Please enjoy the following excerpt of The Cancer Ladies' Running Club, copyright 2021, Jo Rees

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NEW YEAR’S EVE

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“Quick! It’s nearly time,” I shout, and we turn on the TV just as Jools Holland is counting down to midnight. The kids run in from the lounge. and I put my arms around Tilly, my eldest, and Jacob, my thirteen-year-old son, as we yell out the final three seconds at the top of our voices.

     There are cheers and hugs as all twenty of us kiss each other happy New Year and quickly form a ragtag circle between the long wooden table and the wood-burning stove in the kitchen of Scout’s Suffolk farmhouse. After overlapping our hands to sing “Auld Lang Syne,” we all half sing and half laugh as Pooch, our dog, earnestly wags his tail like he’s trying to do a butt shimmy.

     “We’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for days of auld lang syne,” I bellow, bumping shoulders with the kids, my cheeks pink. Who knows what it means? It feels good to sing it.

     Afterward, we break apart, and I fall into Tom’s arms. In all the mayhem, I haven’t been able to wish him happy New Year yet.

     “Steady on,” my husband laughs, holding me up. “Have you been keeping up with Joss on the champagne?” We both know Joss can drink all of us under the table.

     “Yep, but I love you,” I slur, looking up into his familiar face. He wears thick-framed glasses that make him look kind of distinguished and funky. His once-lustrous hair has thinned so much he now shaves his head, but he’s better-looking to me than ever—and definitely improving with age.

     “I love you too, my Keira.” He runs his hands over my hair and looks into my eyes, then kisses me tenderly, and my heart melts, as it always does.

     “Okay, okay, you two lovebirds, break it up,” Joss says. “There are children present. Honestly, you’re just as soppy as you were twenty years ago. You coming outside?” she asks me, in a meaningful way. A meaning not lost on Tom.

     “Good idea to get some fresh air. I’ll put Bea to bed,” Tom says, letting me go and nodding to our youngest, who is heading for the cozy window seat with Pooch. Joss grabs three glasses of champagne and my arm, and we head for the back door. “Have fun. I’ll distract the teens,” Tom calls after us, and winks at me.

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* * *

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Outside, Scout joins me and Joss as we sit on the stone wall outside the kitchen. The huge garden is bathed in silvery shadows, and the stars twinkle in the black sky. Inside, through the steamed-up window, we can see Scout’s husband, Mart, lining up tequila shots. It’s going to be a long night.

     “So a new year,” Joss says, lighting one of her thin menthol cigarettes. “What are we all going to change? Apart from the no smoking— which starts at daybreak.”

     Scout and I laugh. She and I have known each other since our school days, but we became proper friends only when we both wound up at the same uni and she, Joss, and I were in halls together. The three of us became inseparable friends, and we shared a flat in Ladbroke Grove when we graduated, partying together through the midnineties. Scout and I stopped clubbing and smoking years ago when we got married and had babies, but Joss remains an eternal twenty-five-year-old. Every New Year, she swears she’s going to give it up, but she never does. I don’t mind, though, because it means I can still bum the occasional party cigarette off her. I check through the window to make sure that Tom really has distracted the teenagers. I can’t risk being caught by Tilly.

     “You know me, I hate change,” I say as she hands the cigarette to me. I take a drag, squinting through the unfamiliar smoke. “And anyway, everything is just fine and dandy.”

     “Now that you’re going to be Brightmouth’s retailer of the year,” Joss says in an excited voice. She’s referring back to the speech Tom gave over dinner, saying how proud he was that Wishwells, my shop, had been nominated for the award.

     “Yes, well,” I say, handing the cigarette to Scout. “I haven’t actually won yet, but it’s good to be recognized for what we’ve achieved.”

     “You’ll win it,” Joss says confidently, and I smile at her unwavering faith.

     “What about you, Scouty? You happy living the dream?” I ask.

     Scout left a high-flying city job five years ago and moved up here to this lovely patch of Suffolk to start a new life as a farmer. You’d never know from looking at her. She’s small, with a blonde bob, and she looks lovely tonight in her ancient Karen Millen velvet dress. She blows a stream of smoke out thoughtfully.

     “It’s good, I think,” she says. “But if I’m honest, it gets lonely sometimes with just the alpacas for company. I don’t get to meet new people.” It’s true that she’s isolated up here, and I worry about her. Mart still commutes to London, so he’s away three nights a week, and her twin boys are in boarding school during term time.

     “Oh, they’re overrated,” Joss says, though for a second I’m not sure if she’s referring to people or the alpacas. She works in a London PR agency and has to schmooze for a living. “Right, K? New friends?” She pulls a face. “Who has time for those?”

I nod and laugh in agreement. I already have a host of gorgeous women in my life—friends I’ve known for twenty years or even longer, like these two. Then there’s the staff in the shop, not to mention my suppliers and all my regular customers. My days are full of people. I don’t have room for anyone new.

