Beluga by A. B. Lord. (little readers txt) 📕

How many pipes would there be? Kate felt her concentration slipping. She pulled herself back in to line, dabbing a bit of foundation across her face to hide the red puffiness of eight hours of lounging on a train.


Foundation had been a constant bane of her life. It occurred to her the market was not set up for Scottish women with pale skin, prone to reddish blotchiness. Even the lightest shades, labelled suggestively as “porcelain” and “ivory”, seemed to bare striking similarities to orange. She had finally found a brand that produced a nice pale finish. She imagined this sort of stuff was big news for gothic young girls the world over. Except she wasn’t a gothic young girl. She was a 19 year old university student on the cusp of graduation, and what may be considered as “deathly pale” by some, was in fact her natural skin tone. As the foundation glided in to place, she finished off her make up with a quick dust of powder. She left out the mascara. Not today.


“We will shortly be arriving in Dumfries. We would ask that all passengers...”


The tanoy signalled their arrival in to the sleepy little town and Kate gathered up her things.


Stepping off the train, she was met by the glowing, almost blinding, glare of the white snow. The glass in the windows of the train must have dulled it slightly and it took a moment for her eyes to relax. Walking over to the taxi rank, she climbed in to the back of a taxi and asked the driver to take her to the hospice.


She saw the taxi drivers face tighten. It’s that word, she thought. “Hospice.” She wondered how many times he had been asked to drive someone to the hospice, and wondered how he must feel, knowing he was partaking in such a sombre and private moment.


“Righty-oh, hen. Have you there in a jiffy.”


Kate looked around her. She was absorbed in this tiny little automotive cocoon of greys and checks. The greys created a sort of depth to the taxi cabin, but the harshness of the materials, made it more of a claustrophobic deep space, than a warm, welcoming one, like a bed, or a big cushy armchair. The intensity of the white snow all around increased its depth. If white could have a shade, Scotland’s snow was neon white. White covers everything.


The grey was broken up by flashes of yellow and orange. Neon warning stickers, asking her to please wear her seatbelt, and not to distract the driver whilst the vehicle was in motion. They made the depth of the grey cocoon taken on the sinister silence and slowness of a funeral march. Warning – inside this grey cocoon, is a young girl about to say goodbye to her Daddy. Please stand back.


The driver drove in silence and Kate was very glad for his respectful manner. All this way on the train and not one person had spoken to her, other than Jamie the refreshment cart man, and she had been left alone with her thoughts. They had been building up. Long stretches of concentrated, resigned silence in her head were stabbed in to oblivion by memories and thoughts that just refused to go away and snapped at her heels. She was worried if she began to talk, she’d cry. Or worse. She might scream.


Loosing Dad was her idea of living hell. Her parents had divorced when was twelve and since then her family life had been fragmented. A Birthday here. A Christmas there. But at least she still had a Dad and a Mum. Soon, it would just be Mum.


She wished that this could be fiction. She wished that all of this pain and misery, in knowing her Dad was to die of cancer within the next few days, and all the plans and ideas for the future, to die with him, could be something she could just brush away. Smooth over with optic white foundation and face up to another time; another time far in the future. But it wasn’t.


Her Dad and her had an unusually close relationship; closer than most Fathers and Daughters. His name was Frank and he was a Yorkshireman. Despite having lived in Scotland for twenty years of his life, his accent was still so thick and littered with ducks, loves and chucks, that it nearly always drew questions of “Now, where are you from with an accent like that? You’re not a Scotsman, that’s for sure...”. He was also a fitness fanatic, and fifty-four, had kept himself in remarkably good shape. He loved to cycle and run, and also dabbled in body building from time to time. He enjoyed a drink. Perhaps too much. He enjoyed a drink so much so that it had been part of his undoing. The doctors had thought he’d beat cancer until it had hit his liver. Then they said there was no hope.


About a year earlier, he had got engaged to his girlfriend and they were going to be marrying next year. Of course, that’ wouldn’t happen now. She’d been good for him. Had given him a bit of stability, and had calmed his drinking. Now he only had a bit of vodka at Christmas times and a glass of wine with special dinners. But it was too late. By the time the cancer had hit the liver, the damage was already long done and there was no more hope.


Just like that, things had shattered in to a million pieces. “No hope.”


