Chapter Two
Anya
After the interview, I called Mum from Paddington Station as I waited for my train. I hadn’t been able to speak to her yet that day and I was worried about her. She was in hospital and had been having a rough time of it. People thronged the concourse as the phone rang. The departures board rippled with changing information.
Finally, Viv answered. After Mum’s first round of chemo, she and I had realized she couldn’t cope alone. I offered to suspend my studies and come home to take care of her myself, but Mum wouldn’t hear of it. She said she’d find the money from somewhere to pay for help.I won’t let this fucking cancer compromise your future as well as mine.My mother had a potty mouth but a warm heart and buckets of courage. She hired Viv, who cost a fortune but was worth every penny.
Viv looked harassed. “Your mum’s not doing great today,” she said, and my heart sank. I heard Mum say, “Don’t tell her that,” as she took the phone.
“I’m fine,” she said. Was she having trouble holding the phone, or purposely angling it so I couldn’t see her properly? Sometimes she did that when she was looking rough and she didn’t want me to see.The screen showed a slice of the ceiling of her ward, then the curtain around her bed. It wobbled again, and her forehead came into view. “How areyou?” she asked.
“I can’t see you, Mum. Can you move the phone?”
The image onscreen wobbled again. Finally, I saw her face. She looked terrible, and I felt the usual grip of panic and the urge to go to her immediately, even though she’d hate it if I did.
“I had a really great interview today,” I told her.
“Who with this time?”
“St. Andrews.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What about America?”
“I’m just looking at all my options before I make a final decision. St. Andrews contacted me.”
She started to speak. I only caught a few words—“Yale” and “you must” and “don’t”—before she got caught up in a coughing fit and dropped the phone.
“Are you okay?” I shouted.
Viv’s face appeared on the screen. “Sorry,” she said. “She’s okay but it’s been a rough evening. She’s been drifting in and out and hallucinating from the morphine. Earlier she thought she could see a mouse in the corner of the room. There was nothing there, but she was convinced.”
This was the trade-off that we had to manage on Mum’s bad days: pain versus coherence.
“Maybe it would be best to call back tomorrow,” Viv suggested.
I hung up. Before Mum was diagnosed, I didn’t know that illness could feel like such an impossibly sad and heavy weight. The everyday evils of treatment, the torment of hope, and the crush of disappointment were horrendous. Then there was the huge, unthinkable fear of losing her completely.
The symbols for death were some of the first I’d learned when I started my studies at uni. In Western art and literature, it’s the grim reaper, scythe, skull, cloak, and hourglass. Other cultures associatedeath with the jackal, the crow, the death’s-head hawk moth, the vulture, and more. We all know this. They’re some of the most recognizable symbols in the world.
I was adding to them as Mum’s illness progressed, as we met more sick people and their families, other repeat customers on the oncology ward. I knew that death could also look like a letter from the hospital, the somber expression on a doctor’s face. Bad blood results. A sinister shadow on a scan. An invitation to talk in a private room.
Those things could also scythe you down with brutal efficiency.
What I didn’t yet know was that the grim reaper can look exactly like someone you know.
When I got back to Oxford, Sid was sitting in my bed, working on his laptop. He looked studious and sweet. There was no one I’d rather have come back to.
We lived in adjacent Oxford colleges but since we met a year ago, we’d been inseparable. He was my first serious relationship, the first man I’d fallen hard for. We barely fought, and we laughed a lot. It had been fun, and perfect, and easy so far, but now, with the future looming, we had hard decisions to make. What to prioritize? Our relationship or our work? We were both ambitious.
When I’d first mentioned Yale, Sid said, “If you go, you won’t come back.”
I’d wanted to protest that it wasn’t true, but he was probably right. I’d thought of a solution, though: “You could apply for jobs on the East Coast of the US, too. Why not?”
He shook his head. “For starters, getting a visa won’t be easy. I’d have to get an employer to sponsor me, which would limit my options. If I want to work on Lucis it’ll be much easier to do here, because I can pick up work whenever I need it if I get short of funds.”
My friend Ella once asked me, “Do you even have a computer science boyfriend if he doesn’t have a tech start-up dream?” Luciswas Sid’s dream. He believed it had huge potential. He was a security researcher, specializing in defenses against malware. If you met Sid, you wouldn’t immediately have him down as a fighter, but that’s what he was: a warrior on the front line of the arms race to develop tech that could outwit cybercriminals.
I sat on the bed beside him and rested my head on his shoulder. He closed his laptop. “How was it?” He sounded guarded, as if he was braced for me to say it went badly, especially because I hadn’t messaged him from the train. I wanted to see his reaction in person.
