No Sister of Mine by Vivien Brown

Author:Vivien Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-12-09T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

SARAH

Dad wasn’t coping very well. Mum having to have a full mastectomy had come as a shock, and now that she had been back at home for three weeks and we were all learning to come to terms with things, the reality of it all seemed suddenly to have hit him hard, in some ways even harder than it had hit her.

She’d always been the one in charge at home, much as she would have denied it and pretended otherwise. While Dad earned the bulk of the money and dished out smiles and treats and pats on the head, the real day-to-day nitty-gritty things, like the housework, the finances, the decisions about where to go on holiday, what colour to paint the hall, what to have for dinner, had always rested with her. But now she was bruised and battered, and, for now anyway, her zest for life seemed to have gone.

She spent a lot of time in bed, feeling weak and sick after her first chemo session and dreading the ones yet to come. Even when she did get up and about, there were still so many things she could not do, partly because of the after-effects of the surgery to her chest and under her arms, partly because the chemo had taken it out of her so all she wanted to do was sleep. No hoovering, no heavy lifting, no driving, no going to work. Her appetite went up and down like a yoyo and she was a lot more careful about what she ate. She had decided too that in the interests of as healthy a lifestyle as possible, they would both give up alcohol altogether, just when Dad could have used a stiff drink, but he did what she asked. It was obvious he felt helpless and useless and hopelessly ill-informed, but he wanted to please her, to support her in any way he could, so the whisky bottle remained resolutely unopened. I wasn’t sure if he had even seen her scars yet.

Josh was working longer hours than ever, and I did wonder if it was his way of avoiding me, Mum, the illness, all of it. I’d seen it before, when Janey had caught a nasty bug, and that time she’d come home from school to tell us she had nits, and when I had a particularly bad period and there was blood on the sheets. He backed away from it, kept his distance, made sure he didn’t have to deal with any of the mucky unpleasant stuff, waited until whatever it was had passed before easing himself back in as if he’d never been gone.

Sometimes I felt about a hundred years old, as if the weight of the world and all its sorrows was on my shoulders. Eve was miles away in Wales, Dad was crumbling and Josh was distant. And that just left me.

I went down to the park once, around the same time of day I had bumped into Colin Grant that time.

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