The Art of Not Falling Apart

by Christina Patterson

  Well, exactly. Lots of people said I was ‘marvellous’ both times I had cancer, but if you live on your own, what choice have you got? You could, I suppose, scream at the TV, but the TV is not going to say ‘poor you’. I would rather not scream at my friends, because I would quite like to keep them.

  For Mimi, that sense of ‘it will be all right’ kept her going in the terrible years when Tom was in and out of mental hospital. ‘You don’t go spiralling off into months and years of panic,’ she said. During the worst times, and particularly the times when Tom disappeared for months without any contact, she tried, she said, to deal with things ‘in a rational way’. She would look at the ‘pros and cons’ of whatever she was thinking of doing, ‘figure it out’ and bide her time. Work got her through. Friends got her through. She has good friends, because she is a good friend. She is patient. She is kind. She is extremely good company. And she’s funny. Thank God for friends who are funny. All that ‘how are you really?’ stuff is all very well, but can we please also have a laugh?

  Most people, I told her, would feel pretty angry to have two children diagnosed with an incurable disease. Doesn’t she? Mimi sighed. ‘I’ve never really understood that question “why me?” It just seems daft. I don’t like daftness! I’ve always been aware of how much luck I’ve had in my life. So, on balance, I’ve been incredibly lucky to have such gorgeous kids. I think they’re both lovely. They’re both very beautiful, they’re both very bright, they’re both very talented. And best of all, they’re both really nice people. I think,’ she said, ‘that’s a blessing.’

  I went to see my friend Louise the day after I had given a speech in Edinburgh. I was demob happy because the speech had been an ordeal. It was a keynote speech and I had been told to time it to the minute. Just before midnight at a dinner the night before, the chairman of the organization suddenly announced that he wanted ten minutes instead of fifteen. It took me three hours to cut the text and the slides and by then I was too tired to sleep. I gave the truncated version to a thousand people on no sleep and no rehearsal. Amazingly, it seemed to go down well.

  Louise picked me up from Stirling station and in her beautiful garden I opened the champagne they had handed me as I left. We clinked glasses as we watched the sun set over the Trossachs. Whenever I see Louise, I always feel like clinking glasses. She has buried a baby and spent most of the last twelve years stuck at home with a child who can’t lift her head. In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, her company still feels to me like champagne.

  When Louise first moved to that house, Beatrice wasn’t yet a year old and Sam was four. ‘I tried very hard to keep things normal for Sam,’ she told me. ‘I was determined to cope on my own. I did cry a lot, but then I had things to cry about. I kept washing and brushing my teeth and feeding my other child. What more,’ she said breezily, ‘do you want? But I don’t,’ she added, ‘remember feeling particularly bad.’

  Really? She was pretty much a prisoner, with a child who was not going to make it into adulthood, and she was basically feeling fine? Louise took a sip of her champagne. ‘It’s, you know, the Alcoholics Anonymous thing. God grant me the courage to tolerate the things I can, etc.’ I took a sip of mine and then recited it. ‘Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’ I had, I told her, been vaguely trying to follow it since I first found the prayer in my mid-twenties, though I’ve never been anywhere near AA and long ago ditched any belief in any kind of a God.

  ‘Did I,’ she asked, ‘really have a choice?’ No, I agreed, she didn’t. But she certainly had a choice about how she dealt with the whole situation, and she seems to have done it with great . . . well, what’s the word? Style? Verve? Panache? ‘I often think,’ said Louise, ‘that one of the reasons I’ve basically got happier – and this is not to my credit – is that I’m less different to other people. As we get older, more and more people have had really bad things happen to them. Because you do feel very separate if everyone else is having a lovely time. That’s one of the pains of it.’

  Tell me about it. In my twenties, I told her, I felt so embarrassed because I felt I was a walking – or rather non-walking, that was the problem – disaster. I’d been disfigured with acne. I couldn’t walk more than a few yards. My sister was in a desperate state. We were all in a desperate state. My parents were desperate because we were desperate. And I was meeting people whose only trauma had been getting a 2:1 instead of a first.

