Love for Now (23 page)

Tats has gone into town to Boots to get her ‘Children’s fight sequence’ of photographs developed. I feel I am fast becoming the luddite in the family, listening to myself explaining to guests: ‘It’s really incredible you know, you just take in your disc, you know, out of your camera, leave it with them, then come back in three days for your shots.’ They look at me blankly for a minute, trying to gauge if I am stupid or trying to be ironic. ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘we’ve been doing it for a year now.’

It’s the first time I can remember getting photos back while we are still on holiday. The key word here, of course, is ‘remember’. A good article in the weekend
Guardian
by Tim de Lisle outlining how photographs not only aid memory, but over time actually become or even replace, the thing or event remembered. Thus: we get the photos back while still being ‘away’ and already talk about ‘the day the kids fought on the grass and Tatty photographed them’ as though it had
already passed into family legend, the act of photography both preserver and event in its own right.

What you remember is very unreliable of course. This was made clear to us the week before we came away, when we saw Mummy and Daddy in Exeter, with Marie-Claude and Claude, on a long detour back from the Lakes. As always happens with Daddy, a packet of photographs was passed around, including the family shots of Granny’s 100th birthday weekend in Lymington. They were just over a month old. What we all said, on looking at me, bald and very pale, was how terrible I looked. The thing was, during the weekend itself, I spent a lot of the time saying thank you to everyone who said how well I looked. Here was evidence that I looked completely exhausted, overweight and strained.

Yesterday we went up into the woods above the house and cooked sausages, sweetcorn and potatoes over a fire. Marshmallows for pudding which we ate first; juice and beer and ketchup. We spent hours up there, the kids flying off to add to the two dens either side of the fire-circle. We came back stiff from squatting on logs and reeking of smoke. I took the best part of a roll of film – they all said, ‘Oh, it’s film’, as though I’d just got out a square wheel – as I did with the boat ceremony five years ago, almost to persuade myself that holidays can really be this magical, and relaxed.

Everyone on good form. Paul and I drove Nell and Patrick into town last evening to catch the bus to Edinburgh, then went onto Morrison’s to buy ingredients for Ant’s Big Curry Evening. It was the first time I’d really cooked properly on a grand scale for a while. It was exhausting, but also uplifting. As if reprising my former life I drank beer in small glasses while Paul acted as sous-chef, secretly topping me up.

The curry was a success – a bastardised version of the Jalfrezi – but the beer was a disaster. I was hung-over, on three
small glasses, before we had even finished eating. I may as well accept it: for the foreseeable future I will have to live without drink.

We topped the evening off with an increasingly absurd game of Ex Libris, in which Jack thrashed the rest of us. Useless to try and repeat the jokes – you had to be there. The best material was a Dick Francis novel and
Pilgrim’s Progress.
Quietly chuffed to have guessed the right opening to V. S. Naipaul’s
A Bend in The River
, never having read it.

At the airport the other night I put into practice John Sutherland’s advice in the
Guardian
from his recent
How to Read a Novel
. To tell whether we are going to enjoy a book or not, don’t read the opening paragraph but page 69. If you like it there’s a good chance you’ll like the rest. I tried it out with the new Rachel Cusk, which I loved; the new John O’Farrell, which seemed utterly lazy; the new Maggie O’Farrell, which seemed too much like writing, to use Elmore Leonard’s phrase; and
A Prayer for Owen Meaney
, whose tone and voice I adored, without understanding a word. Then I tried the nearest slab of airport bestseller which just sent me to cliché-induced sleep. Apparently you can only buy a book to take onto the plane with you once you’ve passed through security. I wonder if it’s wall to wall Jodi Picoult through there, or if there’s a few Cusk-like bits of gold glinting in the muck.

A piece in yesterday’s
Guardian
about breast cancer by Dina Rabinovitch, someone, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve never heard of. She is in New York, feeling hot, having a hickman line fitted to ease intravenous administration of experimental drugs and starting treatment with a new doctor. She admits to waiting three years before coming forward to talk about the lump. She describes with great precision the look of heartbreak
– and disappointment – on the doctor’s face as she says this: ‘I am still amazed they care.’

