by Rick Gekoski
‘You’re not tempted to write something or other?’
‘No! Never ever ever. Not that I have much time. But I am not going to write a fucking word, or read another C.S. bloody Lewis whingeing away for Joy. They want consolation, do they?’
‘Everyone wants – ’
She picked up a book from her bedside table. ‘Listen to this arsehole!’
For what is it to die, but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
‘Maybe it consoles some people who read it?’
‘It’s shite. I’ll guarantee he wasn’t dying when he wrote it! There is no fucking consolation. I’m not some sort of deluded Christian or cod smiling Buddhist. I am a modern woman. There is me, alone, and soon there will be no me.’
What to do, when there is nothing to be done? Soon enough my principles, my taste, a lifetime of fine discrimination lay in ruins. Needs must. I purchased a jumbo flat-screen telly – a man delivered it and spent three and a half hours fiddling and making an intolerable racket. We hid in my study until he knocked at the door and demonstrated his handiwork: the TV suspended on the wall opposite our bed in defiance of the laws of both gravity and aesthetics.
‘There she is. A real beauty. Sixty inches – I don’t do many that big. I’ll show you how to use the controls.’
‘Is it difficult?’
‘Not at all. You have a Sky box, and only one remote. Piece of cake.’
Sky! I had none of the usual objections. I knew nothing of it, not even enough to know if I wanted it or not. Rupert Murdoch was not one of my wee beasties, though we had friends who spat out his name with a venom previously preserved for the Antichrist. But he provided programmes that were worth watching, in our extremity. Arts programmes, documentaries about nature, a history channel. Fodder to pass the time as the time passes.
Box sets? I thought they were for chess pieces. It turned out they contained discs with multiple episodes of programmes. There were a bundle of them by that superannuated sweetie David Attenborough, whom Suzy adored. Life on Earth . . .
We lay side by side on the bed, holding hands, with cups of tea on the bedside tables, watching Mr Attenborough and his travelling circus.
I plumped up her pillows, and made sure she was comfortable.
‘Isn’t this fun, my love?’
‘He would have made a good undertaker. A voice to die for, so soothing. I liked that praying mantis, I wish vicars were like that.’
Once you buy one of those monster tellies, and then you add Sky, the floodgates of necessity open, and to hell with your standards. I now purchased an electronic reading machine. Next thing I knew we would have a bungalow in Basingstoke with all mod cons, a satellite dish on the front of the house, and a paved garden. So easy to maintain!
A Kindle? Why would I do that? It was not, of course, allowed into my study, where my books would scream with derision and anguish, as they were exposed to the future of reading. Not the future of books. Books have no future. Screens, that’s what people want. Soon we will all be implanted with inner screens at birth, and grow up reading inside our eyelids, bumping into what used to be our fellow men, as in the rush hour at Paddington station.
That I had capitulated to this was a gloomy thought, though unaccompanied by regret. I needed my Kindle. I could sit and read from it to Suzy, with its spidery little light sticking out of its cover, while she half dozed in the dark.
It was hard to find something to read that could still hold her attention. She was bored by the newspapers, couldn’t tolerate magazine fodder, was heartily sick of literature, had scant interest in the biographies and memoirs of worthies who no longer mattered to her.
I tried to find something that might amuse her. When we were freshers at Oxford, we’d joined the P.G. Wodehouse Society, ‘which exists to entertain its members’ but didn’t, though Plum himself continued to. We read him to each other on holidays in country cottages in the rain, in modest gîtes and paradors in the heat of the afternoon. He was an agreeable travelling companion, like going abroad with an attention-seeking but amusing elderly uncle.
I suggested that we make a brief foray, to see if he still amused us. Or her.
She was a bit doubtful at first. ‘I couldn’t bear to plough through a whole book. His plots are risible, like the worst sorts of bedroom farces. Just read me the funny bits. Can you find that one I used to like, the one about critics?’
‘Which book was it from?’
‘Either The Clicking of Cuthbert or Summer Moonshine, I think.’
