Infidelity for Beginners

by Danny King

  I’m looking forward to next week already, though not quite as much as I looked forward to seeing Andrew at the end of my meeting.

  It’s funny how it sometimes takes misfortune before you realise just how fortunate you are.

  Chapter 19. To Lavish a Girl with Complements

  It’s funny, but when you’re fit and well, most of us are pretty cynical about anything we can’t get over the counter at Boots. Fall ill or experience some sort of calamity and before you know it we’re filling our pockets with charms and drinking the bark of Chinese trees. That’s just the nature of life, I guess. We’ll pin our colours to any mast that’ll give us hope, and that’s no bad thing in the long run. There are no atheists in foxholes, as they say.

  I started reading up about all this sort of thing on the internet and after a little initial eye rolling I actually found some of it quite interesting. Okay sure, we weren’t going to cancel the chemotherapy in favour of having some elderly hippy dangle crystals over us every Wednesday but there was nothing to stop us from opening our minds and broadening our approach to Sally’s illness.

  The key word to complementary therapies is “complementary”, as opposed to alternative.

  Now, I’d already sorted out Sally’s diet for her so that we were eating the right foods to flush her toxins out and the brand spanking new osmosis water filter was bolted in and providing us with good, clean tap water, so next I looked at what else I could do.

  Green tea; this was a revelation. Why hadn’t anyone told me about green tea before? According to the book, it could not only help people avoid cancer, it could also help people fight it by limiting the cancer cells’ production of urokinase. Startling (whatever they were). Why weren’t there billboard posters up and down the country proclaiming this fact? I mean Christ, if they can paper the land with adverts for chicken dippers and cocopops, why can’t they do the same for green tea? Admittedly, it tastes pretty disgusting, but then again so do chicken dippers and cocopops, so what’s the difference?

  “I think it’s one of those things you get used to,” I reassured Sally, as her eyes pleaded with me for a cup of PG and a HobNob.

  “Are you drinking it as well?” she asked.

  “No, I thought I’d have an Irish whiskey and a chocolate éclair. Of course I’m drinking it,” I replied, and did just that to prove it was safe. “Delicious,” I gasped, smacking my lips.

  “Really?”

  “No, not really. But then things you have to get used to never are, are they?”

  And the fun didn’t just stop with green tea. We had all sorts of mad and mysterious teas; dandelion & burdock, cinnamon, liquorice, prickly ash and hawthorn and other such treats. I learned about them on the net and read up about the beneficial properties of each, then found a herbalist who lived a short car journey away and got her to mix me up a few batches. She was a nice old stick and served me with such a warm smile that I could’ve sworn she recognised me from one of her previous lives. She seemed to know what she was banging on about too and tailored the teas to Sally’s exact requirements.

  “Where do you get your ingredients?” I decided to ask, just as I was leaving.

  “ICI. Most of it’s just left-over paint scrapings,” she replied.

  “What?” I gawped, but the lady just smiled:

  “Nature.”

  “Oh. Oh right,” I replied, then nodded. Who would’ve thought: a herbalist with a sense of humour?

  Most of the teas were also pretty disgusting but none of them came close to my own attempt at making nettle tea. I’d read up about it on the internet and convinced myself that I could boil anything down I found in a field just as good as Andy McNab or my comedy herbalist friend, so I gave Tom a call and asked him if he wanted to give me a hand.

  “What, nettles? Stinging nettles? Are you serious?”

  “People have been drinking it for years. It’s meant to be very nice,” I told him.

  “I’ll have a fiver on that,” he replied.

  “Well, perhaps not nice, but you know, good for you.”

  “Make that a tenner.”

  Tom was up and out of his wheel chair these days and moving about on sticks. He walked along like a new born giraffe and was just about as stable, a point he proved the following afternoon down the common when he leaned too far forward picking nettles and went face-first into a great big dirty ditch full of them.

  God that was funny. I can’t ever remember laughing so hard in all my life and Tom just kept setting me off again every time he pointed his tingling, speckled scowl in my direction.

  “What happened?” Sally asked, when we got home.

  “If I was you I wouldn’t worry about me. I’d worry more about what you’re having as an aperitif tonight,” Tom replied.

