Two days before Christmas, I couldn’t put off the present purchasing any longer and dragged myself to the shopping centre, the large glass towers of which rose up above the surrounding suburban houses like tombstones. It took so long to find a parking spot I thought I’d probably missed Christmas altogether. I then panted through department stores in a desperate hunt for last-minute gifts for my picky brothers-in-law, followed by a frantic dash through the supermarket for the necessary ingredients for my potato bake. Carrying my own body weight in chips, dips, drinks, napkins, nuts, potatoes, mince pies and marzipan – enough stuff, in fact, to establish a comfortable wilderness homestead – I then tried to find my way back to the car. Where the hell was it again? I’d been so distracted and irritated, I hadn’t paid enough attention to where I’d parked. After two futile attempts in two different parking areas, I realised I’d have to hire a car to find my car.

The taxi rank was at the other end of the huge shopping complex. On and on I trudged along endless fluorescent corridors, passing elves in budgie smugglers and carol singers in bikinis, and endless glossy promotional photographs of festively festooned couples smiling at each other as they happily hung curtains and drilled nails in DIY cupboards, cruelly mocking the fraught misery of the average suburban scene of attempted IKEA assemblage, which had embittered couples turning their power tools on each other, shouting, ‘Die, evil scum!’ within minutes.

I was slogging past the food hall towards the escalators when a wave of nausea almost knocked me off my feet. I lurched left and steadied myself on the shoulder of an exhausted Santa who was chowing down on a spring roll during his lunch break. He was wearing the full red suit, requisite fluffy white beard, eyebrows that resembled toothbrush bristles and the suitably wrung-out expression of a man who’d been sitting all day letting kids pee on his lap while they whispered the brand names of skate and surf boards into his ear.

I felt myself swoon and then collapsed onto his lap, where I promptly vomited into my handbag – the handbag that contained the car keys I’d have to fetch out when I finally found my car. But I felt too sick to care. Bent double, barfing, two things dawned on me. First, that I was going to be a headline in my own newspaper: ‘Fifty-Year-Old Woman Arrested for Refusing to Get Off Santa’s Lap’. And, second, that I really was sick. There was no doubt in my mind that it was cancer. I felt it in my gut. It would be poetic justice, wouldn’t it? The medical karma I so richly deserved. And, of course, the worst part was, nobody would bloody well believe me.

28

‘Ruby Ryan?’