Love for Now (21 page)

On the front of the
Observer
, beneath a photo of Wayne Rooney looking up at his red card like a tearful schoolboy I read: ‘Farewell Fred: Fred Trueman, legendary Yorkshire and England test bowler, has died at 75.’ I thought, but he’s only just been diagnosed. Between reading this and finding that the piece on him was by Vic I made another bet with myself that it would be ‘after a short battle with etc.’ that he had died.

Seeing it was by Vic, and remembering our evening together in Guy and Jemima’s garden I quickly cancelled the bet. I shouldn’t have. In an otherwise beautiful piece of cricket writing, wry, respectful and lyrical, he opened with the sentence: ‘We were in the dining room at Headingley when we heard the grim news that Fred Trueman had died at the age of 75 after a short battle with lung cancer.’ Much more accurate, and it keeps the sense of brevity, and suddenness, of the disease. The thing is, if Fred did have a battle with it, it was over pretty quickly, and he came second. I don’t think the man Vic describes would have liked being portrayed as a loser. And yet that’s what the language does, when it comes to cancer. It kills you, before you even have a chance.

On the doorstop last night, Robyn. She had come round to say that Merenna would need to catch the bus in the morning, as she and Rorg were away. All of a sudden we were having a deep conversation about our cancers. She is now into her second year of remission, and I am (hopefully) about to begin my first.

Just as she had at Budleigh beach, she welled up almost immediately. She told me matter-of-factly that ‘It takes about a year before you stop thinking ‘Oh, can I do this?’, and start feeling normal again’. She went on to say that the worst part of having the disease comes afterwards, ‘when you’re on your own. It’s the bit no one tells you about.’

On Sunday we took my cards down. Since early February they have been collecting on the sill under our bedroom window, a New York skyline of sunsets and flowers. It was Tats who brought it up, though it had been bugging me for a week or two. The mass of them was five or six deep in places, tucked into one another to stop them toppling. Once or twice this has happened, the effect very much like a line of dominoes: it takes seconds to come down and an age to put them back up again. Now we are sticking up the sash for some breeze at night it seemed pointless to go on keeping them there. But it made me think: does this mean I am well now? Or that I am allowing myself to become well? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle. Either way, it seems the end of a chapter, though the cards have been filed away, with all the other documentation I’m not ready to throw out yet.

On taking them down I noticed how many had curled in the sunlight and had had their ink bleached by the same, their messages of hope and offers of favours now faded, so many months after the event.

My fingernails are a real mess, especially on my right hand, which was the one holding the leaking Calor gas canister when I set fire to the inside of a tent eighteen years ago. My thumb and forefinger now have a deep trough in the middle
of them as the nail underneath tries to push through. From the side view they make a neat slope for half a centimetre or so, then appear to start growing in a completely new direction. The top edges are all jagged and keep catching on trouser pockets and hand towels etc.

Everyone keeps mentioning my hair, and how much of it I now have: ‘like duck down,’ as Karl said. I can’t tell if it is blonde, as when I was four, the usual brown, or a distinguished post-cancer-trauma grey. We’re off for our six-weekly family haircut on Friday, an event I’ve been sending apologies to. It’ll be interesting to see what Hayley makes of me.

One of the stronger aspects of returning hair is my almost rabidly growing moustache. By lunchtime, I have noticed, I now need a shave, like Homer Simpson. Never the most hirsute part of my body, I have become, in the eloquent words of Tatty, akin to ‘some Greek waiter.’ She is daring me to grow a handlebar over the summer.

I wrote a long email yesterday to Jean, in reply to her question about whether this has changed me at all. I talked a lot about relishing each day more than I did before. And the need to look and listen more, especially to my children. I have come to realise that people are more afraid of cancer (while they are speaking to me) than I am. But the thing which made me do a double take, even though I had written it a thousand times before, is how I signed off: ‘Love for now’, suddenly realising it was an imperative to make the most of each day whilst realising that each one is so short.