  Anyway, we boiled it all up, stunk out the house and it was truly disgusting, so we tipped the rest of it away and decided to stick with my humorist’s home brews. I mean, they might’ve been horrible too but at least someone in a white coat had told us they were good for us.

  “Are you stopping for dinner Tom?” Sally asked.

  “What is it?”

  “Mushrooms – shitake mushrooms – fried in garlic with onions, ginger, turmeric and brown rice and with a green salad,” I told him.

  “Why?” he asked, suspiciously.

  “Shitake mushrooms are officially,” I underlined, “recognised in Japan as cancer fighting fodder.”

  Tom weighed it up. “Go on then, I’m game. Besides, if it’s horrible, I can always get myself kebab on the way home with that tenner you owe me.”

  “Huh?”

  I tried many of these sorts of recipes and some of them took a bit of getting used to and some of them were actually all right, but the main thing was that they were helping Sally. She’d now undergone her second instalment of chemotherapy and was listless and weak all over again, but the difference this time around was that she was starting to believe – and that was half the battle.

  Before, when there’d only been bad news and all the agonies were raw, it had been practically impossible to pick her up off the ground. Sally had seen only doom and gloom and no hope or even reason, but I’d done everything in my power to batter this out of her with a constant bombardment of buoyancy and rosiness that would’ve seen the average person tunnelling to escape me. Fortunately Sally was far too weak for that sort of nonsense and had to endure all I could throw at her until her spirits finally waved the white flag and started to lift.

  Well, you can’t stay downhearted forever. Your mind simply won’t let you. It’s just too much like hard work. Something always has to give and I wasn’t going to chuck in the towel until it did.

  She even tolerated shower time, which was hot and cold, hot and cold, alternately, to give her lymph circulation a kick start and helped oxygenate her tissues and drain away toxins, though first time around was something of a punch-up.

  “Oh my God! Turn it off! Turn it off!”

  “Chilly is it? Blimey yeah, that’s like ice on my fingers,” I said, testing it myself as I splashed it all over Sally.

  “Turn it off, Andrew seriously stop it! STOP IT!”

  I twisted the hot tap and the water flowed warm again, bring Sally and our next-door neighbours merciful relief.

  “You fucking dickhead, that was far too cold Andrew. That was bloody freezing.”

  “You know, you really shouldn’t call the bloke in charge of the taps a fucking dickhead. That’s not sensible.”

  “No Andrew don’t, I don’t like it…”

  “Get ready for the cold stuff.”

  “Andrew, nooooOOOOOHHHHH!”

  “That’s it love, you scream. Screaming is supposed to be good for you too. Hmm, now where did I read that?”

  Of course, in between the fun and games of bath and meal times, Sally was still deeply despondent about the fact that we would never have children but, like with the green tea, the weird mushrooms dinners and the ice cold hosings, it was something she
was learning to live with. Still, every now and again I’d catch her feeling the corners of the bedclothes or staring blankly at her toothbrush in a particular way and when this happened, I’d rush in and quickly head off her thoughts with a hug.

  Sometimes it worked.

  Sometimes it didn’t. But this was how we filled our days.

  I tried to find as many practical solutions to Sally’s condition as I could and scoured the internet and almost melted the telephone talking to her various support groups, phone friends and all the experts that were generous enough to spare me a few moments of their precious time, although this wasn’t all entirely for Sally’s benefit.

  The plain simple truth of the matter was that I couldn’t bear to sit still – figuratively and literally. I just couldn’t do it.

  Not even for five minutes.

  I had done so in those first few days after diagnosis but that was only because back then I didn’t know what else I could do, but it had nearly driven me so far out of my mind that I couldn’t think to breathe.

  And there was another reason I tried to keep busy.

  Back at the start, when there were only worries and fingernails and worst fears, my thoughts would occasionally stumble upon questions I didn’t even want to ponder. Questions such as:

  What if the cancer spread further still?

  What if the chemotherapy didn’t stop it?

  What if Sally were to die?

  What would I do then?

  I hated thinking these thoughts but once Pandora’s lid was lifted there was nothing I could do to stop them from tumbling out. It was awful. And the more I allowed myself to think about these things, the more specific my questions would become.

