But Suzie has thrown herself into managing The Castle like a duck to water. I’m glad it’s worked out like this, because keeping occupied can only help to keep her mind off her illness. Not that it’s troubled her of late. It’s been three years since she had her left breast removed. The diagnosis was clear, but the specialist said he might save it with some chemo or radiotherapy. But Suzie asked around and the general message was to have it off and have done with it. “I mean, at your age they only get in the way,” said Elsie, our next door neighbour. Hers certainly would get in someone’s way, and regularly did, if the number of different cars parked outside her house was anything to go by. It’s just possible, of course, that her bloke was a used car salesman and came home every day in a different choice off the forecourt.
That’s one thing about Suzie. Once her mind is made up she’s not going to change. She’ll follow it through to the letter. But it does remind you to keep things in perspective. I remember being with her in Ribthwaite Infirmary that day. It was all very matter of fact. Suzie had been for her regular scan and then, about three weeks later she was called back for another X-ray. It had happened before, the time when they’d forgotten to put the film in the camera, as Suzie put it. But this time it was different, because they asked me to go as well. They did another X-ray, but the specialist told both of us what it was there and then. He was altogether pleasant about it, sounding like we might have won the lottery or something. He was determined to be positive, he told us, his intention to make us both feel included, a part of things, as if we’d be missing out if one of us didn’t have cancer.
When he went into rapture about how his treatment could do this and that, Suzie cut him short. It was like a scythe swung to take him off at the knees. “I’m having it off,” she said with not the slightest appreciation of double entendre. The mendicant seemed to smile in response. It was patronising. I could have thumped him. “Mrs Cottee,” I remember him striking up before Suzie went for him.
“My mind is made up. I’m having it off.” Suzie paused between her two sentences to check that the first had sunk in. In that split second, she glanced towards her specialist and wordlessly said, “I care not who you think you are, where you studied for your megapterine degree or how many mitral academic papers you’ve written for the muciferous journal of oncology. Just shut your momentaneous mouth and operate.”
She got her operation. And then she had to have the radio and chemo anyway. That’s how it’s done, they said. It’s just to be sure. And she was as sick as a dog for weeks. I’m told the drugs are better these days. And it’s to be hoped they are. Suzie had an awful time. But what was strange from my perspective was to see her change, become totally inward-looking, completely and exclusively self-obsessed. She shut out the world and whenever it intruded, she bit it, like a dog snapping at fingers pushed through a fence.
Her hair fell out. All of it - they said it might. And that meant she wouldn’t let anyone come to see her because she wouldn’t be seen. She couldn’t stop her nose running because all the hairs had fallen out of her nostrils. It’s one of those complications you can’t imagine before it happens to you. And for Suzie it was the inability to still her ever-running nose that more than anything else symbolised her suffering. Of course it didn’t cause pain and of course it didn’t make her ill, but she has always been a stickler for tidiness and cleanliness. She’s always kept a beautiful house, without a speck of dust or a mark on the paint. And suddenly, she’s dropping paper tissues all over the place, finding them squashed between cushions on the sofa or curled into balls at the bottom of the bed. It wasn’t her fault, but she hated coming across evidence of her own untidiness. She was suffering at the time. She was in pain, she was still recovering from surgery and treatment, but it was the mess she was making and the mess the treatment was making of her that caused her the most angst. She visited Ribthwaite Infirmary as an outpatient for her treatments and then, for a week afterwards, she suffered. How she suffered. But she got over it, thank goodness.
Her hair grew back. And she got better. She aged ten years in three months, but that didn’t matter because she always looked twenty years younger than she was. And in the end, it was no great shakes. She’s managed with a less than useful left arm for most of her life, so the left breast going down the same route was no great loss. At least that was what she said in public. It became an almost rehearsed reply to most questions about her health and always brought proceedings to a successful and mildly humorous end. At least she’s still in one piece, which is more than you could say mentally about most of the medics who treated her and physically about my mate Geoff Watson.
But what’s so strange about Phil and Karen, and Maureen for that matter, is that they seem to be people without histories. If Suzie meets a woman, invariably one of the first things they talk about is breast cancer. She does it with a lot of the customers at The Castle as well. She seems proud that she’s overcome it and risen to meet the challenge of her job. There’s hardly a punter in the bar that doesn’t have an intimate knowledge of my wife’s left breast, despite the fact that it doesn’t exist.
And what is it, you might ask, that brings about this mood of reflection? Fire. When you live in a place like Kiddington, where the biggest problem each year is the one centimetre of snow that brings public transport to a halt, closes schools and fills national news for three days until the floods take over, you are apt to forget that bigger things can happen elsewhere. Personally, not since the Stokes brothers kidnapped me have I experienced a major natural threat. I’ve never seen a hurricane, felt an earthquake or waded through a flood. And the closest I’ve seen to conflagration has been a dog-end-driven flare-up of gorse or bracken on the common or the long smoky smoulder that used to afflict the muck stacks by the pit or the soft wispy coating that indicates a chimney on fire.
