Charlie and Pearl (18 page)

PEARL

Rafting was a
n absolute
blast
.
I fell out twice and one of those times nearly got stuck under a rock but I’ve never felt so alive
.
I was high on adrenaline afterwards, pumped,
drunk with
life
.

Charlie was white as a sheet and the second we touched safe ground again he flung himself on it and refused to get up until I promised I would never make him do it again. Ever. With a cherry on top.

“Blouse” I called him, affectionately.

“Crazy adventure junkie chick” he retorted.

We decided that it had been too much fun to just go home again so we drove to the big town and dined on Thai (
whole fried
snapper
with chilli
, ginger and garlic
-
delicious) and watched a movie (Horton hears a who – a Dr Seuss adaption with Jim Carrey as the voice of the elephant, which was great because I normally can’t stand him but I didn’t have to see him – oh and which was hilarious) then we went for a walk along the beachfront walkway, arm in arm,
under the
huge Pohutukawa trees, and I told Charlie they were my favourite tree in the whole wide world, because in summer they bloomed with fat crimson red bristly flowers, quite rightly earning their reputation as New Zealand’s native Christmas tree.

The
amber
streetlights
were just blinking on.

We were both rugged up in jackets, and I could smell the spicy aftershave he wears, from an orange bottle
I now knew
. I could smell that and the smell of the salty ocean. I remember thinking that they blended together perfectly.

And that’s the last thing I remember.

CHARLIE

I have never been so scared in my entire life.

One moment we were walking along, arm in arm
as the horizon blended soft pinks and indigo
. I was feeling...proud, like any guy should with his girl, a girl who that day had showed me yet another side to herself; even though it was a side I wasn’t exactly onboard with myself.

“I’ll just stay on the shore next time and watch you” I told her.

“Sorry what’s that? I’m still a little deaf from all the girly screaming you did in my ear” she joked.

We’d eaten a nice dinner, laughed through a funny movie, and were snugly enjoying the night air. One minute I was telling her how Rangi and I used to sit on the beach at night, having snuck out after dark, and we would use twigs and pretend we were smoking, blowing the cold frosty air out like smoke. We thought we were so cool. She was laughing one second and the next she was folding into me, like a collapsing deck chair, her eyes rolled back into her head, her face whiter than white.

“Pearl!” I shouted, catching her awkwardly and half falling with her, my knee hitting the ground heavily causing
a sharp
pain to shoot up my leg. “Pearl!” I shook her; put my head to her mouth to see if I could hear her breathing like they did in the movies. I couldn’t hear anything, what else was I supposed to do? I didn’t know what to do. How could I not know what to do!

I took out my phone, called 111, shouted for an ambulance. The lady on the other end of the phone was reassuring, “Calm d
own Sir, help is on the way ok
” she said.

Someone ran over, alerted by my shouts. They knew more than helplessly stupid me, put her in the recovery position, checked her airways, cradled her head. Other people gathered.

The rest of the night is a blur of images, sights, sounds.

Flashing lights, an ambulance, stretcher. Gloves, pulses.

The drive to the hospital, beeping machines, sirens, oxygen masks. 

Doctors, nurses, fluorescent lights, plastic footsteps.

Waiting room, hard chairs, old magazines, Styrofoam cups of sweet coffee.

Confusion.

Sometime after
one
in the morning a doctor came out to see me in the waiting room. I stood up
, scared of what he might say
.

“Are you family?” he asked.

“No, I’m her boyfriend. Is she ok?”

“At the moment yes, she’s fine.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“We’re not sure at this stage. She lost consciousness for a period of time but she’s stable now. We’ll know more when we run some tests tomorrow”

“Can I see her?”

“She’s asleep right now; we’ve given her something to help her rest. I’ll get a nurse to take you through in a minute and you can sit with her, but please, don’t disturb her”

“I won’t”

“Does she have any family that we should call?”

“Her mum, I guess...but I don’t have the number”

He looked at me a little strangely. “Well, I guess all that can wait until tomorrow”

He went back through the double doors which closed behind him and a minute later a nurse stuck her head out, holding the door open.

“Come though love, but keep it down ok,
people are
sleeping”

I followed her through the doors into the ward, the lights were dimmed, I trod lightly, followed her to the cubicle down the end with a curtain drawn around it, just like the others. She opened it a crack and beckoned me through, “there’s a lazy boy you can rest on” she said, “I’m in an office over there if you can let me know when you’re leaving.”

“Do I have to? I want to stay with her all night, if that’s possible”

She looked at me, her head on the side and with pursed lips. “That’s not really normal procedure”

“Please?” I must have looked pathetic enough because she sighed.

