Page 59 of While I’m Still Here

His mouth twitches at the surname, but he doesn't retreat from the question. “You asked whether I was scared. You didn't ask whether fear is the only thing left afterwards.”

I shut up.

Marcus folds his arms loosely over his chest, and for the first time since we started talking, I find myself looking directly at the left side of it without immediately feeling guilty. I can't see the scar beneath his shirt. There is nothing announcing what happened to him, nothing that would have made me look twice if I'd passed him in Tesco. He just looks like a man standing beside a kettle, which feels absurdly important somehow.

“Is it?” I ask. “The only thing left?”

“No.”

Before I can ask anything else, Janet calls everyone back towards the chairs. Around us, paper cups are being thrown away, and conversations are beginning to break apart. Marcus picks up his paper cup, drops it into the bin and starts to move away, but the question that has been sitting underneath every other question for four days rises into my throat before I can stop it. “Marcus?” He turns. “Does it get better?”

He doesn't answer immediately, and I am glad. I don't want the automatic response or the version people give because a newly diagnosed woman is standing in front of them and surely the decent thing is to promise that everything gets better eventually. Marcus looks at me properly, and I can almost see him sorting through whatever answer experience has given him, deciding how much of it is truth and how much is fear.

Then he nods. “Yes.”

My shoulders loosen by an amount so small I probably wouldn't notice if I hadn't spent four days carrying them somewhere near my ears. “Okay.”

Marcus gives me a small nod in return. “Okay.”

Then he walks back towards the circle and takes the chair by the window. I stay beside the kettle for a few seconds longer, holding a cup of tea I no longer want and staring at the back of a man I didn't know existed an hour ago.

I've spent the last four days surrounded by people who love me.

Colin is trying to make sure I never sit through an appointment alone. Mum has assembled fourteen people and an unidentified Carol into a digital army that appears prepared to invade my life if my oncologist gives the order. Danny has decided the most respectful thing he can possibly do is continue sexually harassing me about spreadsheets because I asked him not to look at me like I was dying.

They're giving me exactly what they know how to give.

I love them for it, but none of them has ever sat in a room and been told they have breast cancer, apart from my mum.

Marcus has.

He found a lump beneath his nipple and ignored it because nobody had ever taught him that breast cancer was something he needed to consider. He sat in rooms full of women and pink leaflets and photographs of female bodies while trying to understand what was happening to his own. He went through surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy in a world where even the name of his illness probably made people assume he was there for somebody else. Then, after all of it, he came back to a support group he doesn't particularly like because when he first walked through a door like this there wasn't another man sitting on the other side of it.

Not because he enjoys talking about cancer or because surviving turned him into some inspirational saint with a motivational quote tattooed across his arse… he did it because he remembers.

Something about that lodges itself beneath my ribs.

I finally throw my tea away and walk back towards my chair. Before I sit, I glance towards the window. Marcus listens while Janet speaks, one ankle resting over the opposite knee, his expression serious enough that anyone who didn’t know better might assume he’s irritated to be here. I know slightly better now. As though he can feel me staring, he turns his head, and our eyes meet. Marcus raises one eyebrow, and I immediately look away and sit down beside Janet, suddenly extremely interested in the aggressively pink leaflet on the chair beside me.

Fuck.

I've had cancer for four days, and apparently my vagina has decided this is an excellent time to develop a crush… not me, though; I’m too emotionally constipated to even think about it.

Colin’s waiting outside when I emerge fifty-eight minutes after he left me. He’s leaning against his car holding a takeaway coffee and looking at his phone. The second he sees me, he straightens, and I know he’s trying to read my face before I even reach him.

“Well?” he asks.

“Hated it.”

“Obviously,” he laughs. “I wouldn’t expect anything else.”

“There were pink cupcakes.”

“The bastards.”

“Pink flowers.”

“Unforgivable.”