Appalled, and with a shaft of pain in his own chest that left him breathless, Bill tried to catch her wrists. She threw the paperweight away from her and it thudded and then rolled harmlessly on the rug. She clenched her fists instead and pounded them against Bill’s chest. Her mouth gaped and her head wagged and gusts of ragged sobbing shook her body.
Jeanette had been deaf since birth. The sounds she was making now were shapeless bellows of anguish.
He managed to catch her flailing arms and pin them to her sides.
‘I know,’ he crooned. ‘I know, I know.’
She was gasping for breath, tears pouring down her face and dripping from her chin. She was too weak to sustain the paroxysm of rage. It subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving her shuddering in his arms. Bill stood still and held her, smoothing the tufts of her pale hair. When he thought she could bear it he took out his handkerchief and dried her cheeks. At length he was able to steer her towards the chair and she sank down. He brought up the footstool and sat close against her knees.
Her wrists and fingers were limp now. It cost her a huge effort to speak.
– I don’t want to die.
Her words came as loose, blurted outbursts. Bill was the only person she trusted to decipher what she said. Even with her son, she preferred to use sign language for almost everything.
‘I know,’ he told her. ‘You aren’t going to die yet.’
Jeanette gazed into his face, searching for the truth.
She had always told him, from when they first knew one another, that he was easy to lip-read because he had a generous face. Some people were costive, keeping their lips pinched in and biting their words in half as if they were coins they were unwilling to spend, but not Bill Bunting.
– No?
‘No, you are not,’ he said firmly.
The oncologist had told them that she might have six months. It could be rather less, just conceivably more, but six months was what he thought they should allow.
Her head drooped.
– I’m sorry, she said.
‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a table.’ He smiled at her. If he could have changed places with her, he would have done it gladly.
– For being ill. Leaving you and Noah.
‘You haven’t left us,’ he said. His hands cupped her knees.
The first time he saw Jeanette Thorne was at a student union party. She was with someone else, a mathematician he knew only slightly. The room was crowded and there was barely enough space for leaping up and down to the punk band. Through a thicket of legs he caught a flicker of her red shoes, platform-soled with a strap across the instep. Then she jumped in the air and the hem of her skirt flipped up to reveal the tender pallor of her bare thighs. He had elbowed his way through the sweaty crowd so he could stand behind her to watch, and ever since that moment he had loved the long blade of her shins and the bluish hollow behind her knees.
That was when they were both twenty-one.
Later that evening he had found himself next to her, packed in a wedge of people between the wall and an angle of the bar. He had studied her pale, abstracted profile against the surging crowd. She looked as if she was deep in thought and he had longed to talk to her. In the end he had positioned himself at her shoulder and had murmured something into the bell of blonde hair that swung to her shoulders, some banal question about what she thought of the band. She ignored him, and he had been about to creep away, abashed. Then a girl he knew pressed her elbow into his ribs.
‘That’s Jeanette Thorne. She’s in Biological Sciences. She’s completely deaf, you know. She does everything, just the same. Amazing, really.’
At that moment Jeanette turned her head and for the first time looked straight into his eyes. It was as if she could see into his head, and read the sexual stirring in him before he had even registered it properly himself. Words would have been entirely superfluous. Jeanette’s mouth merely curved in a smile that transformed the dingy bar into some antechamber to Paradise.
‘I am Bill,’ he said.
She placed the flat of her right hand over her breastbone and gently inclined her head. A lock of hair fell forwards and revealed the thick plastic aid that curved behind her ear. Bill wanted nothing more than to lean forward and kiss that faulty ear and tuck her hair back into place.
It was only when he came to know Jeanette much better that he understood that her voluptuous body and her mass of blonde hair were at odds with her personality. Jeanette looked wanton, but she was not. She was too determined to be more than just a deaf girl to let even sex distract her for long.
He fell in love with that contradiction.
– When’s Noah coming?
‘He’ll be here for dinner.’
– Will you tell him?
‘I don’t exactly know yet.’
Noah would have to be told that his mother’s cancer was terminal.
It was a terrible word, that.
They sat with the overturned bowl and the hurled paperweight on the rug beside them, holding on to each other and looking out into the garden as the sun drifted behind the trees. Permanence had turned into fragility. What had been certain was now a series of questions, neither spoken nor answered.
Later, after Jeanette had gone to bed, Bill and Noah sat in the small, cluttered downstairs room that Bill used as his study. They had eaten dinner together, or rather the two men had eaten and Jeanette had made a flattened mound of her food and then placed her knife and fork on top of it.
– I’m tired, she had confessed. Noah made the slow journey upstairs with her, and then came down again to join his father.
Bill poured himself a whisky. ‘The news about Mum isn’t good,’ he began tentatively.
‘What? What do you mean?’ The aggressive edge to Noah’s voice suggested that on some level he had feared this and was now intending to contest the information.
‘The surgeon who did the operation told us this morning. They found when they reached the tumour site that there was only a part of it they could remove.’
The television in the corner was on with the sound muted. Familiar newscaster faces floated between footage of soldiers in Afghanistan and the highlights of a football match. Bill kept his eyes on the screen as he talked because he was as yet unable to look at Noah without the risk of weeping.
‘So there was another part of it that they couldn’t remove? What does that mean? Is she going to die? Is that what you’re trying to say?’ Noah’s voice rose.
With an effort, Bill kept his steady.
‘They think it’s likely to be about six months.’
Noah had a bottle of beer. He rotated it on the arm of his chair, staring as if he hoped each time the label came into sight it might read differently.
‘I don’t understand. Wait a minute. Are they sure? They can’t be certain, can they? I mean, you hear of people who’ve been given a certain amount of time to live and who get better against