Authors: Hilary Bonner
Moira. Kelly didn’t like thinking about Moira. He really should have visited her that night. He hadn’t. It was too late now, far too late, he told himself. Once inside he went straight to the bathroom, stripped off his damp clothes which he left in an untidy pile on the floor, and wrapped himself in his big towelling dressing gown. Then he headed for the kitchen, made himself a cup of strong sweet tea which he took into the living room, where he switched on the gas fire and settled gratefully in front of it in his favourite armchair. With his free hand he switched on the radio which was more or less permanently tuned to Classic FM, Kelly’s writing and thinking music.
The journalist in him would not lie down. In his head, he went over again and again his meeting in the pub with the young man who had told him he was called Alan. The lad had been frightened. Genuinely frightened. There was no doubt about that. But on the other hand, he had also been drunk as a skunk. Alcoholic paranoia, Kelly told himself.
He sipped at his still scalding hot tea, deep in thought. Then his reverie was rudely interrupted by the phone. Kelly jumped in his chair. The telephone had a habit of making him jump at the moment, particularly if it rang late at night. Moira, he thought. Oh, shit. He reached out for the cordless receiver which was sitting next to the radio on the table alongside his chair, its battery light flickering weakly. Naturally, he had failed to put it back in its charger when he had gone out earlier that day.
The low battery did not, however, cause him a problem. He had no need to talk for long. The caller was Jennifer, Moira’s youngest daughter.
‘Mum’s been expecting you all night,’ said Jennifer, with only the slightest hint of reproach in her voice. At first, Kelly felt only relief. At least it didn’t sound as if Moira were any worse. But as Jennifer continued to speak he became immersed in the all too familiar sense of guilt.
‘You told Mum you’d be over tonight when you’d finished writing. She really wants to see you. Are you still coming?’
Kelly glanced at his watch. ‘Well, it’s so late. It’s after midnight …’
‘I know. But she can’t sleep. We tried to call you earlier, at home and on your mobile …’
Kelly squeezed his eyes tightly shut for just a few seconds. Inside his head he could see his mobile phone sitting on his desk upstairs, where he had left it earlier, and he really had no idea whether or not he had deliberately failed to take it with him on his jaunt to The Wild Dog.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, and automatically launched himself into a series of unconvincing lies. ‘I seemed to manage to let all the batteries go …’
‘You could still come over. She’s wide awake …’
Kelly took a deep breath.
‘Yes, of course,’ he responded as brightly as he could. ‘I’ll be right there. I’ve been working late. I lost track of the time, that’s all. The words were flowing for once.’
And that, of course, was the biggest lie of all. Kelly cursed himself roundly as he began the perennial
hunt for his car keys, which he realised he must have put down somewhere only minutes earlier. But Kelly never ever knew where he’d put his car keys. He found them eventually on top of the cistern in the bathroom, and cursed himself and his various inadequacies all over again.
Back behind the wheel of the little MG – Moira’s home, where she was being cared for by her three daughters, was only a couple of streets away – Kelly was suddenly in a real hurry to get there. He was hit by a major wave of guilt and remorse. This was not the first time he had promised to visit Moira and then failed to do so. But worse than ever on this occasion, by the time he had returned home he had more or less made himself forget that he had ever made the arrangement in the first place. His subconscious had been at work again, he feared.
Moira was terminally ill with cancer of the liver. And although the disease had only been diagnosed four months earlier, this notoriously fast-developing form of cancer had already brought her close to the end.
Kelly and Moira had never quite shared a home together, but they had none the less shared each other’s lives for more than ten years. Throughout that time Moira had spent only limited periods in her own house, until the last few weeks in fact. By then Kelly had found himself quite unable to cope with his partner’s illness. Almost before it began to really take a hold of her, he had realised that he could not possibly nurse her. Moira, who had been a nursing sister at Torbay Hospital, had, Kelly later realised, been aware of that from the beginning and had made it easy for him by telling him there was absolutely no
way she was going to let him attempt to care for her and, in doing so, doubtless botch up whatever life she had left to live.