‘Let me look . . . I think there’s some sort of anthology or omnibus . . .’
I looked up and down the pages, filled with whimsies and felicities of the most evanescent sort, before coming upon one of my old favourites. I do an admirable Bertie Wooster and a stonking Jeeves, and here was a chance to resurrect them in miniature.
First Bertie, reedy, querulous, filled with boundless, unfounded self-assurance, but distinctly lacking a bit of the old gorm:
‘I mean to say, I know perfectly well that I’ve got, roughly speaking, half the amount of brain a normal bloke ought to possess. And when a girl comes along who has about twice the regular allowance, she too often makes a bee-line for me with the love-light in her eyes. I don’t know how to account for it, but it is so.’
Followed by Jeeves, who always begins with a pause, and whose gravid tones are those of a genuine purveyor of information, leavened with a suitable degree of irony. I lowered the register of my voice, made it both airy and orotund, which, as Bertie himself might remark, is rather a fine trick:
‘It may be Nature’s provision for maintaining the balance of the species, sir.’
I waited expectantly for a guffaw, or a slow hand clap of approval as at an Oxford cricket match. None was forthcoming.
Suzy looked thoughtful, and a bit sad. ‘You know what? It’s not funny any more. Gussie Fink-Nottle, for fuck’s sake! I’m sick of P.G. Wodehouse.’
‘Honestly Suzy, that’s a bit rich. After all, he’s not a shitslinger. He’s an antidote to wisdom!’
‘He’s just as bad, he’s a twitslinger! Fancy sitting next to Bertie Wooster at dinner! You’d want to hit him. Or that insufferable Jeeves. I’d stick a lamb cutlet up his nose.’
‘He’d be below stairs.’
‘Only the English think it’s funny, all this class nonsense. What a sad lot we are. And we think Americans are dim and lacking in irony because they don’t appreciate Wodehouse.’
I was rather shocked. He is such a useful reminder of the gorgeous foolishness of things, his wit a reliable antidote to life’s hardships. There’s nothing more soothing to the soul than a well-turned phrase.
‘Put him away,’ said Suzy, turning on her side. No amusement for the dying to be found there.
‘I know what, love, I’ll buy you some of those noise-cancelling earphones, for when that hound of the bastardvilles starts howling. They’re good for music too, so when the yowling starts you can listen to some of your favourites.’
But music had lost its capacity to soothe. She found it irritating and insistent: Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Tom Waits, nasal whingeing in the wind. I felt similarly, not about her crooners and balladeers, but about my music – proper music. I once depended upon my beloved Beethoven and revered Bach to guide and to transport, but now they grated on me, feeling as insistent, calculating and manipulative as that dreadful Wagner cranking away on his Teutonic genius machine, bullying me to follow and to be moved.
‘Something loud, you mean? Good idea, I’ll have a fucking brass band. Why didn’t we think of this before? You know, it’s funny, I’ve rarely met a dog I didn’t like. Even that ugly mutt next door, if it had a loving owner, might be affectionate and manageable.’
‘Yeah, like having a pet lion. So cute until it eats you.’
‘When I w
as a girl we had the dearest dog – Bobo. You know? He was a Golden Retriever – Daddy thought them appropriate to his position in the county – but he behaved like a lap dog. He loved me the most because I kept sneaking him bits of meat when he sat under the table. I used to get told off for it, but I did it anyway. He would curl up on my lap when I sat in a comfy chair, and he was as big as I was . . .’ She stopped for a moment of recall, her eyes wet. ‘He was so loyal, he followed me everywhere. I even taught him to pick up my toys when I left them in the garden, and bring them up to my room. I left the lid of my toy chest open for him, and he’d bring them up one by one, ever so gently, and pop them in.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘Not at all. He was a retriever. He liked picking things up, and stuffed toys are a piece of piss compared to half-dead pheasants. Daddy rather fancied shooting, but he was such a bad shot, and so neglectful of all niceties, that one day he winged a beater, and it was discreetly suggested that he might join the hunt instead. He was even worse at that, kept lagging behind or falling off. He finally dressed up in his red rags for the hunts, but never actually set off, just had a few whiskies until the hunters came back, and greeted them drunkenly.’
