The Various Haunts of Men (7 page)

It had been three weeks since Karin had first come to the surgery about the lump in her breast, and Cat had suspected at once that it was malignant, but she had been shocked at the results of the X-rays, which had shown extensive involvement of the lymph glands. The biopsy had highlighted a particularly aggressive type of cancer.

Now, Karin had had her first
consultation with the consultant oncologist, Jill Monk, whose report Cat had already seen.

‘You can’t begin to know how sorry I am.’

‘Yes I can. And look what you’ve done … got me X-rays and an appointment lightning fast and I know what a difference that can make.’

Karin looked bright – too bright, Cat thought. ‘It’s early days,’ she said carefully, ‘it takes time for all the implications to
sink in.’

‘Oh, it’s sunk, don’t you worry.’

‘Sorry, I don’t mean to patronise you.’

‘You’re not. People are meant to agonise … ask “Why
me?” But why not me, Cat? It’s random. After I saw Dr Monk, I got home, had a huge Scotch and howled my eyes out. But that’s that. So let’s talk about what’s next.’

Cat glanced down at the oncologist’s letter. It did not make cheerful reading.

‘Surgery is
the immediate way forward, as she will have told you … in this instance, she won’t want to be too … conservative.’

‘Full mastectomy, including the glands, yes, she said.’

‘Then chemo, certainly, and radiography, possibly, depending on how she decides after the operation. There is a possibility that she might want to do a double mastectomy, you know that?’

Karin was silent.

‘Bevham General
is a centre of excellence for oncology and I wouldn’t recommend you go privately … though if you want an amenity bed, by all means pay for that. I would … If I’m feeling rough, I like to be by myself to do it.’

I’m babbling, Cat thought. Karin was unnerving her. She sat without fidgeting, apparently quite relaxed, and for the most part she kept her eyes on Cat’s face. Her wild red hair was tied
back in a black velvet snood, to reveal her bony face – large nose, high cheekbones and forehead – it was an interesting, intelligent face, with the repose of a woman entirely comfortable in her own skin.

‘Cat, I have thought about it … well, as you may imagine, I haven’t done much else. I have thought very hard and very clearly and carefully. And I’ve talked to Mike. And now I’m telling you.
I don’t want to have any of this. No, hang on, let me say it all. The only suggestion of Dr Monk’s I did consider seriously was the surgery. I know it’s radical, but oddly enough the idea of it
is still acceptable … I want to keep the possibility in reserve. Chemo and radiotherapy I won’t go near.’

‘I’m not sure I understand you.’

‘I want to go down the other route … alternative, complementary,
whatever you call it. The gentle way. I’m thinking of going to America to the Gerson Clinic. I’m absolutely sure that it’s a better way, Cat … physically, spiritually … everything tells me so. I won’t poison my body and destroy my immune system with toxins and I won’t be subjected to overdoses of radiation. I am quite sure about it, but you’re my doctor and of course I will listen to what you
have to say. I’m not a fool.’

Cat got up and walked to the window. The car park was almost empty. It was still pouring with rain.

‘Did you say any of this to Jill Monk?’

‘No. I hadn’t thought it through then. Besides, I don’t think she’d have been sympathetic.’

‘And you think I am?’

‘Cat, whatever the outcome of this, it is my body, my illness, my decision, and I live with it. Or not, I suppose.
But whatever, it isn’t yours so don’t worry.’

‘Of course I bloody worry … all my training and knowledge and experience and instinct tell me to worry because you are wrong. Just plain wrong.’

‘Are you washing your hands of me?’

‘Look, Karin, you are my patient and it is my job to give you my professional advice and counsel. It’s also my job to support you in any medical decisions you make because,
ultimately, those decisions always are the patient’s. And you are a good friend. And the more certain I am that you are making the wrong decision, the greater my support and help have to be. OK?’

‘Sorry. I’ll need you.’

‘You will.’

‘I didn’t think that you’d be so against the alternative way.’