The book this comes from isn’t out till March next year, by which time … who knows? … I should be well again, about to have a second three-monthly check up, at a guess. About to celebrate being 43, all things being equal. (We should have a party, at the very least to wave off being 42, which has been lousy.) About to finish my novel? About to get a contract? About to complete what I set out to do? Do it today, don’t wait around.

Rabinovitch’s writing is classy: you can’t help but be charmed. I look forward to seeing her story in print – and to reading of her survival while enjoying my own.

The moustache is really coming on.

I began it partly in jest, partly to see if Jack would come with me. Behind all of this was a dare to myself that I would actually follow it through. Tats has said to friends it’s to celebrate having hair again: and I have heard myself say ‘It’s for Al and Dude’s party in September’ (actually a month away). Whatever. I suspect the real reason is Shimi’s chiding: ‘I bet you won’t do it, Dad. You never do what you say you’re going to do.’ So, to prove him wrong, I’ve not shaved for eight days or so.

In town for lunch today with Jack and Jena at the Drum café (a second-hand Jennifer Johnston for
£
2.50 – I don’t need to read p. 69 to know that she is a genius). Jack asked Jena to walk between us so the citizens of Hawick wouldn’t think we were an item.

Jack’s ’tache makes him look like a
Dodgeball
-era Ben Stiller. The person I most closely resemble is Welsh poet Steven Knight – not famous, but at least he uses the language properly.

Back in Exeter at half-eleven last night; to the Oncology department this afternoon for a ‘verification appointment’. This began with a twenty-five minute session on an X-ray table under a large periscope-like device, with three women drawing lines on my tummy in thick felt tip. The positioning of these is crucial. I have to lie in exactly the same position for each of my twenty radiotherapy visits, so they had to get it right today. I asked, in the name of comfort, if I could have a triangular cushion for the space under my knees, as with the PET scan.

I am already dreading it.

Not the pain – of which there isn’t any – but the relentless mechanised atmosphere of the place, so different from the warmth across the corridor in Haematology.

That’s not to say the radiologists clucking round me today weren’t nice (‘7.6 across and 1.2 down – is that OK?’ one said above me) or attentive, just that I feel I am now on a conveyor belt of care, far from home.

This was made most clear to me by the reactions to my questions about possible kidney damage. Every person I have mentioned it to blinks back at me wordlessly. For me it has been the only question I really want answering – will I come out of this with kidney damage? – but it is as though that part of my conversation with Dr Perry has not reached their notes. ‘I’ll go and have a look for you,’ they smile, kindly, without knowing what I am on about. At last one of them comes back – was it on the notes, or a computer screen? – and says that my kidney is not in the field. My turn to look back blankly. ‘It means it won’t be radiated, no. Of course, we can’t absolutely guarantee that because it’s an organ and organs move around. But no, it should be fine. Is that all?’

I miss Felicity’s twinkle and Karl being rude. Just before going out I phoned up Ian, who is in charge of my stem cell collection. They are moving it to November now, as I can’t be radiated and have bone marrow collected at the same time. ‘Hello Ian, it’s Anthony.’ He knew who I was straight away.

The scary thing about the Oncology dept is that everyone is obviously really ill. They are in Haematology, too, but, apart from the hair loss, don’t look it – except Geraldine, who looked iller and thinner each week. Everything there is on the inside. In Oncology, you see a man whose face looks like it is melting, layer by layer. Or a woman with a red, almost
purple, neck, swathed in bandages. People in wheelchairs with no hair, in hospital gowns.

Perhaps for this reason, in Oncology, they use the telly. In Haematology I only saw it on once, during the World Cup, the day I had my hickman line out, and the only people I saw watching it were doctors. (In fact, I’m sure I saw Karl shouting at a nurse to move Geraldine’s armchair left a bit so he could watch the game from behind the desk.) In Oncology it’s on all the time:
Flog It!
followed by
Diagnosis Murder
, appropriate for a hospital waiting area, somehow. You think you’re ill, but you could be having treatment from Dick Van Dyke, and his son, Barry.