‘Poor you. He must have been an embarrassment.’
‘Not half. But he did actually love dogs, I’ll say that for him. After Bobo died I was inconsolable, and took to my bed. And Daddy came up and lay beside me quietly. He hardly said a word – most unusual for him – just put his arm around me and kept still. It was so lovely, so lovely of him and so lovely to be with him, that I quite forgot, or maybe even forgave, what a bad father he often was. And six months later, when I came home from school for the summer, there was a puppy Golden Retriever, and Daddy didn’t say a word about that either. Just introduced us, and left us to it.’
‘Did it work?’
‘Sure. Love is replaceable. But Bobo was my first love, you can’t replicate that.’
I don’t get it, this doggy stuff, these irrational attachments. When it came to pets, I put my foot down. Suzy was hard to say no to, but accepted that my aversion was so great that it would never have worked. She loved taking a dog for a walk, and was quite ready to scoop its shit into her plastic glove, bag it up and throw it in the appropriate bin in the park. But if she had been absent or ill, I could never have done so. As far as I was concerned, it could foul the garden like the mutt next door, and Suzy could clean it up. She gave in, with bad grace.
I never had a pet as a child, and cannot bear being importuned and slobbered on and followed about by an adoring and invasive member of an inferior species. I said this a couple of times, though I learned not to repeat it.
‘If there is an inferior species,’ Suzy protested, ‘it is humans. Dogs are loving and loyal and beautiful. That’s more than you can say of humankind!’
‘Right, sure. You must introduce me to Sir Walter Scottie, or Labrador Leonardo.’
It was a view that I held firmly at the time, though less so now, when my opinion of my fellow man is so diminished that even a dog looks good by comparison. Or better yet, a horse. Horses are dignified and reasonable, they don’t slobber and fawn.
Poor Bobo was run over by a speeding car in one of those narrow country lanes bordered by high hedges, and couldn’t get out of the way. I’m not sure Suzy ever recovered from it. Her eyes didn’t mist over when she remembered her parents, or various friends who had died prematurely. About those she ranged from indifferent to sad, about Bobo, she was, still, inconsolable.
‘That fucking shitslinger Kübler-Ross promised me acceptance! That is so not happening. God, listen to me, my syntax is decaying too.’
‘I think she was writing about grief.’
‘Grief, dying. Same thing.’
‘I was wondering, love – ’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know how to say this. If I should – ’
‘For fuck’s sake, it’s a bit late for circumlocutions. Out with it!’
‘Well, do you still want to be buried in Oxfordshire? I’m surprised you don’t want to be cremated. I do. I’m too claustrophobic for a grave.’
‘Ashes to ashes? No, I like the idea of the fine and quiet place. But I’m frightened there might be a resurrection of the body, and on Judgement Day I would emerge from my grave like one of Stanley Spencer’s doughy matrons in a hideous frock. As if the local Women’s Institute had all died together. Maybe a poisoned apple crumble, like in a Dorothy Sayers mystery? Death at the W.I.’
‘I’d read that.’
‘Life eternal in Cookham? It would be enough to kill me. I’d rather be an angel on a fucking cloud, even that’d be less dreary.’
‘I like your plot under the yew trees. Is it stupid, holding onto you like that? I can still visit you. Visit with you.’
‘It won’t be me, just some hired place for my carcass to rest in.’
‘Don’t, please don’t.’
Lawrence was prepared to tell me in detail what was happening, and what was likely to happen and when. I dreaded and needed his visits, both resented and fawned on him like a victim with Stockholm Syndrome.
What he had to say was grim.
‘It’s palliative care. Frankly I sometimes wonder if it is worth it, all this chemotherapy business. She has a few months to live, and we can extend that marginally but at a cost . . .’