No one else up. Sitting here with coffee in the kitchen. Is this what getting better is like? I am not hung-over but my knees hurt like hell. I have just seen eight or nine blue tits on the apple tree looking for insects and darting on and off the bird feeder.

In the middle of all this, a call to my mobile on Wednesday evening, as she said she would, from Felicity Carr. I am going to have ‘involved field radiotherapy’, as we discussed. The activity on my tumour is ‘almost negligible’, the MDT has pronounced. ‘But even if your scan results were completely negative, we would still have given it to you, just to make sure.’ She went on: ‘As you had such bulky disease, it’s better to be safe than sorry.’ It is fascinating how the words ‘huge’ and ‘bulky’ crop up, now I’m almost into remission, replacing ‘substantial’ and ‘high-grade’. I don’t blame them for retrospectively telling me how dangerous my disease was. After all, you don’t greet your new patient with ‘You’ve got a huge tumour there, Mr Wilson, and it’s really aggressive!’, do you?

The side effects aren’t serious, Felicity told me, ‘nothing like chemo anyway.’

‘What about the tiredness?’ I asked her.

‘Oh, you might get tired, yes. But tiredness we don’t count as serious, just inconvenient.’

So that’s what the last five months have been. Tatty has set me two projects: to make CDs for the car (the first lot all got nicked) and to sort out the photos. The former is a piece of cake: not for nothing do they know me as DJ Ant up at the deli. As far as the latter is concerned, the words
‘Augean’ and ‘stables’ come to mind. We are talking about a blue plastic storage box, the kind they used to sell in Habitat, full of photos, undated and unsorted, from the last thirteen years. The last actual album I filled in was one commemorating the birth of Shimi, with Merenna still in nappies. And I must have done that one two years ago, in a rare burst of guilty activity.

You come across a lot of things when you scatter your life over the floor. Me looking twelve on my wedding day. Colislinn, the kids in the stream. The stuff which goes through your mind when you’re told you have cancer, as it happens. Several are of Jay and Rosie, holidays we took together in 1992, in France and Norfolk. It goes: Jay and Ant by the Canal du Nord; Jay and Rosie by the Canal du Nord; Rosie and Tatty by the Canal du Nord. Ditto the North Sea in Norfolk. In each one we are smiling the unlined hopeful smiles of the recently married, either at each other or straight to the camera. There is one of Jay with his head on my shoulder. None of us have had children yet, though it was in le Ribécourt that Tatty and I began discussing trying. It was a lot of fun, that holiday.

In the garden: the raspberries droop earthwards; young apples, no bigger than golf balls, litter the lawn. The lettuce close to being shot. The lavatera are poking through the fence at the front. For the first time in six months I have eyebrows again, perfect dark arcs above each eye, with none of the bleached wiry hairs of old. Young hairs on my arms, too. I haven’t tried to drink alcohol for a week now, and feel better for it – I read a story in the paper once about a stand-up comic who gave it up while she wrote her memoirs, because it helped her remain clear-headed. Whatever it takes. What’s another two months without it? Or six? Or a year? Or a lifetime? The thing is, you remember everything much better. And enjoy the mornings more. At least I still have coffee.
Yesterday my first two-cup day since Christmas. Partly we were running low on tea, and partly I wanted to see if I could take it. I sailed through, as Karl would say.

The fridge magnet fairies have been back:

I love this. It’s nonsense, or rather, as Seamus Heaney says about Edward Lear, a
parody
of sense. Leaving death at luscious leg light is, surely, what it’s all about, isn’t it?

Not really following my own advice today, or any day this week. I ring the hospital, who say they’ll chase my appointment and that a letter will come. It doesn’t come. I ring again and they say they’ll chase it again and ring me back later. It’s a bit like dealing with B&Q.

Meanwhile the nails on my thumbs and index finger are splitting. They’re now pulled out of their troughs and have started to curve back towards the ceiling. The thumb in particular is gruesome. The nail underneath is now almost fully grown, making the jagged crescent on top of it loose. It is starting to come away at the sides now. I slide a fingernail from the other hand underneath it to try and prise it off, but it does not want to come. If I catch it on a door handle or kitchen drawer before it falls off I can envisage much blood and cursing.