  ‘For the first few years of Beatrice’s life,’ she said, ‘it was very, very hard work looking after her. I don’t remember being acutely unhappy or repressing anything, but perhaps I was? But then, when she was eight, her airway collapsed and I got a phone call in the middle of the night saying “your daughter has crashed, do you want her resuscitated?” That,’ she said with her usual lacing of irony, ‘was nice. So I went in, and those were dark, dark days. I was asked over and over again whether it was a life worth living and whether there was any point in keeping her alive. And I felt it was.’

  Beatrice was given a tracheotomy and now breathes through a hole in her neck. She has twenty-four-hour care. ‘She has,’ said Louise, ‘cost you, the taxpayer, millions and millions. A lot of these severely disabled kids go to one extreme or the other. They’re either very happy or very unhappy, and the ones that are very unhappy, it’s a lot more difficult, obviously. But Beatrice has happiness.’ How, I asked, does she know? ‘Because she laughs and smiles when she sees people and things she likes. She’s my happy, smiley daughter who happens to need extremely high levels of care.’

  One of the things that has always struck me about Louise is her lack of self-pity. How the hell, I asked, has she managed it? Louise offered me a crisp. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I am a bit of a snob and I can’t bear to be pitied. I want people to think I’m coping, so I can have interesting conversations with them, rather than just doom and gloom. And even your best friends get sick of misery. They do, don’t they?’

  Yes, I said. You have to be good company. Friends will help you get through, but you only have friends if you’re nice to be around. If you have credit built up, you can sit and weep at times, but you do need to have the credit built up. You can’t be miserable all the time. You have to be interested in other people. Louise nodded and we both took another gulp of champagne. ‘That’s crucial,’ she said, ‘being interested in other people. I think that’s a big life lesson for everybody.’

  Louise got breast cancer not long after I got it the second time. ‘I remember thinking,’ she said, ‘“well, that’s fucking great”! I joined a gym around the time I was diagnosed and the people who go during the day all want to chat. I thought: I can either do the disabled child or the breast cancer, or people will think I’m a walking tragedy!’

  I remember feeling pretty much the same. My sister had died, my father had died and then I got cancer and thought: enough, already. Let’s talk about the weather. I told Louise about the school reunions I had missed, because I couldn’t face the shiny, happy families and the glittering careers. ‘I’m going to a school reunion next month,’ she said, ‘my first one. They had one about fifteen years ago and I thought: there’s no way I’m going, they will all be successful, they’ll all have healthy children, functional marriages, fabulous careers, great houses, look good, not be fat, all of that. And now I think I don’t care. Things will have gone wrong for some of them.’

  We clinked glasses again. ‘I think one of the reasons I have coped better than some parents do,’ said Louise, ‘is that the baby’s born, they’re all happy and then someone says “oh, it’s got spina bifida” and your whole world falls apart. I didn’t have that situation. My two babies came into the world with a junior doctor telling me that they were both going to die, and one of them survived, and that was good. The glass is half full. When people ask me what Beatrice has done to or for me, I have to say something that sounds meaningless. She’s ruined m
y life, and,’ she said, taking one last gulp of champagne, ‘been the making of me.’

  A signal you send out

  My upstairs neighbour keeps flooding my flat. The first time he left his bath running, what came through the ceiling was like Niagara Falls. I grabbed all the saucepans and placed them on the floor before dashing off to interview Alice Cooper. When Alice Cooper talked about performing on stage with dead chickens or boa constrictors, all I could think about was whether or not my flat had turned into the Titanic. When it happened the third time, I was on the phone. I heard a loud beeping and then smelled burning as water poured through the smoke alarm and on to the floor. The man I was talking to said I should call the fire brigade. Ten minutes later, six huge firemen were sitting in my hall.

