Page 14 of All the Things We Never Knew

Then I sat next to her, reaching out to touch her gloved hand. She gripped mine fiercely and I waited for her to speak.

Gray is sick, she said at last, with difficulty, as if the cold had numbed her lips or she could barely bring herself to voice the words. Gray is going to die.

Anna! I was appalled. Of all the things for her to tell me, this was the last I had expected. My neighbour, who I’ve seen almost every day for twenty years – that vital man, so full of life and laughter. It seemed impossible. It was the other thing I had been expecting her to tell me – or one of the other things.

After that, the words came out of her in a rush. She stopped crying, but her voice was as hoarse as if she had been screaming.

He has cancer, she told me. The tests show it is inoperable – it has spread from his pancreas to his liver. The time he has left can be measured in weeks – months at best.

Is there nothing they can do? I asked.

What she told me next surprised me almost more than her original revelation.

He’d only got one kidney, she said. He always has had – she continued – ever since I’ve known him. But it wasn’t congenital – he wasn’t born that way, although some people are apparently. He donated it. He gave it to a friend when he was twenty-two, before I met him. He doesn’t really talk about it. I always thought it was a good thing – a wonderful thing for him to have done. But now…

Now, it transpired, Gray’s body is not strong enough to withstand chemotherapy. That altruistic act as a young man has turned into a death sentence – or so it seems to her. I know very little about medical matters – I have never needed to, thank God – but I suspect the prognosis might be the same even if he had two functioning kidneys. For Anna, though, this feels like the deciding factor, the one thing she is focusing on.

There was something else, too. I could sense it in Anna’s utter dejection – the way she tilted her head and looked at me as if she was about to say something else, but didn’t. Something equally painful and perhaps even harder for her to come to terms with.

Something she is keeping to herself, at least for now.

I know about secrets. I know how they eat away at the soul in the same way cancer eats at the body – as silent, as invisible and as deadly. I know how it feels to live in fear of them being brought to light.

But I didn’t say that, or even ask many questions. I only listened to her, holding her hands as the last of the day faded, and lights began to come on in the surrounding houses.

Poor Anna. Those poor children.

NINE

ANNA

The news from Gray’s doctors came in a trio of devastating blows, so powerful that they felt almost physical.

Yes, it’s cancer.

It’s advanced and inoperable.

Unfortunately chemotherapy won’t be possible.

Although the news was delivered with tact, sensitivity and compassion, it left me bludgeoned, almost unable to catch my breath.

We left the oncologist’s office together, a sheaf of printed leaflets stuffed into my handbag: advice, information, support, details of people we could contact and people who would contact us. I gripped Gray’s hand, feeling the sweat on my palm slippery against his skin.

‘Are you okay, Anna?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I lied, forcing a smile. ‘It’s a shock. But I’m okay. I’ve got to be okay. It’s not like there’s another option. How are you feeling?’

‘I want to get drunk.’ I looked at him. His face was pale in the thin March sunlight, his eyes almost feverishly bright. ‘Completely arseholed. And then maybe do a couple of lines. And then…’

He didn’t finish, but I knew what he was thinking. Have an absolutely epic shag. Except the person he wanted to do that with wasn’t me.

‘You’re not going to, are you?’ I asked.

‘Course not. I’m going to go into the office and talk to Carl.’

His business partner. I knew that Gray had mentioned he wasn’t well, was having some tests done. But there was no point in scaring the horses, he’d said. No point in preparing people for the worst until we knew what the worst was.

Now we did. I pictured the bright, edgy converted warehouse in Soho, Gray and Carl’s team perching expectantly on their desks with Stanley mugs of coffee, called for an all-staff meeting. Has someone been promoted? they’d be wondering. Will they be making redundancies? Are we moving offices?