Some really shitty news yesterday, not in the pile of post-holiday mail, but buried in the avalanche of email, just as I was beginning to wane from wading through it all.

A man I tutored on the Arvon course last year has committed suicide. He was Australian, a retired sociology professor who came on the course on a whim. Someone had dropped out and at the last minute he filled it. He was on a grand tour of Europe, visiting ancestral sites, the trip of a lifetime. He said he hoped Arvon would change his life: his last email, in October last year, said that it was still too early to say if it had, though he had continued writing.

I got the news from Jean, who had forwarded it from Alan, another participant. Andrew was such a lovely man. He was always the one, in our workshops, who would lob in a depth charge of a comment, right at the end of a discussion of a poem, which would have us either speechless with laughter or in amazement at its wisdom. His poems ranged from
left-field
extemporisation to straight-under-the-fingernails lyrics which it seemed he had waited his whole life to write. I remember clearly telling him to locate that voice and do his damndest to hold onto it, because it was compelling. Even that, though, wasn’t enough. It turns out his wife had recently left him and that he had fallen into despair. He left this, one of the last poems Alan had received from him:

More poignant poetry, left on the fridge door:

A revelation about poetry day today as I lay in the bath admiring my luxuriantly hairy arms and thighs (previously blond): that, having escaped the ultimate rejection slip of death, the whole business of writing new poems will come, eventually, but in the meantime, I feel I couldn’t care less. This new – and shocking – feeling of indifference came to me as I flicked through the new edition of a poetry magazine in the mail-pile yesterday morning. I could almost feel it creeping up my arms: So what? And this, despite the fact that I spotted the names of friends and acquaintances, including a tutee from last year’s Arvon in the index. Exactly the same sensation occurred – it wasn’t a feeling, it was a physical reaction – as I looked at the programme notes to the poetry festival I read at four years ago. An impeccable array of poets, workshops, readings and talks. I felt it bounce off me, the need to compete and say, in the words of the old actor/
light bulb joke, ‘That could have been me up there’ completely absent. Cancer nearly killed my immune system; instead it seems to have nuked my literary ambition, a proper miracle.

First radiation in the bag.

The verification people on Friday were right: it takes about a quarter of an hour, 10 minutes of which is spent making sure you are in the right position, and the rest positioning the machine and then firing the rays. The latter takes 20 seconds, twice.

You lie down on the slab, under the periscope/hairdryer. They press a TV remote control and you move upwards, till you are about shoulder height with them, a foot and a half below the eye of the machine. Lots of clicking again and calling out of numbers. Out come the felt tips. One of them squidges your tummy, pulling one side down a bit while pushing the other up towards your ribs. Another moves your feet five centimetres to the right. So it goes on.

Then, with an invisible nod to each other, they appear satisfied – and vanish.

The lights go off for a second. You become aware of lines of red light criss-crossing the room. One of these is coming from a slit in the ceiling above you. You notice a yellow sticker next to it telling you not to look into the light. You look away and try to banish thoughts of James Bond films. You become aware that Radio 2 is playing in the corner of the room. The lights come on again.

Then there is a buzzing sound and a click.

Your big toe goes all fuzzy.

The radiologists reappear, chatting. They ask you to keep lying still, while explaining that the hairdryer is now going to swivel to a position underneath the small of your back. Out comes the TV remote control.

You try not to think of
Dr Who
.

They smile.

Then vanish again saying I will feel nothing.

And suddenly they’re back, saying you can climb off now Mr Wilson and see you tomorrow.

On the way out I noticed that the handrail that runs both sides down the corridor from the waiting area to the radiation room is completely plastered with Thank You cards, stuck on with sellotape. Many depict flowers and sunsets: most are a bit yellowing. It struck me very hard that so many have obviously forged bonds here – and which so far have eluded me.

