast with their arms round each other, watching the boys search rock pools for tiny fish.

“You’re right,” Sally agreed, her face lifted towards the sun. “They should market the west of Ireland as a counselling alternative,” she added, clinging tightly to Steve’s tall frame. “Phone the tourist board and tell them when we get home.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Steve. “Your wish is my command.”

Afterwards, Steve said it was incredible how happy Sally had been for the whole of the weekend, playing with Jack and Daniel on the private beach of their hotel and enjoying romantic meals with him, as relaxed and calm as if they had a lifetime of such holidays ahead of them.

“She told me her guardian angel was watching over us all, giving us one final beautiful memory,” he said. “She said that we were to remember the good times and not the bad ones to come.”

It was as if Sally knew the time was near. That glorious weekend was the last carefree time she got to share with Steve, Jack and Daniel. When they returned, Sally’s condition deteriorated and only a few days after she’d played on a windswept Connemara beach with her family, she moved into a hospice.

Steve and Delia were at her side when she died in her sleep.

nineteen

F
unerals, Lizzie thought, should be confined to wet, miserable days. It felt so wrong to bury anyone on a wonderful day at the beginning of July when the sun gilded the church spire and beamed down on the black-clad shoulders of sombre people hurrying through the church door. Burying vibrant, life-loving Sally Richardson on the sort of day she’d have loved seemed doubly wrong.

Lizzie slid into a seat alongside Erin and Greg, and nodded hello. Then, she glanced up the aisle and her eyes hit upon the solid, grim shape of the coffin. It was hard to imagine that Sally lay cold inside.

Like most people of her generation, Lizzie had been to many funerals and was familiar with the routines of death, but the sight of a coffin still had the power to shock her. A once-living person was lying there and would soon be in the ground, covered with earth, locked away in the cold. She would not want that for herself, she decided, then felt a wave of guilt at such a selfish thought at Sally’s funeral.

She forced herself to look away from the coffin and saw a small boy sitting on the edge of the front row, feet dangling from the seat, already bored with this whole business. It was Jack, Sally’s older son. His father’s arm was around him but the boy didn’t want to be held; he wanted to run up and down the aisle and explore. And from now on, his mother wouldn’t be there for him to run back to.

Lizzie felt her breath catch in her throat at the thought. What had Steve told the children? “Mummy’s gone to heaven but she’s looking down on you?”

Sally had tried to tell them that she wouldn’t be coming back and had worked so hard on that diary for when they were older.

“If I had daughters, I’d be able to include more advice,” she’d laughed wryly the day she told Lizzie what she was doing. “I’d say, ‘Value yourself and remember you are beautiful and never leap into bed with a guy just because he says, “You would if you loved me.” ’ It’s harder to give advice to boys, Lizzie.”

Hard, Lizzie thought, considering Debra, wasn’t the word.

She glanced up as the Bartons arrived and took a pew a few rows further up from hers. Abby, looking drawn and washed out in a charcoal suit, went in first and sank to her knees, followed by Tom and Jess. Lizzie had met Abby briefly in the bank earlier in the month and had been startled to see the change in her. Abby definitely looked thinner and somehow older; the planes of her face were more defined. Lizzie had overheard rumours in the surgery about Tom and Abby being on the verge of splitting up, but she hated malicious gossip and had ignored it. Abby had chatted merrily enough to her that day in the bank and, if there was a sad story of marriage break-up, she’d kept it well hidden. Now, seeing Abby’s drawn face, she wondered if the rumours were true.

Sitting on the hard pew between her parents, Jess stared anywhere but at Steve and the children. She knew she couldn’t bear to look at the boys’ confused little faces.

She remembered months before, when Sally had first been ill and the boys were staying at Lyonnais, and Daniel had woken up early and crept into Jess’s bedroom, delighted with himself for thinking up this new adventure.

“Story,” he’d demanded, dropping a book onto Jess and clambering into the bed beside her. “Read me a story, Dess.” She had got so close to them. Those poor little boys.

Jess knew she’d cry if she thought about how they didn’t have their mum anymore. It was so sad. How could her stupid parents watch Sally’s perfect family fall apart because of something beyond their control and still not understand that their own family didn’t have to fall apart? Couldn’t they see the difference? Sally and Steve would have done anything to stay together. Mum and Dad didn’t seem to want to bother. They could have gone to a counsellor or someone. Lorraine in school’s parents did that. Lorraine had even had to go once to a family session and they’d sorted everything out and made it work. Granted, Jess didn’t know what had been wrong between Lorraine’s parents, but you could sort most things out.

Mrs. Lyons, the guidance counsellor and social studies teacher, said that at lectures on drugs and alcohol. “Never feel there isn’t anyone you can talk to. There is. Your parents care for you. If you imagine you’re alone in the world, then nobody gets the opportunity to help you. But if you look for help and share the problem, then you’ll realise that you’re not alone.”

