The Fish Ladder (27 page)

Where trouble melts like lemon drops,

High above the chimney tops . . .

There was a whirring sound:
whop-whop, whop-whop, whop-whop
and a black bird flapped by at nose level. I could see the lie of the feathers on its back. A crow. There was a staggered note to the downbeat, which was bouncing off the ceiling of cloud. The cloud looked close enough to touch. I couldn’t go on. I sat down for a moment, and then stood up. I told myself that it was the stress of Mum’s illness, and of moving house, and the biopsy that had exhausted me, unwilling to accept the possibility of cancer, or rather, that I might be affected by it in this manner, prevented from completing what I had come to do, and I turned, away from Lord’s Rake, away from the summit, and went back down the hill by the same route that I had climbed it.

Notes on
Innominate Stream

Thames

I had never really got to know the Thames. Even though I had lived in London, on and off, for over twenty years, before moving to Barcelona, I had spent most of that time in Earls Court, and I hardly ever saw the river. But now we lived in Lavender Hill, and I crossed the Thames most days.

We were sitting on the front upstairs seat of a Number 49 bus: Evie, Rupert and I, on our way to an Open Day at one of the secondary schools Evie had chosen. She had only just begun to attend a local primary school, an oasis among the social housing and tangled railway tracks of Battersea. Sacred Heart Primary had chickens in the garden, allotments growing rosemary and chives, chard, sunflowers, sweet peas, sedum and green beans. But she had been there less than a fortnight before we’d had to start thinking about where she might go next. The bus was crossing Battersea Bridge.

‘Evie,’ I said, ‘look at the houseboats!’ and I pointed to the pastel-painted boats moored alongside Cheyne Walk. There must have been forty of them, hugging the wall of the Embankment. Late roses in full bloom nodded around the doorway of the nearest one. The river, at this point, was as wide as a lake.

‘Mummy, why do you keep going to visit Grannie, and why is your breast covered in bruises?’ I reeled my attention back to Evie. I could feel that Rupert was looking at me, but I didn’t meet his gaze. I looked at Evie.

‘Because I have breast cancer.’

Her eyes opened wide, her face turned the colour of cream. ‘Are you going to die?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes, eventually, we all are. But I don’t know when, and I wouldn’t know when if I didn’t have cancer. None of us do.’ I could see it wasn’t the answer she was looking for.

‘But are you going to die of this?’ Rupert reached for Evie’s hand and wrapped it up in his. He looked down at the crown of her hair.

‘I don’t know, my darling.’ The bus had crossed the river and was continuing up Beaufort Street in Chelsea. I glanced back at the coloured houseboats as they slid from view. ‘Eighty per cent of women with breast cancer live and I very much hope to be one of them. I’ve been going to Grannie’s because we don’t have a doctor in London yet, and I have to have a lot of tests. I’ll have to have an operation. It’ll be quicker if I have it done in Chester.’ Evie seemed satisfied with this, with the idea that something was being done, and turned her attention back to the visit.

The school was like a well-ordered version of St Trinian’s. Girls wearing goggles shot home-made aeroplanes out of latticed windows above a statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Evie ran about the frescoed cloister, marvelling at the scarlet ceiling with its white-painted wooden beams, like the inside of the divine chest cavity. ‘It represents the belly of Jonah’s whale!’ a rather strict prefect corrected us, and I was happy about this, because the belly of Jonah’s whale seemed an excellent place to receive an education.

