Love for Now (15 page)

Have felt very strange on this latest round of steroids. Very hot and headachy, with an orange-steroid-man head and face. Also, hungry as a trouper. Marmite on toast a speciality. Lots of fridge-raiding as well. Blocked up all day Saturday then raging diarrhoea last night, to the extent I just lay on the bed, sweating, listening to
Miss Marple
through the door and realising I hadn’t washed their uniforms or filled their sock drawers. Not a good end to the weekend. However grown-up you are, you still need clean school uniform on Monday mornings.

My hair is ‘long’, according to Tats, which means I’m not shaven-headed any longer, but now have that sparse, light-wispy growth which is the giveaway of the true cancer patient: neither bald nor thinning, it sticks out palely (is it grey or blonde?) looking as though the slightest gust might blow it away for good. I don’t really like it. I might gets Tats to take my razor to it one of these days …

Still have a raging appetite – for the most odd things, as well. Was making Shim’s cream cheese and tomato sandwich for school on Monday and decided I had to have them for lunch as well. Ate half a Danish loaf of lovely fluffy white bread without blinking. Am losing the taste for things I previously munched on/drank like breathing: olives (suddenly too bitter); pesto (makes me feel sick); cheese (ditto); and coffee (just can’t face the taste of it at the moment). (Ditto wine, though I let that one go months ago.) The coffee especially is distressing. I was halfway through a bowl yesterday with a nice pain au raisin and it was all I could do not to puke. Is it because of the association with the ward? (I had a pain au raisin during treatment last week.) Quite possibly. I’m still very keen on apples and bananas, though, and marmite. Can you plan for this stuff? You can’t, you have to go with it, however counter-intuitive.

The biggest difference between this week and the last is that I’ve started reading again. That is, holding a book open and getting from one end of the poem/essay to the other. Don’t think I’m up to the long haul of fiction yet, but first things first. Have been going back over Carver’s last poems (
A New Path To The Waterfall
) and his posthumous
No Heroics,
Please
, especially the pieces on his poetry and the short stories and others. There’s a lovely line in his introduction to a book of ‘best of’ North American short stories where he says that a short story should contain what we all
know
but what
no one
is talking about. I like this very much, that kind of ‘guilty thing surprised’ sort of idea. He makes the whole thing, the
hard work of constant revision included, seem doubly important and vital. I should send off my short story off to the Bridport Prize. What on earth do I have to lose?

Before I go … just heard the first real sound of summer, a bee knocking, twice, into the window pane, as loud as a finger tap, and, somehow, as hopeful.

A gorgeous May day. Golden and green, as Frank Keating would say. Big Bone Pain and shivers kicked in just after lunch. Slept, and was woken by the phone ringing. How many times has that happened recently? Each time I want to throw it through the window, but answer it dutifully, desperate not to offend whoever-it-is. When I say ‘yes’ when they ask me if they woke me up I still feel bad that they feel guilty.

So: have been doing what I have been doing all week: dropping off Shim; taking tiny steps home; watching
Frasier
; looking at (and mostly not answering) emails; opening mail; then lying on the bed till lunch, unable (and unwilling) to move; eating a quick sandwich; then falling back onto the bed again – I know I’ve said it before – completely breathless. Then, around half-two, tiptoe to the shops to get the kids a bun; then collapse for a minute; then go and get Shim and collapse again, pointing him in the direction of said bun in its wrapping while I lie on the bed again. Exactly the same for days now. Aching for it all to end.

England making heavy weather of it at Lords. A grey (and briefly sunny) day. Last of the apple blossom clinging to the upper reaches, the crab apple already ragged. As Ted Hughes would say, the beauty contests don’t last long. At least the lilac is still out; I give it another week, at the outside.

I haven’t begun and finished a night in the same bed for three nights. It goes like this: cough mixture, settle down, sleep for an hour or two, then wake coughing, at only half-midnight or one, say, wake Tatty, who has words, then disappear to the sofa. The funny thing is, once I’m out, I hardly cough at all, sometimes never. This happened last night, which I spent on the big blue sofa by the telly, with only one cushion. Tats suggested when I came back at 6.45 that I only go out for half an hour or so, wait for it to calm down, then come back and rest. I’m not sure. I genuinely think I relax more when I’m elsewhere – why else don’t I cough, when lying flat, on only one cushion, my knees around my chest? Very, very odd.