‘I’m not – in some circumstances, quite the contrary. I send patients to Nick Haydn for osteopathy,
and to Aidan Sharpe who does acupuncture. He works miracles on a few stubborn conditions. Just now I sent a bereaved lady who can’t sleep and is in a generally anxious state to look through the relaxation tapes in the health shop … and an aromatherapy massage is a lovely thing. But none of them are cures for cancer, Karin. The
most
complementary therapies could do is help get you through the proper
treatment, make you less sick maybe and relax you generally.’

‘So why don’t I just get a facial and have my nails done?’

Karin stood up. Cat knew that she had upset her and put her back up, and she was furious with herself. She walked with Karin towards the door.

‘Promise me that at least you’ll think hard about it.’

‘I’ll think. But I won’t be changing my mind.’

‘Don’t burn your boats, don’t
close any doors. It’s your life we are talking about here.’

‘Exactly.’

But then Karin had turned and given Cat another warm and accepting hug, before walking, calm and confident, out of the surgery.

‘You can’t go along with it, for God’s sake.’ Chris Deerbon faced Cat across the kitchen table, as they sat drinking mugs of tea late that night. He had just come in from a call.

‘You mean I should
ask her to change GP?’

‘No, I mean you have to try much harder to make her see why she can’t go down that road … it’s not an option, you know that … she hasn’t the luxury of choice.’

Chris was totally opposed to any form of alternative treatment, with the exception of osteopathy for his own bad back.

‘It worries me, of course it does, but she was very adamant and you know Karin.’

‘She probably
hasn’t taken it in properly yet.’

‘I think she has. If I’m going to support her I’m going to have to do some research … at least steer her clear of the real cranks.’

‘I don’t think you should encourage her even that far … she has got to have surgery and chemo. What’s got into you?’

‘Just Karin, I suppose.’

Chris got up and put the kettle back on the hob.

‘There’s too much of it about. All
those loonies up at Starly Tor.’

‘Oh, they’re just New Age airheads … crystals and ley lines.’

‘Where’s the difference? Let Karin McCafferty loose and she’ll be dancing round Stonehenge at dawn.’

When Chris had left on the next night call, Cat had a bath, and then got into bed, propping her laptop on her knees. ‘
Cancer
,’ she typed into Google. ‘
Therapies. Alternative. Complementary
.
Gerson
.’

An hour and a half later, when Chris came in from dispatching a teenager with acute appendicitis to hospital, she was deep into a research article discussing the effects of a sustained programme of meditation and visualisation on cancer patients in New Jersey.

She had filled several pages of a notebook on the pillow beside her. The least she knew she could do for Karin McCafferty was take her
seriously.

When I speak to you here it is like being in the confessional. I am shriving myself by telling you everything. The difference is that I am not asking you for your forgiveness. It should be the other way round.

But I will feel better once you know everything. Some of the secrets of the past have become a tiresome burden to carry alone, though it is not guilt that has weighed me down,
simply the knowledge.

What I am going to tell you today was a secret I did not carry alone. From the beginning, I shared it with Aunt Elsie. She went to her grave with it, as she had told me she would. Uncle Len knew, of course, but you know how meek he was, how he would have said nothing unless she told him to.

It happened one of those times I went to stay with them. You knew how I loved it
there, how I always asked when I could go next. I wanted to live there. I loved the bungalow, because it was a bungalow, there were no stairs. I loved the breakfast she cooked for me every morning, and the small bookcase against
the wall beside the telephone where I sat on the floor and read ‘Your Body in Health and Sickness’ by Dr Roberts. I learned so much from that book. It helped to shape
my destiny.

I loved opening the door of my bedroom slightly and listening to the murmur of talk in the sitting room just along the short corridor, and the voices from the radio.

That was how I first heard of Arthur Needham. I heard his name on the radio, and then, them talking about him, so that he became a mysterious figure in my dreams.

‘Who is Arthur Needham?’ I asked one morning in the
middle of my scrambled egg.

Aunt Elsie and Uncle Len looked at one another. I can see that look now. He frowned and I was sent to clean my teeth. But later, she said, ‘You’ll hear about it soon enough, so I’m going to tell you. You’re quite old enough to know.’

