Charlie and Pearl (25 page)

I hadn’t realised how much I’d been missing the fun that can only be
had from being with a group of
girls. Charlie is great company, but boyfriend fun is very, very different to girlfriend fun. I found myself wishing I’d been there with them when they got ready to go out. All meet
ing up at someone’s house to start the
drinking (because it’s cheaper to drink at home than out), jostling for room at the mirror to apply make-up, trying on dress after dress, and heels after heels. I used to love going out with Kelly and the others. We’d dance the night away. Crash on each other’s couches after making the taxi driver stop at a BP service station on the way home so we could buy
mince and cheese
pies and litres of chocolate milk, the best hangover cure
in the world
.

CHARLIE

The Hen’s party girls were a tonic for Pearl. She got a bit
moody
at one stage,
nostalgic, I assumed,
for
something
she would never have
, but the Bride to b
e wasn’t going to have any sadness on her night of nights
.
S
he dragged Pearl up on the dance floor and they
,
‘got down and boogied’, as girls do.

“What’s wrong with her?” asked one of the more sober girls in the group
, nodding towards where Pearl and the others were badly doing impressions of a robot dance.

“How did you
- ?”

“Her skin, i
t’s grey. My dad’s skin went grey like that too, just before he died”.

“I’m sorry to hear that”

“Thanks. It was a long time ago now, nearly ten years. The pain never
goes away
though”

I didn’t know what to say so I just made a
n M
mm kind of noise and took a swig of my beer.

“So?” she asked, her eyebrows arched in question.

“She has cancer”

“Terminal?”

“Yep”

“How long has she got left
?”

I sighed. This was a question I asked myself daily,
and for which I had
no answer.

PEARL

I could see Charlie and
the
girl talking while I was up on the dance floor. They had their heads together, plotting something. It was clear from the looks he gave me; his smiling eyes had
a
cheeky glint. Next thing the girl was bouncing up on the stage and grabbing the microphone.

“Hey everyone
!” she shouted to the crowd. “
Is everyone having a good time?”

There was a chorus of whistles and cheers.

“Well tonight’s a very special occasion for one of us,” she continued. “
We have a birthday girl
in the house!”

We did?
Before I knew what was happening some of the other girls had
my hands and
dragged
me through the crowds, around the tables and chairs full of happy, jovial people and up onto the stage.
I felt a bit apprehensive as f
rom up there,
an
awful
lot of faces, all looking at me
, filled my vision
.

What the hell had Charlie said to her? She had her wires totally crossed.

“It’s not my birthday” I tried to
protest
but she shushed me.

“Let me hear it for the birthday girl!” she yelled and the crowd roared.

“No seriously…” I said but she just grinned at me. I looked out into the crowd and I could just make out Charlie’s face, grinning at me. Clearly he was in
cahoots with whatever this ambush was.

“Ok people, pipe down” she said, “The birthday girl has a special birthday wish. Who wants to help her achieve it?”

There were
more
cat calls and whistles.

“Come on, you can do better than that!”

Louder cat calls and whistles.

“I…can’t…Hear…YOU!” she shouted.

Even
louder
cat calls and whistles
till I felt the floor vibrate beneath my feet
.

“Um…excuse me…” I
tried again
, a little bit worried about what was coming next.

She ignored me.

“So the lovely Pearl here,” she gestured towards me with a grin that could only really be described as evil, “wants to kiss 50 people before midnight!”

She what? I turned to glare at Charlie. He winked and shrugged his shoulders and mouthed “sorry babe”. He didn’t look sorry.

I was going to kill him.

The girl, whose name I found out was Lara, put a chair in the middle of the dance floor and parked me on it, and then she lined up customers and staff, including the dishwashers and
the
chefs from out back, and one by one they came forward and kissed me, kisses ranging from chaste pecks on the cheek (from grinning grannies) to lip smacking smooches from blushing teenage boys. And some of the girls were the raunchiest of all! I was shy at first, but then I figured, you know what? I was dying, which meant I was going to be deprived of a whole lot of kissing that I should have had over the next 50 or so years so what the hell, and I went for it. It was
another thing to cross off my list after all
.

