Page 66 of While I’m Still Here

I can't argue with that.

She curls both hands around her coffee cup and looks down at it for a moment. Her thumbnail worries at the cardboard sleeve, picking at the edge until a small piece peels away. I've started noticing she does that when we're discussing something that frightens her. The jokes get faster, her questions become more specific, and her hands find something to destroy.

“Could you feel it?” she asks.

“Unfortunately.”

Her nose wrinkles so dramatically that I almost smile. “That sounds fucking disgusting.”

“It wasn't my favourite experience.”

“Where did you put it when you slept?”

That takes us into another five minutes of practicalities. I tell her what I remember about managing it, moving around carefully, sleeping badly and becoming bizarrely territorial about the tubing because the possibility of accidentally pulling something attached to my body was enough to make me reconsider murder when someone nearly ripped it out of me that one time. Bea listens intently, occasionally interrupting with increasingly horrified questions, and somewhere during my explanation she stops peeling the coffee sleeve apart.

That, I think, is why I keep answering.

Not because I'm particularly interested in reliving any of this. I'm not. I’ve worked hard to let parts of treatment become boring memories rather than defining events. But eight days ago, Bea didn't know me, and four days before that she didn't know she had cancer. Now she's sitting opposite a man who woke up after breast-cancer surgery and can tell her what happened next.

Sometimes next is the only useful thing you can give someone.

She takes another drink, then slowly lowers the cup. “Did you name them?”

I stare at her. Of all the questions she could have followed up with, that wasn't one I'd anticipated. Bea notices, and her eyes widen. I say nothing. Her mouth falls open. “You fucking did.”

“I was on morphine.”

The delight that spreads across her face is immediate and deeply concerning. “What was it called?”

“I don't think this is medically relevant.”

“Oh, it's medically relevant now.”

“It really isn't.”

“What was your drain called, Marcus?”

I reach for my coffee because drinking it gives me a legitimate reason not to answer, though judging by the expression on Bea’s face, she has no intention of letting this conversation end until I've humiliated myself. The memory comes back with irritating clarity. Not the surgery itself or the pain or even the first time I looked down and saw the tubing. Just me, drugged and exhausted in a hospital bed, apparently deciding that the plastic receptacle collecting fluid from my chest required an identity.

I take a deliberately slow drink. Bea leans further across the table. “Marcus.”

“Nigel.”

There is a beat of absolute silence. Her expression goes completely blank, then Bea folds in half. Not a polite laugh. Not the restrained café laugh where somebody presses their lips together and remembers there are strangers sitting three feet away. She properly loses it. One hand flies over her mouth while the other grips the edge of the table, her shoulders shaking hard enough that a woman at the next table looks over to see what has happened.

“You called your drain Nigel?”

I can already feel myself regretting every decision that led to this coffee. “I was heavily medicated.”

“Nigel.” She says it again and somehow finds it even funnier the second time. “You had a fucking tube hanging out of your chest and looked at it and thought, Nigel.”

“I don't remember naming it.”

“But you remember the name.”

“Unfortunately.”

She makes a strangled noise and presses both hands over her face. “That's the most interesting thing you've ever told me.”