Infidelity for Beginners

by Danny King

  “Oh. Sorry mate,” Tom grimaced. “Is Sally still in a bad way about that?”

  I took the bottle off Tom and topped up both our glasses.

  “She’s always wanted kids. Me too, come to that, but it was always one of those things that we were going to do when the time was right. Next year. Maybe the year after that. Don’t worry there’s plenty of time, we’re young and nobody has kids until they’re in their thirties these days anyway. Sally’s only thirty-four and now the time’s never going to be right. Ever. It’s something I don’t think she’ll ever get over.”

  Tom said nothing. Perhaps there was nothing to be said.

  I’d found all the above out when the doctors had broken the news to Sally in her hospital bed. It was the thing she’d feared most and the thing for which there were no possible words of comfort. It was without doubt the worst moment of my life. I can’t even begin to glimpse how terrible it must’ve been for Sally.

  What a dreadful, dreadful day.

  “I just don’t know what to do. And I don’t know how to make her better, because she’s never going to be better,” I welled, fighting to suppress my tattered emotions in front of a mate. I wiped my eye and drank my drink, then apologised. Tom told me not to be such a dickhead. For a moment, I thought he meant I was being a dickhead because I was on the verge of tears, which I remember thinking was a bit harsh, even by Tom’s standards, before realising he meant for apologising.

  “You know the ridiculous thing,” I said, when I found my voice again. “Is that Sally keeps calling herself half a woman. I mean, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  “It’s like a bloke calling himself half a man because he gets his nuts shot off, I guess. Amounts to the same thing,” Tom reckoned.

  “I don’t know. Maybe, whatever it is though, it’s ridiculous.”

  And I couldn’t have meant that more. For me, never more than this moment, Sally was the epitome of womanhood. She was kind, she was pretty, she was affectionate and caring and in need. And I so desperately wanted to take care of her and lavish her with love and devotion for the rest of my life.

  I know that description of womanhood might not go down that well with the nutty Labour fatties in the local Town Hall, who’d like nothing better than to see me and my car clapped in irons for expressing such an outrageous opinion, but they could go to hell on a broom handle as far as I was concerned. I was all out of political correctness and patience for anyone who was anything other than a help to Sally and bollocks to anyone who wasn’t.

  “And what about you?” Tom then asked.

  “What about me?”

  “How do you feel about all this? About the possibility of never having children?”

  Tom let that question linger in the air so that I’d spot the significance of what he was getting at and I could think of only one way of answering him.

  “If Sally doesn’t eat ginseng, then I don’t get to eat ginseng either,” I told him.

  Sally’s Diary: March 24th

  My home looks unnervingly spotless, almost like it’s not my home. Andrew has definitely been working on his OCD while I’ve been away and has even taken to folding the ends of the toilet roll into a little arrow. As far as the rest of the house is concerned, this evening I’m going to eat my supper off that bit of floor behind the fridge, simply because these days I can, and afterwards I’m going to spend the rest of the evening scouring the house for our last surviving germ.

  I’ve also decided to expose Andrew for the charlatan he is and collapse unexpectedly to try to catch him out. If I do this a hundred times I think it’s safe to say he’ll not be hovering at my side to catch me at least once. Maybe.

  I shouldn’t mock, he means well and he’s working so hard. And everything he’s done he’s done for me, but he must be exhausted. I know I am and that’s just from watching him. It’s so good to be home again that I’ve almost remembered what colour happiness is. In fact it feels such a relief that I’ve decided to make a concerted effort not to be unhappy any longer, because it’s doing neither of us any good, least of all Andrew. I need to take what good I can from this situation and stop concentrating on the negative. It’s important – for both of us. After all, if the orchestra can play Abide With Me as the Titanic goes down, why can’t I play Monopoly with Andrew?

  Chapter 17. Food For Thought

  You know, it’s bananas when you think about all the crap we eat (bananas perhaps not being the best example). I was thinking about this the other day after my first couple of organic dinners and it’s no wonder we’re all ill and fat and dying from different diseases.

