Elaine sits in the waiting room in her wheelchair, her eyes staring straight ahead. She looks so different away from home, and I curse myself for not noticing the changes before. Slack, yellowing skin drapes over her cheeks and collarbone, as though her bones underneath have shrunk in the wash.

We both know this is not going to end well.

‘Elaine Palmer, please?’

A nurse leads us to a small office. The corridor is so narrow that it takes three tries to get Elaine’s wheelchair through the doorway. The consultant has a flamboyant mane of sandy hair that surfs up from his forehead. As the nurse follows us into the room and leans against the consulting couch, my sense of doom grows.

‘Mrs Palmer, I’m Mr Greer. Thank you for waiting. I’ve had the chance to look at the test results now from last week. We put you through the mill, rather, didn’t we?’

Elaine nods. I know her: she doesn’t want flannel. She wants facts.

‘I’m afraid that the results do confirm what we suspected, that you have cancer of the pancreas. It’s a very difficult cancer to detect early and in your case, the tests we’ve done show that unfortunately, we’re beyond the stage where surgery is an option.’

He leaves silence, for the information to sink in. It’s not a surprise to me, not really. I might not be a doctor, but I knew enough from the extent of the tests and the expressions of the staff carrying them out that I would need to postpone my med school applications. At least that’s one problem I could solve.

In the distance, I can hear a trolley rattling along, the faint nee-naw of a siren.

I reach out for her hand. She lets me hold it but doesn’t grip back. Oh, Elaine.

‘Is there any treatment?’ Her voice is clear and free of self-pity.

The consultant doesn’t flinch. ‘There is chemotherapy, which we will certainly recommend. This is palliative. By which I mean it is aimed more at controlling the growth and effect of the cancer both in the pancreas itself and elsewhere in the body. It is not a cure.’

‘This isn’t a good one to get, is it?’ she asks.

He shakes his head. ‘No. We’ve made some positive steps in recent years but still . . .’

‘How long?’

‘I am always unsure how to answer that, Mrs Palmer. But, um, I would say we are talking in terms of months, rather than years. I’m really very sorry.’

The journey to the cafeteria is long and complex, the warren of corridors and lifts hard to navigate, especially with a wheelchair.

Eventually, we sit down with our pot of tea and the scones neither of us feels like eating.

Elaine exhales. ‘Well, whatever I did in a past life, it must have been extreme to deserve this luck.’