Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.

by Viv Albertine

  Oh, just some kids messing about, I think to myself, probably climbing across the roofs of the houses for a laugh … NO, VIV. THIS IS IT.

  A man is climbing into the house through the open first-floor window at ten o’clock at night he wants my baby he’s come for her I’m alone she’s upstairs I’m downstairs I’m a new mother I don’t know what I’m supposed to do I don’t know how to save someone else I’ve only ever looked after myself before does he have a lookout outside should I run upstairs and grab my baby or will that make us both vulnerable …

  I think all this in a split second and decide to confront him, hopefully luring him away from Baby. I decide to leave her up there alone. I might be wrong. I open the front door – if he has an accomplice, I’m in trouble – and look out into the silent black street. Fucking modern houses, not one of them has a window onto the mews, just brick and render as far as the eye can see. I remember being told that criminals hate noise, it draws attention to them and makes them nervous, so I let out the loudest, most blood-curdling scream I can muster. Two lives depend upon it – I give that scream everything I’ve got. The man drops off the roof and lands a foot away from me as I stand trembling at the open door. I try and slam the door shut but time has gone elastic, my hands have turned to rubber and the door is made of lead. It takes a lonely lifetime to push it shut. An army of men could have come through that door, it seems to take so long.

  Once the door is shut I stand in the hallway and scream again. I don’t know if there’s another man already in the house, I want to give him the chance to get out. Then I run upstairs to Baby, who is crying. She’s never heard her mother make such a frightening noise before. I’ve rehearsed an emergency like this so many times in my head. I’ve always thought I’d lock myself and Baby outside on the balcony, so this is what I do but the moment has passed. All that worrying and plotting my escape I’ve done in the past was useless; when it happened, I had to improvise.

  The police come, they think it was an attempted robbery. ‘Did I do the right thing?’ I ask.

  ‘You and the baby are safe,’ says the officer. ‘That means you did the right thing.’

  11 BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

  1999

  I’m walking with Baby and Hubby on Primrose Hill when I get a terrible, cramping stomach ache, so I go into the nearest pub. I’m losing lots of blood, it’s a wonder I’ve got any left. Something’s wrong. Baby’s only three months old and I’m breastfeeding so I shouldn’t be bleeding at all. I have a feeling that something bad is happening. I’m in the bog for ages; Hubby snaps impatiently through the door at me as if he thinks I’m staying in there to be annoying.

  I go straight to the doctor’s surgery and a trainee nurse does a smear test. I bleed like a stuck pig and the nurse runs out of the room to find a doctor. Fat fleshy steaks slide out of me, they pile up on the white paper sheet covering the examination couch, looks like a butcher’s shop window. I can’t stop it. Where is everyone? Anyone?

  A doctor appears as I’m standing in a pool of red liquid, stuffing slices of liver into the flip-top bin.

  ‘Get in a cab. Go to A & E. Now.’ Not again.

  I’m sitting with Hubby, Baby on my lap, in Dr Jeffer’s office. She says, ‘… burble, burble, burble … cancer … burble, burble …’ I must be looking a bit dazed because she fixes me with her glinting birdy eyes and says: ‘You will never have any more children. Do you understand?’ Well yes, put like that, I do understand.

  I must appear in control, still in charge of my own destiny. ‘How do you get this sort of cancer? How does it happen?’ I ask.

  ‘Cervical cancer can only be contracted by people who are sexually active.’

  Shut up. Stop talking. You’re making me sound like a right slag. What must Hubby be thinking? That he married a loser who not only has cancer but slept around and is now going to die and leave him to bring up Baby alone? I stutter through the rest of the consultation. When I try and say my address, no words come out, just gasps. I leave with an appointment for an MRI scan.