The tone of her voice seemed to change, to go lower into her throat, though she wasn’t whispering. I caught an excitement in it. She
was enjoying this, behind the solemn expression.

Arthur Needham was a small draper who had married a widow with a bit of money and, a year later, murdered her. When he discovered that she had in fact left the money not to him, as she had made out, but to her only daughter, he had murdered the daughter too.

I was interested at once.

‘Where is Arthur Needham now?’

‘In the condemned cell.’

I wanted to know, I wanted to know everything. A
spark from her excitement had touched me and lit something inside me that would never go out.

‘He’s a wicked, evil man, and I’ll be there, watching and waiting until I know he’s been punished and justice has been done.’

‘What will happen?’

‘He’ll be hanged by the neck until he is dead.’ Her face had changed too now; her eyes were bulging slightly
and her mouth was thin and tight and bloodless.

‘You can come with me,’ she said.

Four days later, when she was seeing me to bed, and after she had heard my prayers, she said, ‘It’s tomorrow morning. If you still want to come.’

‘To the hanging prison?’

‘You can change your mind and no shame.’

‘I’m coming with you.’

‘It’ll do you good to see evil vanquished.’

I didn’t understand, of course,
but I knew that I wanted to be there.

‘I’ll be waking you,’ she said, ‘early. And now you have to make me a solemn promise.’

‘I promise.’

‘That you never breathe a word to a living soul about this coming with me tomorrow, where you go, what you see. Your mother’d never forgive me. So you promise. Never a word.’

‘Never a word.’

‘To a living soul.’

‘To a living soul.’

I remember that I added,
‘Amen.’

My aunt went out of the room and I lay on my back, thinking that I would never sleep for wanting
to go to the hanging prison. And not wanting to. ‘To a living soul,’ I promised.

I kept my promise. But it’s all right now, isn’t it? I can tell you at last and the promise is still not broken.

It was as dark as tar when Aunt Elsie woke me before six the next morning, but there was a cup
of hot, sweet tea for me before I had to set foot out of bed and then a fried egg tucked into a thick fried-bread sandwich.

If I close my eyes, I can smell the air now, the smoke from all the chimneys thick in my mouth, mingled with the sharp cold. I can still feel Aunt Elsie’s hand in mine and the hardness of her rings bedded in the soft plumpness of her fingers.

We walked down Pomfrey Street
and then Belmont Road, to the tram stop, and now the streets were busy with women walking to the factories, arm in arm and three or four in a row, all wearing headscarves, and the men in caps, a lot of them on bicycles. The smoke from their cigarettes merged with the chimney smoke. The tram was full and smelled of bodies. I was squeezed between large women, their rough coats pressed against my
cheek. We changed, and when we boarded the second tram, I felt it at once – something was different, people were silent and still now, and I thought how big their eyes looked. We were all going to the prison. I was pushed up against more women, and stared at.

‘Queer place to bring a child,’ someone said.

‘I don’t see why. They have to learn there’s evil in this world.’

People began to take
sides across the tram, but my
aunt crushed my hand in hers like a bone in a mincer and said nothing at all. I felt sick, or perhaps afraid. I did not know what might happen.

The tram stopped and emptied out. I looked back at it, a fuzzily lit caterpillar. But again, what I was most aware of, what I remember most vividly, were the sounds … the footsteps of all the people walking up the black road
towards the great dark hulk with sheer walls and turrets like a castle.

‘The prison,’ Aunt Elsie said, in the low, choked voice.

Footsteps – one-two, one-two, one-two. The sky behind the prison was turning grey as the dawn started to come up. The smoky air felt damp, though it was not raining,

One-two. One-two. One-two.

Nobody spoke.

We joined the crowd that was already there, ten-deep in
front of the high iron gates.

‘There’s the clock. That’s how we’ll know.’

I looked up, though I didn’t understand her, but all I could see were people’s backs, dark coats, scarves, felt hats.

‘Let’s have you up then or you’ll see nowt.’