  See, with me, I used to be one of those blokes who would look down his nose and sneer at vegans and vegetarians and organic fanatics and such like and dismiss them all with one regal wave of the chip fork as idiot nut-jobs, tree-huggers and sissies. I mean, what was wrong with a bit of bacon? And not just bacon; steak, chicken, bangers and mash? Baked beans, fried eggs, white bread and butter? Mince pies, pork pies, sausage rolls and pasties? Cheeseburgers, hamburgers, fish fingers and chips? Roast lamb, tinned soup, corned beef and gateau?

  And that’s not even including all the condiments we splatter on top of our dinners the moment they’re laid in front of us.

  Salt, pepper, mustard and ketchup. White sauce, brown sauce, mint sauce and vinegar. Mayonnaise, salad cream, tartar and chilli. Raspberry sauce, chocolate sauce, custard and cream. And if that’s not enough to get our dinners tasting okay, heaps and heaps of sugar and a couple of chocolate flakes.

  It gives my guts somersaults just thinking about it all.

  See, I was thinking that we are actually a very finely balanced organism. I know we all like to think we’re hard as nails and can handle a hand grenade vindaloo and ten pints of Kingfisher no problem, but really we can’t. Not regularly. Not without doing ourselves untold damage.

  Not even Geordies.

  See, we are the end product of millions and millions of years of fine tinkering by Mother Nature. Evolution. That’s the word I was looking for.

  We have, as a species, evolved over millions and millions of years to become the animal we are today. That is, unless you believe in God, in which case we only took the click of a couple of big fingers and were something of an afterthought as it was (Eve even more so than Adam). But let’s forget about God for the time being because He completely undoes all my theories.

  So evolution.

  This is an incredibly gradual process. It takes millions and millions of years and only ends when a species becomes extinct. Nature doesn’t sit still, but then by that same token she doesn’t exactly break any speed records either, because change is a dangerous thing and it usually takes a great deal of time to bed down. Consequently we’re a very finely balanced animal. As indeed every animal is.

  I heard someone on the telly once say that evolution takes into account three things – diet, environment and culture, and I can totally believe this, especially about the diet and environment. See, the way I reckon it is this: if you took my old friend caveman Ug from fifty thousand years ago and some olde worlde John Bull yeoman off the land from two hundred years ago, sat them down and gave them a couple of medicals – and I mean the works – I bet you’d find that there wasn’t much between them. Yeah sure, one of them might have bigger teeth, more hair and fingernails he could scratch his feet with while standing upright but I bet you’d hardly be able to tell their livers, hearts, kidneys and lungs apart. And that’s because, if you think about it, life has hardly changed for either of these blokes and everyone in between for thousands of years. They both breathed the same air, drank the same water and ate pretty much the same foods (fruit, veg, grain and meat – all organic) and they both toiled and sweated for their daily bread.

  But you can’t say that about us today.

  The air we breathe has crap and pollutants in it that were never around in either Ug or John Bull’s day. The same goes for the water and the land we cultivate on. Pesticides, chemicals a
nd toxins. And that’s not even mentioning all the microwaves, ultrawaves, radiation and mobile phone masts cooking our brains twenty-four hours a day. Then there’s the food; additives, colourings, preservatives, enhancers, monosodium glutamates and rehomogenisation. What the hell is homogenisation? And why the hell does it have to be done twice? And to my dinner? Genetic engineering, intensive farming, cross pollination, best before dates and brown sauce.

  All of these things are suddenly being put into bodies that have grown strong off the back of a stable fifty thousand-year-old diet. This has to be a shock to the system.

  The question shouldn’t be why are we all getting fat and unhealthy and filling cancer wards all of the time; it should be why are some of us getting away with it? And what lies in store for those of us who do?

