The Cuckoo's Child by Margaret Thompson Page A

chemo?”
    â€œRight.”
    â€œThen that’s what we set our sights on. Go for it, Tiger! Nobody ever had to prod you to stick up for yourself.”
    â€œWell, that’s true, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.”
    A small joke. It felt like a victory.
    â€œShall I come up there?”
    â€œNo, no point. We’ll keep you posted. I don’t think I’ll be a very gracious host for a while.”
    â€œHost be damned! We don’t need entertaining! If you need anything, you’ll ask? Ring me tomorrow, okay? Any time, when you feel like it.”
    â€œRight. Thanks.”
    â€œIt’ll be all right, Stephen. It will. It has to be.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œI’ll say goodbye for now, then.”
    â€œYes. Goodbye, Liv.”
    â€œGo and hug your kids. Talk to you soon.”
    â€œYes. Goodbye.”
    I held the receiver to my ear, listening to you listening to me, until I heard the clatter from your end as you hung up. The quiet of the room was punctured by the soft tick of the clock as the second hand swept the face. The fluorescent light hummed to itself. I could see myself reflected in the kitchen window, a stranger’s sombre face turned outward as if weary of imprisonment. Beyond the glass, like a negative image, ghostly snowflakes drifted, trickled over the windowsill and clung, weightless as down, to the bare branches of the apple tree.

TEN
    For the most part, life is undistinguished. We move through our days on fixed tracks, like the little players in a foosball game, not expecting surprises and rarely causing any, mechanically following the routine because that’s what we’ve always done and it’s easier to keep doing it than to think of something original. What percentage of our lives, I wonder, is dedicated to stodgy status quo? If we include sleep—and there’s a third gone right there—eighty-five percent? Ninety? More? And I don’t suppose it’s any different if one is famous or a genius or a hero. A prima donna may sing in every opera house from Sao Paulo to Beijing in the course of a year, but then travel is her norm: living out of a suitcase, booking in and out of palatial hotels, fighting with conductors, worrying about her vocal cords, wearing outlandish costumes, and upstaging the tenor merely the daily trivia of her life.
    In retrospect, she will probably find it very hard to differentiate between successful performances, but just let Mimi have a sneezing fit after she’s died, or let an overly dramatic member of the chorus fall into the kettle drums during an aria, and the event takes on an indelible flavour all its own. Memories may just be our five percent of the extraordinary: the little foosball man twirled too hard, detaching himself from the rod, performing a graceful arc across the crowded bar, and landing slam dunk in a pint of Guinness on the far side of the room.
    And if that sounds a trifle inebriated, hallucinatory, unreal, that was definitely the Flavour of the Year. Mum called that time “When Stephen Was Ill,” as if it had defined limits and was succeeded by another period called “When Stephen Was Well.” The capitals were appropriate, though. Our first exposure to acute illness, watching as you were caught up in the sprockets and rollers of the medical machine, reduced all our ordinary concerns to nothing. We lived and breathed Stephen. Work, shopping for groceries, marking, keeping dental appointments were simply ways of negotiating the voids between visits to the hospital, or bulletins on your progress, or detailed analysis of your doctor’s latest pronouncement. We learned the disease; words like leucocyte , platelets , anaemia , nonlymphocytic fell nonchalantly from our lips. We discussed blood transfusions, bone marrow aspiration, chemotherapy, and WBC counts as if they were on special at Safeway.
    In the end, of course, life with leukemia stopped being an