Written on the Body (12 page)

Cancer treatment is brutal and toxic. Louise would normally be treated with steroids, massive doses to induce remission. When her spleen started to enlarge she might have splenic irridation or even a splenectomy. By then she would be badly anaemic, suffering from deep bruising and bleeding, tired and in pain most of the time. She would be constipated. She would be vomiting and nauseous. Eventually chemotherapy would contribute to failure of her bone marrow. She would be very thin, my beautiful girl, thin and weary and lost. There is no cure for chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.

Louise came home her face shining with frost. There was a
deep glow in her cheeks, her lips were icy when she kissed me. She pushed her frozen hands under my shirt and held them against my back like two branding irons. She was chattering about the cold and the stars and how clear the sky was and the moon hung in an icicle from the roof of the world.

I didn’t want to cry, I wanted to talk to her calmly and gently. But I did cry, fast hot tears falling on to her cold skin, scalding her with my misery. Unhappiness is selfish, grief is selfish. For whom are the tears? Perhaps it can be no other way.

‘Elgin’s been here,’ I said. ‘He told me you have cancer of the blood.’

‘It’s not serious.’ She said this quickly. What did she expect me to do?

‘Cancer’s not serious?’

‘I’m asymptomatic.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Couldn’t you have told me?’

‘It’s not serious.’

There is a silence between us for the first time. I want to be angry with her now. I was pent-up with rage.

‘I was waiting for the results. I’ve had some more tests done. I haven’t got the results yet.’

‘Elgin has, he says you don’t want to know.’

‘I don’t trust Elgin. I’m having a second opinion.’

I was staring at her, my fists clenched so that I could dig my nails into my palms. When I looked at her I saw Elgin’s square spectacled face. Not Louise’s curved lips but his triumphant mouth.

‘Shall I tell you about it?’ she said.

In the hours of the night until the sky turned blue-black,
then pearl grey, until the weak winter sun broke on us, we lay in one another’s arms wrapped in a travel rug and she told me what she feared and I told her my fears. She would not go back to Elgin, of that she was adamant. She knew a great deal about the disease and I would learn. We would face it together. Brave words and comfort to us both who needed comfort in the small cold room that compassed our life that night. We were setting out with nothing and Louise was ill. She was confident that any costs could be met from her settlement. I was not so sure but too tired and too relieved to go further that night. To reach one another again had been far enough.

The following day when Louise had gone out I went to see Elgin. He seemed to be expecting me. We went into his study. He had a new game on his computer screen. This one was called
LABORATORY
. A good scientist (played by the operator) and a mad scientist (played by the computer) fight it out to create the world’s first transgenic tomato. Implanted with human genes the tomato will make itself into a sandwich, sauce or pizza topping with up to three additional ingredients. But is it ethical?

‘Like a game?’ he said.

‘I’ve come about Louise.’

He had her test results spread out on a table. The prognosis was about 100 months. He pointed out to me that whilst it was easy for Louise to be careless about her condition as long as she felt fit and well, that would change when she began to lose her strength.

‘But why treat her as an invalid before she is an invalid?’

‘If we treat her now there is a chance that the disease might be halted. Who knows?’ He shrugged and smiled and jangled a few keys on his terminal. The tomato leered.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘Cancer is an unpredictable condition. It is the body turning upon itself. We don’t understand that yet. We know what happens but not why it happens or how to stop it.’

‘Then you have nothing to offer Louise.’

‘Except her life.’

‘She won’t come back to you.’

‘Aren’t you both a bit old for the romantic dream?’

‘I love Louise.’

‘Then save her.’

Elgin sat down at his screen. He considered our interview to be over. ‘The trouble is’, he said, ‘that if I choose the wrong gene I shall get squirted with tomato sauce. You do see my problem.’

Dear Louise,

I love you more than life itself. I have not known a happier time than with you. I did not know this much happiness was possible. Can love have texture? It is palpable to me, the feeling between us, I weigh it in my hands the way I weigh your head in my hands. I hold on to love as a climber does a rope. I knew our path would be steep but I did not foresee the sheer rock face we have come to. We could ascend it, I know that, but it would be you who took the strain.

