I offered her a drink when we got in, but she didn’t want one. I made do with a San Miguel. It occurs to me, after my hangover on the weekend – Paracetamol at 6 am! – that my resistance to alcohol has been permanently affected by my treatment. First, I find now I can drink again that I can’t resist having one, ha ha. Second, while I feel like drinking a case, I find I am able to have only a single drink without feeling dreadful the morning afterwards. I can see a future of watching other people getting pissed at parties and toasting myself at book launches with Perrier, Raymond Carver style. Still, if that’s what it takes. It’s funny, having cancer. What was previously unthinkable suddenly becomes quite viable (forgive the pun). Normal, even.
Later
As we sat waiting for Felicity yesterday a woman called Wendy came and sat down with her husband. She immediately burst into tears. She had come from the direction of the ward, or perhaps one of the consulting rooms. ‘I just wish I could die,’ she gasped, collapsing onto a row of soft chairs. ‘All I do all day,’ she said to the auxiliary nurse who had come over to comfort her, ‘is lie down. That’s all I do. All day. For the last fortnight. It’s dreadful.’
As the auxiliary handed her a new supply of cardboard sick-bowls she ran through her list of side effects. Tatty whispered to me: ‘She’s still got her hair, though. And her eyebrows.’ This was true. If we’d been sitting next to her on the bus we wouldn’t have thought of her as a cancer patient at all. But in the Haematology waiting room, reeling off a list of complaints and clearly fatigued, she looked as vulnerable as anyone I’ve sat next to on a drip in a headscarf. As we left Tatty whispered to me again: ‘Thank you for being positive. I couldn’t have put up with that.’
‘I didn’t feel I had a choice,’ I said.
Thursday 29 June
Tatty off work with a dodgy tummy. Spent the morning bringing her marmite toast and peppermint tea, then lying on the bed chatting staring at the ceiling. I tried not to think about going back to work. She picked it up immediately and asked what was on my mind.
I’d just had an email, I said, which I needed to answer yesterday, to order books for my students for next year. We spent the next half an hour pricing the list up from Amazon, titles like Teaching Fiction Writing at Key Stage 2. There’s a Ronseal title if I ever saw one. I ought to do one for poetry. How often have I said that in the last year? Does cancer make me more or less likely to get on with these projects?
Then I told Tatty that I was projecting forward to everyone expecting me to be 100% straight away and that it frightened me. She said that cancer has changed me – forced us all to look at our priorities really clearly. And that I had realised that work wasn’t everything, at least not the everything we are so used to stressing over. ‘If you do lose your job,’ she said, ‘which I doubt, you’re really good at what you do, you know, but if you do, it isn’t the end of the world. You know that now.’
‘I suppose so,’ I said. ‘Being terminally ill with six months to live, that’s the end of the world.’ I paused to look at her. ‘And even then, it’s not.’
‘No, that comes when you’ve gone,’ she said.
A new condition for me to get used to: scoliosis, curvature of the spine. When Felicity was examining me a couple of weeks ago before my PET scan she felt around my lower back for a second. ‘Do you have any back trouble?’ She said. ‘How did you know?’ I said. ‘It’s a bit soft in there,’ she said. ‘I think we need an X-ray of your spine.’
The results came back straight away, but were forgotten in the post-PET discussions. She read them out to me again on Tuesday. ‘So when are you having your next bone density scan?’ I told her it had been four or so years since the last one, so might be due for one soon. ‘It seems to be a bit ad hoc,’ I smiled. ‘Ask your GP then,’ she said.
I went in to see him today. I mentioned the scoliosis, talked him through the PET results, and slipped in that I was still having some pain on my side. He looked surprised, but humoured me with an examination. ‘As you know,’ he said afterwards, ‘my own theory was that your pain came from the pressure of your tumour on your urethra, or on some nerve tissue. So I did expect it to go away. Your kidney is fine, by the way. I suggest we wait and see. And if it persists or gets worse then come back. Of course.’ He looked at me a bit blankly, reddening slightly. ‘Of course, this means, this might mean, I mean, that it was coincidence we found it at all. Because you weren’t ill to speak of, symptoms-wise, I mean. It’s one of those funny things.’
