It’s growing inside of me.  Inside my belly.  I can feel it there.  Not, you know, physically, though I’ve tried.  I’ve pressed my fingers into my stomach to see if I can feel the bulge, but there’s nothing there ... yet.  It’s too small, but it’s growing.  Though in my mind, I can feel it.  I can sense it, another entity, part of me but not part of me.  I know that’s just my imagination, but that doesn’t make it any the less real, does it?

 Jeff was incredible when I told him.  At first, he just held me, then he told me we’d get rid of it, and everything would be back the way it was.  I cried when he said that.  Not because of him, or what he said.  It was the way he said it, because at that point he thought that was what I wanted to hear.  He was trying to make it all better.  Better for me, not for him.

 And when I told him we couldn’t get rid of it, I saw the thought behind his eyes.  Have you ever seen that?  When someone’s face and words say one thing, but you know for a certainty they are thinking something else.  I could see the thought as plainly as I can see you now.  He was thinking it was the end of everything.  No more late nights down the pub.  No more motorcycle.  No more holidays in Cancun.  No more fun.  And to be honest, that’s what I thought, too.

 But then he ... sorry, I always choke up when I think of this ... he went down on one knee, like someone in the films, and he asked me to marry him.  I mean, we’d never talked about it.  I hadn’t even really thought about it, not really.  We’d been going out for less than a year.  I didn’t know what to say, but no-one, no-one in the whole world, could have loved someone more than I loved Jeff at that point.  I couldn’t say anything, I just pulled him to his feet and hugged him like my life depended on it.  Which it did, in a way.  And all the while I was crying, he was saying how he’d see what sort of special licence we could get, and if we could, we’d get married next week, and I could tell by his voice he was crying too, though he’s too much of a man to shed actual tears.

 Men, they’re funny, aren’t they?  They pretend to be all tough, but they’re not.  They just bottle it all up until it bursts out every now and then.  I bet they cry in secret, when they’re in the loo and you think they must be constipated or something, they’re taking so long.

 Like my Dad.  I’ve not told him yet.  I’ll have to, I know, but it’s difficult.  When I was younger we had the most terrible rows.  I mean, World War Two rows, shouting and door-slamming and everything.  Then I came home drunk from a party when I was sixteen, and he burst out crying.  I saw the hurt in his eyes, and it was like a light coming on.  Even though I was drunk, I suddenly saw that all the anger I used to get from him was just tears for me, but coming out as shouting, because he was a stupid man like the rest.  And suddenly I loved my dad again.  So how can I make him cry now?

 Can I have a tissue?  Thanks.  Sorry about this.  I don’t know how men do it, really.  I try not to, not in front of Jeff, because he feels so useless when I cry.  It’s not fair on him, not after the way he reacted when I told him.

 No, we didn’t get married.  I mean, I don’t want to tie Jeff down.  Not like that.  He’d never have proposed if it wasn’t for Charlie.

 Oh, Charlie: that’s what I’ve named it.  Just in my head, sort of thing.  Like Charlie Chaplin.  It helps, sometimes.  I imagine it with that stupid, little moustache, and I laugh at it.  Laughing at it is good, isn’t it?  Because I can’t just hate it all the time, it’s too tiring.

 Because, of course, I do hate it.  It’s destroying my life, and Jeff’s.  Dad’s too, when he finds out.  But it’s odd; the more it grows, the less I hate it, the more I just sort of accept it.  Jeff says that’s because I’m growing, too.  He says I’m twice the woman I was before Charlie.  I suppose because it really focuses your mind on what’s important.  Stuff I thought was important then is just trivial now.  Things like Coronation Street and wearing the right labels and going to the popular clubs, they all just get in the way of life.  People, friends, family:  they’re what are important.  Everything else is just filling.

 Like the chemo.  They said I could have chemo, that it would slow it down, add a bit more to my time.  But they can’t kill it, it’s spread too far.  They’d just be putting off the inevitable.  But in the meantime I’d feel sick and weak, and what girl wants all her hair to fall out?  I don’t want that, and I don’t want my friends to see me like that.  It’s important to me that they remember me like this; that they see me and not Charlie.

 So that’s why we’re at this support group, me and Charlie Cancer here.  Thank you for listening.