Freia Lockhart’s Summer of Awful: How Not to Keep it Together When Your World Falls Apart

From one o’clock onwards, Dad nips to Mum’s room every five minutes to see if she’s back yet. He’s led back from his fifth trip by an exasperated-looking nurse.

“Just stay put please, Mr Lockhart,” she says, guiding him to the couch in front of the TV. “I promise someone will come and get you as soon as your wife is back.”

“Sorry,” says Dad, but his eyes are resentful. It’s the same expression Ziggy gets when Mum forces him to agree not to do something stupid, like jumping off the roof into next door’s pool.

I try to ignore Dad’s incessant foot tapping and sighing for the next forty minutes. I’ve exhausted the magazines and moved on to a jigsaw that I’m beginning to suspect is made up of assorted pieces from two separate puzzles, unless there’s a Jungle Book story in which Mowgli meets Mona Lisa that I don’t know about.

Finally, a woman wearing a pink Volunteer badge comes to get us. On the way to Mum’s room she introduces herself as Jenny.

“Are you going to be looking after my mum?” I ask, trying to ascertain how much patient care volunteers might be responsible for.

Jenny laughs. “Don’t worry, the doctors and nurses take care of all the medical business. We volunteers are here for the non-technical stuff – foot rubs and hair brushing, someone to chat to, that sort of thing.” She stops outside Mum’s room. “She’s still groggy from the anaesthetic, so don’t worry if she seems a bit out of it. She’s got a drip in her hand and there’s a drain under her right arm – it looks scary, but it’s all normal after an operation like this. The nurse will be along in a minute to chat to you.” She leaves us at the door with a cheery wave.

Dad hesitates for a moment before going in. The curtain is drawn around Mum’s bed.

“Do you think we can just open it?” he whispers. “Or will that nurse come and tell me off again?”

“Terence?” Mum’s voice is hoarse and muffled but, as soon as she says his name, Dad pulls back the curtain and moves like lightning to the bed.

He leans down to kiss her, carefully avoiding the tube that snakes from the right sleeve of her hospital gown to a plastic bag below, where yellowish liquid tinged with drops of blood is accumulating. Mum does her best to smile but her eyes give away that she’s in pain. She holds out her left arm to me and I go to the other side of the bed and hug her as well as I can without getting tangled in the drip.

“Good afternoon, Gene,” says an efficient voice from the doorway. Dad’s nemesis nurse motions for him to move away from the bed so she can take Mum’s pulse. “I’m Janet O’Toole, the nurse-in-charge this afternoon. Dr Bynes will be along shortly to talk to you about the operation, but according to your notes everything went to plan.”

Dad gives his first genuine smile for the day. “When do you think she’ll be able to come home, Janet? Will she be out by new year?”

“When the doctor says so, Mr Lockhart. Let’s not forget that your wife has just come out of surgery. Our first concern is for her health, not your social plans.”

“That’s not … I didn’t mean …” Dad flounders. Ordinarily, Mum would jump in and say something in Dad’s defence, but she’s closed her eyes.

Nurse O’Toole gives us a look that says, Nursing Staff: 1, Patient’s Family: 0, and leaves the room.

When Dr Bynes appears twenty minutes later she’s back in her stilettos and freshly made-up. If I’d just had surgery, I’d be furious if my surgeon kept me waiting while she gussied herself up, but Mum either doesn’t mind or hasn’t noticed how long it’s been.

“It all went extremely well,” says Dr Bynes before anyone asks. “Although I’m afraid a mastectomy was necessary after all. There was another small tumour behind the one we knew about, and some microcalcification near the chest wall, but I’m confident that we got all of it.”

Mum nods and raises her right hand up to her chest, as if she wants to check that Dr Bynes isn’t playing a prank on her. She only makes it halfway before gasping with pain. Next to me, Dad flinches.

“That arm’s going to be out of action for a little while,” says Dr Bynes, taking Mum’s hand and lowering it to the bed again. “Anyway, it’s not all bad news. As we discussed last week, a mastectomy means that your post-operative treatment should be minimised. We’ll have the results of the biopsy back from pathology tomorrow, so we can talk more about it then, and about your options for reconstruction.”

“Well, depending on the biopsy results and how Gene’s feeling, she should only need a few days rest before she’s fit enough to go home, but she’ll have to take it easy for at least a couple of weeks. There’ll be no housework, no cooking and, preferably, not too much activity at all.”

“Don’t worry,” says Mum. “Freia will look after things at home. Won’t you, Fray?”

She smiles proudly, showing off her capable daughter to her capable doctor. Suddenly, the job of keeping Dad and Ziggy and the house in one piece feels much bigger than just rearranging the names on the chore roster. When I realise that the three of them are waiting for me to answer, I nod. And keep nodding until Dr Bynes begins to look uncomfortable and turns back to Mum.

