This is another romance that will probably not be to everyone's taste. That's life. This story is about courage and love, so please, if you want to criticise it, show a bit of courage yourself and don't hide behind the 'Anonymous' tag. CM
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The first time I saw Imogen it had a profound impact on me. "Hey Simon, come here." Scott should have been working on his computer but was instead looking at YouTube. I got up from my desk and walked over to his. "Have you ever seen anything so amazing in your life?" I wouldn't have gone that far, but it was pretty intriguing. She sat on a high stool that had a back support on it, her waif-like body barely creating any contours on her thin floral dress, in place of hair she wore a bandana tied around her head, and her thin legs were held from the floor by her sandal clad feet on the foot rest. That image was intriguing enough, but what really attracted me was her voice and the song she was singing. In a clear but soft voice as if the effort of getting through the song was almost too much for her, she sang a slightly altered version of the Gloria Gaynor hit, 'I will survive'. It was no longer the disco hit that the original was, it was no longer about a woman getting over the man who was cheating her. In her now folk version, it was an illness that she was fighting. I willed her with all my heart to finish the song, and the final 'I will survive' soared clear and pure and abruptly stopped. There was no fade out, no giving in to the inevitable, she was strong to the end. There was a moment of silence, and just before the image dissolved, the guitar seemed to slip from her hand, it was only the hand holding the neck that prevented it from falling to the floor, and she stood for a second or two, holding the stool for support.
"Who is she?" I had never seen such a gutsy performance.
"I don't know, but what I do know is that this is going to go viral. In the twenty-four hours it has had nearly a hundred thousand hits."
"We have to find out who she is, this could be one of the best human interest stories of the year." My mind was already on my fame and fortune, if I could find her before anyone else could, I could jump on to her publicity band-wagon, possibly even lead it. My job, if you could call it that, was to spot new talent for a community FM radio station that played mostly Indie bands and singers. We had a good following and each year we put out a CD of the top acts of the year. I was one member of the selection panel for this project, and the CD always sold well. We were not a commercial station, and relied heavily on CD sales, public subscriptions and donations to keep us in operation.
It took time and perseverance, but Scott and I managed to track her down. She lived in a small cottage at Leura in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. She answered her phone on the fourth ring. "Hello." The voice had the same clarity as the video, but there was a quality about it that worried me, it was quiet, almost weak.
"Miss Ferrier, my name is Simon Porter, I'm with OriginFM in Sydney. I'm ringing because I saw your YouTube posting and I'm impressed with what I saw and heard. I'd like to come and talk to you about it. Would that be possible?"
"I don't think so."
"Please, hear me out. I'm not so much interested in promoting your song, you seem to be doing pretty well on your own, and it's just that I think that there's more to this than just the song. Don't worry, while I'd like to do a story on you, I will not publish anything without your prior approval. It could be a great human interest piece and, I could be wrong, but I'm thinking that you have a motive behind your posting of the video on YouTube, you want it to be seen as a message of hope to other cancer sufferers."
"How did. . ."
"So you are suffering from cancer, I wasn't sure, although the bandana should have been a dead give-away. This makes it even more imperative that I meet you, I believe that I can help you to really get that message of hope out there."
It was a typical winter's day in the Blue Mountains, it had been trying hard to snow, resulting in a steady drizzle of bitterly cold rain pushed along by the strong wind, layering the roads with the last of the soggy late autumn leaves. The house was set back from the road behind a garden full of English flowers (not so many flowers, they had given up until spring) and shrubs, its weatherboard facade newly painted. The impression that I got was of an ordered existence. She had, at first, sounded reluctant to let me come and interview her, but on my promise of not publishing anything without her approval, she relented, and here I was. I mounted the front steps and pressed the door bell. "It's open, come in." That small voice just managed to penetrate the door. I pushed it open and stepped into a darkened room. I could just make out her shape seated one of those old over-stuffed sofas, with a rug over her knees. "You'll have to forgive me for not getting up, and for the darkness of this room, but the light hurts my eyes."
"I understand. I'm Simon Porter from OriginFM, but you already know that."
"I'm Imogen Ferrier, but you already know that." I could just make out a smile on her face.
"I asked for that, didn't I? The reason I wanted to speak with you was about your YouTube posting. It really moved me, seeing you there singing that song, it looked as if it took a great deal of emotional as well as physical effort just to get through it."
"Yes it did, but I had to do it. If you've done your research, and I assume that you have, you will have already discovered that I have Leukaemia. My doctors have given me six months, so I decided to put what little time I have left to good use. I wasn't going to lie in bed and allow this to sap my physical as well as emotional strength, I am going to fight it every millimetre of the way. When I eventually go, I want to be still fighting, I will not surrender to this."
"I know you won't. I could see that in that video of you singing 'I will survive', that was the voice of a fighter, and I made the decision that I just had to help you fight and survive."
"The survive part of this isn't going to happen, I'm resigned to my fate, I know that there is no cure for me, but my fight is to help those who come after me to survive and hopefully allow me to live on through them."
"I think that I can help you there, I know that I can help you. What I want to do is to help you set up a charity, you can mention it on your Facebook page, we'll set up a Web page so that we can put your song out for people to download, and we will play your song as often as we can, and mention the charity each time we play it. With a little luck we can raise enough money towards Leukaemia research to help find a cure."
"I don't want to limit it to Leukaemia research, I want the money to go to research into all forms of cancer. For some reason cancer seems to run in my family. My mother died of breast cancer three years ago and I came here to live with my aunt. She died six months ago from cervical cancer, and now I have this. I was diagnosed just before Aunt Celia died."
"How has your father taken all of this?"
"I don't know, I haven't heard from him for the past ten years."
"I'm sorry to hear that. What gave you the idea for the video?"