     “I get a lot of time alone to reflect,” Scout says, taking another drag and blowing a smoke ring toward the stars. She’s the only one of us who could ever do that.

     “Uh-oh,” Joss jokes, pulling a face at me. “About what?”

     “Well . . . don’t you ever wonder if this is it? The peak point of our lives?”

     “And it’s all downhill from here?” I exclaim. “Don’t say that.”

     “But we’re all around halfway through.”

     “We’re not even fifty. We’re going to be marching up mountains when we’re ninety,” I remind her. “Don’t start talking like this is the beginning of the end.”

     “Exactly. We’ve still got it, right?” Joss says, and pulls a pout, looking at her reflection in the window, leaning forward to plump up her cleavage in her low-cut leather dress.

     “Don’t you ever want to do something big—that makes a difference?” Scout asks, handing the cigarette back to Joss. “You know . . . don’t you ever think about your legacy?”

     “Your legacy will be a string of heartbroken toy boys,” I tease Joss.

     “How exciting,” she says. She’s recently single, having finally dumped her useless long-term partner, and has found Tinder.

Scout’s face falls. She has a tendency to go all existential when she’s squiffy, and me and Joss always undermine her, but we’ve gone too far and I relent.

     “I know what you mean, Scout, but personally, I’m happy. I really, really don’t want anything to change,” I tell her, grabbing her hand and Joss’s and kissing their knuckles. They laugh, knowing how sentimental I am.

     And I don’t. Right here, right now, surrounded by my best friends, I feel drunk and content. And yes, of course there are things I could improve, but on the whole, I’ve made good choices, I reckon. I’m lucky. I want my life to stay just as it is.

 

 

♦ 1 ♦

January 3

 

In the room on the fourth floor of the breast clinic, I’m flipping through Pinterest on my phone, searching for new ideas for the shop, when a WhatsApp pings up from Lisa, my ceramics supplier. Check these out, it says, and I open her message to see the picture she’s sent.

     “Oh, they are lovely,” I gasp out loud, looking at the pretty batch of espresso cups she’s made with our latest floral design. I can’t wait to get back to the shop and show the girls.

     I feel a glow of pride as I text Lisa back with effusive praise, and once again I thank my lucky stars that I found her when I had to outsource my ceramics all those years ago. She’s been making teapots galore for me, and it’s lovely to see her hit the ground running this New Year with renewed enthusiasm after our fantastic Christmas sales.

     But as I send the message, I’m momentarily distracted by the vase of plastic yellow dahlias on the table, which seem to throb in the shaft of sunlight coming through the slatted blind.

     “Come on,” I sigh, tapping my foot. I really don’t have time to be here. Lorna, my business partner, has scheduled a meeting this morning with our accountant, Miles. He’s a dry old thing and I’m much more fond of him than Lorna is, so I need to be there to grease the wheels. He’s been with us forever. He even used to do the books for Dad when Wishwells was Dad’s framing shop.

     So I don’t want Lorna—or worse, Pierre—to have the meeting with Miles without me. Don’t get me wrong; Pierre, Lorna’s husband, has been very helpful over the last few months, and revamping the office computer system with a much-needed upgrade was a job I never would have gotten around to. The problem is, I’m not sure how long he’s going to keep “helping.”

I said he could come in as a favor to Lorna, really. He’d been sitting at home twiddling his thumbs since being fired from his job in finance (unfairly, apparently) at the end of last summer. Lorna made the good point that it was ridiculous to have someone with the business nous of Pierre at our disposal and not use him, so I said he could come in. But I can’t help feeling that he’s gotten his feet too far under the table and wants to change everything. And Lorna seems to hang on his every word.

The door opens and the nurse comes in. She’s wearing a blue smock, and she checks the dangling watch on her chest before smiling at me and sitting down in the chair with a sigh, as if it’s good to be off her feet. “So, Mrs. Beck . . .”

     “Oh, please. Just call me Keira,” I say. I don’t like being Mrs. Beck. It gives me too much in common with my battle-ax of a mother-in-law. I kept my maiden name for the business, and I’m used to being Keira Wishwell at work.

     “Keira.” She smiles. “Thanks for waiting.”

     “Do you know how long this will take?” I ask, looking at my phone as I slide it into my handbag on the floor. The big clock on the screen saver says 10:08, which means Lorna will almost certainly have to face Miles alone. Shit.

     “Well, that depends.”

     “On what?”

     She shuffles her bottom on the chair. “Well you see, after your first mammogram, before Christmas, we called you back because . . .”

     Something in her tone makes my ears prick up like a prairie dog’s. I was under the impression I’d been called back to the breast clinic as a routine kind of thing. They’d said that might happen. People get called back all the time.

She holds my gaze. “We can see some unusual breast tissue.”

     Breast tissue?

     BOOM!

     I’m in the quiet room.

     It dawns on me only now that she’s brought me in here with the plastic dahlias to deliver bad news. Is this bad news?

“Unusual how?” My voice is squeaky and quivery, not like my voice at all.

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(end of excerpt)

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