On my chest, 45º north-east from my nipple, a perfect round scar where my hickman line used to protrude. At a jaunty angle just above it, a scar a centimetre long, where Duncan went in to cut the tube out. Together they make quite a neat exclamation mark.

The hospital rang yesterday. It was a new voice, Clare Murray, the secretary of Dr Perera (‘Perry’ to everyone who knows him) my oncologist. He’s the one who was missing from the MDT two weeks ago, and on whose say-so I’m being blasted. My appointment isn’t for two weeks: 26 July. Either they are very confident that there’s barely any activity on my tumour, or things have genuinely started to slow down now I’ve moved from one department to another. Feel a mixture of resignation and frustration. The former because, however scared of going back I am, this effectively puts my return to work back to late September/early October. The latter because we had hoped we would all be done and dusted before going up to Scotland. Have told them I
am
going away, that the holiday is inviolable. This doesn’t seem to have fazed them. A distinct lack of rush suddenly.

I have chopped off the loose thumbnail which had begun to separate itself from the new one underneath. This revealed, right at the bottom of the nail’s now enormous bulge (the trough at the foot of the hill) a groove running right across the nail. It could be the result of some over-eager use of the nail file, but I doubt it. It’s much more likely to be my final – and most extreme – beau line from the chemotherapy, evidence that the poison still hasn’t quite left the system.

With the fingernail on my right hand in such a chronic state, I’ve noticed that I’m putting my cash machine cards into my wallet with the raised numbers showing so they are easier to get a grip when I pull them out. It’s something I never do, for security reasons, but now find I’m stuck in shops and in queues for minutes on end if I don’t.

Second week of the heatwave.

We went to see
Twelfth Night
in the park.

The setting was great: Victorian/Edwardian dress, an end-of-the-pier helter-skelter and Punch and Judy box, the latter used to fantastic effect in the box-tree scene. It was one of those shows that bats well all down the order without anyone really stealing it. Closest in this regard came Sir Andrew Aguecheek, resplendent in a Toad-of-Toad-Hall check and blonde wig, all wobbly limbs and permanently nonplussed. He reminded me of an upper class Eric Idle, with all the confidence taken out.

Malvolio was good, a sour-faced butler, and a brave decision to play Feste as a seen-it-all busker really paid off.

What really struck me though, was the verse. They all get memorable lines (‘Some have greatness’ etc.) but best by far are Viola’s. It seemed to me that whenever she opened her mouth to say anything it was as if the emotional voltage of the play got switched back on to full. Not that the rest of it is set piece stuff, or treading water, just that Shakespeare really goes under the fingernails when she’s around. The willow cabin speech and the duet with Orsino (‘a bit like yours, my lord’) were simply lovely to watch, and arousing, in the best sense of the word.

Have padded around the house all day with nothing to show for it. Woke up late so got dressed without bathing in order to play catch up with everyone’s breakfasts and packed lunches.

Dropped Shim off then watched telly with the windows open. Then a (cold) bath and a shave. Farted around on email (i.e. deleting ones from work without reading them), then added books to my wish list on Amazon.

No cricket on the radio to kill the silence. There is, as Beckett says somewhere, … just … me. Today is the last one (Merenna breaks up this afternoon) of my life alone during my illness. From tomorrow there will be friends coming round, a different TV channel being watched, more mess. Life.

I realised as I walked Shim to school yesterday, that this was the last week of school-walks, ever. Today he told me ‘I’ve got 24 hours of this school left.’ We’re all counting them off.

I wonder what it’s done to me, this time alone? Even when I taught part-time and wrote my first book of poems for the rest of it, before children, I don’t think I’ve been so consistently on my own, in my own head. I can hardly turn round and say I’ve used it to work my way through Tolstoy or that I finally got round to
Ulysses
.

Neither can I claim any great insight. As Jane Tomlinson put it in the newspaper the other day, having cancer is shit. People are great, and some days are better than others, but basically, it’s a shit time. Let no one tell you otherwise. I wish I could say that I’m wiser for it, or less selfish, or better at listening, though I’d like to be.