Saturday 1 July
World Cup quarter-final day. All to play for.
Everyone in town or at the beach. Shim on the annual dads-and-kids weekend, this year a bargain-basement deal in a field near the surf, after last year’s £200/person effort which I boycotted. I’m meeting Tats and Bendy in a minute for a posh lunch to say well done for her report and for the prize the school have awarded her for ‘achievement’.
Further proof of life having moved on whilst I have been ill came later that evening. We were on the way out to supper, suddenly panicking into clothes like Hugh Grant at the beginning of Four Weddings and a Funeral (‘Fuck! Fuck! Shit!’) having lost all sense of time during the penalties with Portugal. I put an M&S Toad in the Hole in the oven, switched the alarm clock on for when it needed to come out, and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You’ll be OK then? We’re on my mobile if you need us.’
As we walked up the road to Stella’s house I remembered those first days at Hazel’s, our child-minder in Brixton, when Merenna would only be calmed down by being placed into the arms of Adam, Hazel’s husband, every day for two weeks. And here she was, being left alone for the first time of an evening.
When we came back it was as though she were both child and babysitter. The child had gone to bed but the babysitter was still up. She had closed the curtains, had her laptop out, and was watching a rap video on the Hits channel. ‘Hi Dad.’ On a plate on the table lay the empty Toad in the Hole foil tray. Next to it, the box of four chocolate cream éclairs we’d bought her for pudding. She had eaten three of them. ‘I’ll go to bed in a minute,’ she said. ‘I’m just finishing watching this.’
As I drove Tats into town earlier I found myself saying to her that I didn’t think there was going to be a champagne-popping moment when having cancer will cease. What I predict (and what I said) is that after the (almost certain) radiotherapy there’ll be a scan and it will say I am pretty much OK. But it won’t be conclusive. They will tell me to go away, to go back to work, and to come back for a check sometime before Christmas. And when I’ve had that check, which will be inconclusive, I’ll be told the same. That check will be OK. ‘No signs of activity’, they will say. This time they will tell me to come back in six months. That check will be OK as well. ‘See you in another six months,’ they will say. And so it will go on. There won’t be a moment, like getting a book contract, or the letter confirming you have been awarded your PhD, when the project will come to an end. Not for five years, at the earliest. The hardest moment to take will be the one in late summer when they tell me that ‘for now, we’ll just have to wait and see’ which means they won’t know if they’ve got rid of it or not, not for sure, not definitely.
Like red buses, cancer-stories come and go, then reappear in twos. Yesterday was a two-in-a-row day. It began, between World-Cup-Exit-phone-ins, with 5 Live’s coverage of the Race for Life in Chiswick. They had an actor from The Bill who has been in remission for a little while, and a man whose job it is to train the people who answer the phones at Cancer Research.
It was the most sensible and sensitive discussion, in the right sense of the word, that I have heard on the subject since being diagnosed. This is high praise: I had made yet another bet with myself that within five seconds I’d be ringing in to complain at their used of war imagery. Perhaps it was because they had someone on who had actually been through the treatment; maybe it was the influence of a man whose job is to pay attention to the exact words we use to describe feel
ings about the disease. Whatever it was, it worked.
Most people who ring up, said the trainer man, just want advice on how to be able to talk about it. ‘And these are not always relations,’ he said, ‘like husbands, wives, brothers and so on. Many of them are just ordinary friends and acquaintances. And all they want is someone to tell them that it’s OK, that we all find cancer difficult and frightening.’ Is this worth the licence fee? I think it is.
The presenter went on: ‘And in that sense, perhaps, cancer is perhaps one of our remaining taboos. Dave, how did you deal with it?’
