But now, she found herself at home, alone, in her flat, recuperating from surgery with nothing to do but feel things, and she didn’t like it.
Being a lawyer had provided her with a daily life of the gym, power lunches and long hours in the office or in court, coupled with nights drinking expensive wine in posh bars. And if she wasn’t doing that, she was at the beauty salon or the hairdresser having a facial or her nails done or having her long black wavy hair blow-dried straight. She had to look the part in court and in the office. She had to be perfect at all times.
Being perfect was a great distraction from enduring your feelings, Ellie was discovering. She flicked the channels from one retired couple looking for a house in Spain to an American soap that had been on when she was at Oxford, almost twenty years ago, to a daytime chat show where the hosts were discussing the best healthy breakfasts.
She kept crying, on and off. It was like a tap she couldn’t turn off. Some of it was tiredness, and a kind of release of the worry she’d been building up before the operation. She didn’t have a Positive Mental Attitude. In fact, she was in a state of grief.
Nothing like this had ever happened to Ellie before. Yes, she’d had to work hard to get a scholarship to Oxford, and she’d worked hard in her career, but that was a challenge she’d enjoyed. That wasn’t like this. This was… she didn’t have words for it. It was like being punched. Like someone had broken into her flat and trashed it. It was as alien an experience as anything she could think of.
There was normal life, running along happily in its groove, and then there was being told you had cancer, which was like falling into a sudden earthquake. All the usual rules suddenly did not apply. Ellie felt that she had been abruptly removed from normal life by some kind of Martian overlord and plonked down in a world she didn’t recognise at all. A world of tests and anxiety and the smell of antiseptic and the beeping of machines. Of sudden surgery, without being given the time to prepare her feelings.
And now, here she was, a few weeks later, in bed, watchingCash in the Atticand feeling like she couldn’t stop crying.
Plus, she’d bid on the motorhome late one night, in the days after she’d had the mastectomy, and now she had no idea what to do with it.
Ellie still wasn’t quite sure what had possessed her to do it, but it might have had something to do with the two glasses of wine she’d drunk as she lay on the sofa, watching a depressing movie about a mother who had lost her child. She wasn’t supposed to be drinking at all, what with the painkillers she was on, but she’d been desperate to numb her brain, which kept whirring around and around, imagining the worst.What if the cancer comes back? What about all the things I haven’t done? Why aren’t I married?
She’d been depressed and terrified and desperate for any distraction. She couldn’t sleep, because she was uncomfortable, despite the painkillers, and she still had a tube taped to her chest which was draining liquid into a plastic bulb. Apparently, this was standard procedure, and the drain was supposed to stay in for about two weeks. It was towards the end of week two already, and the drain was a monumental pain in the behind. Ellie had realised that the tube got caught up in her clothes really easily and had to be taped to her side to make sure it didn’t accidentally get ripped out. She couldn’t wear anything that had to be taken off over her head because it was hard to move her arm on her left side, and the drain tubes got in the way.
The night she’d bought the motorhome, she’d opened her laptop, her fingers hovering over her work email icon. She was actually signed off for six weeks, and HR had told her to check in after five; she could let them know if she wanted to be off for longer. They’d been very good about everything, but Ellie knew that although her assistant was supposed to be looking at her inbox for her, and though she’d handed over her main clients to a colleague, her emails were still going to get out of hand really quickly.
Still, she resisted the urge to look at her emails, and tapped the eBay icon instead.
Ellie’s friend Toni had introduced Ellie to eBay in her first term in halls, and initially Ellie had welcomed a bargain website where she could find a new top for £5 or less, or some winter boots that she needed. But Toni and some of the others on the law course had made a game of it, buying the most random items they could at the last minute. They’d called it the Last-Minute Bid for Glory.
Ellie’s new friends thought nothing of spending hundreds of pounds on stupid things they didn’t need, all for a laugh. Ellie was on an academic scholarship, and accounted for every penny she spent. She had all the loans she could get on top of that, and even then she was only just making ends meet. By contrast, Toni and the rest of them threw money around as if it was confetti at a wedding.
Once, Toni had bought a goat on eBay. A real, live goat. It had been delivered to her halls by a guy in a van, and she’d got a serious telling-off from the warden, who had ended up taking it home to live in his sister’s garden. Goodness only knew why anyone was selling a goat on a general auction website: it was clearly dodgy.
Another time, one of their friends, Giles, had bought a car and then given it away to some guy in the local pub because there was nowhere to park it on campus. Last-minute purchases were always accompanied by much celebration and drunken whooping. It had always seemed amusing at the time, though Ellie marvelled that no one’s parents ever seemed to mind that their children were spending hundreds of pounds on nothing in particular in late-night drunken splurges. At least, none of her friends ever talked about it if they did.
A couple of months before Ellie had been due to leave for Oxford, her mum had been diagnosed with cancer. She’d shooed Ellie away, even though Ellie had wanted to defer a year and stay at home to be there for her. But her mum wouldn’t hear of it. She had been so proud of Ellie: the first person in their family to go to university.
Make me proud, she’d said as she hugged Ellie at the train station.I know you will. And I’m already so proud of you, my lovely girl.
Ellie had watched her university friends throwing their money around and, every time, she thought about her mum who couldn’t work now, because she was ill, living on benefits and refusing to let Ellie drop out of university to get a job to help her. She thought about her mum’s house, which didn’t have central heating, and how her mum wrapped herself up in so many blankets at night to keep warm that they joked she looked like the Michelin Man.
She thought about how the money for just one of those stupid online purchases could have paid her mum’s winter electricity bill, or bought her a whole month’s worth of food and still provided change for her weekly bus ride to the hospital. But she never said anything to her friends, because what could she say? They wouldn’t understand.
When her mum had passed away two years later, Ellie hadn’t wanted to tell any of them. Toni had found out because she’d walked into Ellie’s room one night and found her crying. In fact, once they knew, her friends had been incredibly kind. They had asked Ellie to come and stay with their families, taken her on holiday, made her their plus one at dinners and events and all the stuff she could never have afforded to do otherwise. They weren’t bad people: they had just never known what it was to be poor, or cold, or hungry.
In a way, it was losing Ellie’s mum that had made her a part of that moneyed, affluent gang. They had taken care of her at her lowest ebb, and she felt a loyalty to them.
Ellie had played Last-Minute Bid for Glory, but she had never bought anything expensive because she couldn’t afford it. But that evening in her flat, recovering from a mastectomy, tipsy, tearful and feeling like she just didn’t care about anything anymore, she had opened up the online auction site and refreshed the home page.
And there, just about to close, was a 1985 Airstream motorhome, complete with original awnings, a working ice maker, oven and gas stove, and twin beds. She’d entered a stupid bid, closed her eyes, and passed out on the sofa.
In the morning, she’d found the email confirming that she’d bought the damn thing.
