It was a beautiful early spring morning. I got up, showered, got dressed, just as I would on any other day. I shouted to my husband Paul to get up too as I went downstairs to make breakfast. He was quite quick that morning, given that he could usually sleep for England. I glanced at him as he stumbled into the kitchen, long blond hair flopping over his eyes. We’d been married almost a year, together for a lot longer, and I still got a flutter every time I looked at him – my husband!
My husband was Paul Hunter.
My husband was one of the best snooker players in the entire world.
He was famous and loved and recognized – but to me, none of that mattered when he came home at night, when the rest of the world wasn’t there.
He was just the man of my dreams.
I absolutely adored him.
He came over to me behind the breakfast bar of our Leeds home and grabbed a bacon sarnie off the plate, kissing me as he did it. ‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Let’s be going, Linz.’
I pulled him towards me as he headed for the door. ‘Paul,’ I began, ‘Whatever happens …’
He cut me off. ‘It’ll be fine, Linz. Everything will be fine. You’ve said so yourself often enough.’ With that he smiled, picked up the keys to his BMW and we headed out of the door.
It took over an hour to get there, park, and make our way inside. The sign on the wall will mean lots of things to lots of different people: St James’ University Hospital, commonly known to locals as Jimmy’s. They might be there to have a baby, to get their broken leg fixed, to see their granny – a thousand reasons, each one so important to the person experiencing it. We didn’t know what we were going to hear but, as always, I had a plan. If I prepared myself for the worst, I thought nothing could surprise me, nothing could knock me off course.
I’d already had my shock. The one that took us there. Only a couple of weeks earlier, Paul became concerned about a pain in his side. The worry was that he might be heading for a burst appendix. God, we thought, how awful would that be? But it wasn’t his appendix; it was a lump. That day, in Jimmy’s, one of the largest oncology centres in Europe, we were to find out whether our life could move on. There was still a bit of me that was surprised we were even in an ‘oncology’ centre. I wouldn’t have known what the word meant until this all started. I know now. I know the definition: it’s the branch of medicine that deals with tumours, including the study of their development, diagnosis, treatment and prevention.
The branch of medicine that deals with the word we all fear.
Cancer.
We walked towards the NHS waiting room and I think I was probably shaking, but it was hard to tell because Paul was shaking so much more. There was peeling paper on the walls, ancient magazines on the tables, and a coffee machine that no one was risking. The waiting room was busy. It felt old, as if no one had put any care into it for years and that made me cross. People who sit waiting there are going through a very bad time in their lives. Couldn’t it have been nicer? Couldn’t it have been fresh and clean and pretty? I knew I was trying to distract myself.
Paul and I were holding hands. Tightly. Sometimes I ran my hand over the top of his, back and forth. Sometimes I squeezed his fingers and smiled when he looked at me. Sometimes I gave him a little kiss on the cheek. It was all meant to comfort – but why was I trying to comfort him if everything was going to be all right?
I wanted it to be over and done with so that we could get on with our lives, be together until we were old. Another part of me didn’t want to move, didn’t want time to tick by. If the news was bad, I knew everything would be broken from the moment we were told.
There were people of all ages, all types, beside us. Every so often, someone nodded towards Paul, or smiled, or hesitantly said ‘Hiya’. He didn’t know these people and I wondered whether they recognized him as the snooker player from the telly or if there was just some sort of automatic friendship between people waiting to hear if they had cancer or not?
‘You’ll be fine, babes,’ I said. Again.
I’d been saying it for two weeks, ever since he first got the pain in his side. I said it in the middle of the night when he woke up in a cold sweat. I said it when he came back from doing an interview in which he talked about the future. I said it to everyone else, and I said it to myself.
This was D Day. We’d staggered through the last two weeks, trying to be a normal couple, trying to forget what was going to happen that day, but we couldn’t ignore it any longer. There was only one thought going through my mind: PLEASE LET EVERYTHING BE OK.
Paul walked into the consulting room and I followed. We sat down and went through the usual pleasantries, constantly aware of the folder on the doctor’s desk. I tried to read things upside down, tried to read the body language of the consultant. Then the reality hit me. I actually heard what he was saying.
I had prepared myself for the worst and it happened.
Those words were being said.
Paul had cancer.
Eight years earlier, Paul Hunter had arrived in my world without any fanfare. It started innocently enough, but none of us know how little, everyday moments are going to join together to form the story of our lives, do we? I was working in a Leeds beauty salon at the time and probably could have won competitions as the most reliable, steady 21-year-old in the city. I’d gone to a local beauty college at 16 and worked in a salon to get experience from that point on, always taking any chance for extra responsibility, always planning ahead. I’d had a pension plan and an endowment fund since my first pay packet was put into my hand as a teenager, and I’d never taken a day off work in my life. As well as working in the salon full time during the day, I worked as an assessor and tutor in a college in the city centre at night.
One day, into this sensible, organized world flew Nicky Hunter, Paul’s cousin. The door of the salon burst open and this dark-haired bundle of energy ran straight behind the reception desk and threw her arms around me. We’d met a few years earlier at college when we did some classes together but as Nicky was in the year ahead of me, we’d lost touch once she graduated. I’d always liked her, and seeing her again brought a smile to my face – she was loud, funny, and never backwards at coming forwards.
‘Lindsey!’ she screamed once she’d released me from a bear hug. ‘Where have you been?’ I hadn’t been anywhere. I was in Leeds all the time but to Nicky life was only what happened around about her, so as far as she was concerned I could have been on the Moon for three years. She had known all there was to know about my life back at college, so she launched straight into the question she was most interested in.
‘Are you still with Dave?’ she asked. Before I got a chance to answer, she went on, ‘God, that’s been years now, hasn’t it? I’ve never known anyone to have a boyfriend that long. Weren’t you only about 15 when you started seeing him?’
Nicky was right. Dave had been a family friend ever since I could remember, and we’d always hung around together. About six years ago, that natural friendship turned into an equally natural relationship when he came on holiday to Spain with my friend’s family. We went away as mates and came back as boyfriend and girlfriend. He was my first boyfriend. In fact, he had been my only boyfriend. And now, he was my ex-boyfriend.
‘We’ve split up,’ I told her, aware there was a queue forming behind her in the reception area.
‘Don’t