All I would say is, I may not use them to the maximum, but I do appreciate each day more, the texture of the air at 7 am, feet on the cold kitchen floor, breeze in at the back door, the mornings of seagulls and cathedral bells. I have also noticed how unambitious I have become. For me, I mean. I’m determined to finish the novel, but if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t. Suddenly I feel the same for the poetry. And I never thought I would say that.

What I want is to – to be present. That’s what I’ve learned. I want to strive for presence, now, here in my kitchen, with a Boeing overhead, and later at Merenna’s prize-giving as she collects her award. In my writing, as I listen to the music in a line and as my characters cause each other damage. To hear it, feel it and imagine it, as one might the shock of recognition of Thomas putting his hand in the Lord’s side. I want that ‘deep down sense of things,’ to use Hopkins’ phrase. The wild cry of shame in Shim’s voice when he comes in late and when we aren’t even angry with him. The laughter and a candlelit table which is both transitory and timeless. To spot words in Shakespeare plays that you didn’t know he used
– ‘botched’ for example. To watch weird dance and good, meaty thrillers. To walk on Exmouth beach on bracing Saturday afternoons and be rugby tackled by your son and his friend. To use trains. To watch the light take leave of a room. To breathe, and then breathe again, but to notice it.

In a flash of inspiration yesterday I went onto the net and found a great website which sells both Clairefontaine exercise books – like these, and Lamy fountain pens – like this one. You pick your colour and quantity, send them your email, then ring up with your credit card no. when the confirmation comes through. And it’s not in French. They’re based in Bury St Edmunds and have sent the books already. In the background I heard a boy shouting. ‘Someone has just discovered the
Dr Who
website,’ the voice said. ‘By the way, if what you want isn’t there, just ask and we’ll order it.’ I can feel a love affair coming on.

A great evening last night. Paul and Sally, Claude and Lauren, Steven and Kari. Courgette bruschetta with our drinks, melon from the continental market with Serrano ham from the deli, Ant’s famous chicken salad, and raspberries from the garden. Didn’t even go near a drink and can remember everything.

Slowly I am realising how much of a crutch it was before I had cancer. Secretly guzzling a glass or two of Chardonnay while cooking before the guests arrived. The constant feeling of worry the next morning that I had shouted or been rude or just crashed out. Tats said over breakfast just now: ‘Don’t worry, you haven’t done that for ages.’ I woke this morning feeling exhausted and instantly thinking two things: I’m not hung-over and Did I really behave? As though I haven’t yet
trained myself to relax and trust that I can get through a supper without being sloshed.

The other thing I noticed, as when I had chemo, was the alcohol on other people’s breath. Not that anyone was steaming. It made me faintly nauseous, a kind of chemical memory laid down in the poisoning that I thought I had lost or moved on from. (I was in Spar early in the morning the other day, during the baking-hour, and felt much the same, still, nearly gagging at the cooked pastry smell.)

The reading I did back in June, the Richard Ford novel, turned out to be a false dawn. Stuck at the proverbial p. 63. You get into it, but don’t persevere (am I being too harsh on myself?). It is nothing to do with the writing, and everything with my concentration, or lack of. Another book flies across the room.

Has having cancer changed me? I talk a good game of it. But I’m not sure really. Suspicions remain that I am still the same airheaded husband of old. Not malicious, just not very good at listening and doing what I’ve been asked.

This was made brutally clear to me the other night when Tatty asked: ‘Did you get the alcopop and Pimms for my classroom assistants?’ I went cold.

Spar was able to help with the Smirnoff, but no joy on the Pimms. I had to make do with a Valpolicella from the wine rack instead.

Tats was explosive, but, considering, quite restrained, reminding me of my utter disregard for her and that my focus remains trained on myself, which is especially selfish as I am hardly busy. I took it on the chin (‘Don’t even think of saying sorry. “Sorry” isn’t good enough.’) and stayed quiet for the rest of the evening.