I’m going away tonight, I don’t know where, all I know is I won’t come back. You don’t have to leave the flat; I have made arrangements there. You are safe in my home but not in my arms. If I stay it will be you who goes, in pain, without help. Our love was not meant to cost you your life. I can’t bear that. If it could be my life I would gladly give it. You came to me in the clothes you stood up in, that was enough. No more Louise. No more
giving. You have given me everything already.

Please go with Elgin. He has promised to tell me how you are. I shall think of you every day, many times a day. Your hand prints are all over my body. Your flesh is my flesh. You deciphered me and now I am plain to read. The message is a simple one; my love for you. I want you to live. Forgive my mistakes. Forgive me.

I packed and took a train to Yorkshire. I covered my tracks so that Louise could not find me. I took my work and some money that I had, the money left over from paying the mortgage for a year, money enough for a couple of months. I found a tiny cottage and a P.O. Box for my publishers and a friend who had committed to help me. I took a job in a fancy wine bar. A supper bar designed for the nouveau refugees who thought that fish and chips were too working class. We served pommes frites with Dover sole that had never seen a cliff. We served prawns so deeply packed in ice that we sometimes dropped them in a drink by mistake. ‘It’s a new fashion Sir, Scotch on the rocks à la prawn.’ After that everybody wanted one.

My job was to unload coolers of Frascati on to fashionably tiny tables and take the supper order. We offered Mediterranean Special (fish and chips), Pavarotti Special (pizza and chips), Olde Englysshe Special (sausage and chips) and Lovers Special (spare ribs for two with chips and aromatic vinegar). There was an à la carte menu but nobody could find it. All night the handsomely studded green baize door to the kitchens swung back and forth offering a brief glimpse of two busy chefs in hats like steeples.

‘Chuck us another pizza Kev.’

‘She wants sweetcorn extra.’

‘Well give us the tin opener then.’

The ceaseless pinging from the banks of microwaves stacked like a
NASA
terminal was largely drowned out by the hypnotic thud of the bass speakers in the bar. No-one ever asked how their food was cooked and, had they, they would have been reassured by a postcard of the kitchens signed compliments of the chef. They were not our kitchens but they might have been. The bread was so white it shone.

I bought a bicycle to cover the twenty miles that separated the bar from my rented hovel. I wanted to be too exhausted to think. Still every turn of the wheel was Louise.

My cottage had a table, two chairs, a peg-rug and a bed with a winded mattress. If I needed heat I chopped wood and lit a fire. The cottage had been long abandoned. No-one wanted to live in it and no-one else would have been stupid enough to rent it. There was no telephone and the bath sat in the middle of a semi-partitioned room. The draught wheezed in through a badly boarded up window. The floor creaked like a Hammer horror set. It was dirty, depressing and ideal. The people who owned it thought I was a fool. I am a fool.

There was a greasy armchair by the fire, armchair shrunken inside its loose covers like an old man in a heyday suit. Let me sit in it and never have to get up. I want to rot here, slowly sinking into the faded pattern, invisible against the dead roses. If you could see through the filthy windows you’d see just the back of my head bulging over the line of the chair. You’d see my hair, sparse and thinning, greying, gone. Death’s head in the chair, the rose chair in the stagnant garden. What is the point of movement when movement indicates life and life
indicates hope? I have neither life nor hope. Better then to fall in with the crumbling wainscot, to settle with the dust and be drawn up into someone’s nostrils. Daily we breathe the dead.

What are the characteristics of living things? At school, in biology I was told the following: Excretion, growth, irritability, locomotion, nutrition, reproduction and respiration. This does not seem like a very lively list to me. If that’s all there is to being a living thing I may as well be dead. What of that other characteristic prevalent in human living things, the longing to be loved? No, it doesn’t come under the heading Reproduction. I have no desire to reproduce but I still seek out love. Reproduction. Over-polished Queen Anne style dining-room suite reduced to clear. Genuine wood. Is that what I want? The model family, two plus two in an easy home assembly kit. I don’t want a model, I want the full-scale original. I don’t want to reproduce, I want to make something entirely new. Fighting words but the fight’s gone out of me.

I tried to clean up a little. I cut some winter jasmine from the ragged garden and brought it indoors. It looked like a nun in a slum. I bought a hammer and some hardboard and patched up the worst of the neglect. I made it so that I could sit over the fire and not feel the wind at the same time. This was an achievement. Mark Twain built a house for himself with a window over the fireplace so that he could watch the snow falling over the flames. I had a hole that let the rain in, but then I had a life that let the rain in.

