Precious Lives

by Margaret Forster

  We went to the café on the other side of the street. It wasn’t really a café so much as a bread shop which had stuck a couple of tables and a few chairs outside, like so many shops during this amazing summer. We often sat there and had a cup of coffee, and Marion would repeat over and over how pleasant this was, how enjoyable. What a treat to be sitting in the sun in the afternoon having coffee, the height of bliss. We watched the Hoppa bus go by, we watched children coming out of school. We had plenty of time to sit and stare. Then, before we set off home along the other side of the block we were walking round, I was sent in to buy cigarettes and a copy of the Guardian, for whose Society pages Marion had once written a witty column. It had such a happy history, that column. Every one of those Wednesday evenings when Marion used to come, straight from work, for supper with us, she’d regale us with tales of the more extraordinary cases she was involved in and make us laugh as she described how she managed her team. Again and again we’d say this material was too good to keep to herself and that she should write it all down and offer it to some newspaper or magazine as a new sort of column. We coaxed and bullied her and eventually she got down to doing this in the summer of 1991. When she’d completed four columns she sent them off to the Guardian, who immediately accepted them and asked for more. Oh what rapture! There she was, by then fifty-two, someone who had never tried to write before, and now she was a Guardian columnist (though under a pseudonym, hiding behind the name Mary Black – Leader of the Pack – because she was worried about being sacked if anyone identified her).

  She had changed all the names, of course, of both clients and staff, and altered locations and so forth, but essentially the columns were true to life. Even now, as we walked along she’d see people in the street who would remind her of clients she’d written about. ‘Look,’ she said once, nudging me as we made our slow way down her road: ‘that woman’s just like the one I called Mrs Brown. Remember Mrs Brown?’ I did. Mrs Brown had made one of her funniest columns. She was a woman who’d come into Marion’s office demanding a free bus pass. She’d brought her five young children with her, all of whom had run amok in the waiting-room. Marion had explained that a bus pass could only be issued under the Chronically Sick and Disabled Act to those who had ‘a permanent and substantial handicap’. She asked Mrs Brown what her handicap was. Mrs Brown went into detail about all the operations she’d had. Politely, Marion explained that none of these qualified her as either permanently or substantially disabled. Mrs Brown promptly stood up, lifted her skirt, pulled down her knickers, and showed a large scar which ran from her navel to her pubic hair. She said she would like to know what could be more permanent or substantial than that. Marion gave up. She said she’d consult Mrs Brown’s GP and let her know the result.

  I’d forgotten what it was. Marion reminded me as we turned the corner, and ‘Mrs Brown’ disappeared. She’d met Mrs Brown on Brighton beach a year later, long after her request for the bus pass had been turned down. She’d moved to Brighton and was now the proud possessor of the bus pass Camden wouldn’t sanction. ‘I’m handicapped now!’ she shouted to Marion as she ran and jumped around with her children on the beach. ‘It’s grand!’

  It was sad to buy the Guardian on Wednesdays now and know there would be no column of Marion’s on its Society pages. She didn’t want to go into the newsagents herself in case she was jostled – it was a busy place at that time of day, full of schoolchildren buying sweets – and so she stood leaning on the window, looking nervous, until I came out. Then off we’d go, on the last lap, passing a launderette where Marion knew the woman who worked there. She was from Pakistan and spoke hardly any English, but seeing Marion she’d dart out to say hello. The first time she did this her beautiful eyes widened and she pointed at Marion’s neck – not covered that day by the usual scarf – and looked concerned, miming a question about what had happened to cause this wound, Marion smiled, and said, ‘Nothing, it’s nothing,’ and patted her hand. But the woman didn’t need any English to know it was not ‘nothing’, and ever after we had to go through the same poignant charade. It was tiring for all concerned, but as a sign of genuine concern it was uplifting.

