Page 77 of While I’m Still Here

But he doesn't drag cancer into everything either. If I'm annoyed, I'm allowed to be annoyed. If I'm laughing, I'm allowed to laugh. If I tell Susan from Marketing that her proposed campaign is shit, Danny doesn't look at me with worried eyes and wonder whether irritability is a side effect of impending death. Somehow, almost immediately, he understood something I hadn't known how to explain to anyone.

The quickest way to make me disappear is to make everything I do about cancer.

I turn slightly in my chair. “What do you mean, then?”

“The dress, for one.”

I look down at myself. “It's a dress.”

“It's the dress.”

Of course he remembers.

I mentioned it months ago after far too much wine at a work dinner, complaining that I'd bought a red dress I loved and then never worn because it felt too noticeable, too fitted, and far too much for an ordinary day. I'd said I was saving it for something, although I hadn't been able to tell him what. Apparently the answer was breast cancer. Fabulous. Danny nods towards the rest of the office. “And you told Susan her idea was shit this morning.”

“It was shit.”

“You normally spend ten minutes constructing it into a compliment sandwich. Y’know, something nice, then you tell them the work was shit, but then you always follow up with another nice thing. You didn’t do that today, Bea.”

“I've experienced personal growth.”

“It's terrifying.”

I smile, but it’s not a full one because he's right.

I hadn't planned to become different when I got dressed this morning. I hadn't stood in front of the wardrobe and decided Today I shall begin my inspirational cancer transformation. I'd simply looked at the red dress hanging where it had hung for more than a year and suddenly couldn't remember what the fuck I was waiting for… So I wore it.

Then Susan presented an objectively terrible idea in the morning meeting and, instead of spending ten minutes wrapping my disagreement in enough politeness to survive nuclear fallout, I'd said, “I don't think that works,” and explained why.

Nobody died. Well… Hopefully nobody dies. Cancer has really fucked with that phrase.

“I made a list,” I tell him.

Danny's eyebrows lift. “Of people whose ideas are shit?”

“Things I've been putting off.”

I tell him about the notebook Colin found on my kitchen table and the list that started as something stupid before becoming irritatingly sincere. I tell him about the dress and the tattoo I've wanted for years but kept finding reasons not to book. I tell him about all of it and then I tell him how ridiculous it feels to realise that I've spent so much of my life waiting for some future version of myself to arrive.

Thinner Bea.

Braver Bea.

More confident Bea.

Bea with more money. Bea with more time. Bea who doesn't worry what everybody else thinks. Bea who wakes up one morning magically qualified to live the life current Bea keeps preparing for her.

Except Future Bea has turned out to be a spectacularly unreliable bitch because somebody told me I have cancer, and suddenly the assumption that she'll eventually arrive and sort everything out is a lie.

Danny doesn't interrupt.

That might be the most alarming development of the entire week.

When I finally stop talking, Danny looks at me for a moment, then asks. “Anything else on the list?”

There is.

Unfortunately, he’s sitting approximately two feet away from me.