But what happened here last weekend was spectacular. We had a fire. All the mountains along the back of Benidorm were alight. Alight here, said the bus driver. Someone took him seriously. It looked like Armageddon warmed up.
But this wasn’t just a little bonfire that got out of control. We had high winds, strong enough to flatten advertisement hoardings along the roadside and uproot the occasional tree. In the middle of Saturday afternoon, one such falling object hit a pylon carrying high tension electricity cables and down it went. It might be January, but they say we’ve had the least winter rain in decades, so all the hillsides are as dry as the proverbial. The rosemary bushes, browned off at this time of year anyway, went up like torches and then caught the foliage on the pines.
By eight o’clock that night the whole town nearby had been evacuated and there was a line of fire ten kilometres long. Smoke blanketed the sky out to sea, because the wind was in the west. It burned all the way down the barrancos, bypassing but threatening the urbanisations built along the ridges in between.
And of course there’s no water up there. All the fire brigade could do was park their engines at the limits of the housing estates, hose down the vegetation across the road and hope that the fire would go the other way. Usually, I’m told, they bomb the fire with water from the air with helicopters and specially designed seaplanes, but last night the wind was so strong nothing could fly, so everything was left to burn.
I went down to The Castle to tell Suzie. The place was packed at nine when I arrived and the turns were about to start. Suzie wasn’t at all pleased when I announced at the top of my voice that the mountains were on fire and, within two minutes, had completely emptied the place as people went outside to see for themselves. Everyone walked off to the end of the road where you could get a good view of the flames through a gap between the high rises. I told her not to worry, that they would be back in a minute, and they were. But didn’t she give me a mouthful... It was a reaction that really surprised me. It’s not often she swears, but last night she cursed me good and proper.
“What the acritochromat
ic hell do you think you are doing, Donkey? You come in here shouting carburetting ‘fire’ at the top of your vocalic voice and the crenellated place empties! Do you think I’m doing this for the good of my halibiotic health?”
I was about to say “Yes” in the pause and she knew it. I reconsidered and judged the comment inappropriate. She would have hit me.
“I spend my diuturnal waking hours advertising, promoting and grafting while you, you burro, you levirate off up into the mountains on your quadrinomial Raptor. And then, while I’m making a success of our lives, making it possible for us to expiscating live in this recumbency, you run in from your autocthonous computer, that digitigrade waste of time, crying wolf and empty the fossorial place. Just premiate back off home and proceleusmatic stay away from here!”
I had the feeling that my contribution had not been appreciated. What I did not appreciate, however, was how Suzie would further develop her position.
“Let the comburent place burn! There’s too much dead wood around here. It needs rooting out. Burn it off! Let the wind separate the chaff from the grain. I’m post-dentigerously fed up with you, so transmontane off into the mountains on that bike. I hope the whole altisonant thing burns down so there’s nowhere left for you to go. Coprolite the ambisinister environment! It’s the environment in here that interests me. And another thing... Oh hello Jean, darling,” she said, as the first of the self-absented punters began to filter back into the bar, her face changing immediately back into its gentle glow after her eyes had virtually burned through my skin.
I came home troubled. I stayed for a pint or two, of course, but I couldn’t get over Suzie’s outburst. I’ve not heard her come out with something like that since I last gave her a dose of chemotherapy.
“Those pellicular pills are occipitally killing me. I don’t want to take any more.”
“The doctor said they’d make you better.”
“Here’s a coetanous chain-saw. Chop your own head off. The new look will suit you. Load of pelotherapic balls,” I can remember her saying as a prelude to swallowing the four brown spheroids. “Rorulent poison!” she confirmed after swallowing.
Sure enough she was sick for the following week, but by then the dose was smaller and the severity of her reaction had mellowed. She let me have it through the mouth throughout those days, however, as if it was my fault she had a tumour, my fault she had to take those pills.
When Suzie came home from The Castle in the early hours of Sunday morning, I was in bed, but not asleep. I was going to say something, but she came in all bubbly and laughing, as if nothing untoward had happened between us. She told me how well all the acts had performed, that they’d had two hen parties, that they’d got on well together and that they had arranged to meet up for another round. She was so upbeat about The Castle I couldn’t begin to raise anything even remotely negative, so I let it ride. But what had happened? It’s taken me a couple of days to realise. It wasn’t the fact that I’d cleared the place. It wasn’t because I’d poked my nose in where I shouldn’t. The problem was that I raised the anxiety. Reminded of impending disaster, Suzie reverted to the manner she had adopted during her suffering. I had brought in not news but a memory. I had promised disaster and she had been reminded of the consequences that she, perhaps all of us, never wants to face. Poor Suzie.
Twenty Eight
We all like to live our fantasies, imagined or otherwise ... - Donald continues his recollection of discovering his musical skills and gives details of the activities of No Molesta. He describes his magic Matchless helmets and makes reference to the past. He pays a call on Mick Watson’s house and is immediately imprisoned. He then achieves a goal. He later tries to repeat the experience.