  I lie on the conveyor belt, put on the headphones that protect your ears from the loud noise and grip the little buzzer tightly, which I’m told to press if I want to come out. The machine is so loud they won’t be able to hear me scream. I tell the radiologist I’m claustrophobic. She says, ‘You’ll be fine, you won’t go in very far. Just up to your head.’ There’s a sense of urgency. MRI machines cost thousands of pounds a minute to run. There’s no time for a chat. The radiologist retreats into a side room and peers at me through a glass window. ‘We’re taking you in now,’ says a disembodied voice. The conveyor belt slides slowly into the machine. There’s a soft wind blowing. My feet are deep inside the tunnel, my head is at the entrance now, but I don’t stop moving, the conveyor belt keeps sliding deeper into the tunnel. She lied. The roof is almost touching my face, I’m enclosed, entombed, on and on it goes, further and further in, until I’m a long, lonely way down the shaft. I can’t stand it. I press the buzzer, ‘Stop! Stop!’ I want to scramble out but the space is too tight, like a pothole, I can’t turn round. Any second now, I’m going to start clawing at the walls. The stretcher reverses slowly, and I’m back in the cold white room. So ashamed. I’ve wasted the hospital’s time and money. I’ve let the doctors down. I’ve let my daughter down. I’m hustled out of the door and told briskly to make another appointment. There’s a queue of people in the waiting room ready to be scanned.

  You’d think you could overcome anything if your life depended on it.

  I go home, empty out three large cardboard boxes and stick them together so they make a long thin coffin shape. I lie in the coffin – in the middle of the living room – every day. And every day, I draw a blanket closer and closer to my face, until by the third day I can stand it covering my face for five minutes. When I can lie in the box for half an hour, I go back and have the MRI.

  This time I’m fine. Some things you just can’t do without practice.

  I’m fucked. I’ve got a huge tumour at the top of my cervix. If I had gone ahead with a natural birth, I would have bled to death. Having a Caesarean saved my life. The tumour went undetected somehow, even though I paid to have a smear test annually instead of every three years. Cervical cancer is one of the few cancers that are viral. You catch it from shagging. You could shag only once in your life without protection and get it. The doctors say they’ll do what they can, but I should make arrangements ‘just in case’.

  Now the guilt descends. Is this the consequence of too much careless sex? Of wanting and needing love? Am I shallow? Immoral? I confide in a friend who has HIV, and he asks me, ‘Do these thoughts help you get better?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then don’t think them.’ My sister flies over from America and takes care of Baby, so she doesn’t have to go into a nursery. My mother comes round every day and forces me to eat, spaghetti with salt and butter is all I can face. My friend Tricia accompanies me to hospital appointments – otherwise I can’t remember anything that’s said – and another friend, Erin, delivers a home-cooked meal for Hubby every night. These women, and a grant from the charity Macmillan Nurses, keep me from going under.

  Hospital, doctor. Doors opening. Doors closing. Fourth floor. Lift going up. MRI. Endocrinology. Oncology. Train. Home. Baby, cuddle, sleep.

  Hospital. Blood test, endoscopy, scan, anaesthetic. Vomit. Bleed. Results. Worse than we thought, I’m afraid. Bus. Home. Baby, cuddle, sleep.

  Lift going down. This may sting a little. Did you take a number? You need a ticket. Blood levels. Drip, chemotherapy. Vomit. A little tattoo. Lie very still. Think of the machine as helping you get well. Radiotherapy. Vomit. Bleed. Taxi. Home. Baby, cuddle, sleep.

  Close your eyes. Open your legs. I’m important, me, I’m ill. Poke, test, weigh. Vomit. Diarrhoea. Please use the hand gel. Follow the green line. You are here.

  Thank god that’s not my life. I can’t feel anything, so it must be happening to someone else. It’s all happening to that woman who was so desperat
e for a baby – it’s her who is being prodded and irradiated and her veins flushed with platinum (cisplatin, the chemotherapy drug, is made from platinum), not me. Anyway, I would never shit in my pants. I’m quite elegant actually, so it can’t possibly be me – standing at the junction of York Way and Camden Road, face screwed up like a bunched fist, legs trembling from the effort of holding back the poo. Look at her with her knees clamped together, clutching the black iron railings that surround the council estate (great rock ’n’ roll moments). She’s probably a drug addict, or a wino. Tut tut. So many of them in Camden Town. Even posh ones. ‘Please can I use the loo? Thank you so much.’ Use best voice so don’t sound like a junkie desperate for her next fix. Act calm, just a few more steps. Too late, can’t stop it. Disgusting filthy stinking soiled low-life …

  I see life differently now. I can’t ever go back to the well side, I’ve crossed over. And I’m glad. Now I have patience and compassion and I’m not scared of ill or dying people. People who haven’t been to the other side, or aren’t close to someone who has – they seem a bit half-baked to me, lifeless.

