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waiter.
    Our roles, I realised, had reversed: suddenly I was the parent, taking care of my lost-looking, infantile brood; dishing out the don’t-worrys and it’ll-be-okays that I hoped would comfort them. Dad later admitted that he feared I was becoming our family’s matriarch at such a young age. And, notoriously bossy as I am, it wasn’t a position I was interested in. Almost as soon as the words ‘breast cancer’ had entered our world, it felt as if everyone was suddenly looking to me for strength and guidance and cues on how to act or what to say. And half of me felt pleased that they did; but the other half felt like a clueless, desperate child. What made anyone think that at twenty-eight –
twenty-eight!
– I was any better equipped than them to deal with this? Why was
I
suddenly the ringleader?
I
was the child.
I
was the one in trouble.
I
was the one in need of help. How could I scream my parents into submission one minute and expect them to wipe away my tears the next? Nothing, nothing, not a single fucking thing about this was fair, and I wanted to wail and scream and throw a noisy, fist-banging fit on the restaurant floor. But just as having to keep it together for everyone I loved wasn’t fair, it was simultaneously the only thing I could bring myself to do.
    When our crapas eventually arrived, I encouraged P, Mum and Dad to eat something, using their fork-pushing as an excuse to ignore my own food and instead make a list of the people I needed to keep informed. Jamie was first, then my mate Tills.
    ‘Perhaps I ought to tell J,’ said Mum.
    ‘No, this is for me to do,’ I snapped, in the manner of a haughty headmistress. ‘In fact, I’m doing it right now,’ I insisted, grabbing my phone from the table as though it were a clipboard from which I was about to read the school register. I stood watching P and my folks stare at their plates from the opposite side of the road as I called Jamie, picking at the flaking paint on some iron railings as his phone rang.
    ‘Mate, it’s me … it’s invasive,’ I revealed, wishing as soon as I’d said it that I’d found a better way to break the news.
    ‘Fuck,’ came the instant reply. ‘Shit, sis … fuck. What are they going to do?’
    I recounted the routine like a shopping list. ‘Well, first I’m seeing a fertility expert to see whether I can get any eggs frozen before chemotherapy shoots the lot of them to shit. Then this Friday I’m having a mastectomy and once I’ve recovered from that there’ll be a few months of chemo.’ The phone line crackled with sniffs and mumbled expletives, but I continued with my cancer-catalogue. ‘And then there’ll be some radiotherapy and finally some hormone therapy, but to be honest I’m not really sure what that means.’
    Jamie composed himself. ‘And all of that is going to work, right?’ I could sense the panic in his voice and it frightened the hell out of me.
    ‘It’d fucking bett … yes, mate, of course it’s going to work,’ I corrected myself, choosing then and there to keep my doubts to myself. ‘They’re all really positive, J,’ I said, finally finding a more sensitive tone. ‘I’m young enough and tough enough to be able to handle this, y’know, and they’re throwing everything they’ve got at it.’
    I glanced back over to the restaurant window, trying to lip-read what P, Mum and Dad were saying to each other. I assumed this was a tapas-sized taster of what was to come: being talked about whenever I was absent, but continually unaware of what was being said.
    ‘Will you be okay, dude?’ I asked Jamie.
    ‘Of course
I’ll
be okay, you nobhead,’ he replied, as I welcomed the relief of someone finally lightening the tone. ‘I just want
you
to be, sis.’
    My call to Tills went a similar way. I came clean about my tumour and recited the treatment shopping list. She gasped in all the right places and said ‘fuck’ a lot. Tills had clearly been steeling herself to hear the