We all went to stay with Mum for the surgery, although she was barely out of hospital herself. Evie had a week off school. The day of the operation was the Feast Day of St Francis of Assisi, and Evie lent me her gold medallion of the saint, which I am wearing even as I write. I went into what I had thought would be forty minutes of anaesthetic and woke up five hours later. The sun had gone from outside my window, my throat was sore, my neck stiff from being intubated. Nausea rolled around in sticky bales. I had a recollection of a conversation happening around me, but felt sure the cancer had gone. I felt better, so much better, despite the anaesthetic. Evie and Rupert were sitting at my bedside. The next morning the registrar came to visit me. He told me that my surgeon, Claudia, had removed two lymph nodes along with the prickly tumour. She had kept me under anaesthetic while she waited for an initial analysis of the nodes. They had appeared to be disease-free. Had they been otherwise she would have removed all the nodes in my arm. It was this wait that had prolonged the anaesthetic. The survival statistics were woolly for my particular type of cancer, perhaps because so very few people got it. I was aware that the prognosis was ‘generally poor’.

‘Claudia has done her very best for you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I smiled. ‘I know she has.’

Claudia referred me to the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, which was exactly two miles from our house. I was excited by this because I believed it to be the best cancer hospital in the country. For a month I kicked my heels and was impatient with my new doctors. I longed to begin chemotherapy. But the pathologists at the Royal Marsden wanted to perform their own examination of the tumour. And there was the idea that I should recover from surgery. There was tension in this waiting. The cares that had resulted in our coming to London in the first place were not about to go away. Obviously, I still wasn’t working, and was not in a pos­­ition to look for work. Rupert’s schedule had been completely disrupted. We talked about selling the cottage. Or rather, Rupert did. I couldn’t bear to part with it. One night Evie ran to her bedroom, her hands over her ears, as we argued.

Keeping our house warm became a contentious luxury. For the most part the house was cold. We used the heating when Evie got home and if I had visitors, although the moment the door closed behind them I flicked the control to
Off
. Food also required consideration, not helped by my insistence on buying organic produce, and I perfected the art of making a chicken last three days (roast, soup, risotto). Rupert gave up drinking in order to save money, although insisted that I should drink red wine, because it contained something that counteracted cancer. Our lives were pared back, finely honed, absolutely without excess.

What I could do, and did do, every day, was walk. Early one afternoon, towards the end of October, I set off north through Battersea Park until I reached the wide expanse of the river. I left the park at Albert Bridge, and headed west along the Thames Path. A heron flew low over the water. Brake lights winked along the Embankment on the opposite shore. The bronze water appeared to be still. A cormorant splashed clumsily into the middle of the river. One wing was missing a couple of flight feathers, and I thought briefly of the black and white keys on a piano. And then the cormorant remained there, drifting neither east nor west. As I crossed the road at Battersea Bridge a cyclist slammed into me:
What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?
We landed together, on the pavement, and I caught his smell of sweat and 3-IN-ONE OIL, a rich, metallic tang. He got back onto his bike, muttering under his breath, a red light winking on the back of his helmet, and was on his way before I had even got to my feet. I swung my legs out of the road, anxious to avoid the lunchtime traffic. I was winded, and bruised, but inexplicably energised, glad of the contact with another human being, jolted by the impact of the collision.

I rejoined the footpath. Alongside the river wall, in front of St Mary’s Church, a line of single shoes hung by their laces. Plane trees, starved of colour, hissed in the breeze. Behind them, the
tick-tick-tick
of a London cab, the yawn and judder of a double-decker bus. A single scarlet leaf, big as a beer mat, blew to my feet and I bent down and picked it up. It was from a Virginia creeper, sometimes called five-finger, although this one only had three. At its base was a lemon-coloured crescent. I pressed the leaf inside the book I was carrying. Other leaves curled like yellow cigarette papers. I picked one up. Rowan. The orange berries hung in clusters over my head. Some late nasturtiums had put out optimistic watery green discs. Pale roses, like balled-up tissues, nodded on browning stems. I listened to the layers of sound, the cars, the clank of a JCB on the northern bank at Chelsea Wharf, the whine of aeroplanes on their way to Heathrow Airport, the whirr of a child’s buggy, and the flat rhythmic tread as his mother sped past me, multitasking, running, walking the baby, all the while listening to her iPod on padded headphones. The child’s hair floated like the fluffy seeds of willow herb. I worried about his head getting cold. His fingers opened like daisies as they passed.