  The stairs from the front door to the first floor flat were at first no problem but then, as September went on, became something of a challenge. There were fourteen stairs rising steeply in a straight row to the first landing. ‘Wait,’ Marion began to say, ‘wait’. I waited. We took her jacket off and hung it on a hook. She stood still, gripping the stair rail running up the right-hand wall, the very picture of determination. Slowly, she began to tackle these stairs, each foot having to be joined by the other before it was once more lifted. She made little puffing noises as each stair was negotiated and when finally she reached the top her sense of triumph was blatant, coming out in a great ‘There! Done it!’

  She went into the kitchen in such good spirits and celebrated with a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Soon, Frances would be home. ‘Go home,’ she would say to me, ‘go on. I’m fine. Don’t wait for Frances, get yourself home.’ I never knew whether she urged me to go because she wanted some time on her own, or because it made her feel less of an invalid to be without anyone for a little while, or because she was concerned that I would be walking home in the dark if I stayed much longer. If it was raining she worried about me and wished I’d call a cab, and when I went striding off without an umbrella she was so anxious. She was never, ever, so wrapped up in her terminal illness that she lost concern for others.

  On Thursdays, I didn’t go to be with her. Thursday was Annabel’s day. Her twin sister came straight from work, by train from Leighton Buzzard, and stayed the night. Marion, though longing to see her, would stress, every week, that Annabel must not exhaust herself – she must never think that she was obliged to come. She was under enough strain as it was, what with working and with looking after Roger, whose multiple sclerosis was so severe he could do little for himself. But nothing would keep Annabel away, and Roger himself urged her to go, understanding perfectly the incredible strength of the bond between these two sisters. So on Thursday, Annabel came, agonisingly hard for her, agonisingly hard for Marion, but it was precious time together. They both, fortunately, shared the same philosophy: facts had to be faced and as cheerfully as possible. Neither believed in burdening the other with her own despair and misery; neither went in for public weeping and wailing; neither bothered to curse fate, because it would only sour the months left to them.

  It was strange, during this time, to witness the subtle change in the relationship between the twins, a change forced upon them by these new and distressing circumstances. Marion, always thought (though not always correctly) to be the stronger of the two, was no longer able to be strong in the sense of being the one upon whom Annabel could lean. In a way, it was a return to their very early childhood – their mother had told me how slow Marion was to learn to speak and how she depended on Annabel to interpret for her. The bond between them was as tight as ever, but naturally it was not the same. Marion was not able to be the protector, a role she’d come to fulfil as the twins grew up.

  When they were children, she had literally fought anyone who threatened her sister, including their own older brother, Hunter. He was four years older than his sisters but easily beaten in any fight with Marion. He only had to push Annabel for Marion to be whirling at him like a boxer. In fact, she was so effective as a fighter that if he was involved in any scrap of his own outside the house he wasn’t in the least embarrassed to enlist her aid. She took on adults, too, if necessary. There was one PE teacher who made her life, and Annabel’s, a misery. Everyone hated this teacher, but the twins especially loathed her because she seemed to take a delight in victimising them. They never had their own PE kit (Davies finances did not run to one set of kit, never mind two) and were obliged to borrow from other girls who had the lesson before. This meant they were always wearing blouses and shorts too big or too small, and the teacher would look at them in disgust and hold them up to r
idicule. But worse than that was her treatment of Marion. Marion had a badly injured arm, the result of a burn caused by pulling a pan of boiling water over herself when she was very young. The burn had shrivelled and twisted the skin the whole length of her arm. It was unsightly and she was acutely self-conscious about it, naturally preferring to keep it covered. But the teacher wouldn’t let her. ‘Short sleeves only!’ she’d shout, and force Marion to expose her arm.

