Postscript (P.S. I Love You #2)(52)

Paul is displaying it grandly, proudly.

‘This,’ he grins, ‘was my first baby before the monsters were born. I put it in here for the acoustics. Do you play?’

I shake my head.

‘Started when I was five. Practised every morning from eight to eight thirty before I went to school. It was the bane of my life until I left school, started college and then realised being a piano player at parties is a babe magnet.’

We laugh.

‘Or at least, the centre of all entertainment.’ He starts playing. It’s jazz. Free. Fun.

‘“I’ve Got the World on a String”,’ he tells me, still playing.

He gets lost in his own world, playing along, head down, shoulders up. No despair, just joy. He stops suddenly, and we’re plummeted into silence.

I stand up quickly and go to his side. ‘Are you OK?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘Paul, are you OK?’ I look him in the eye. Headaches, nausea, vomiting, double vision, seizures. I know what Paul experiences. I’ve seen it. But he can’t be experiencing it now; the tumour is gone. He’s in remission, he beat it. This is all precautionary. Of all the people I am spending time with, Paul has the most cause for optimism.

‘It’s back,’ he says, choked up.

‘What?’ I ask. I know exactly what he means, but my brain can’t compute it.

‘I had a five-hour seizure. Doctor said it’s back with a bang.’

‘Oh Paul, I’m so … sorry.’ It’s too weak, the words are not enough. ‘Fuck.’

He smiles sadly. ‘Yeah. Fuck.’ He rubs his face tiredly and I give him a moment, my mind racing. ‘So what do you think?’ he asks, looking me in the eye. ‘About the piano lesson?’

What do I think? I think I’m unsure about whether to push him more. I think I’m afraid something will happen to him, in my presence, and I’m afraid of that happening and I don’t know how I’d explain that to his wife. I think that instead of him spending time with me here, he should be with his wife and children, making actual memories, not ones for the future.

‘I think … that you’re right. This works much better on camera than in a letter.’

He smiles, relieved.

I place my hand on his shoulder and squeeze encouragingly. ‘Let’s show your babies exactly who you are.’

I hold my phone up and begin recording. He looks straight into the camera and the energy is back, a playful look in his eyes.

‘Casper, Eva, it’s me, Daddy! And today, I’m going to teach you both how to play the piano.’

I smile and watch, zoom in on his fingers as he teaches the scales, trying not to laugh as he jokes and makes deliberate mistakes. I am not in the room. I am not here. This is a man, speaking to his children, from his grave.

After basic scales and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’, we move to the kitchen.

He opens the fridge and removes two cakes. One is chocolate for Casper and the other is sponge with pink icing, for Eva. He rummages through a shopping bag and retrieves a pink candle; a number three.

‘For Eva,’ he says, pushing it into the centre of the cake. He looks at it for a moment and I can’t even imagine the depths of his thoughts. Perhaps he’s making his own wish. Then he lights it.

I press record and zoom in on his face, half-hidden beneath the cake held up in his hands. He starts to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. He closes his eyes, makes his wish, then blows the candle out. When he opens them, his eyes are misty. ‘PS. I love you, baby.’

I end the recording.

‘Beautiful,’ I say quietly, not wanting to ruin his moment.

He takes the phone from me and reviews his work and while he’s doing that I look inside the shopping bag.

‘Paul? How many candles do you have in here?’

He doesn’t answer. I turn the bag upside down and everything spills on to the marble countertop.

‘OK,’ he says, after watching the recording back. ‘Maybe zoom in on me and the cake more, I don’t want too much of the background.’ When he looks up, he sees my face, then the contents of the bag on the counter. Pink and blue numbered candles fill the countertop. I see 4, 5, 6 – all the way to ten. I see an 18, 21, 30. All the years he’s prepared himself to miss. He shifts awkwardly from one foot to the other, embarrassed. ‘Too weird?’

‘No.’ I gather myself. ‘Not at all. But we’re going to need a lot more time to get through this. And we’re going to have to mix things up a little. We can’t have them looking at you in the same shirt every year. Can you get some different tops? And fancy dress. I bet you guys have lots of fancy dress, let’s make this fun.’

He smiles, grateful.

Despite the battle Paul faces, a battle he’s had to fight once already, I find that spending time with him feels productive. With Gerry I felt so powerless, we were at the whim of every doctor’s decision, following appointments, schedules and treatments to a T, not knowing enough about it ourselves to be able to make clear decisions or take different options. I felt powerless. Now, while I’m obviously still powerless against Paul’s tumour, at least I feel that I can do something for him. We have a goal and we’re getting somewhere. Perhaps this is how Gerry felt while writing the letters for me. While everything else was uncertain, or out of his control, he had this one thing under control. At the same time I was fighting for him to live, he was making preparations for after his death. I wonder when that began, what moment he submitted to the knowledge, or did it begin as a ‘just in case’ as it did with Paul.