“I’ll stop by before I leave today to see how you’re going, Gene. You get as much sleep as you can, and call the nurse straightaway if you’re in pain. We don’t need any martyrs here.” Mum nods and gives her a weak smile. “And you two,” says Dr Bynes, nodding to me and Dad as she stands to leave, “should get going. You can come back during visiting hours this evening.”

After Dr Bynes leaves, I move out of the way so Dad can sit closer to Mum. The two of them whisper back and forth for a couple of minutes. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I get the feeling it’s Mum who’s comforting Dad, not the other way around.

On the drive home Dad’s acting weird, even by his standards. Every time we stop at a red light he gives me a massive grin. At first I think he’s just happy that Mum made it through the operation okay, but when he starts asking random questions about what I’ve got planned for the rest of the day and whether I need any help getting my first batch of brownies to Jay on time, I know Mum’s told him to do it.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You don’t have to pretend to be interested just because Mum’s not around.”

“Don’t worry about it. You’re you and Mum’s Mum. I don’t need both of you stickybeaking.”

Dad exhales loudly, as if the time bomb between us has just been defused. “Okay. But you know if there’s anything you want to talk about–”

When we get in Dad calls Grandma Thelma and tells her that they operated on the right bits and Mum’s doing fine. Then Gran has her usual rant at him about how he and Mum should get mobile phones. I can tell because he responds with all the lines that he’s heard Mum use: they have no one to call but each other and Gran, mobiles are expensive and unnecessary, no one needs to be contactable twenty-four hours a day. I notice he leaves out Mum’s main argument, which is that the electromagnetic fields from mobiles give you cancer. When Dad finally manages to get off the phone (by lying that I’m waiting for a lift to a friend’s place) he says that he and Boris have a date with his new Bach CD in his study and heads to my room to fetch his cat. Finally, something feels normal around here.

The reason I’ve been hanging near the phone is to check the answering machine in case Dan called while we were at the hospital, but there are no messages. Perhaps he’s waiting for me to call? I mean, if one of his parents had just had surgery, I’d want to know if Dan was okay (and the parent, of course, but mainly Dan), so this doesn’t count as Hysterical Girlfriend behaviour, right?

There’s no answer at Dan’s house so I dial his mobile number, even though I’m not meant to call it from the home phone unless it’s an emergency. He answers on the third ring.

“Oh yeah! The, um, it … thing was today, wasn’t it? That’s great news. Listen, can I call you back in an hour or so? I’m with Dad.”

Well, that explains the weirdness in his voice, at least. “Sure. We’re going back to the hospital when Ziggy gets home, but–”

“Excellent, I’ll talk to you later then.” He hangs up before I can even say what time we’ll be home.

One thing about having been exposed to every “women’s interest” magazine on the newsagent’s shelf while I was tagging along behind the Bs is that I’ve read eleventy-thousand articles about the psychology of the male mind, what men say versus what they really mean, how to tell when a guy is lying to you, et cetera, et cetera. I remind myself of the advice given to scores of women who write to Dr Love to find out why their boyfriend/husband/crush is acting less than thrilled to hear from them: don’t read anything into it.

All I have to do is keep myself busy for an hour and then Dan’ll call me from somewhere out of earshot of Dr Phil, and I’ll tell him about Mum and he’ll say something reassuring and everything will be okay again.

I should use the time to make the brownies to drop off to Jay tomorrow morning, but for once I’m not in the mood for baking. Perhaps a little boogie break would help?

It’s dusk when I wake up, still wearing my headphones. I’d treated myself to a little Kylie reminiscing but, instead of making me feel better, it had the opposite effect. Dancing round my room to Kylie Minogue’s Greatest Hits album used to be my best mood-lifter (seriously, I defy you to stay mopey while disco roboting to “Can’t get you out of my head”) but I haven’t listened to it much since I started hanging out with Dan and Siouxsie and Steph and Vix. Their taste is more punk than pop and while they all know about my fondness for Ms Minogue, it’s not something we talk about. Anyway, today it seemed like Kylie was the only cure for my ills so I dug it out from under the pile of cooler stuff Dan had burned onto CDs for me.

It started off well enough – I did a few high kicks and shook my imaginary gold hotpants for a couple of tracks – but then I remembered what Mum had said about her and Kylie having something in common now and I kind of lost it. I reminded myself that Kylie was now cancer-free, but then I got to thinking about how she was much younger than Mum when she was diagnosed, and how she could afford the absolute-best medical team and best treatment, which Mum definitely can’t, especially with me and Ziggy to support. And then I started crying and I couldn’t stop, and then I felt as if I’d run a marathon and I fell asleep. My bedside clock says it’s now 6.18. I was asleep for hours.

I go to Dad’s study to tell him we should get going for the hospital, but the only sign of life there is Boris’s swishing tail. He follows me to the kitchen where I see a note on the table, written in Dad’s barely legible scrawl.

Hope you slept well. Zig and I have gone to see Mum. Will pick up something for dinner on the way home.

Dad

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