At Battersea Railway Bridge I stopped. The bridge needed repainting. Undercoat the colour of marigolds showed through a grey, peeling topcoat. Buddleia, fading with the season, waved between metal arches. A weeping willow nodded, its leaves trailing in the water. In the middle of the Thames was a flat tender, containing two men in Day-Glo jackets. The men seemed tiny, and were pointing into a flurry of circling gulls. The whole scene reminded me of a snow-globe paperweight. Suddenly the gulls stopped circling and settled on the water. They began to drift upstream. One of the men threw something, and again the gulls swirled about the boat. And again they settled on the water, and began to drift upstream.

I watched the river settle into this new direction. The sun was shining, the sky pale blue, and the distinctive chalk-milk, clay-grey emulsion was hidden beneath the reflected sky. Etymologists argue that this colour gives the river its name, although they disagree about exactly how.
Thames
derives from the Middle English
Temese
, which in turn grew out of the Celtic name,
Tamesas
, which probably means dark, while a possible Indo-European, but pre-Celtic root implies muddiness, from
*t
ā
-
, or
melt
. The water crackled like a stream of newly minted coins. The river had been quite silent, but now a sound appeared, regular as a heartbeat, and every second or two a wave broke along the shore. Common gulls and mallards trimmed the water’s edge, each one no more than a yard from the next. The ducks guzzled the soft mud, the emerald and turquoise heads of the drakes giving a beaded, party look, the white gulls soft as sequins. The female mallards were the same colour as the bank, which was spattered in webbed footprints. A great whirring of cormorants landed in the middle of the river, diving below the water, and reappearing back at the surface, each one always in a different place, like the revolving tin birds in a fairground shooting range. By the time I had regained Albert Bridge the river had settled into its new direction, the water coursing inland in sheets, like newspapers slipping off a press. A man and a woman were arguing. The man was holding a map, and then jabbing in the direction of Putney.

‘Tower Bridge is that way!’ the man insisted. ‘Look at the direction of the water.’ The man pointed at the river, and then at Battersea Park. ‘That is clearly the Royal Hospital in Chelsea.’ From where they stood, the iconic Battersea Power Station, which would surely have helped them orientate themselves, was hidden, tucked out of sight. The woman looked uncomfortable, and tugged at her hair. We were far from the Estuary, and yet there was nothing to indicate, as they and I stood and watched the water, that it might ever have behaved in any other way. When they set off in the direction of the Railway Bridge I said:

‘Excuse me.’ The man looked surprised, and the woman looked relieved. I said: ‘The river flows upstream.’

‘What?’ he said.

‘The Thames is tidal. Tower Bridge is behind you. This is the south bank of the river. In about six hours it will flow the other way.’ The man looked at me as though I were mad.

I left the couple squabbling about where they thought they were. But I had had the germ of an idea. If this river, the mighty Thames, could flow upstream, could reverse its direction, twice, each day, then surely it was possible that I could survive my cancer.

A month later I walked over Albert Bridge. The sugar-pink and lilypad-green and powder-blue suspension bridge was under repair. The road had been taken up to reveal the rotting iron plates below, although there was still a footpath along one side. Men in steel-toed boots and orange jackets and hard plastic hats filtered the pedestrians, and asked cyclists to dismount. Sparks rained down from a welding torch. There was a smell of sea salt and tar. A cormorant skipped and dived through the current, the same colour as the water. When I got to the Royal Marsden I went round to the Fulham Road entrance and marched up the steps to the front door, although the back door had been nearer. I glanced at the coat of arms in passing. The shield was flanked by an owl and a unicorn. Beneath one of the owl’s feet there was a crab. I remembered my little diurnal owl on the moors above Dunbeath. But this owl was the owl of Minerva, Athena, daughter of Zeus, who hatched from her father’s head fully dressed with her shield, spear and helmet, her free hand flashing lightning bolts. The goddess of wisdom, healing, and war. The one who helped Odysseus come home.