Dave the actor said two things to this. First, that you need a very robust sense of humour. And that as a cancer patient you want things both ways: the simultaneous desire to be left alone and to talk about it. His advice to those close to cancer-patients (no one used the word ‘sufferers’) was to take each conversation as it came and not to expect too much. ‘If they want to offload on you, let them. And if all they want is to gossip and talk about the football, that’s great too.’ This was also spot on. It cheered me enormously to listen to such a common sense conversation, but saddened me almost the second it was over that it had not gone on for longer (‘And now over to Sally for the traffic …’) and was so rare of its kind: a mainstream radio programme talking about a disease which affects one-in-three of us with calmness, wit and honesty.
Later on, Tats was watching a recorded Without a Trace on video. I missed it, preferring instead to read to Shim the latest instalment of Charlie Higson’s junior James Bond book. Much later still she asked into the darkness whether I was still awake. I could tell she was crying. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s that Without a Trace you missed.’ (I had seen a minute of it, so knew it concerned the disappearance of a woman with breast cancer who had been given two months to live.)
‘What about it? Was it bad?’
‘It’s just that. It’s just that she disappeared because she felt so strongly that no one had really listened to her while she had been ill, that they hadn’t let her be who she was through it all. I was worried that I’d been like that to you.’
In spite of my protestations to the absolute contrary, I wasn’t convinced that I had persuaded her of the strength, courage and hope she has given me. If I ever do get to look back on this experience with gratitude, it is the image of Tatty smiling at me as I blinked awake on the ward, after a treatment, saying ‘Hello darling. You looked so peaceful while you slept,’ which I will treasure most closely.
Sunday 2 July
On the front of the Observer, beneath a photo of Wayne Rooney looking up at his red card like a tearful schoolboy I read: ‘Farewell Fred: Fred Trueman, legendary Yorkshire and England test bowler, has died at 75.’ I thought, but he’s only just been diagnosed. Between reading this and finding that the piece on him was by Vic I made another bet with myself that it would be ‘after a short battle with etc.’ that he had died.
Seeing it was by Vic, and remembering our evening together in Guy and Jemima’s garden I quickly cancelled the bet. I shouldn’t have. In an otherwise beautiful piece of cricket writing, wry, respectful and lyrical, he opened with the sentence: ‘We were in the dining room at Headingley when we heard the grim news that Fred Trueman had died at the age of 75 after a short battle with lung cancer.’ Much more accurate, and it keeps the sense of brevity, and suddenness, of the disease. The thing is, if Fred did have a battle with it, it was over pretty quickly, and he came second. I don’t think the man Vic describes would have liked being portrayed as a loser. And yet that’s what the language does, when it comes to cancer. It kills you, before you even have a chance.
Tuesday 4 July
On the doorstop last night, Robyn. She had come round to say that Merenna would need to catch the bus in the morning, as she and Rorg were away. All of a sudden we were having a deep conversation about our cancers. She is now into her second year of remission, and I am (hopefully) about to begin my first.
Just as she had at Budleigh beach, she welled up almost immediately. She told me matter-of-factly that ‘It takes about a year before you stop thinking ‘Oh, can I do this?’, and start feeling normal again’. She went on to say that the worst part of having the disease comes afterwards, ‘when you’re on your own. It’s the bit no one tells you about.’
On Sunday we took my cards down. Since early February they have been collecting on the sill under our bedroom window, a New York skyline of sunsets and flowers. It was Tats who brought it up, though it had been bugging me for a week or two. The mass of them was five or six deep in places, tucked into one another to stop them toppling. Once or twice this has happened, the effect very much like a line of dominoes: it takes seconds to come down and an age to put them back up again. Now we are sticking up the sash for some breeze at night it seemed pointless to go on keeping them there. But it made me think: does this mean I am well now? Or that I am allowing myself to become well? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. Either way, it seems the end of a chapter, though the cards have been filed away, with all the other documentation I’m not ready to throw out yet.
On taking them down I noticed how many had curled in the sunlight and had had their ink bleached by the same, their messages of hope and offers of favours now faded, so many months after the event.