On the way in, a young porter/male nurse walked me down the corridor, routinely checking my name, date of birth and address before asking me to wait. Then he said: ‘And how are we feeling today?’ It was the first time I’ve been asked that question since crossing the corridor. I could have cried.

‘It’s a fight every day’: new slogan for a spot-removing cream from an ad on telly last night. If proof were needed that war metaphor has seeped into all aspects of language about health, surely it has arrived with this. Below the surface, as with all advertising, is the premise that you can’t do without it; and underneath that lies the fear that life isn’t worth living if you don’t buy what it tells you to.

Tatty came to bed late last night. She’d been on the internet all evening, having read Glenn’s email on Lisa’s CT scan, looking up lung cancer. We drove out with Sally to Cheriton Fitzpaine to see them this morning. It doesn’t look good.

Most people who get it die within five years of diagnosis. The most common killer of all cancers, it receives the least funding on account of smoking. On the Roy Castle site it even says words to the effect of ‘If you don’t want to know the score, look away now.’

Amazingly Glenn and Lisa were very calm. I think they
realised something was up a few weeks back, when the antibiotics proved useless and when the first conversation at the hospital was with a consultant. ‘It’s called “gradual disclosure”,’ I said, sounding like a know-all. Into the space that followed this remark I wanted to pour my hard-won knowledge of the cancer sufferer, but nothing came. Even when you have lived with the possibility of death for seven months, it still hits you harder when it happens to someone else. I noticed as we sat cradling coffee cups in Lisa’s kitchen that the only person who didn’t use the word ‘cancer’ was me.

We all went into their drawing room and said prayers for them.

Their house is fantastically peaceful – with its art and rugs and inglenook fireplaces – as are they. ‘Whatever it is,’ Glenn said, ‘we’re OK with it and we’ll face it.’

I can’t express how courageous I found this. I certainly don’t remember feeling the same back in February, whatever anyone told us at the time.

Perhaps there are two kinds of cancer; the one you imagine in the abstract, and the real one you contract, out of the blue. They are both terrifying, but you only know your reaction to the latter when you’re actually given the news. I’d bet with most people it isn’t what they expect.

Before my treatment, as we walked down the corridor, the senior nurse told me she had had a bad day. (I don’t know her name, she hasn’t introdueced herself yet.) ‘That’s why I’m asking you to take that chewing gum out.’ Suddenly I was back at infants school. ‘We don’t want you choking, do we?’

Tats and I strolled into town for a Wagamama’s lunch, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. It rained.

When we got back Tats said we should honour our agreement to go down to the FORCE (cancer) centre on the corner of the main road by the hospital. We introduced ourselves by saying that my neighbour (Lucinda) had recommended we came, and that until now I’d not been well enough, really, to put in an appearance. They welcomed us like long lost friends.

We were sat down on some very comfortable bamboo armchairs. There were pot plants; a Celtic harp CD played in the background. A silver-haired lady brought us tea and a plate of biscuits.

Our introductory interview was with Brenda, who told us she is filling in for Robert, who is on holiday. ‘I just pop in from time to time,’ she said. Between questions she casually informed us she was responsible for setting the whole thing up. ‘A few years ago it was just a space on Cherrybrook Ward, and now look at us.’ She got up to fetch us some leaflets.

When she came back she handed them out to Tatty, including the one on ‘Cancer for Men.’ She turned to me and, smiling, said something which completely floored me: ‘You look a million dollars. I’m so pleased you came.’ She went away to find more leaflets for us. I rubbed at my eyes and tried to focus on the greenery through the patio door. As Tatty used to say when I was in diagnosis limbo, ‘It’s only difficult when people are nice.’

Over lunch Tatty looked straight at me and said ‘If you had to face mortality again would your reaction be the same?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, lying. Then I said: ‘I’d be more accepting of it.’

‘The idea of missing out on seeing what the kids become?’

‘Exactly.’

‘And what you’d become?’

‘What?’

‘Well, if it was me, who was going to die I mean.’

‘I misunderstood you. I thought you meant me.’