  All this Marion put up with, but what she would not put up with was malice towards Annabel. Annabel once yawned at the start of a lesson (she and Marion had been up at six doing a paper round before school) and the teacher had told her to go and sit on the bench if she was so tired. This was tolerable for one lesson but ever after, week after week, the lesson would begin with ‘Annabel Davies, on the bench!’ She sat there, isolated and conspicuous, taking no part in PE or games or dancing. Miserable, and afraid of the teacher, she slunk to the bench when ordered until one day Marion had had enough. ‘Annabel Davies, bench!’ shouted the teacher, as usual, as though Annabel was a dog, and this time Marion shouted back: ‘No! Don’t go to the bench, Annabel!’ Annabel froze, scared to disobey the teacher but automatically obeying Marion. ‘Bench!’ yelled the teacher. ‘No!’ yelled Marion. The whole class of twelve-year-old girls was mesmerised. Who would win? Suddenly, the teacher launched into the lesson, without Annabel having gone to the bench.

  But later, as the girls queued up for showers, the teacher came down the line. When she reached Marion she drew back her arm to lash her bare thighs with all the force she had – at which point Marion seized her arm and heaved the teacher right round, pushing her off. Again, the class held its breath, and again the teacher did nothing. She, in turn, was now obviously a little afraid of Marion. Everyone, child and adult alike, became wary of her strength and of her fury when crossed. Annabel, smaller, slighter, more delicately boned, was clearly protected by her bigger, stronger, tougher twin. And though things changed once their lives separated, the rules of their relationship were set. Until now. It upset Marion to think she was failing Annabel and causing her such pain; but Annabel was determined to be resolute and show she cared more about supporting Marion than about losing support herself.

  By October, we were all wondering just how many months were left. Time had become an obsession, naturally enough. So had keeping charts and making lists. On the freezer door, there was now a chart made by Marion listing all the varieties of ice-cream she’d bought (forty pounds’ worth) and against each were ticks for how often she’d eaten them. She had become passionately interested in the consumption of the coffee ice-cream compared with the pistachio, of the chocolate over the maple-and-walnut.

  Then there were the drugs. She was taking so many, and liked them all to be listed, with the times they had to be taken and the dosage beside them. After she’d swallowed each lot she would tick off what she’d taken. Frances was extremely efficient at doling out these drugs, and under her guidance so was I – there was no chance of mistakes, it was really quite simple. But not for Marion. She would get in a panic about whether she was taking the right drug at the right time and would hardly trust me or Frances to know the system. ‘Fancy,’ she’d exclaim, joking yet clearly meaning it, ‘three of the greatest brains in Britain and we can’t get it right.’ But we always got it right. It was she who, losing control of everything else in her life, struggled to control this single aspect. The drugs were keeping pain at bay and they were keeping her mobile, so she felt that if they were not administered properly disaster would follow. So she sat hunched over the kitchen table, laboriously writing down yet again the names and dosage of each drug she took, the only way she could stave off complete disintegration.

  But she was also, each day, jotting down thoughts and observations and sometimes little verses she’d made up. She’d come late to writing, very late. She was over forty before she’d begun to try to write plays, and even older before she attempted any journalism. And when she did start, she was slow. One play had been produced at the ICA in London, and broadcast on Radio 4, but no others had followed, though she’d completed a second eventually. All her efforts had gone into her Guardian columns, but once she became ill these had stopped. I kept urging her to write but she said she didn’t see the point any more: writing didn’t attract her, it wouldn’t give her any pleasure or provide any sense of release. She said she supposed that meant she wasn’t a real writer, writing wasn’t second nature to her, it wasn’t in her blood, like it was in Dennis Potter’s (who, at that time, was writing up to the very end of his life, and deeply impressed her). But nevertheless, she felt some sort of urge because there they were, her observations, her thoughts. She had a pad of A4 paper on the kitchen table covered with her scrawls – and they were scrawls; her handwriting was appalling. She had the most disturbed-looking handwriting I have ever seen. It gave me vertigo to look at it. I’d always longed to send a sample to a graphologist who, I was sure, would instinctively have recoiled at what was revealed. This writing of hers was backhand and loose, looking more like hieroglyphics than recognisable words, and it bounced wildly all over the place. But using her word processor was now beyond her – it sat, sadly, in the corner of her bedroom – so a Biro was the only option.