  Once they had stuck a label on the smoke alarm system I had already disabled, and a temporary smoke alarm in a place that meant yet another ceiling would have to be repainted, we did ‘the paperwork’. How many people lived at the property? Oh right! Just one. And is it Mrs or Miss Patterson? Miss! Rightio. You could almost see them sniffing around for cats.

  I don’t know why single women make some people feel uneasy, but we do. In restaurants, when I have gone to eat on my own, I have been ushered to half-hidden tables at the back. Once, in a café in Stoke Newington, I was asked to leave. I had just spent a fiver on a coffee and pastry and thought I had bought myself a good hour of papers and peace. As soon as I’d taken my last bite, the manager came up to me. ‘We need this table now,’ he told me. Two fierce-looking young women were standing at the entrance with giant buggies. ‘I’m eating my breakfast,’ I said. ‘You’ve finished it. The table,’ he said, as if he’d just unearthed an obscure contract in a legal dispute, ‘is reserved.’ I felt the blood rush to my cheeks as I stormed out.

  It’s there at the gym, or on the face of the official, that pitying look when you’re asked to put your next of kin and faithfully print the name of your mum. It’s there when people ask you about your holiday and it gradually dawns on them that you have actually gone away on your own. ‘What was that like?’ said one political editor in the green room at Sky. I’d actually had a lovely time, reading, eating and basking in the sun, but suddenly I felt as if I’d been sent to some gulag, beaten and fed on dry crusts.

  Over the years, so many people have asked me why I am single. The poet Wendy Cope, who wrote many poems about the angst of being single before she found love, at forty-nine, once told me that practically all the poets she knew had asked if anyone knew. I even once bought a book called If I’m So Wonderful, Why Am I Still Single?, as if the answer might be encrypted in some Da Vinci code on the last page. I think I used to think that being single was a kind of affliction, a shameful state that had been handed to me by fate. It has taken me a very, very long time to realize that I’m probably single because I really like being on my own.

  ‘I don’t think,’ said a shrink once, ‘that you actually want to meet someone.’ I was lying on a couch. Yes, like Woody Allen, I was actually lying on a couch. I was shocked. What do you mean I don’t want to meet someone? What about all the dating? The bloody awful dating? What about the speed dating, and the internet dating, and the dating agency, and the blind dates arranged by friends, and the dinners, and the parties, and the sheer, exhausting and sometimes humiliating effort? I had gone to see the shrink because I didn’t know what to do. It was not long after I had fallen in love, been dumped and then found out that my cancer had come back. It seemed a bit much to cope with all at once.

  I saw that shrink for three years. I can’t even say exactly what happened in that time, because it seemed to happen at a level beyond words. But one thing I did learn was that I don’t actually need to be with somebody else.

  I was thirty-five when I decided that if I was going to be single, I was going to try to do it magnificently. This may have been a slightly unhelpful self-fulfilling prophecy, but in some ways it has served me well. It was when I bought my flat. I was on my way to take some books back to the library when I suddenly saw a sign saying ‘loft apartment’ and a picture flashed into my head of a huge loft, full of people and parties and books. Unfortunately, I wasn’t earning enough to buy a huge anything, but I did go and look at an old school in Stoke Newington that was being converted into ‘lofts’. Some of them were enormous. The one I looked at was not. My father was with me. My beloved father was with me. He said, ‘I think you should go for it,’ so I sold my flat and did.

  My flat has a small bedroom, a small study and a tiny kitchen, but it has quite a big sitting room, with a gallery I use as a dining space, and the ceiling goes up to the second floor. I can’t have big parties, but I can have parties. And I can have dinners. I once served meatballs made with minced plastic, not realizing that the blender had a plastic guard you had to take off. I have dropped sea bass on the floor, scooped it up and served it anyway. I have about three recipes. The one I do most often is ‘my lemon chicken’, which is actually Lisa’s recipe and takes about ten minutes to prepare. But people don’t come round to eat gourmet food, or at least they don’t come round to eat gourmet food at mine. They come to eat, drink, laugh and be with you.

