Sunday Morning Pancakes

Sunday mornings and pancakes go together beautifully.

I remember groggily walking into the kitchen on a Sunday morning (generally, a morning very close to being blended into afternoon) hopelessly hungover and praying to find pancakes. And a lazy, slightly mischievous, but mostly relieved smile would wipe across my face when I saw them there. They were always there. Neatly stacked up on our chequered table, almost like they appeared by magic. I liked to imagine elves creeping into our kitchen at midnight to make us pancakes, while we were away drinking and dancing and generally behaving badly as you do on Saturday nights. Of course I knew the pancakes weren’t the magical creation of kindly elves. But it was hard to imagine Anna battling a brutal hangover and waking up at some inappropriately early hour on Sunday, just to make sure I got the perfect pancake breakfast I loved so much. Pancakes with Anna defined my Sundays for a whole year. I looked forward to them, talked about them with other people and even marked them in my diary, as you do with all important events.

Anna liked hers with sugar and lemon. I had mine with bananas and chocolate sauce. Sometimes we exchanged and sometimes we both had them with fruit. Our pancake sessions generally lasted about two hours and in that time, we discussed any number of relevant things. Details from last night’s party, the weather forecast, the predicted direction of our careers, why the neighbours shagged so loudly, why Anna missed her mum so much but refused to call her, how we didn’t care that we didn’t have boyfriends and what would happen if we just packed our bags one day and left for Argentina without telling anyone.

The Argentina plan was generally discussed last because that very thought, that very slightest existence of possibility, would whisk us away in to a world of fantasy from which it was rather hard to recover and come back to the realities of our seemingly mundane existences.

But I knew that Sunday was different. And I knew the conversation wasn’t over once we had landed at Buenos Aires airport.

I knew from the way Anna looked at her nails as she talked to me and from the way she laughed a bit too wholeheartedly at my rather juvenile jokes. But most of all, I knew because of her eyes. Because her eyes suffered from an inability to conceal. Her eyes always wanted to give you the full story.

‘Cancer.’ she blurted out, in the blunt, cut-to-the-chase manner that was so characteristic of Anna Campbell. ‘They reckon I have another year.’

Her manner was calm, somewhat unmoved. But her voice was tense and ever so slightly shaken.

Ten minutes later and I was still silent. Why was I silent? How come none of the thousand questions bursting in my head made their way through my mouth? How come I didn’t hug her, or burst into tears or display any sort of emotion for that matter? I just sat in my chair, numb.

She looked at me and smiled. It was a smile I knew. A delicate but firm smile. A smile which told me she had accepted and moved on, so I had better catch up. A smile which said she didn’t want to talk about it, but she would listen if I felt like talking.

A smile which gradually became bigger and bigger until I realised there was something else I didn’t know about.

‘I talked to your boss’ she said, as she put down two tickets to Argentina on the table in front of us.