Page 67 of While I’m Still Here

“We've known each other for eight days.”

“Exactly.” Bea lowers her hands enough to look at me between her fingers. Her cheeks are pink now, eyes watering from laughing. “Fucking Nigel.”

Despite myself, I laugh.

It catches me slightly off guard.

I laugh more than people seem to assume I do, but there hasn't been much about this conversation that should be funny. I've been watching Bea absorb information she wishes she didn't need, trying to give her enough truth to make the unknown smaller without handing her my experience as though hers will be identical, and now she's sitting opposite me crying with laughter because I named a surgical drain Nigel.

“Why Nigel?” she demands when she has recovered enough to speak.

“I genuinely don't know.”

“There must have been a reason.”

“I was on morphine. I'm not convinced reason was heavily involved.”

“You looked at a tube full of bodily fluid and thought, That's a Nigel?”

“Apparently.”

She starts laughing again, and this time I don't even bother trying not to join her. “Did you only have one?” she asks.

“Yes.”

Her laughter fades into a disappointed little sigh. “Shame.”

I should know better than to ask. I ask anyway. “Why?”

Her face brightens with the unmistakable look of someone who’s just been handed an opportunity she has no intention of wasting. “You could've called the other one Farage.”

I close my eyes. There are moments in life when no response is preferable.

This is one of them.

When I open them again, Bea is still laughing, delighted with herself, and I find myself watching her instead of reaching for my coffee. There is something startling about seeing her like this after the woman I met at the support group eight days ago, sitting rigidly in a circle of chairs with terror tucked beneath every sarcastic comment. The fear is still there. I can see it every time her fingers return to the mangled cardboard sleeve around her cup, every time she asks a question and waits too carefully for the answer.

But that’s not all I see now.

For the last half hour, I've been thinking of this as something useful. Bea has questions. I have answers. I went through the version of this that happened to me, and if telling her what I remember makes the weeks ahead fractionally less frightening, then sitting here has a purpose.

Somewhere between discussing the practicalities of drains and admitting that mine had a middle-aged man's name, however, I stopped feeling useful.

I'm simply enjoying myself. The realisation is inconvenient enough that I reach for my coffee again even though there is barely any left.

Bea wipes beneath one eye with the side of her finger. “I'm calling mine Nigel.”

“You absolutely are not.”

“Why not?”

“Get your own name.”

Her mouth drops open in offence. “You're gatekeeping drain names?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. I'll call one Farage.”