  At the end of the radio- and chemotherapy, I have one last treatment to go through. Brachytherapy. This involves the doctors shoving a stick of radioactive material inside my vagina (it looks like that glowing green bar that Homer Simpson gets caught in his shirt in the title sequence of The Simpsons), then they all scoot out of the room and lock the nuclear-attack-proof door behind them, peering through a triple-glazed window at me as I lie on a trolley, legs in the air, green thing up my whatsit. I spend most of the week after this treatment on the polished wooden floor of our bathroom, writhing in agony and vomiting bright green liquid as blood pours out of my arse, which feels like it has been slashed with a razor.

  I write a long letter to Baby in case I don’t make it. I’ve read that’s a good thing to do. I’m so angry with myself; what kind of a mother are you, to bring a child into the world and then immediately go and die on her? I vacillate between damning myself for dying and thinking I’m a burden to Hubby and Baby and should top myself. Do them both a favour.

  Night-time is the worst though. Death waiting patiently just outside the half-open bedroom door. I know he’s out there, and he knows I’m in here. Even if I beat him and get through another night, he’s not bothered, he knows his time will come. ‘I’m scared,’ I whisper to Hubby. ‘I know,’ he says. What else can he say?

  When you’re facing death, you have to walk that walk alone.

  12 THE WHITE HOUSE

  1999–2007

  Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength.

  Sigmund Freud

  I’m still drained from the radiotherapy and chemotherapy. I’m as dead as an alive person can be without actually pegging it. I really should eat a vegetable occasionally. During the treatment I drank wheatgrass, shiitake mushroom juice, miso soup, ate vegetables, no carbs, no sugar, no wheat, no dairy, oh and before the chemo started I drank my own piss – only to be done if you’re not taking any supplements, medication, etc. – but now there’s something about the smell and taste of chlorophyll that makes me gag. I’m so thin that I can’t lie on a mattress, I have to have two pillows under my body.

  I wish I could get up off the sofa. Wish I could smile and laugh. I can’t remember the last time I laughed. I wish I could think of one thing in the world that interested me apart from my daughter. I’ll spend today trying to think of something that makes me a tiny bit excited. I look at the lampshade for a couple of hours. I like looking at the lampshade, it’s neutral, has no feelings, no agenda. There’s nothing about the lampshade that upsets or frightens me. That’s also why I think about that female gardener on TV, Charlie Dimmock. I don’t wonder about her, I just picture her. She’s neutral too. The other person I picture is Heather Mills. Heather Mills lost her leg but still thinks of herself as an attractive woman. If I get very scared that I might die, I chant to myself, ‘Heather Mills, Heather Mills, Heather Mills, Charlie Dimmock, Charlie Dimmock, Charlie Dimmock.’ I can’t think about anything that will make me feel. That’s the trouble with serious illness, and depression, you can’t imagine being well – like on a cold day you can’t imagine warmth – you live in the everlasting dread-filled moment.

  The only thing keeping me going is my daughter. Because of her, love courses through my body like a drug. I can feel it there all the time. This must be confusing the cancer, this intensely happy feeling pulsing through my veins all day. I’m determined to get well enough to enjoy Baby’s first Christmas; she’s eight months old. The only time I spend with her nowadays is holding her when she and I are both asleep. Hubby does all her feeds and changes her nappies. She’s started looking to him eagerly for cuddles, she feels safer with him because he’s the provider of comfort.

  I watch as the intense bond I had with my daughter slips away. I’m losing the child I fought so hard to have in my life. It’s un believable, inconceivable, we were telepathic. Tied together in love.

  I lie awake all night watching Baby sleep in her cot next to us, remembering how happy we were. After a few hours of sniffling, the self-pity starts to evaporate and my brain kicks in, Hang on, maybe I can do something about this. I can at least try to turn this around. Not many things in life are irreversible. I’m so down, I’ve forgotten that I can control things in my life. Cancer can make you feel so worthless.

  The next morning I say to Hubby, ‘From now on I do all Baby’s feeds and changes. No matter how tired I am.’