Did I m
ention that I even kissed girls?
Charlie said he knew some guys who would have paid good money to see that
.

CHARLIE

Every Sunday we
buy a phone card from a corner dairy,
find a phone booth and call home.
Me,
I look forward to it; Mum is supportive of this trip and she loves Pearl, so we spend five or ten minutes yakking about what Pearl and I’ve been up to. One Sunday she tells me that the Bookshop has been sold. The new owners are
city folk, from Auckland,
looking for a lifestyle change.

“They’ve only gone and painted the walls black and installed fancy
silver
lighting” she said
scandalously
.

Honestly? I did feel a moment’s sadness.
It was confirmation
that a door had closed
firmly
behind me. The future was not
currently something I cared to think
about much
.
You know the old cliché, “live every day as if it might be your last”? Well I was literally living it. I couldn’t allow myself to plan more than a few days ahead.

Pearl
was reluctant to call home. I had to gently coax her, promise her
she didn’t have to talk for long
. Bribe her with promises of treats.

She would call her dad first because he was the easiest one to deal with.
D
epending on her mood, if Kathy answered she would simply hang up without saying a word.

“What?” she would say defiantly when I’d look at her. “If there’s one thing I know” she’d say, “it’s that I don’t have to talk to anyone I don’t want to”

How could I argue with that?

Her mum was always the same. Upset, crying,
enquiring as to how
she was feeling, whether she’d had any
further
bad ‘symptoms’ of her illness. Pearl would end up in a state after talking to her. We’d argue after she’d cry and say she was never going to call her mother again.

“You can’t blame her” I’d insist. “You’re her only daughter; of course she’s going to be upset”

Although secretly I’d think that Claire could at least make an effort to be more upbeat when talking to Pearl. It was as if she was the child and Pearl the adult
who had to do all the
comforting. It left her
in a mood
every time so I learnt to leave her alone for awhile, give her some space.

I did feel
a bit
guilty for taking her away from them. No one knew how long she had left; not the doctors at the hospital,
certainly
not I. What if I was depriving them of Pearls last days here on earth? Scratch that, I knew I was depriving them.

But I knew that if Pearl had a choice she would choose to spend her remaining time with me, in our motor home, touring the country, over spending each day in that lazy boy in her mother’s lounge.

Hands down, no contest.

PEARL

The pain is much, much worse than I expected. My legs hurt; the bones in my thighs feel like the marrow is being sucked out slowly through a straw. And my back, it’s a constant, stabbing pain
every time I move or even breathe too deeply.

I don’t tell Charlie. I’m scared that if he knows how I’m feeling he will insist on taking me to a hospital. There’s nothing a hospital can do. Maybe they could give me some morphine but I’m doing
managing myself on a cocktail of Ibuprofen
and wine. I know it’s highly advised against mix
ing
the two, and I know that the packet of 24 I’m getting through in 48 hours is also probably against
general
advisement, but hey, what’s the worst that could happen right? I overdose and DIE?

The hardest thing to hide is
the
constant need to pee. We have a toilet in the motor home but after the incident when I had to throw out one of my most favourite pairs of ballet style fla
ts I don’t try to go when the truck is moving
anymore.

And I don’t want to ask Charlie to stop every five minutes. Especially when most of the time
,
I desperately feel like I want to go
but
nothing happens. I strain, and sit there and nothing comes out. But the feeling
won’t
go away.

CHARLIE

She thinks I haven’t noticed but I have. The amount of pills she’s taking, the way her face is sometimes so tight with the pain she’s trying hard not to show me. It’s breaking my heart but I don’t know what I can do for her.

Last night she cried and thrashed and sweated all night. She wasn’t fully conscious, but she wasn’t asleep either. It was like
she was in
a semi state of awareness.