‘Would you recommend merely letting nature take its course then?’ I may have sounded a bit aggressive, because he bridled.
‘I am a doctor. I will give my advice, and then do what you and she decide, and she says she wants the best available treatment.’
‘Tell me about the side effects. She’s getting more discomfort from the remedies than she is from the disease.’
He shrugged. ‘That’s chemotherapy for you. We hope to shrink the tumour by up to 25 per cent, but it’s an unpleasant business, and some people experience the side effects more acutely than others. The Cisplatin causes nausea and vomiting, but there are drugs to counteract that. Haldol perhaps.’
I was unsure whether his specificity with regard to drugs, side effects, platelets, all the cancer stuff, was a form of respect, or an attempt to patronise me. But I made notes, and after his visit repaired to the internet for further information, in spite of his repeated injunctions not to do so. It infallibly made me feel worse.
‘The burning feeling in her feet – we call it peripheral neuropathy – that is keeping her awake is associated with this. It won’t go away. But that is the least of her problems.’
‘She doesn’t think so!’
‘I can prescribe something for it. And she will need stronger sleeping pills. I am more concerned about her anaemia. Her fatigue and pallor are caused by low red cells, but the low white blood count is more dangerous, and you’ll have to make some adjustments. Her immune system has been suppressed. She certainly cannot go out any more . . .’
‘You might well say!’ It had been weeks since she’d done so, and was clearly never going to again, until the final day.
‘And you need to make sure that visitors haven’t got colds or any sort of infection.’
That was good news. As the news spread that Suzy was terminally ill, a very large number of acquaintances, and a smaller number of friends, wished to come and have a final gander. I found this infuriating, and Suzy called them the rubberneckers. None lasted more than twenty minutes at her bedside, though few wished to.
‘They put on these phoney quiet voices, all concerned and delicate, and I can’t hear a fucking thing. I’ve got this hissing in my ears, it drives me crazy . . . I can’t stand any more sensitive company. Not when I’ve got you.’
Each visitor came armed with special knowledge, and wise counsel. Of course chemotherapy and allopathic medicine wouldn’t work. They made you worse! Poisoned the system! It made no difference whether Suzy was listening – she closed her eyes and played dead: Raw vegetables! Carrot juice! Vitamin D! Go to Bristol! No, go to India! Meditation! Laught
er therapy!
After one such visit I came into the bedroom to find her giggling. ‘What’s so funny?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘that was Benjamin. You know, from the paper.’
I must have looked blank.
‘The one who’s married to Maid Marion.’
I didn’t have any idea who she was talking about, being as interested in her professional colleagues as she was in my teaching ones.
‘He had some advice. It took him time to get round to it, I could tell something funny was up. Sort of beseeching, and evasive and over-familiar, needy and creepy like so many men? You know.’
‘I don’t. Go on.’
‘Anyway, he said he had a good woman friend and she’d discovered a miraculous way to deal with her cancer! I didn’t encourage him. Every fucker is a purveyor of cancer miracle-cure stories, they’re all like evangelical Baptists: everyone gets Saved! Praise the fucking Lord!’
Cut to the chase, I counselled. Another bore? So what?
‘“You’ve never been a coffee-drinker, have you?” he asked. I was surprised he remembered.’
‘So what?’
‘“That,” he said, “is because you’re taking it at the wrong end . . .”’
I didn’t follow this at all.
‘Don’t be stupid, it’s obvious. If I’d encouraged him, he’d have put on a white smock, and got his rubber tube and bag out!’
‘Forgive me, I’m not at all sure I’m following this.’
‘Enemas! Coffee enemas!’
I was horrified. ‘What did you say?’
‘Say? Women deal with some version of this every day, some man perving. You just flick them off, tell them to be a good boy. That makes them even pervier . . . So I just told him to go home, and he slunk off.’
From then on, I could say that the doctor had prohibited visitors other than family. Henceforth, no one but Lucy, when she could manage to come. And her Sam too, I suppose.