  Sometimes when I arrived in the morning and was clearing the always cluttered table, I’d see a fresh page turned and a lot written down already. I’d ask if it was all right for me to read it and she’d say of course, it was nothing. But it wasn’t nothing. It was often a touching stab at trying to make something of what was going on in her head, confessions of all the losses she was experiencing and would experience, little bursts of misery she was struggling to overcome, forlorn acknowledgements of the suffering she was causing others. She never wrote anything down when I or any other visitor was there, only when she was with Frances or on her own. She said she liked to write best early in the morning, when she first got up and was testing herself. If she could swallow her mushy Weetabix fairly easily it was going to be a good day and she felt up to recording whatever she was thinking. Once, looking directly at me after I’d read what she’d written that morning, she said, ‘When all this is over, are you going to write about it?’ I said I had no plans to. I reminded her that she knew books didn’t start like that for me, they started with problems, with turning over problems. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘isn’t this a problem? Isn’t dying a problem?’ There was a sudden awkwardness, almost an embarrassment. ‘Do you want me to try to write about it?’ I asked. She smiled, and shrugged and said, ‘If you like, if you want, sometime.’ It was never mentioned again.

  Three months had gone by since the prognosis in July that Marion had about six months to live. Did that mean there were only three left now? They’d said it could be more. Or less. But she still seemed, by mid-October, fairly strong and in good spirits. ‘If this is dying,’ she said, ‘if this is how it is going to be, it will be all right.’ She said she wasn’t in what she regarded as pain (though I had the feeling others might) so much as some discomfort and she had morphine at hand for whenever this became too much. It was kept in a bottle – no, not a bottle, some sort of container beside her bed. It amused her to watch people looking at it and guessing what it was. ‘It’s liquid morphine,’ she’d say, straight out. ‘I can have as much of it as I want. Too much, if I like,’ and she’d laugh. I asked her if ‘too much’ meant what I thought it meant. Did it mean she would drink enough to end her life if it became unbearable? She said yes, it did, and that she intended to do just that if the pain she feared began in earnest. She’d tell Frances first and then she’d do it. All she worried about was whether this would invalidate her life insurance. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, exasperated, ‘who cares about life insurance?’ ‘I do,’ she said, ‘but if I’m in agony I won’t.’

  So that was clear, or so it seemed. There was after all a point at which life would no longer be precious enough to cling on to at all costs. It was a relief in some ways to know this, yet
at the same time I saw a grey area opening up. How bad does pain have to become for death to be chosen, actually chosen, as preferable to life? And when it is reached, will control, the control to decide to use all the morphine, still be there? Or does someone else have to lift the bottle to your lips when you beg them? Problems there, indeed … But Marion was content to have made this decision and then to have set it aside. She was still getting up each day, still going for walks, still reading (though only newspapers now), still listening to the radio and to music on tapes. Television was no longer one of her small pleasures. She had no patience with it.

  But a change was coming. I sensed it nervously. I more than sensed it. I was on the look-out for it, monitoring every movement she made, minutely examining her face and body for signs. Surely she wasn’t walking up the stairs so well. Now, her ‘Wait, wait,’ took longer to end and the heaving up of her feet was awful to watch. She’d stop halfway up and had literally to be pushed on. But she was still keen to go for walks, though it was no longer safe for just one person to go with her. By the middle of October, it took two of us, one either side. The last walk I took her on by myself was very nearly disastrous. She said she didn’t want to walk round the block. She wanted to go into Crouch End, shopping. She’d made a list and was quite feverish in her determination to get everything on it, especially the first and most important item, a Christmas present for Frances, to be hidden in my house and given to her on Christmas Eve by me, ‘if’.