I know these two men. What are they keeping from me?
‘Can I take you for a drive, Cam?’ Hugh asks, leaning forward. They don’t go for beers any more. Advanced dementia and alcohol are a bad combination. Often, on Sundays, Hugh has turned up, helped Cam into the wheelchair and into his car and they just drive, Springsteen and The Who blaring.
Cam eyes him thoughtfully. Though ‘thoughtfully’ is becoming a problematic word. His thoughts aren’t what they used to be. He fixates on things. He misunderstands. His conversation is closing in, like the four walls he spends most of his time staring at. Every sentence exhausts him – so many words on the tip of his tongue, hardly any to hand when he wants them. He can read aloud, disjointedly. It’s as if the English professor within him is clinging to words for dear life, but he can’t comprehend what he reads, because so much of what he’s read is immediately forgotten. Even reading to Charlie the other day I noticed he repeated whole pages so many times that Charlie became incensed and threw the book across the room. It undid me. My luminous husband and teacher, losing his language.
‘Go for a drive, Cam,’ I suggest. ‘It will do you good to get out.’
He looks at me and glowers. ‘It will do you good for me to get out,’ he says coldly. The words sting. This whole time, the one thing I’ve been really proud of is my patience with him, right from that first incident at the work barbecue when he let Charlie wander to the water’s edge and I held my anger back. It’s getting harder by the day not to be abrupt with him when he asks the same thing for the hundredth time in a row, or now that he’s having uncharacteristically angry outbursts like this. I remind myself that this is the disease talking. Not the person.
‘Cam,’ I start to say, hiding how much it hurts.
‘Don’t you want a husband who works?’
‘We’re fine, Cam. We have income protection insurance.’
He narrows his eyes. ‘I don’t mean working in a job. I mean someone like him!’ He points at Hugh. ‘He can drive and talk and make you laugh.’
‘Oh, that’s a bit of a stretch,’ Hugh says.
His attempt at humour falls flat, as do most ideas in this house in recent weeks. It’s wearing me down, but I’m committed to giving Cam every shred of patience that I can dredge. I kneel down beside his chair and take his hand and put it to my face. ‘I don’t want anyone else, Cam. There will never be anyone else.’
Try to remember. Please.
That’s the problem, though. He won’t remember it. We’ll repeat this conversation, without a single word of it sticking and, even if he believes me when I say it in real time, he’ll forget it the moment it’s passed. It’s hopeless.
‘Tell him, Hugh,’ I hear myself pleading, as if the information will somehow sink in with two of us on one.
Hugh looks like I’ve thrown him in the deep end with no warning. Cam and I watch him, waiting for his magic words. ‘She loves you, mate,’ he says earnestly, after a pause. ‘She’ll always love you. End of story.’
End of story. He directs that bit to me. It’s tragic that my love life finishes here. In my more optimistic moments, I imagine I’ll go on and be a mum and have a career and have friends. I’ll travel and read and hopefully write again if I can ever find the will or the courage. I’ll find things to enjoy, I hope. Life might even be nice one day.
But I’ll always love Cam. His absence will be the eternal backdrop to everything else I do until the day I die. The second half of my life stretches so far into the distance it’s out of sight across the horizon. Me here. Cam gone.
No part two.
No sequel.
It’s agony already.
28
Last thing I remember, I had my head in my hands, sitting beside Hugh on the steps of the beach house, each gathering momentous thoughts as waves crashed hypnotically over the rise. I’d been wrangling with more conflicting emotions than I’d have thought were humanly possible to cram into one body.
After thirty-six hours without sleep and four years without peace, safe in the company of the man who’s been beside me through so much, I must have succumbed to . . . everything. I’m disconcerted to wake, still sitting on the steps, with a cricked neck, my head resting where it definitely shouldn’t be: in Hugh Lancaster’s lap. It’s disorienting, except for one thing. Unconscious Kate is a liability.
I can feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder, which he removes as I stir and struggle upright, wondering why he didn’t wake me or move me. I must look a picture . . . definitely not like a person who is out to impress a potential love interest.
Why am I thinking about love interests?
And why plural?
‘Tried to wake you,’ he explains. ‘You were a dead weight.’
Flattering.
‘You don’t look good . . .’ he adds.
Okay, let’s agree and move on. ‘What time is it?’ I ask.
‘About midnight.’
Oh! I’m hungry and cold and uncomfortable and anxious and unsettled and – very confused.
‘Why don’t you change into something warmer, while I stir the fire and make some hot chocolate?’
Solid plan, as usual.
There’s a lamp on downstairs, but the rest of the house is in darkness. As I stand up, I’m wobbly on my feet, woozy with exhaustion.
Hugh instinctively grabs my legs and looks up at me from the step. ‘Sorry,’ he says, taking his hands off just as quickly, as if he’s accidentally touched a flame. Is it because we work together, or—
I’d take it as a compliment except I’m too busy trying to work out how the heat from his fingers has lingered on my skin like a phantom touch. I’ve clearly been reading too much vintage Danielle Steel.
Upstairs, I sift through the bag of clothes I bought from the op shop and find a deliciously soft, cream mohair jumper and a pair of black leggings, even though they trigger Mum’s ‘leggings aren’t pants’ speech in my mind. I throw my hair, which is even more untamed than usual in the humidity, into a high bun the way I used to do when I was a carefree teenager. Before The Unravelling . . .
That’s how Grace and I always describe the period immediately following Cam’s diagnosis. It’s become one of our labels, and we apply it every time things go badly in either of our lives.
As I come back downstairs, I’m greeted by a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hallmark movie. Hugh stokes the fire as it roars to life. We could almost be stranded in a log cabin in the wilderness, holed up in the snow together for days. And if we follow the Hallmark formula . . .
‘What are you thinking about?’ he asks me.
‘Reinvention,’ I say.
I don’t know why that word pops into my head. Maybe it’s the wholesome scene before me. Maybe it’s the bad dreams and interrupted sleep. Maybe The Reinvention is an actual thing, the natural next step after The Unravelling. It never occurred to me that it could exist, and that one nice event could trigger an upward spiral of lovely and beautiful life changes leading towards a Happily Ever After, Mark II – whether or not a man is involved. But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual.