“It’s not your fault.” It’s a default answer and he says no more.
“Would you like me to come and see you?” I ask, before I realize I’ve asked it.
He’s silent and then, “No. Thank you. But no.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t want you to see me like this,” he says.
“Really? Like what, I can’t—”
“I’m going to look very different throughout this—not like the me you’ve gotten to know,” he says simply, and I push him because I can’t comprehend how. Davey takes a deep breath. “I’ve seen guys in here around my age. I know what’s coming,” he says. “I’m going to be put on a whole bunch of steroids. I’m going to lose my hair. So Grant’s shaving my head for me tomorrow. I need to get used to it.”
I inhale sharply.
“It’s the only thing I can control,” he says. “I’m taking my hair off before the chemo does.”
I nod and then I try for a sexy lightheartedness, but in my eagerness to make everything OK I misfire. “I love a bad-boy look. Send me a picture.”
“No,” he says solemnly. “No more pictures. No more video calls.”
I close my eyes at the sharpness of his reaction. “I understand,” I say quietly.
“Thank you,” he says. “But you can’t possibly understand, and that’s not your fault. Listen, Hannah, I need some sleep. I have a big day tomorrow.”
“What are you—”
“Sperm bank. Tomorrow I have to go look at porn and finish into a jar,” he says with an absurd laugh. I put my hand over my mouth at this sudden, unexpected turn in the conversation.
“You know where I am if you…” I trail off. I have nothing to add that’s ladylike.
“If I need a hand?” he questions darkly and I start laughing, slowly and quietly, for fear of upsetting him. But at the other end of the phone I can hear him chuckling away until the two of us are laughing together. It’s nice. It’s how it was before. And then I remember it’s not. We say goodbye and that we’re going to talk again soon, but the sands have already shifted beneath us.
—
His chemo regime begins at the end of the month and we talk the night before Davey’s due to arrive at the hospital. He’s going to stay as an in-patient for at least three days, and then he’s moving back home with his parents. The lease on his apartment has ended and he’s living out of the two oversized rucksacks he packed for London, only he’s still in Texas. We’re struggling to find times to talk when we can be alone, given that his mum won’t stop fussing around him. He’s taking his dad with him tomorrow. “He’s made of sterner stuff,” Davey says simply. “And to be honest, I can’t handle all the crying from my mom anymore.”
I make a mental note not to cry again during our phone calls. I will be buoyant and upbeat, but hopefully not annoyingly so. But I’m stunned when he tells me he’s going to need months of treatment and, as he runs through the cycle, my heart hurts for him. I feel so stupidly helpless, and so much further away now than I was before. I need to stop saying “OK.” I need to find other words, but I have none.
“You’ll be fine” has become my new go-to phrase. But I can tell that’s starting to get on his nerves. He goes quiet every time I say it. During his first long, awful treatment cycle we hardly talk. I message him words of encouragement, and because I want him to know normality awaits him when this is all over, I send him pictures of early snowdrops that have grown in the park, pictures of me every now and again with a smile on my face. I wait for what feels like forever for him to reply and I carry on: buoyant, encouraging, silently frightened.
When he’s home from the first three-day stint in the hospital we finally talk. He sounds awful, groggy, and the tiredness in his voice never leaves him throughout our call. And so I’m left filling silences with chatter about my day, about how I’ve finally gone back to the gym, about how Miranda is coming over later for the first time in ages. He listens and in the background I hear the tide turn, as it’s he who starts crying. I stop talking and say, “Davey?”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Please don’t be.”
He goes quiet. He won’t say what he’s feeling and I don’t want to prompt, but I don’t want him to feel lost, alone.
“Tell me,” I say.
“I can’t. It’s so fucked up. I’m fucked up now.”
“You aren’t,” I say. “It’s scary. It’s all so scary, but things are happening fast.”
“I just lie here,” he says. “While chemicals try to chase the cancer away.”
“I know. But it will be over one day, and when it is…I’ve read the statistics. You have an eighty percent chance of a full recovery. That’s so high. You have to keep going. Just…keep going.”
