Page 69 of While I’m Still Here

Because you fascinate me.

Because I noticed you before you noticed me.

Because I've spent the last hour listening for your voice every time somebody else spoke.

None of those answers is appropriate. “I wanted to.” Apparently, that's the answer I choose instead.

Eventually she takes another sip of coffee. “Right.”

“Right.”

The conversation moves elsewhere, but something has changed underneath it. I feel it every time she looks at me, and I suspect she does too. We stay until the café begins clearing tables around us.

Outside, rain falls hard enough that we stay beneath the awning while Bea checks her phone. Colin is ten minutes away. She tells me I can leave, and I tell her I know but that I’d rather stay.

While we're waiting, I take out my phone. “Give me your number.”

Bea turns slowly towards me. “Excuse me?”

“For someone who asked a near-stranger for coffee, you look remarkably scandalised.”

“I'm not scandalised. I'm deciding whether this is you making a move.”

“It isn't.” Her eyebrows rise. I reconsider. “Not entirely.” I hold out my phone before I say anything more unwise. “Your number, Bea.”

She takes it, enters her details and passes it back. I send her a message so she has mine. Her phone vibrates. She looks down.

Marcus Bennett.

“No emoji?”

“No.”

“Very on brand.”

“Please don't add one.”

“I wasn't going to.”

I don't believe her. She slips her phone into her pocket, but her expression becomes more serious. “Why are you giving me your number?”

This part, at least, is simple. “Because you're eleven days into something that took over a year of my life.” She doesn't speak. “You're being given more information than you can possibly process at appointments, and everyone around you is probably asking whether you're all right before you've worked out the answer yourself. During the day, there are people everywhere. Nurses. Doctors. Family. Friends. Then you go home.”

I remember lying awake in the dark with my phone inches from my face, asking a search engine questions I was too embarrassed to ask anyone else. I remember checking the same survival statistics repeatedly as though they might improve overnight. I remember touching lymph nodes I wasn't qualified to assess, staring at photographs of scars and wondering whether I'd recognise myself afterwards.

Most of all, I remember how enormous cancer became at two in the morning.

“The questions don't always arrive when you're sitting opposite an oncologist,” I tell her. “Sometimes they arrive when you're lying in bed, and everyone else is asleep.”

Bea gives me a small, humourless smile. “I've noticed.”

“If it's medical, you call the numbers the hospital gives you. If you're unwell, worried about a symptom or something changes, you speak to someone qualified. I'm not a doctor.”

“Disappointing.”

“But if it's two in the morning and you suddenly need to know whether it's normal to hate everybody who tells you to stay positive, you can text me. Or if you want to know whether you can be terrified of surgery while simultaneously wanting them to hurry up and get the fucking thing out of you, text me. If you want to know whether you're allowed to grieve something everyone else keeps telling you that you should simply be grateful to lose, text me.”

For once, Bea doesn't have an immediate joke. “Even at two in the morning?”