My fingernails are a real mess, especially on my right hand, which was the one holding the leaking Calor gas canister when I set fire to the inside of a tent eighteen years ago. My thumb and forefinger now have a deep trough in the middle of them as the nail underneath tries to push through. From the side view they make a neat slope for half a centimetre or so, then appear to start growing in a completely new direction. The top edges are all jagged and keep catching on trouser pockets and hand towels etc.
Everyone keeps mentioning my hair, and how much of it I now have: ‘like duck down,’ as Karl said. I can’t tell if it is blonde, as when I was four, the usual brown, or a distinguished post-cancer-trauma grey. We’re off for our six-weekly family haircut on Friday, an event I’ve been sending apologies to. It’ll be interesting to see what Hayley makes of me.
One of the stronger aspects of returning hair is my almost rabidly growing moustache. By lunchtime, I have noticed, I now need a shave, like Homer Simpson. Never the most hirsute part of my body, I have become, in the eloquent words of Tatty, akin to ‘some Greek waiter.’ She is daring me to grow a handlebar over the summer.
I wrote a long email yesterday to Jean, in reply to her question about whether this has changed me at all. I talked a lot about relishing each day more than I did before. And the need to look and listen more, especially to my children. I have come to realise that people are more afraid of cancer (while they are speaking to me) than I am. But the thing which made me do a double take, even though I had written it a thousand times before, is how I signed off: ‘Love for now’, suddenly realising it was an imperative to make the most of each day whilst realising that each one is so short.
Presence
Sunday 9 July
Morning
No one else up. Sitting here with coffee in the kitchen. Is this what getting better is like? I am not hung-over but my knees hurt like hell. I have just seen eight or nine blue tits on the apple tree looking for insects and darting on and off the bird feeder.
In the middle of all this, a call to my mobile on Wednesday evening, as she said she would, from Felicity Carr. I am going to have ‘involved field radiotherapy’, as we discussed. The activity on my tumour is ‘almost negligible’, the MDT has pronounced. ‘But even if your scan results were completely negative, we would still have given it to you, just to make sure.’ She went on: ‘As you had such bulky disease, it’s better to be safe than sorry.’ It is fascinating how the words ‘huge’ and ‘bulky’ crop up, now I’m almost into remission, replacing ‘substantial’ and ‘high-grade’. I don’t blame them for retrospectively telling me how dangerous my disease was. After all, you don’t greet your new patient with ‘You’ve got a huge tumo
ur there, Mr Wilson, and it’s really aggressive!’, do you?
The side effects aren’t serious, Felicity told me, ‘nothing like chemo anyway.’
‘What about the tiredness?’ I asked her.
‘Oh, you might get tired, yes. But tiredness we don’t count as serious, just inconvenient.’
So that’s what the last five months have been. Tatty has set me two projects: to make CDs for the car (the first lot all got nicked) and to sort out the photos. The former is a piece of cake: not for nothing do they know me as DJ Ant up at the deli. As far as the latter is concerned, the words ‘Augean’ and ‘stables’ come to mind. We are talking about a blue plastic storage box, the kind they used to sell in Habitat, full of photos, undated and unsorted, from the last thirteen years. The last actual album I filled in was one commemorating the birth of Shimi, with Merenna still in nappies. And I must have done that one two years ago, in a rare burst of guilty activity.
You come across a lot of things when you scatter your life over the floor. Me looking twelve on my wedding day. Colislinn, the kids in the stream. The stuff which goes through your mind when you’re told you have cancer, as it happens. Several are of Jay and Rosie, holidays we took together in 1992, in France and Norfolk. It goes: Jay and Ant by the Canal du Nord; Jay and Rosie by the Canal du Nord; Rosie and Tatty by the Canal du Nord. Ditto the North Sea in Norfolk. In each one we are smiling the unlined hopeful smiles of the recently married, either at each other or straight to the camera. There is one of Jay with his head on my shoulder. None of us have had children yet, though it was in le Ribécourt that Tatty and I began discussing trying. It was a lot of fun, that holiday.
Love for Now Page 18