We have recently celebrated Shim’s birthday. He opens his presents like Daddy, extremely slowly, taking in each word on every card, fingering them carefully for cheques. We took them (Shim brought Sam) to Harry’s for supper. Shim put all four of his green chillies from atop his chilli con carne promptly into his mouth as an act of bravado. He spent the rest of the evening guzzling water, sweating above the lip, and saying he was fine. For pudding we all shared a Harry’s Heart Attack. This comes in a six-inch deep, four-inch wide goblet. In layers from the bottom are: chocolate brownies with chocolate sauce; chocolate ice cream; vanilla ice cream; marshmallows. The whole edifice is topped with squirty whipped cream and two flakes at 45° like devil’s horns. Sad to say, in spite of Sam’s late bid for the dregs, that we were defeated.

I joined them slightly late, having fulfilled my duty to talk at book group about
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
by Jon McGregor (my choice). I was relieved to find that it went down universally pretty well, with most people saying things like ‘it is beautifully written’ and ‘I haven’t read anything like it before.’ I did wonder afterwards if people were being generous on account of my illness. Let’s agree with him in case he dies.

To Spencer and Maura’s, for Spencer’s birthday supper, cooked by Spencer in the Sephardic Jewish, i.e. Middle Eastern tradition: potato salad with spring onion and salted lemon; orange segments with cinnamon; roasted peppers; and then for the main course, roasted lamb, and couscous with dates, raisins and almonds. For pudding (‘I did this, Spencer doesn’t do baking: it’s a
male
thing’) yoghurt cake, with orange syrup and fruit salad, and pudding wine. As Maura handed out the glasses she made sure Tats and I had the pair which said ‘To Have’ (mine) and ‘To Hold’ (hers) ‘which is what I feel you’ve been doing recently.’

We gave her my new book and a ‘DJ Ant’ compilation. She insisted I read one before supper, so I read ‘The Surprise’ because I like the ending: ‘Your life a garden bench/left out/facing all weathers.’

I sat next to a woman I’d not met before (Lewis and Maura from down the road were there and were sweet and solicitous) called Megan. After hearing (or enduring, most likely) the monologue for a little while she said the usual things like:

and then something very brave and insightful which no one has dared say which was: ‘Well, sometimes we need a little kick. And maybe this is yours.’ She’s right, I’m sure of it. If I don’t get on after this and finish the novel and short stories I’ve got planned I really will only have myself to blame.

Tatty’s school got the ‘brown envelope’ call from Ofsted on Friday: they arrive on Wednesday for two days. Hurrah. Tats already glass-eyed and monosyllabic with tiredness (I can hear her on the phone downstairs to a friend from another school, a PE expert, planning a lesson with his advice). Thank God for Kari jumping into the breach with tonight’s lasagne and Ben and Jerry’s Fossil Fuel (a bit like a Harry’s Heart Attack, Shim said) tub of ice cream. They are still giving her Wednesdays
off to be in hospital with me, but she will have to charge back straight away afterwards, as soon as I’ve been Rituximabed. That leaves Thursday for being observed: she’s convinced they’ll watch her Henry VIII lesson, which she prepped for yesterday by watching David Starkey. The kids have to write an essay arguing whether Catherine of Aragon loved Henry or not. Deep stuff. Listening to her I again had the feeling that I was in the presence of one of those rare teachers you never forget. My A level history was not this alive, nor as interesting.

Big Bone Pain in the morning and now this evening. My thighs are hairless, as are my arms (never very hairy, more downy). I noticed this evening that half my eyebrows seem to be missing, the further away from the centre of my forehead they grow. My fingertips have tingled for nearly a week: not painful, just a warm-electric shock kind of feeling. Bowels: erratic. What the codeine (cough mixture) gives (constipation), the GCSF/antibiotics take away (diarrhoea). Weight: hovering around 13 stone, but not dipping below it, as it threatened to just after Easter. Still having that lower back pain which kicked this whole thing off. Am prepared to ignore it. For now. But I do want answers. Fingernails: curving, some with valleys in them.