A few days after I arrived I heard an uncertain yowling outside. A sound that should have been defiant and swagger-all but that wasn’t quite. I put on my boots,
took a flashlight and stumbled through the January slutch. The mud was deep and viscous. To keep a path to my house I had to strew it daily with ashes. The ashes were choked with mud, the gutter ran straight off the house down to my doorstep. Any gust brought the tiles off the roof.

Flat up against the wall of the house, if sweating potbellied brickwork held together with lichen can be called a wall, was a thin mangy cat. It looked at me with eyes composed of hope and fear. It was soaked and shivering. I didn’t hesitate, leant down and took it by the scruff of the neck the way Louise had taken me.

Under the light I saw the cat and I were filthy. When had I last taken a bath? My clothes were stale, my skin was grey. My hair fell in defeated flashes. The cat had oil down one flank and mud punking up the fur of its belly.

‘It’s bathnight in Yorkshire,’ I said and took the cat to the tired old enamel tub on three claw feet. The fourth end rested on a copy of the Bible. ‘Rock of ages cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee.’ I bullied the ancient boiler into life with a series of screams, pleas, matches and lighter fuel. It finally rumbled and spat, billowing evil-smelling clouds of steam into the peeling bathroom. I could see the cat’s eyes, aghast, watching me.

We did get clean, the pair of us, him wrapped in a handtowel, me in my only luxury, a fleecy bathsheet. His head was tiny with the fur plastered against the skull. He had a notch out of one ear and a bad scar over one eye. He trembled in my arms though I spoke to him softly about a bowl of milk. Later, in the collapsing bed, burrowed under an eiderdown so misused that the feathers didn’t move when I shook it, a milk-full cat learned to purr. He slept on my chest all night. I didn’t sleep much. I
tried to keep awake at night until utterly exhausted so that I could miss the early dreaming sleep of one who has much to hide. There are people who starve themselves by day only to find that in the night their denied bodies have savaged the fridge, taken carcasses raw, eaten cat food, toilet paper, anything to satisfy the need.

Sleeping beside Louise had been a pleasure that often led to sex but which was separate from it. The delicious temperate warmth of her body, skin temperature perfect with mine. Moving away from her only to turn over again hours later and mould myself into the curve of her back. Her smell. Specific Louise smell. Her hair. A red blanket to cover us both. Her legs. She never shaved them enough to keep them absolutely smooth. There was a residual roughness that I liked, the very beginning of the hairs growing back. They were not allowed to appear so I didn’t discover their colour but I felt them with my feet, pushing my foot down her shin-bone, the long bones of her legs rich in marrow. Marrow where the blood cells are formed red and white. Red and white, the colours of Louise.

In bereavement books they tell you to sleep with a pillow pulled down beside you. Not quite a Dutch wife, that is a bolster held between the legs in the tropics to soak up the sweat, not quite a Dutch wife. ‘The pillow will comfort you in the long unbroken hours. If you sleep you will unconsciously benefit from its presence. If you wake the bed will seem less large and lonely.’ Who writes these books? Do they really think, those quiet concerned counsellors, that two feet of linen-bound stuffing will assuage a broken heart? I don’t want a pillow I want your moving breathing flesh. I want you to hold my hand in the dark, I want to roll on to you and push myself into you. When
I turn in the night the bed is continent-broad. There is endless white space where you won’t be. I travel it inch by inch but you’re not there. It’s not a game, you’re not going to leap out and surprise me. The bed is empty. I’m in it but the bed is empty.

I named the cat Hopeful because on the first day he brought me a rabbit and we ate it with lentils. I was able to do some translating work that day and when I got back from the wine bar Hopeful was waiting by the door with an ear cocked and such a look of anticipation that for a moment, a single clear moment, I forgot what I had done. The next day I cycled to the library but instead of going to the Russian section as I had intended I went to the medical books. I became obsessed with anatomy. If I could not put Louise out of my mind I would drown myself in her. Within the clinical language, through the dispassionate view of the sucking, sweating, greedy, defecating self, I found a love-poem to Louise. I would go on knowing her, more intimately than the skin, hair and voice that I craved. I would have her plasma, her spleen, her synovial fluid. I would recognise her even when her body had long since fallen away.