That had actually made Kelly feel even more of a worm. But Moira’s daughters had promptly volunteered to share between them the task of caring for their mother in her own home until the end, and Kelly remained deeply grateful to them.
Paula, the eldest, drove down from London every week or so to spend several days with her mother, sometimes bringing her four-year-old son Dominic with her, and sometimes leaving him either with his dad, Ben, or with her mother-in-law. Lynne, the middle girl, came home each weekend from Bristol, where she was at university. And Jennifer, at barely nineteen the youngest of them, carried the biggest burden of all. She had returned to England after a gap year of travelling, following sixth form college, to find her mother in the grips of this terrible disease. Without appearing to pause for thought at all, she had promptly deferred a planned university course for another year and moved back into her mother’s home announcing that she was going to take charge of caring for Moira, which she had continued to do uncomplainingly, helped as much as possible by her sisters. Kelly thought young Jennifer was a miracle on legs. Indeed, he thought all the girls were. And they really did put him to shame.
As he pulled up outside Moira’s house, a three-bedroomed terraced job uncannily similar to his own home, even down to the angular style of the bay window at the front, Kelly leaned back in his seat and tried to prepare himself for the right sort of approach to a sick visit. He knew he had never got over the
shock of Moira’s diagnosis and the speed of her decline. Almost every day he intended to spend at least part of the evening with Moira, but one way and another, he actually seemed to be visiting her less and less. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. John Kelly cared about Moira probably as much as it was possible for him to care about anyone. It was just that he did not want to confront the grim reality of Moira’s condition, so he refused to think about it. All too often that was Kelly’s way. And it had probably been one of the main reasons why many years ago he had so casually embarked along the road that had led him to near-terminal drug and alcohol abuse. Kelly had spent far too much of his life looking for ways to obliterate reality.
He took a big, deep, long breath, stepped out of the car and made himself approach the front door, first walking through a little front garden, which was also pretty much like his own except that he knew there was not a single weed to be seen in the pristine-neat flowerbeds surrounding a rectangular patch of stone paving. On the doorstep he stood for a few seconds more, taking another deep breath, before ringing the bell. Kelly had his own key, of course, but since Moira had become ill and the girls had been there looking after her, he had stopped using it. He couldn’t explain why exactly.
Jennifer opened the door. She was a slim, pretty girl with a shock of fair hair like her mother’s, kind hazel-brown eyes, a big bright smile and long athletic limbs, who had absolutely no idea at all that she was attractive. John Kelly didn’t really notice that any more either. All he saw was one of the bravest, strongest human beings he had ever met.
She was so young and yet she was coping so well with her mother’s illness. Certainly, she had taken it upon herself to ensure that her mother’s last days were made as comfortable as was humanly possible.
She flashed her brightest smile when she saw Kelly on the doorstep. He didn’t know how she could do it. He could see the strain around those hazel eyes, and he was sure her mother could too, but Jennifer was still putting on a front.
‘I-I’m sorry,’ he muttered in greeting.
Jennifer reached up and kissed him lightly on one cheek. She was quite tall, considerably taller than her petite mother, that was for sure, but Kelly, a good six foot two in his stockinged feet, still towered over her.
‘You’re here,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s all that matters.’
‘I did mean to come earlier, Jens …’
‘I know.’
She did know too. Kelly and Jennifer had been friends from the start, from the moment he had first dated her mother. He supposed that even he was something of an improvement on her real father, a middle-class, middle England thug of a man who had systematically beaten his wife throughout their unhappy marriage. According to Moira none of the girls knew about their father’s brutality, but Kelly had never been too sure about that. One way and another, he had come to treasure his relationship with all three of them every bit as much as his relationship with their mother. Perhaps more, if he was honest. Kelly had one son, Nick, now a grown man almost thirty years old, but he had somehow contrived to miss virtually all of Nick’s childhood. Nick had been brought up almost entirely by his mother, not only
after she and Kelly had separated but also before, because Kelly had spent so much time away on stories and in the pubs and clubs of Fleet Street that he had only rarely seemed to be at home. More recently, after Nick had actively sought out his father following years of estrangement, the two men had begun to build what Kelly regarded as a very special relationship. But ironically he had seen far more of the growing up of Moira’s girls, as they moved from childhood into young womanhood, particularly Jennifer who had been only nine when her mother and Kelly had got together, than he had of his own son. And over the years they really had become like daughters to him. They had already forgiven him one hell of a lot, too.