  Single men get called bachelors, which sounds like really good fun. Single women still sometimes get called spinsters, which makes people think of Victorian governesses wanting to cover table legs. In the Middle Ages, as Sara Maitland points out in her book How to Be Alone, the word ‘spinster’ was a compliment. It was someone who could spin well and was therefore financially independent. ‘The word’, says Maitland, ‘was generously applied to all women at the point of marriage as a way of saying they came into the relationship freely, from personal choice not financial desperation. Now it is an insult, because we fear “for” such women – and now men as well – who are probably “sociopaths”.’

  I’m not sure that most people would actually go as far as thinking that single people are ‘sociopaths’, but I do think some people feel quite threatened by the idea that a woman can function quite well in the world on her own. She can walk! She can talk! She can have a good job! She can buy a nice flat! She can go on holiday on her own and have a really nice time! ‘My view,’ said Juliet Taylor, the headhunter I met when I lost my job, during one of our regular catch-ups in a hotel bar, ‘is that anxiety is largely created by compliance or otherwise to social norms. Eccentrics, by definition, feel no compunction to conform. Therefore their experience of stress and anxiety is massively reduced compared to other people who are conformist.’

  Juliet thinks we can all learn from eccentrics. Neither she nor I would call ourselves eccentric, but we have both, we agreed, tended to do things in our own way. ‘You don’t necessarily want to be a man in a caravan or someone who has fifty cats,’ she said, ‘but what we can all learn from eccentrics is that you can be happy without conforming. And people with a very strong character are often happier. People often regard me,’ she said with a cheerful smile, ‘as an eccentric, because I don’t worry about the stuff other people seem to worry about. That’s because my family is eccentric, my mother in particular. I’ve learnt from her to protect myself from the things that affect other people.’

  Oh, what a gift. To stop worrying what other people think. How different our lives would be if we all stopped worrying what other people thought. In my journalism, I learnt to do this years ago. What’s the point in having a platform if you can’t use it to say what you think? When I go on TV or radio, I often get messages or tweets saying ‘what makes you think your opinion is worth any more than anyone else’s?’ My response is usually: it isn’t, but I’ve been invited to give it. And when the tweets come, telling me how ugly and old and stupid I am, I know it’s mostly because they wish they could have a platform, too.

  Whenever I see Patsy, my heart lifts. It always did. The moment we met, at that bookshop when I was twenty-two, we started a conversation that has never stopped. It started as we ripped open boxes of books in the tiny stock room, and continued in lu
nches and tea breaks, and then in the pub after work. It went on sometimes at weekends in her house, in a small village outside Guildford, a house that looked like a cottage in a fairy tale.

  We talk about books. We talk about love. We talk about life. When I first met Patsy, she was separated from her second husband, Daniel. She had spent years working as a PA, then worked in the bookshop, then did a degree in English literature in her forties and then became an English teacher. I hope the boys she taught know how lucky they were.

  When Patsy told me, at our usual table in the café part of the Wolesley, about her love life, I thought it sounded like a slice of social history. She was, she reminded me, a virgin when she got married for the first time, at twenty. When that marriage broke up, she moved into a little room on her own. It was 1967. ‘I’ve never been lonely in my elder life,’ said Patsy, ‘but that was a lonely time, because you weren’t part of Swinging London. There was something a bit sleazy about it all.’

  Unfortunately, the ‘swinging’ ethos took quite a toll on her marriage. Her husband, Daniel, who was an artist, fitted the stereotype. He liked women. He liked drink. When she told me about some of the things he used to get up to, she laughed at the expression on my face. ‘I don’t think I can ever not love him,’ she said. ‘That person is still there somewhere. It’s not like love where you feel great. I had a lover and they make you feel wonderful. I know the difference between that love and loving Daniel, who made me feel terrible.’