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forthcoming nuptials, making bets on whether she or Jamie would come off worst from the hen/stag weekends. I suggested that, since I’d be bald for their ceremony, perhaps I should go for some laughs and give my reading in a funny accent, too.
    We ate our chicken and reminisced about childhood memories. Of Jamie entering a talent show as a Michael Jackson impersonator, then collapsing into tears when he took the stage. Of the many mornings at Nan and Grandad’s house, making tents beneath clothes horses, creating crazy golf courses in the garden and picking trodden-in Play-Doh out of the carpet. And of the time Mum left me on the potty to answer a phone call, only to wonder where I’d got the chocolate that was smeared around my mouth when she returned. Leanne’s eyes almost burst out of her head; she was the only person in the room who hadn’t previously been aware of my filthy secret. Ordinarily I’d be in bits about such an admission, but on that day my folks got away with it. Because, even if it took the revelation of my shit-eating, this was as good an example as any of my wonderful family’s ability to crack a joke in
any
situation – and, by ’eck, was I grateful.

CHAPTER 5
    New balls, please
    The day before a mastectomy ought to be nervy and fretful and can’t-eat-anything worrying. But I’ve never been one for doing things the right way around. Instead, I’ve spent the day before
my
mastectomy staring at Rafael Nadal’s arse.
    A particularly canny ex-boss with friends in all the right places had clearly anticipated that Mastectomy Eve had the potential to be a horribly squeaky-bum day, and thus wangled two front-row, number-one-court Wimbledon tickets for P and I, as a means of taking our minds off tomorrow’s boob-removal. And what a terrific distraction it proved to be.
    By ‘it’, of course, I mean Rafa’s beautiful behind. Round, honed, perfectly peachy. You could sink your teeth into it. If you’d spotted me on the TV coverage, you’d have noticed that mine was the only transfixed head not following the ball from one side of court to the other. I became almost as obsessed with Rafa’s bottom as I have recently with other people’s boobs. I’m not ogling them, mind you – it’s research. (And girls, that’s the one time in your life when you can believe that line.) It was bound to happen. With all the chest-talk of late, I’ve quickly become a mammary meister. But seriously – when it comes to my new-look chest, will I be the Elephant Woman?
    I worked myself up into a panic about that yesterday, while P and I snogged our way round London on an open-top bus (his tactic to divert my attention from tomorrow’s inevitable). Will he still fancy me after the mastectomy (man, I hate that word), when I’m all stitched and swollen and unnatural-feeling and
sans
nipple? And, more to the bloody point, will he still fancy me when I’m pale and hairless, and bloated from the steroids? So lovely is P that he’s offered to shave his head when my hair falls out. But I’ve told him not to – he’s so darned handsome it’ll ruin his looks, and I like him the way he is. And how ridiculous is that, eh?
    *
    ‘IF ONE MORE person tells me to be strong,’ said P on the morning of my mastectomy as we drove to the fertility clinic, ‘I’m going to use what little is left of my strength to strangle the motherfucker.’ I giggled, relieved that we were somehow able to turn our situation into an in-joke, just for us. But P’s frustration was bang on the money. All we’d heard for the past few days was ‘be strong’, ‘hang in there’, ‘stay positive’, ‘you can do it’ … and to say it was doing our heads in was as much of an understatement as saying that I’d rather not lose my hair.
    Once the initial shock settles in (which is a fib in itself, since it never really settles in) people’s reactions naturally turn from stunned to helpful. But there are, of course, varying degrees of