“Ok, as long as you don’t disturb her or anyone else”

“I won’t, I promise”

She let the curtain fall closed behind her and I heard her plastic crocs walk lightly off, one slightly sticking to the floor and making a suction noise every time she lifted it. I took a deep breath, and turned to l
ook at Pearl.

She looked like Pearl.
I wasn’t quite sure what I’d been expecting but she looked just like she normally did sleeping. Maybe a little paler than normal and with some inky black smudges under her eyes, but still her.

I sat in the lazy boy for hours, just watching her breathe, memorising every curve of her face; her lips, her nose, her eyelids. I never noticed how long her eyelashes were before. I felt an urge to tickle them with my finger but I resisted. At some stage I dozed off because when I woke up it was morning, the light in the room was brighter, natural light, and I could hear every day sounds of a busy hospital muffled in the distance.

Pearl was still sleeping. “You sleep like the dead” I joked with her once.

The curtain was pulled pack and the same doctor from before entered. “Morning” he smiled briskly, and checked the machines hooked up to Pearl.

“I’m off soon” he said, “but I’ve done the handover with the next doctor and he will run some bloods, probably order a scan. We should know more today.”

“Don’t” Pearl said weakly.

“Hey you’re awake!” I was so relieved to hear her voice again.

She smiled at me, sleepily, “Hey you”

I took her hand in mine and she lifted both up to her cheek, nestling them against her skin, inhaling our scent.

“Good morning Pearl” the Doctor said, “Do you know where you are?”

She looked at him, licked her dry lips. “Hospital”

“That’s right, you had a bit of an episode last night, so we’re going to run some tests today to see if we can find out what caused it”

“No”

“I’m sorry?’

“No tests” she said firmly. “I already know what’s wrong” She turned towards me, her eyes anxious.

“I’m sorry Charlie,” she said, “I didn’t know how to tell you”

“Tell me what?”

“I have cancer”.

PEARL

“I’ll give you two a moment” said the Doctor tactfully and left the cubicle, pulling the curtain closed behind him.

Oh god. This is not how I wanted Charlie to find out. I hadn’t even decided if I wanted to Charlie to know at all. This thing we have,
whatever it was,
I had no idea how long it was going to last. There wasn’t even supposed to be a ‘thing’ in the first place!

Talk about backed into a corner.

“I’m sorry” I said again.

“I don’t understand” he said, his expression shell-shocked. “How long have you known for?”

“I found out a few months before I came here”

“Shouldn’t you be...I don’t know...having chemo
therapy or radiation
or whatever it is they do?”

I looked down at my lap, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. I didn’t like talking about something that I hadn’t even let myself think about.

“I tried chemo
, it was horrible”

He frowned,
“
but i
sn’t that the point?”

“Charlie, the
type of
cancer I have, it’s terminal. Chemo might give me a little longer but I made a decision, I want quality of life, for however long I have left.”

After the whole drama with the forced miscarriage for the ‘products of conception’, I had to have weekly blood tests and when my pregnancy hormones didn’t fall quite as fast as they expected they sent me along for a scan, just to make sure they’d ‘got everything’
.

Products of conception
? It was a baby you asshole! That’s what I should have said to the doctor
who said it in a matter of fact tone
.  But I was too numb to say anything.

Anyway, I went for the scan, sat in the waiting room with ready to pop pregnant woman all around me, laid on the bed and gasped when the woman put cold gel on my belly, and turned my face away from the scan while she checked to make sure my useless uterus was empty.

So I never saw what she saw. The first I knew anything was wrong was when my GP called me into her office.

“You have a mass” she said gravely, “on your ovaries. We need to schedule you in to have it biopsied.”

Which was unpleasant to say the least, but nothing compared to what came afterwards. Bloods, scans, more biopsies. More bloods. More scans. Till they sat me down in a room one day, only two weeks after the original scan.

“We’re so sorry” they said, “but its cancer and it has
spread
to other parts of your body”

“Spread?”

“It’s a process we call metastasis. The cancer gets into your blood stream and travels to other organs”

“Right...so...what do we do about it?”

I still had no idea about the seriousness of the situation. I thought, “Bummer, I’ll have to have another operation”. After the miscarriage I never wanted to see the inside of a hospital EVER again.

They exchanged looks. And from that look one of them obviously drew the short straw because he got to be the lucky one to tell me that the cancer was in my lungs and my liver and two of my lymph nodes.

“But not my legs?”

“Sorry?”

“Well it seems like it’s everywhere else starting with the letter L”

Ok, a poor attempt at a joke.

There was nothing they could do. They could treat it with chemo, it might prolong my life by a few months, so I tried it but it was worse even than I imagined it could ever be, I was hot like I was
burning
from the inside out, blisters, mouth sores. I thought I was going to die. Well, you know what I mean.