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worst, and immediately switched into super-practical mode, deciding who she would tell on my behalf and how she could clear her diary for any time I might need her. She was brilliantly frank, and I was instantly grateful.
    ‘I can’t be doing with tears right now, Tills,’ I said.
    ‘Which is why you won’t be getting any from me,’ she replied. ‘In fact, it’s your duty to tell people to shut the fuck up whenever you want to. You’ve got to do this your way and it’s not going to help if people are blubbering around you.’
    I told her how I’d screamed my family into silence at the hospital, and she congratulated my efforts. ‘That’s my girl,’ she said. ‘You kick some ass.’
    It seemed that there’d been some similar ass-kicking in the restaurant – though I’m still not sure by whom. By the time I’d made my calls and returned to my stool, P and my folks were sitting upright and feigning smiles, having apparently decided that straightforward and practical was their best tactic from here on in.
    ‘We’ve been talking,’ said Dad, ‘and if you two want any time on your own, just say the word and we’ll piss off back up the motorway.’
    ‘That’s more like it,’ I thought to myself. Dad saying ‘piss’ and Jamie calling me a nobhead was exactly the kind of discourse I was after. Yes, this was The Worst News In The History Of The World, and yes, it was heartbreaking and upsetting and frightening and going to take one hell of a joint effort to get through, but there wasn’t a hope of any of us getting through it if there wasn’t even a sniff of light-heartedness about the situation.
    ‘Yeah. I think maybe you’d better piss off.’ I winked at Dad, turning to P for his consent. (As if he’d have disagreed. I’m sure if I’d have played Veruca Salt and asked for a pony and an MX5 and a Mulberry handbag he’d have let me get away with it.)
    We paid our bill, piled into the car and headed back to the flat, making further lists of who to tell and how, each of our phones chirping a chorus of text-message beeps on the way. But as everyone else kept to their secret pact of staying practical and helpful and upbeat, our roles began to shift again, and I became the needy, petulant child to their calm, considered guardians. Bottom lip protruding, I stared out of the window at the backpacked tourists wandering along Baker Street, seeking out other girls my age. ‘Why wasn’t it you?’ I thought as we passed a happy-looking twenty-something, arm in arm with her equally – and nauseatingly – happy-looking boyfriend. ‘Why haven’t
you
got this?’
    I imagined all the things she could have done to justify a tumour in her breast. Perhaps she’d once seriously assaulted someone or committed fraud or perhaps her boyfriend was blissfully unaware of the husband and kids who assumed she was out at work. I made a mental list of the things I’d done that could have tipped my own karma in the wrong direction, but drew blanks at teenage hair-pulling, exaggerating my CV and stealing a carpet from an Indian restaurant in Freshers’ Week. But even if I had nicked every CD in my collection, kicked the crap out of my school nemesis or cheated on every boyfriend I’d had, would that mean that I deserved to get cancer?
    ‘It’s not fucking fair,’ I whinged when we got back home and resumed our positions – P on a floor cushion, me on the sofa, Dad in the armchair and Mum on the ottoman in the bay window. I wasn’t timid or tearful or frightened. Just angry. Blood-boilingly angry. I needed to stomp and shout and swear and punch things – and I needed to do it on my own. So, selfish as it was to make them do it, my parents packed their car and drove back up to Derby, to give my brother the support he needed as much as any of us, and to make arrangements to waste their annual leave on seeing me through The Bullshit.
    My phone was ringing off the hook. Everyone had known that I was heading back to