From there it had got in to his blood and pumped itself around his body like a vile disgusting disease. He had been so hell bent on beating it. He said he imagined it was his worst enemy at times and treat it accordingly. He was adamant he was going to win. To him, it was just another obstacle, there to be conquered then laughed about.


Kate had struggled to see it that way.


The whole circumstances surrounding his cancer had been like a giant unwanted interruption to her Dads life, and her own. Cancer was the guest nobody wanted at the party; it was most certainly unwelcome. The news that Frank had cancer reached Kate one evening when she was strolling through London with a friend who had come to visit and stay the night. All day she had felt a horrible sense of foreboding. She knew something was wrong. The phone had rung and swivelling on the axel of one sentence, her entire life blew apart with a creak and a thump.


“The good news is, he is out of surgery is fine. The bad news is, they found cancer.”


Cancer...


That word; cancer. It was like a bloody atomic bomb. As she’d listened on the phone, her friend had gauged the very distinct change in her facial expression and waited patiently until she’d hung up.


“My Dad, he’s got....”.


The words wouldn’t come out. Horrible cancer. Vicious cancer. Sick cancer. Deadly cancer. The word cancer nestled in her throat like a giant bubble. The bubble wanted to be a scream, but she wanted it to be the word “cancer.” What came out was “cancer” in very hushed tones full of fright and terror, like a horrible dirty secret.


It made her sick.


Cancer.


The word itself was a disease on society. Sure, there had been developments in science and she was always hearing about people who beat cancer, but there’s also a reason that when someone says cancer, entire rooms fall silent. Cancer is a killer.


At first it had taken Kate a while to get past the idea that cancer meant indefinite death. Most of the time she maintained a deathly silence which everyone said wasn’t normal. But one night she made a hysterical call to him in which she yelled and cried down the phone that she didn’t want him to die, and he had yelled back, “I’m not going to die from cancer. You’ll see! I’ll beat this and I’ll be here forever, Catherine!”


Her Dad persuaded her he was going to beat cancer, then he’d marry his fiancé and they’d buy a little farm somewhere n the borders, with chickens, and Kate was always going to be welcome. The light would always be on for her.


Then things started to get ugly; really ugly. Cancer sprouted an arm and a leg and they started calling it “secondary cancer.” That’s when Kate starting getting the horrible gut feeling in her stomach, that her initial reaction was correct, this was not going to end well. There would be no wedding and no farm with chickens.


Her repulsion at the word cancer returned again. People would ask,


“How’s your Dad getting on?”


“He’s fine.”


“No more cancer?”


“No more cancer.”


It wasn’t denial, it was evasion. What was she meant to say?


“The cancer is secondary and it’s not looking good. How’s your Dad?”


With every phone call to say he had worsened, Kates colour turned from glowing white to angry, violent, red. It was the type of red that trickles out of someone’s head who has just fallen out a seventy storey building and whose head has been cracked open; that deep, seeping, slow moving red that creeps slowly and which entices silence; and then screams. She sat snug in her red terror, sipping constantly on glasses of wine.


And then she got the call. “Terminal cancer” had joined the party now too.


She had been sitting drinking in a pub with a friend when the phone rang. It was her Mother and she’d had a call from Scotland.


Cancer.


Terminal.


Days to live.


Need to go to Scotland.


Tonight.


The conversation came in bits. Kate imagined if this had been a movie about her Dad and her, at this very moment, all the cameras all at once would zoom in on her, and everything would fall deathly quiet, allowing the study of the woman who just found out her Dad is going to die.


The thoughts’ had raced through her head, from then until now but the main one that terrified her was one that she knew she was completely alone in feeling. Everyone felt remorse, everyone felt sad, but Kate... no, she felt something quite different. All her life, there was nobody who had died who her Dad couldn’t reach. He’d reached them all, right in front of her. Some people are adamant that mediums make it up, but Kate knew different. This was real. But who would reach her Dad for her when his time came? No one. She didn’t know any other mediums. She would be alone, spiritually. Completely and entirely, left to fend in a world where she knew spirits existed, but whose deafening silence made her feel she may as well of been alone. They never spoke to her. Only her Dad.


Kate sighed and remembered her Dad. It was strange how she already thought of him in the past tense, as if part of him was already resigning