  Talking purely as a species now, I reckon we’ve got to be looking at extinction. Forget about World War III and Atomic Armageddon and alien invasions because we don’t need them. We’re already doing it to ourselves. I mean you simply can’t dilly-dally with all the basics to such an extent without doing yourself and future generations incalculable harm. Nature simply won’t allow you and she’s the one in charge. It’s all right though, don’t panic, us here and now have nothing in particular to worry about. Like with everything in nature, extinction is a painfully slow process (the dinosaurs took about a million years to turn up their claws), but we’ve certainly got ourselves pointed in the right direction and that’s a start.

  Yeah, okay this whole argument’s been going around for donkey’s years so I won’t lecture any further. All I wanted to say was that Sally’s illness really got me thinking about a few things that actually mattered and for the first time in my life my eyes were open.

  Also, cancer’s a funny old thing, because it’s a disease that comes from within. It’s not like AIDS or rabies or Hepatitis or flu where you can point at one bloke/needle/bat and say “he’s the one that gave it to me, he’s the one to blame” because you’ve given it to yourself. But that’s a hard nut to swallow, so people start looking around for others to blame.

  Tobacco companies, drinks companies, petrol companies, battery farmers, dairy farmers, mobile phone companies, pit owners, factory bosses and talcum powder.

  It’s always everyone else’s fault. Never ours.

  And there’s certainly something to that because it probably is. These industrialists are generally a load of corrupt arseholes who have been poisoning us for the past hundred years or so just to fill their pockets and swimming pools. But that’s also wrong because it’s not completely their fault. It’s yours and mine too because in most case we do have a choice (mobile phone masts and brown sauce being the obvious exceptions). You can choose not to smoke, not to drink, not to live on deep-fat fried micro-chips and not to spend all day downloading ringtones until you’ve barbecued your fingers. It’s as simple as that. You’ve got the power.

  I’m lecturing again aren’t I? Okay, I’ll cut it out and end the sermon before I come across as some sort of tree-hugging sissy. There’s nothing worse than an ex-smoker/drinker/kebab eater is there?

  Anyway, it was everyone’s fault and our fault too, but you know what, I really hated being a victim and from what I could tell Sally wasn’t too keen on it either, so we made a conscious decision to try and forget about the blame game and concentrate on what we could do to put things right.

  People are always saying that you have to stay positive when the chips are down and I really came to believe in these words over the period of Sally’s illness. After all, who cares if it was all ICI or Osama bin Laden’s fault? Running around moaning and bleating about it wasn’t going to do any good, least of all Sally. But a positive, upbeat outlook? You can’t put a price on that.

  Seriously, sometimes that’s the best medicine of all. See, your brain might’ve got you into this mess, but it also held the power to get you out of it? And I’m not talking about signing over your life savings to Ali Bongo the miracle faith healer or being irritated to death by the eminently punchable Patch Adams, I’m just talking about being positive and staying upbeat and believing that you’re on the mend, as this can give you the strength you need to get through what you’ve got to get through.

  Which in Sally’s case was chemotherapy.

  One of the few positives of Sally’s chemotherapy was that she could be treated as an out-patient, which was a major plus. Hospitals are grim places at the best of times and just being in them is a constant reminder that you’re either sick, pregnant or a doctor. So being able to stay at home was a major plus for Sally.

  Her first treatment was scheduled for three o’clock in the afternoon, so we had to set the alarm for twelve hours earlier and get up in the middle of the night so that Sally could take her pre-med. Dexamethasone is how you spell it, but don’t ask me how you pronounce it. I still haven’t got it right and every time I try to within earshot of a doctor, they almost always turn around and laugh.

  The tablets were to be taken twelve and six hours before the start of treatment and sitting next to Sally on the bed as she stared at them in her hand was the beginning for both of us.

  “Do you want fresh water?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “But I’d love a big glass of wine.”

  “Alkie,” I said. “Oh, and junkie too,” I added, when I remembered the pills. Sally smiled and sent the pills down. We went back to bed and lay like spoons until we eventually drifted off to sleep.