We all like to live our fantasies, imagined or otherwise constructed. I ask you, what would life be if we couldn’t have our little dreams? And what more gratifying experience could be imagined than a dream that just might come true? I suppose that remains one of the great attractions of pop. It’s full of promises, transformations that give new life, fresh starts and clean slates. Never mind the reality, feel the pop.
Back in the days of yore, I went through a phase when I was one of those drainpipe-trousered, slick-back teddies that queued outside the Mecca in Bromaton on Saturday mornings. I never actually managed the velvet-collared jacket, but I did have the winkle pickers. It was just another expression, just a few years later, of what I had been doing when I ran around the common in my Davy Crockett suit shooting Indians. I had adopted a package that took me out of my own life and made me something separate, something I could identify with. The garb changed, but the process was the same.
And when we got inside the Mecca, it was not only dark, it was full of pop, sound that did for the mind what cowboy suits and winkle pickers did for the body. It didn’t matter if my mates had conspired to pair me off with Margaret Catchpole, the rotund, waddling dribbler from Gagstone, who was always visiting her auntie on Kiddington’s council estate. If the lights stayed low and the music loud, you could shut your eyes and carry on regardless. As long as you sang along with the song, then the blubbery, stumbling filly you’d drawn apparently at random when the partners were chosen could be anything from Doris Day to Connie Francis to Brenda Lee. We didn’t fancy Shirley Bassey, by the way. As long as you kept your eyes shut, reality could be anything you fancied, and there was always a chance your fantasy might come true.
Now that’s why the words mattered. They could be completely inane and meaningless when read from a book of lyrics, but as long as they created and then propagated myth, they could keep a dream alive. You had to believe in the process, however, if you wanted it to succeed. In later years, of course, I came to see this as essentially the same argument as the stained glass interpretation of religion. From outside, the church windows are just grey. From inside, they are resplendent with colour. It only means something if you enter into the spirit.
In this context, I refer you back, my devoted blogoshpere adherent, to Kiddingtonians at karaoke time, placing themselves in an hotel in California and allying themselves with an identity born of West Virginia. Now most Kiddingtonians couldn’t name a single hotel beyond Punslet, save for the few they have packaged themselves into in Mallorca, Benidorm, Pattaya Beach and lately communist Cuba with unlimited free cocktails thrown in. Kiddingtonians no longer think that pina colada is a euphemism for a flavoured condom, but would probably still prefer the barman to hold off on the tetrapack orange juice.
You see, this is the crucial difference between the nobs’ music and the so-called popular, most of which isn’t. Pop is dumbed down to a chant, often no more than a rant, a single line that capitalist creators funnel down the gullets of an audience of open-beaked quackers in communal pursuit of the designer liver. Nobs’ music, on the other hand, often has more than one thing going on at a time. It also goes loud and soft, piano forte, forte piano, and so can’t be used as that perfect example of absurdly useful consumerism, background music, a commodity purchased and employed solely so it can be completely ignored, the perfect designer good.
There was something that I learned in A279, however, that I had never before known. Now whether it’s a consequence of my penchant for precision, a predilection I demand in every aspect of life, I do not know. But when I undertook the practical assignments that were an essential part of the course, I and my tutor soon realised that either I was born with or had somehow developed perfect pitch. I can remember the tutorial like it was yesterday. As a group, we were conducting a critical aural appraisal of the opening movement of Tortellini’s E-flat quartet, a work of the early classical era, but stuffed with baroque features, and noted for the composer’s characteristic first movement structure, where the material reappears inverted, as if knotted back on itself. I admit that I had listened - note: listened - to the piece before, but when the tutor brought to our attention a particularly poignant passage, I was able to offer
a succinct analysis that left her quite gobsmacked.
“It works,” I told her and the rest of the tutorial group, “because the main theme in E-flat is still being played in the cello part as if its harmonic progression has been adopted as a form of the by then outmoded technique of ground bass. Meanwhile, above it, the violins inhabit the enharmonic minor, implying without ever establishing a Phrygian mode while Lydia, on the viola, adds an almost jazz-like commentary, thus mixing Lydia in a fifth above. It’s all in the flattened thirds and sevenths... And that’s how it works.”
I had obviously ignored the rondo finale which is just a string of tunes hung around a little plonkety-plonk duple-time dance tune and has about the same musical content as Britney Spears meets The Wombles. My first movement analysis, however, raised eyebrows. “My eyebrows are raised,” said Mountefort de Quincey, the shaven-head lesbian, now male transsexual with a propensity for depression. “Give me an A,” he said, raising her eyebrows even further.
I resisted a strong temptation to start a football chant and complied, tuning up.
“Mr Cottee,” he continued, “Tortellini’s twenty-seventh quartet is in C-sharp minor and starts with a motif in the cello part, beginning on the tonic. Can you sing it?”
I complied.
“Perfect pitch,” he said.
Now I might be confused in her labials, since he was rather confused about them herself. It was the adenoids that always troubled him, so his p might have been a b, or vice versa. I couldn’t tell.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 28