I lay on Shim’s bed with him the other night, after his story, talking to the ceiling.

‘How long have you been ill, dad?’

‘Don’t know. They think since last summer.’

A pause.

‘Almost a year?’

‘How do you get it?’

‘They don’t really know. They think that the lymph nodes fight off another illness and that for some reason, one cell in the lymph nodes starts growing. Like it receives a bit of energy, perhaps from radiation, or genetically – they don’t know – then it starts splitting and growing and growing, and soon it’s a tumour.’

‘Is it just bad luck then?’

‘Yes. Just really bad luck.’

‘Is there anything you can do not to get it?’

‘Not really.’

‘But you are getting better?’

England drew in the end. Just couldn’t bowl Sri Lanka out. I listened to the whole thing on my fab Roberts Radio, in a mixture of rapture and apoplexy. Lovely sound, very warm. Some great howlers: Blowers calling Monty Panesar Monty Python; then Lord’s the Oval. It must have been Alec Stewart putting him off. I love his one word sentences. ‘And. There. Is. No. Run.’; ‘My. Dear. Old. Thing.’

Fred Trueman, the greatest English fast bowler etc. etc., has cancer, according to
Test Match Special
. As soon as they announced it, solemnly, by Christopher Martin Jenkins, I began laying bets with myself about how long it would be before they said ‘… but if anyone can fight this, Fred can.’ It took just two seconds. I timed it. And they used those exact words. (It wasn’t clear whether CMJ was reading a Yorkshire CC press statement, or merely voicing his own opinion.) A friend who has myeloma reported people saying exactly the same thing to him. Why do we insist on the language of fight when talking about cancer? Is it that we resort to it in Fred’s instance because he was a fast bowler of incomparable fiery-ness? Or that to
not
say ‘he will fight it’ is somehow to question his moral/physical strength/courage, thereby letting him down? Again, I nearly wrote in. But no.

Day after my penultimate treatment.

What a difference not having chemotherapy makes. Yesterday it was just – just! – Rituximab, a nice Piriton and Paracetamol
chaser to take the edge off, and away I went, stretched out on a bed with my Walkman in la-la land.

Duncan decided to put me back on antibiotics, as he heard something in my chest. This time it’s a double whammy of Augmentin (horse pills, three times a day) and Doxycycline (once a day). Duncan says that if it isn’t clearing up by next time (two weeks away), they might get me looked at by a sinus man. ‘It’s basically like a puddle in there,’ he said. ‘It has nowhere to run off to as it’s a self-contained system. But first things first, eh?’ Which is as pithy a summary of the whole cough/snot saga, and their view of it on the scale of importance, as anything I’ve heard from anyone.

A feeling of total joy – I actually punched the air – this morning lying in bed and waking next to Tatty. When was the last time I did this? Like a normal chemo night (I suppose not, when you think that I suddenly had no steroids zinging round my system) I lay awake and so crawled off to watch the
Frasier
I’d recorded (The One Where They Go To Car Maintenance Class), came back, headed off a coughing attack with some codeine, then, er, slept. And that was it. Next thing I know, Tatty was shouting ‘well done, you did it.’

Some new terminology from yesterday. The ‘ripples’ on my fingernails – horizontal grooves or miniature valleys – which appear weeks after each chemo treatment, are called ‘beau’ lines. No one knows why.

‘That’ll be something to take to your dinner party,’ said Gillian.

I’m still amazed by Tatty’s forbearance of these days at the chemo-face. Apart from the fact that all the attention is on me and that there’s loads of ill people attached to drips and bags of blood (I noticed a very thin – and quiet – Geraldine in the far corner of the ward, a shadow of what she was even a month ago, and she looked rubbish then) it must be so dull knowing that within ten minutes of the Piriton kicking in
that I’ll nod off and remain that way for 2–3 hours. The big difference yesterday was Ofsted paperwork. Very kind of the school to let her come at all. The results are in: they dropped points on only one ‘cell’ (assessment, I think) and were otherwise fine. The unofficial line is that for a school ‘with “notice to improve” (Stalinist jargon) they’ve done well; are, in fact, “an improving school.”’ So while they’re getting better, observably, they’re now also being
told
that they need to get better still just in case they think they’ve improved enough and can start coasting.