Emmerdale spoilers – Aaron Dingle ‘bricking it’ as he is terrified to die in tragic storyline
There were some tender and touching scenes between Aaron Dingle (Danny Miller) and his mum Chas (Lucy Pargeter) in Tuesday (April 2)’s episode of Emmerdale, when Chas got Aaron to open up about his gene test.
Along with her breast cancer diagnosis, Chas discovered that she had the BRCA2 gene mutation, which made her more likely to get breast cancer.
As this can be passed from parent to child, she urged her son to get tested for it. As she’d inherited it from her mother, Faith (Sally Dexter), who’d died of breast cancer, her brothers Cain (Jeff Hordley) and Caleb (William Ash) were also tested.
While Cain and Caleb’s test both came back negative, Aaron’s was positive – but he decided to lie about this to Chas because he didn’t want to worry her. And when Liam (Jonny McPherson) hinted to Chas that Aaron could be hiding something, Aaron thumped him.
In this episode Chas spotted Liam’s wounded jaw and guessed it had been Aaron. She rushed off to confront him. Liam, however, had some wise words for her, reminding her about how scared she was when she first had her diagnosis and reminding her to be sensitive when talking to her son.
So she went to see Aaron with a box of his old toys. This little appeal to nostalgia and to his younger self before he got all angry and prone to lead with his fists worked. Aaron started to open up about why he’d lied about the test.
Firstly, he saw how happy it made Chas to see that her brothers were negative and he didn’t want to be the one to rain on her parade. Secondly, he was absolutely terrified about what the result meant for him.
He said that his life was unlucky. People he’d loved, like his sister Liv (Isobel Steele), Jackson Walsh (Mark Silcock), Ben Tucker (Simon Lennon) and his gran Faith, had died and left him. He refused to see a doctor because he didn’t want to face what they might say.
‘I’m absolutely bricking it,’ he admitted to Chas. He said that after Liv died he spent a long time wishing he was dead.
‘Now I’ve got this thing inside me waiting to take me down, I don’t want to go anywhere. I don’t want to die.’
Chas tried to reassure him, telling him that he’d been through so much and survived that he was the strongest person she knows.
Chas and Aaron’s relationship has been through some seriously difficult times, including the rift in the wake of her affair with Al Chapman (Michael Wildman) that Aaron blamed for Liv’s death.
At one point it seemed like they could never have a close relationship again, but Chas’s illness has changed that.
As Aaron agreed to make an appointment to see the doctor about what steps he could take now, Chas insisted, ‘We can get through this if we stick together.