William Collins
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First published in Great Britain by William Collins 2015
Text © Kate Gross 2015
Kate Gross asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record of this book is
available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780008103453
Ebook Edition © January 2015 ISBN: 9780008103460
Version: 2015-07-23
There are two copies of this book that matter. There are two pairs of eyes I imagine reading every word. There are two adult hands which I hope will hold a battered paperback when others have long forgotten me and what I have to say. I write this for Oscar and Isaac, my little Knights, my joy and my wonder.
Contents
1 The Plastic Bag and the Red Coat
7 Earthquakes, and the Light They Let In
9 What’s Love Got to Do With It?
When I was three, I told my mum that I kept my words in my head, in a clear plastic bag. Now it is time for me to take them out, to arrange them into this story. The thing is, I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know if I will die before I finish writing it. But if I do, I know someone else will write the ending for me. My mum will step in to close off my story, just as she used to step in to help with my homework. So I can begin.
We will start on 11 October 2012. I am running along the beach in Southern California. It is dusk, and as the waves break on the shore, surfers head out to sea. My legs feel strong, my lungs full of salty air. I’m here to raise money for the charity I run, which works in post-conflict Africa. I’m a successful thirty-something woman with an amazing job through which I travel the world and converse with presidents and prime ministers. My adorable twins are three, and their father, Billy, is my soulmate, as well as being the best-looking man I’ve ever kissed. But inside me a lump of cells has broken free of the rules and spawned a tumour which has blocked my colon, crept through my lymph nodes and colonised my liver. Cancer is halfway to killing me, and I am completely oblivious to its presence.
The next day I am at the airport, my week-long trip over, and finally on my way home to Cambridge. As I arrive at check-in, I am hit by a wave of nausea. I throw up for fifteen hours – through security, in the lounge, and all the way back home. I feel feverish, exhausted. Now, at last, I know something is seriously wrong. I crawl into a taxi at Heathrow and ask the driver to drop me off at the emergency department at Addenbrooke’s, our local hospital. A CT scan follows, and twelve hours after landing in the UK I am in emergency surgery. The blockage in my colon is a tumour, and the dark spots the doctors saw on my liver a series of secondary lesions – metastases, to use the proper term. I have stage four cancer. All this cancer-speak is new to me, but I do know there isn’t a stage five. What I didn’t realise then – though of course the ever internet-enabled Billy did, right from the start – was that I had only a 6 per cent chance of surviving the next five years.
Now we are more than two years on from that, the first earthquake to hit our little family. Two operations, six months of chemotherapy, and a brief, joyful remission filled that interlude. But now the cancer is back. It has spread, it is incurable. I will die before my children finish primary school, and probably before they reach the grand old age of six, which they think is impossibly grown-up, and I think is impossibly young. It won’t be long now.
I began to write straight after my diagnosis. And as soon as I started to type, the words emerged, as prolific at reproducing and ordering themselves as the malignant cells inside me. Everything I wrote was a gift to myself,