Short Story - 'Surprise'

I’ve always arranged surprise parties. I never understand people who don’t enjoy them. I love the fact it means you care enough about someone to want to express your love and pride for them. I get a thrill from crossing my fingers that everyone’s gonna keep the secret, I take the challenge of making sure that each individual contribution to the food, drinks, decoration or entertainment melds together seemlessly very seriously and I adore the moment it hits the party recipient that all these people who mean the world to them are right there in the room without having to have lifted a finger to get them there. My party organising was the bane of Martin’s life. Nice, sweet, sturdy Martin who lived life with his face in a book and his hand clasped around his daily organiser. I think he was just as shocked as his family and friends were that he’d fallen in love with the kookiest, most excitable girl at university.  But, like in every aspect of our lives, he knew how to humour me, to play along and, always, to be my rock. The prep for this party was squashed in between treatments, panics and painful paperwork. Yet it was perfect in every way. 

The cake was chosen because it was a replica of our wedding cake. The deep chocolate sponge I loved made up the base of the cake and the top was the light vanilla sponge that Martin, the purist that he was, always found superior to any of today’s fancy flavours. Squashed in between them was the heavy fruit cake that we both hated but, since it’s the traditional choice for a wedding cake, superstitiously agreed we should include. You know. Just to be sure. 

Martin’s surprise party was a bittersweet affair. A heady mix of love and loss and an oddly cordial acceptance of failure. I suppose there’s no other way to put it really. It was a goodbye. The chance for everyone who knew and loved Martin - I was never surprised by how many people that described - to see him, touch him, kiss him and breathe in the very essence of him one last time. And for him to do the same. 

The music was a strange little band that had been playing in the dingy pub where we had our first date at university. I doubt any of the guests at the party enjoyed the music. In fact I’m not sure either of us ever had either. We’d talked through their set, lost ourselves in our first kiss and then snuck out, away from the racket, to smoke. Later I’d bought their album at a student union gig for Martin’s Valentine’s Day gift. A jokey one really, but he’d put it on, lowered the lights and kissed me. Recreated that first night. Then he looked at me and said, “Gemma, I love you”. For the first time. Suddenly that music meant something, regardless of how terrible it sounded. 

If it seems weird to you that a party was the way this was done, well, I don’t blame you. I think most people believe that when you’re dying, it’s the time for you to be closed off from the rest of the world to be with your family. It’s supposed to be a time of shock, of pain, of grief, of heartache. All very serious. But when your husband has been dying, right in front of your eyes, for years and years? When your wife has become your carer - doing all the things for you that you one day expected her to do for your children? When you’ve spent so many horrendous years swinging between joy, hope and misery, spending most of it in a limbo land where you have absolutely no control so you’re stuck just watching the years pass and, along with them, steadily losing ground on all the plans you once made so carefully and lovingly together? Well, you’re done with being serious. You’ve earned a party. I think our friends and family just wanted to see us together one last time, relaxing into each other like we used to. 

The weeks leading up to the party was the sickest I’d seen Martin. I’d stopped getting shocked at his bald head, his steroid bloated frame and his slurring voice. I was so busy looking after him, in what must have become a rather over-efficient matronly type of way ,that I’d blocked out the difference between what I wanted my husband to look like and the awful reality. But now even I was noticing the difference. His breathing was more and more laboured, his nose bleeds frequent and, though he didn’t say anything, I could see his eyes glaze over each time he was racked with pain. For the first time he started asking me to leave the room while he talked to his family on the phone. I thought he didn’t feel I was strong enough to handle too many goodbyes. 

On the day of the party I picked Martin up from the hospital and was driving towards his parents’ house when he suddenly said, “Turn left”.

“What?” I asked. 

“Turn left here.”

A little chill ran through me. “That’s not the way to your Mum’s house Martin.” 

“Thank you Einstein.” I stared at him and he weakly forced a throaty little chuckle. 

“I’m not quite off my rocker yet darling. Turn left. Please.” 

“We’ll be late for dinner at your parents”, I murmured. But I was already turning left. I never could say no to him. 

“They’ll understand”. 

I drove down the road until I came to the town hall. I slowed down as I caught sight of fifty, sixty, maybe more people filling the car park until we finally came to a standstill at the entrance. I turned to my left and looked at Martin. He was gazing back at me with the broadest grin I’d seen on him for months and his whole face with glowing with pleasure. 

Everyone and everything was there. My parents, his parents, our nieces and nephews, best friends, the cake, the terrible music. Each guest received copies of the book we were reading in the English class we met in and, rather embarrassingly, a copy of the first poem I wrote for Martin. We ate an eccentric looking buffet that was a gastronomic history of our relationship eating habits stretching from university stir fries to my ‘grown-up’ Nigella-esque meal attempts via plenty of chinese takeaways, emergency pizzas and broke beans on toast. We sat and told stories. About Martin, about our parents, about us...everyone had an anecdote. Kids scrambled to press kisses on Martin’s cheeks and a sombre-faced ten year old nephew reassured me he’d look after me after Uncle Martin had gone to hang out with God. Grown men laughed while brusquely wiping away tears and women clucked and cleaned busily, stopping only to lay a gentle hand on one of us or to press champagne into our hands. Later that evening we all sat close, huddled under blankets, and used the hall’s projector to watch home movies, laughing at the sight of a five year old Martin running through his garden stark naked. At midnight he squeezed my hand lightly and, smiling, whispered, “Surprise darling”.