  It felt like I’d barely got my eyes shut before the alarm went off again, but sure enough it was half past eight. Time to get up and time for Sally to take another dose. Sally rolled her head over on the pillow beside me and shone her pretty green eyes up at me in a way that made me wonder if they’d closed at all last night.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, stupidly.

  “Like a million lira,” she replied.

  “Well, I’m off out with the boys later today. Game of golf, a few pints at lunchtime and curry for dinner. Might even try that new lap-dancing place in Camberley this evening. What are you up to today?”

  “Just my chemo,” she replied.

  “Oh well, don’t wait up…” I started to tell her before she stifled my nonsense with a back-breaking embrace.

  The worse thing about having an appointment in the middle of the afternoon is that you’ve got to somehow try to make it through the morning and lunchtime with nothing else on your mind except your three o’clock appointment. I guess this is why they had executions in the morning. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think there’s ever a good time to fall down a short drop with an even shorter piece of rope tied around your neck, but on the whole, I think if it had to happen I’d rather get it out of the way first thing.

  The papers and telly were still packed full of war, death and famine, so I cancelled my subscription with the newsagents and unplugged the aerial to create a sanctuary of positive energy, which sounded like just the ticket – if a bit gay.

  However, this did make it somewhat harder to fill in all the silences and distract Sally when she needed distracting, such as this morning, but I did my very utmost and over the past couple of weeks had dug out all our old favourite books, DVDs, craft kits and board games. Unbelievably, that much derided painting-by-numbers kit I got her for Christmas even got the dust blown off its lid.

  “When have you got to go back to work? You must’ve used your entire year’s holiday up by now?” she asked. She’d asked me this several times already over the last couple of days but could never remember my answer.

  “Oh not for another week. Norman reckons he’s having too much fun getting this month’s issue out, so he told me to take as much time as I needed.”

  “Do you think you should go back in a day or so, just so that he doesn’t think you’re swinging the lead? Or if not, maybe you should just do that report he wanted so that you’ve at least got something to show for when you go back.”

  “What report?” I asked, not a cl
ue what she was talking about.

  “You know, that report he wanted you to do before Christmas.”

  I searched the deepest, darkest recesses of my brain and eventually found something that looked and felt about the right shape but I told Sally not to worry about it. “If I’ve forgotten about it then I’m sure Norman has too.”

  We spent the rest of the morning and lunchtime filling the hours where we could. Sally took a long, hot bath, washed her hair and plucked her eyebrows, then spent an inconceivable amount of time painting her nails, applying her make-up and getting herself ready so that when she emerged she looked more like she was going to a Royal garden party than a chemotherapy appointment.

  “Well, if I’ve got to feel dreadful, I want to at least look good,” she explained, and I couldn’t have loved her more had she been holding a gun to a kitten’s head and demanding my undying devotion.

  Sally’s Diary: April 24th

  ‘Side effects’ is a funny phrase, isn’t it? It makes you think that something small and rather insignificant happens next to the main event. Like a sideshow, or a sidekick, but curiously that’s not how side effects feel. The funny thing with my cancer was that it didn’t actually hurt. I was tender from time to time and it gave me a little inexplicable indigestion, but by and large we’d always got on quite well. I can’t say the same for Taxol. It’s been a week since my first session and I’m just about getting over (or used to) the worst of it. My muscles ache and I swing between exhausted and nauseous like a broken barometer. The pins and needles in my fingers sometimes get so bad that I can’t hold a pen, and I’m finding it near impossible to hold down some of Andrew’s weird and “wonderful” recipes – though I’m not entirely sure how much of that is down to the Taxol. And then, there’s my hair. I’m already started to clog up the bathroom plug holes and I know it’s only going to get worse, but I can’t decide whether to bite the bullet and go for a Sinead O’Connor right away or wait a few more weeks and try to Bobby Charlton it out a bit longer (whose descriptions do you think those are?).