Recently, however, he had become slightly embarrassed to be in the company of these girls he adored. He supposed that was just one manifestation of the guilt which seemed to consume his entire being throughout most of his waking hours, right now. The girls accepted him, warts and all, always had done, and had never questioned his congenital inability to deal with their mother’s illness.
Kelly followed Jennifer upstairs to Moira’s bedroom, the pair of them moving almost soundlessly on the thick pile red carpet. He knew that Moira had not been downstairs for more than a week now, although she did still manage, with some difficulty he had been told, to struggle out of bed in order to use the bathroom next to her bedroom.
Moira’s eldest daughter Paula, also a pretty, fair-haired young woman, but a little plumper than either of her sisters, was sitting by her bed. The two women were watching TV. Kelly found himself glancing
towards the screen as he entered the room. Anything other than look at Moira. An old episode of
The Vicar of Dibley
, a programme which had always been one of Moira’s favourites, flickered away on Plus. Kelly had once bought Moira the entire video set of the comedy featuring Dawn French as a village’s first woman vicar as a birthday present, and the two of them had sat up in bed one night and watched virtually the whole lot straight through – something Kelly had, rather to his surprise, found that he had enjoyed every bit as much as Moira. It had been dawn before they had finally fallen asleep, his arm around her shoulders, her head resting on his chest, with the video still running. The memory hurt. Kelly concentrated hard on the flickering screen. In her bed by the window, Moira laughed weakly. She always had had a ready laugh, but it used to be a deep rip-roaring rumble of a laugh, which had always come as something of a surprise from such a small woman. A great hip-shaking eye-watering belter of a laugh. Kelly had teased her that she had the filthiest laugh in Devon, and that had always set her off all the more.
His eyes filled at the thought.
‘Hello, John.’ Moira’s voice was even weaker than her laugh.
Shit, thought Kelly. How could anyone cope with this? What were they all supposed to do? Just sit around and wait for her to die?
Aloud he said: ‘Hello, sweetheart.’
He made himself smile and walked over to the bed where he perched on the edge and took her hand. Moira had always been pretty and all three of her daughters had inherited their mother’s looks. Her fluffy blonde hair still retained its original colour in
spite of her age and illness, and she continued to look surprisingly good even though there were dark circles beneath her eyes and her skin was pale to the point of near translucence. In fact, she looked almost beautiful. Her face was drawn, thin skin taut over exposed cheekbones, while previously Moira’s face had been quite plump, and although pretty, never beautiful. Not really. Her illness had added a sculpted look, and in the low light of the bedroom the yellowish tinge, which Kelly knew had been acquired due to liver deficiency, appeared only to give her skin a cream hue. Yes, she really had become quite tragically beautiful.
She had lost a lot of weight, of course, but she exhibited none of the usual signs of a body ravaged by cancer. That was because Moira, an experienced nurse who knew all about the illness she was bearing so gallantly, had, when she had been told the degree and extent of her cancer, opted to decline conventional treatment. Moira had believed that with her kind of cancer and the extent to which it had already destroyed her liver, her life expectancy would be much the same whether she put herself through the rigours of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, or whether she didn’t.
And both Kelly and her daughters had accepted her decision that she would rather live out her last few months without having to cope with the cruelties she knew those treatments could inflict, instead choosing to allow her illness to take its course while striving to enjoy whatever of life was left to her. Her courage so far had been extraordinary, although Kelly was bewildered sometimes by the form it took. It was Moira’s way to barely discuss her illness, and if she
did ever mention it, to do so in such a manner that she gave no indication at all that it was terminal. She knew, though. Better than any of them, she knew.