Steph hated Mrs. Lyons. “She looks straight at me when she talks about smoking being bad for you,” Steph grumbled.

Steph was smoking lots more now.

While Jess secretly thought Mrs. Lyons talked sense, she also wanted to know why adults made such a big deal about how you could discuss anything and sort it out and then, in their own lives, refused to talk. It was one rule for teenagers and another rule for parents, she thought angrily. Like in everything else.

Sometimes, she wanted to scream at Mum and Dad to stop behaving like kids and make up. Didn’t they know what this was doing to her?

The silence in the car on the way to the church had been stifling, but the atmosphere was almost as bad when they spoke to each other.

“Those boys are too young to go to the funeral,” Dad had said, almost as if he was daring Mum to contradict him, which she did.

“Sally would have wanted them there,” Mum replied sharply. “She was their mother.”

“Mothers don’t always do what’s right,” Dad snapped back.

Shut up! Jess wanted to yell. This is a sad day. Stop arguing about stupid things! But she said nothing, and chewed a bit of nail on her index finger as she stared out the back window. Oliver had said he’d come to support her but she’d said no, she’d have enough trouble keeping the peace as it was and wouldn’t have time to talk to him. Now she was sorry she’d said that. Oliver holding her hand would have been comforting. She’d finally told Mum and Dad about him, which was a relief. Dad had been cool about her having a boyfriend and seemed to like Oliver when they’d met. Mum, on the other hand, had gone all mental and paranoid, and now seemed even keener on knowing where Jess was every moment of every day. What did Mum think she and Oliver were going to get up to?

At the start of the ceremony, Jess coped by just not listening. She kept her mind elsewhere, thinking of how she’d go to the refuge in the afternoon and see Twiglet. There was something comforting about cuddling his wriggling little body, letting him lick her face before he’d struggle to get down so he could bite and pull at her socks. At five months old, he was addicted to worrying people’s socks, and thought it was the best game ever, even better than getting an empty sock and having a tug of war with another dog.

“You love him, don’t you?” Jean had said last time Jess was at the refuge, when she was exhausted from helping scrub down the cattery, but still found the energy to play with Twiglet and another, smaller puppy, Conker.

Jess nodded.

“He’ll need to be rehomed soon,” Jean added, watching her face.

Jess said nothing, although she knew Jean was saying that she could take Twiglet home if her parents agreed. Her parents didn’t want a dog. There was no point asking. They didn’t want a family either. Jess knew that when people split up, they had to move houses. If they could only afford a small house, there’d be no room for Twiglet.

At home, she sometimes pretended her toy sausage dog was Twiglet and she talked to him in her room at night.

“Are you cosy enough, Twiglet? Would you like another doggy biscuit?”

The sausage dog version of Twiglet would gaze up at her with its shiny black button eyes. He wasn’t anywhere near as good as the real thing, but he still helped.

Four seats back, Erin cradled her hand round her growing belly. She loved doing this, reminding herself of the new life inside, a whole new being with a heartbeat. Despite her joy over this, it felt so unfair that she could feel this new life moving inside her and Sally’s had been snuffed out.

Who decided who got to live or die? Why were good people taken away? What was the point?

She sniffed and realised that she’d forgotten tissues. Greg’s big hand found one of hers and clasped it tightly. He knew how she felt: he felt the same.

“We’ve got so much and Steve has lost her. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Erin,” Greg had said the night before as they lay in their new bed in the new-smelling apartment, curled close, his hand resting on her belly.

“I couldn’t bear to leave you,” Erin said sadly. “That would be the hardest thing of all: leaving you when I love you so much. It would break my heart.”

There was a certain peace to be had in the ritual of a funeral, Lizzie had usually found. The combination of the familiar prayers and the soft yet powerful way the words sounded when a large group of people chanted them was calming. Death was a part of life, the whole process seemed to say. We are burying this person but, one day, it will be you, and the people who love you will do you the honour of mourning you. The cycle of life goes on. But today, the prayers and the priest’s words did not have the ring of truth for Lizzie. Today, they felt all wrong. The old traditions could not do justice to Sally.

Then, Steve got up to speak.

Lizzie felt that tender ache in her heart that she used to get when Joe and Debra were little children and had to perform in the school nativity play. Her heart would swell with the hope that they were brave enough to get through it all. Now she felt exactly the same for Steve.

He looked broken, she thought as she watched him stand behind the pulpit, holding a few sheets of paper. Everyone else in the church was tanned and healthy from the superb weather, while Steve had the pallor of one who’d spent many hours inside. The sun had hurt Sally’s eyes and, towards the end, in the sanctuary of the hospice, she’d been too frail to want to be wheeled outside to the tiny walled garden.

Lizzie had visited Sally there once but it had been a short visit. Sally, her eyes dulled with morphine, which in the end had been necessary, had only been able to remain awake for a few minutes. On the way back to her car, Lizzie had walked through the walled garden and sobbed.