  I don’t have the energy to do it but it’s that or lose my daughter, so I find the strength from somewhere. Doing all the day-to-day chores for her pulls me back to life. Through these actions I learn what matters to a baby – the one who takes care of her physical needs, the one who plays with her, feeds and changes her, that’s the person she wants to hold her when she cries. Clever baby. After two weeks, she’s back. And over the next few months we grow closer than ever. She needed time and effort from her mother; I’m rewarded with her love.

  Holding Baby (tight) on Primrose Hill, 2001

  If I’m not looking after Baby, I barely get up off the sofa. I don’t watch TV, I just sit there. I don’t even stare into space, I just exist in the tiniest amoeba-like way. I never go out. I don’t want to see or talk to anyone. It never occurs to me that I might be depressed. I know there’s nothing apart from my daughter and my husband that holds any interest for me and I’ve become very lethargic and antisocial, but I just think I’m a bit burnt out and jaded from all the hard work I’ve put into life, followed by the traumas of IVF, childbirth and cancer. I mention to my doctor that I can’t laugh, but I don’t want to say too much in case she takes my baby away.

  During all this I get a call from Ari. I haven’t heard from her for ten years, she’s living in New York now and wants me to re-form the Slits with her. I am terrified of Ari being back in my life. I can’t take the madness and chaos that I know will ensue. I tell her no way. She tries very hard to persuade me. I don’t mention the cancer, it all feels too raw. She’s very upset that I won’t countenance being in the band again, but I can’t possibly do anything that would be disruptive to my daughter or my physical and mental health.

  One morning I find myself sweeping the kitchen floor. Pushing the broom around in front of me, I don’t remember deciding to sweep the floor, getting up and going into the kitchen, I just notice that I’m doing it. I used to enjoy sweeping up, it was the only household chore I liked. I remember thinking to myself, back when I was well, Poor old Madonna, never gets to sweep her own floor, someone does it for her, she doesn’t know what she’s missing. I think there’s something very healthy about keeping your own cave clean. It is a good barometer of how your life is going, the state of your home. If it’s a complete tip, you’re taking on too much or depressed; if someone else has to keep it clean for you, it’s too big or you’re too busy.

  As I sweep, I realise that this is the first time for a year I’ve felt motivated to do anything th
at’s not absolutely necessary, and I know that a little shift has occurred. It gives me hope that maybe, if more little shifts start to happen, I might get better.

  From that day, when I realised I’d got up off the sofa and was sweeping the kitchen, it took ten years until I could honestly say: ‘I am well.’

  I think I’ll go back to the gym. I sit on the exercise bike and picture a phoenix rising out of the ashes to give myself a boost. I set the resistance level to 1 – the easiest setting – I used to be on 10 but I need to give myself time. The bike doesn’t bloody work. The pedals won’t go round. I flap my hand at an instructor as he wanders past. ‘Excuse me, excuse me.’ He comes over, has a fiddle with the controls, says it seems to be all right. I slide off and he hops onto the bike to test it. The pedals go round. I climb back on, the pedals don’t go round. I’ve got nothing. Nothing in my legs.

  London is full of bad memories; Hubby and I think it might help me get better if we move to the coast – the fresh air, slower pace of life – and it will be good for our daughter too. I sell my guitars – it surprises me how pleased Hubby is that I’m selling them – but I don’t throw away my picks. I keep them in my ladylike purse. I like seeing them every time I get money out; a gold one with a serrated grip and a heavy-gauge pale grey one.

  Hubby and I view a house by the sea. To get to it we have to walk up a narrow dirt track, across a wooden bridge – where we pause and look down into the stream as two swans sail underneath us – past lilac bushes and an apple orchard, a row of flint fishermen’s cottages, until we come to a white clapboard A-frame beach house, like an American holiday home from the fifties, perched on top of a slab of rock that drops away to the English Channel. The white shingle path to the front door winds around enormous sword plants and yuccas – just walking up the path is an adventure – but as we round the last bend, we come across a rabbit splayed out on the doorstep, its throat and stomach ripped open. The estate agent scoops the limp carcass into a plastic bag in one deft movement. I step over the entrails and joke that maybe this is a sign we shouldn’t buy the house. We enter the large white open-plan living room and straight ahead, as if there’s no wall, is sea sea sea. We decide to buy the house, sign or no sign.