‘I’m sorry, I should think before I speak. I don’t know how to apologize, everything I say is wrong. I didn’t know you had your breasts removed.’
‘Natalie, relax.’
‘And I didn’t mean to be pushing at you. I’m like an elephant who stamps around on good things and it makes me—’
‘Kiddo, I’ve let it go.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Relax. It’s gone. I’m not holding it. Cancer taught me that much.’
I wipe sweat off my forearms. ‘Did it hurt?’
‘Did what hurt? What you said or the cancer?’
I wince. ‘The cancer. The surgery. Were you in a lot of pain?’
‘Sit down, you’ll make me nervous too if you keep standing there like that.’
I sit on the bench beside her.
‘Yes. I was. Afterwards I was bruised and swollen. I had drains to gather fluid around the wounds. But I was very dizzy. The dizziness was more a confusion, there were parts of me gone. I’d never get them back.’ Her eyes darken. ‘It was the end of my body in the way I’d known it for my adult life. And I couldn’t get my mind around that at the beginning. No amount of research prepared me for that. I had to learn my body again.’
I cross my arms and hold my shoulders, resting my chin on my right wrist. My legs are weak as I imagine the experience.
‘I became numb for a while. I don’t know if that was from the operation or if it was me blocking it out. Then I started to wake up at night with these horrible tickles. My chest would be numb and tickling at the same time in a really horrid way. This went on for months.’
‘Does it still happen?’
‘No. I began to see a woman, a New Age-type therapist, and she told me to speak to the tickles, find out what they wanted.’
‘Are you joking?’
‘No.’
I suppress a nervous laugh. ‘Did it work?’
She looks me dead in the eye. ‘Of course it did.’
‘What did they want?’
‘They wanted me to make peace.’
‘With what?’
‘With lots of things. With my ex-husband, mostly.’
‘I never met him.’
‘Lucky for you.’ She chuckles. ‘We were a good couple initially but we were young hippies and didn’t know how to be honest with each other.’
I don’t want to ask a stupid question so I say nothing.
‘We didn’t know how to fight.’
‘Was that not a good thing?’
‘I’m not saying we didn’t fight, we did. But we didn’t know how to do it respectfully. We’d get annoyed with each other but never spoke about it. We’d force being nice and peaceful but we grew bitter and things would eventually erupt into drama for us. One of us always thought they knew what was right. One of us would always have to win.’
‘Is that why you got divorced?’
‘It was probably the underlying issue, yes. We were unconscious to what we were doing to each other, and drifted. I made friends with a colleague. One who I felt safe to speak to. It was never sexual. My ex-husband used to go crazy because of this. Also because he considered my colleague to be a square. I got some sort of sick thrill from that. My fury would be satiated by it. Of course my husband met someone else. He said I drove him to her.’
‘That’s sad, Dolores,’ I say.
‘That’s life, Natalie. In many ways, he was right. I wasn’t sleeping with my colleague but I was giving him the respect and emotional intimacy that I should have been giving my husband. I didn’t acknowledge that until much later, until I’d forgiven things.’
‘Are you friends now?’
‘Friends?’ She laughs in a high pitch. ‘No. No. I have no idea where or who he is anymore. But look, I’ve forgiven the whole lot. Him, myself, the lot. I wish him joy. Forgive everyone everything is what I believe now. I still struggle to express anger and I have to be careful about that. I’ve to check that I’m being nice for genuine reasons.’
She nods then gazes into the middle distance. ‘Because sometimes you can hold a grudge for so fucking long it goes underground. You’ve forgotten all about it, but it’s there, rotting.’
The air crackles. I glance around. ‘Is a storm coming?’
‘Possibly,’ Dolores says.
We sit for a while, saying nothing, and then she leaves, silently. I hope I haven’t stirred uncomfortable stuff in her for later. I try to picture her bottling up the thick dark liquid of her anger in an actual bottle to smash. Wielding a big shard of its glass at the party, tearing and kicking, screaming profanities and insults, pinkfaced with rage, but my mind’s eye won’t allow it – Dolores keeps turning into me in my daydream.
I check my watch and go back upstairs to change into my evening wear, promising that I won’t slash at myself in my head with nasty comments about my appearance.
We stroll into The Gardens and I wink at the waiter when I give our name. He nods conspiratorially. Dolores is glamorous in a black high-necked dress with a pearl collar. It has long lacy sleeves and falls a little past her knees. She wears sensibly heeled beige shoes.
The waiter writes in a large white book and asks us to follow him outside. ‘We’ll seat you in the function room tonight, ladies, as the restaurant is full with an event.’
‘Do you mind?’ Dolores asks, shifting her stance.
‘No, it’s fine. I don’t mind at all,’ I say.
‘You think they’d put the event in the function room and let the diners be in the restaurant? This is bizarre.’
‘It’s quite a hip place. Maybe they do things differently here,’ I say.
Dolores reluctantly agrees. We follow the waiter out through double doors to a terrace lit with fairy lights, onto a dark, cooler area. He pushes open a door.
The lights are off.
‘What’s happening?’ Dolores asks.
The waiter switches on the lights. ‘SURPRISE!’ roars the crowd. Stevie Wonder’s ‘Happy Birthday’ comes on over the speakers.
Dolores takes at least twenty seconds to figure out what’s going on. Her eyes are glazed and her hand rests on her chest.
‘Surprise, Auntie D.’ I kiss her soft cheek. ‘Happy birthday.’
Different acquaintances and friends swamp her. Bruce and his teenage sons sit by the bar. I’ll hang with them but a lot of people are here. My skin feels tight. I’ll probably have to talk to them all. I don’t have many conversational ideas. What if things fall into awkward silences? I scan around the room for the food.
There’s a table with canapés in the corner; I try to guess what they are. Salmon, maybe, roast beef, avocado and corn, prawns with lemon mayonnaise, some sort of spiced meat which I learn is crocodile from a passing waiter.
Beside that is a table with less fancy party food, pizza, wings and fries. Some crustless egg and cheese sandwiches. Vegetarian nibbles.
I stand by the food table and check to see if I’m being watched as I fill my plate, placing a second pizza slice on top of the first one. I scoop a handful of canapés and move away to the opposite corner of the room.
Bruce jumps up and goes to the bar when Dolores does, to get her a drink, even though he’s put a tab down. He wants to hand the glass to her.
They laugh and cuddle. I eat on.
Bruce hasn’t let himself go completely, like many men of his vintage. His skin is olive so the harsh Australian sun hasn’t ravaged it, even though he works in construction. His hands are gentle-looking too, lithe fingers that are delicate but still masculine. Years of hard work have given his body definition instead of plundering it.
When I finish eating, on Bruce’s cue, I set up the video messages on the projection screen and feel warm hearing all the familiar accents from home. My mother cheerfully wishes her sister a great sixtieth and makes a joke about how they used to be squashed in the car, five of them in the back, to go to Enniscrone beach on holidays. Best seat was the middle and they’d puck each other for it. Dolores would usually be granted it, being the youngest. How the sun shone all the time in 1960s Ireland, which probably gave Dolores the taste she had for sunny weather.