  Bizarre practicalities started taking shape such as how would I pay the mortgage? The amount we’d borrowed had been based on both of our salaries, so did that mean I’d have to sell up and move somewhere smaller? Or would Sally’s life insurance provide enough to meet the payments? We were both on a policy and had been since buying our home but it had never meant anything more to me other than an itemised £20 direct debit on my monthly bank statement for sundry whatevers. I’d never expected to actually have to do anything with the policy in practical terms other than renew it once a year and remember to leave the paperwork somewhere obvious for my kids or Battersea Dogs Home to find when I kicked the bucket. Not my problem.

  But suddenly it was my problem.

  And I didn’t know how it worked.

  Did I have to fill out a load of forms and supply a death certificate before they’d look at my claim? Or would I have to appoint a lawyer to take care of it all? And what if I didn’t want the money? Couldn’t I just have Sally back and the insurance company could keep their money along with all the subs we’d ever paid? If I did collect, would everyone think I was a greedy bastard for doing so when my wife had only just passed away? Wouldn’t it be better if I gave it all to a charity and not even grubby my hands with it? Would Sally prefer that? Probably not, but would she ever have to know?

  And did it come as a cheque or would they just pay it straight into my bank account?

  What if they Welshed and didn’t pay at all? Could they do that and what if they did? Would I get my lawyer to pursue them through the courts and get what was morally and lawfully mine? Or would I let them keep it and not sully Sally’s memory with a legal tug-of-war over a most unwelcome windfall?

  I was savvy enough to know that death was a time when people were at their most vulnerable. How many rightful riches had been signed away through tears and turmoil only to be regretted once the mourning had passed? I didn’t know but I would’ve guessed a lot. And it wasn’t just insurance companies I had to be wary of either; con men and charlatans circled the obituaries just as vultures circled the savannah. Death was money and as unappetising as it was to me, the world was full with scumbags who made a living out of dying.

  A living out of dying? I thought about that for a moment and wondered if I’d intended it as a pun. I didn’t think so but then I started trying to think up other death puns and only stopped when I suddenly remembered what had started me in the first place.

  And then I’d feel awash with guilt: guilt for filling my head with such trifles; guilt for missing the bigger picture and guilt for killing off Sally before she’d even begun her therapy.

  It was a truly terrible time. What sort of a man was I?

  I’d beat myself to bits in an effort to shame any such thoughts out of my head, but they’d never slip very far beneath the surface and before I knew it I’d be at it again, wondering how funeral directors worked and when was the right time to ask Sally if she wanted to be buried or cremated or shot out of a cannon into the sea and how did they sort out the ash of the person out from the ash of the casket and so on and so forth until I was ready to stick my head in the oven in an effort to shut out these terrible thoughts.

  I know it sounds callous but really you have no idea how much these questions tortured me. I hated thinking them but I couldn’t help it. I guess I’ve always been a daydreamer and my mind has a habit of wandering and this was just how my fears manifested themselves. It was too vast and too terrifying a scenario to deal with the emotional side of my fears so these trivialities and niggles would fill the void until I was able to distract myself with the dinner or the washing or the shopping or such like. Then sure enough, a few minutes would slip by and I’d feel confused and miserable over splurging so much thought on pots and pans when Sally was sick upstairs and the whole process would start again. A jolt of dread would jog Sally’s funeral into my mind and the image would fester until a dozen different tentacles reached into every little corner of my imagination and pulled out a jumble of disjointed worries. I simply couldn’t help myself. It was like a sore I couldn’t stop picking.

  It reminded me of when I was little and I first realised my parents were going to die. There I was happily tucked up in bed with Winnie the Pooh under one arm and a plastic M16 under the other. I’d had a great dinner of chicken dippers and alphabetti spaghetti and got to stay up late watching Dave Allen, but all of a sudden all I could do was cry. Why? Because for some unknown reason it had suddenly occurred to me that the big, wonderful lady and strong, reliable man downstairs weren’t always going to be around for me. In fact, one day both of them were going to die and this wasn’t an if or a maybe, this was an absolute definite.

  One day mum and dad were going to die.

  And there was absolutely nothing I could do about that except worry, panic and cry until I heard the thump-thump-thump of reassuring footsteps on the stairs.

  But there were no reassuring footsteps on the stairs for me these days because now I was those reassuring footsteps. And it was my turn to go thump-thump-thumping up the stairs to answer the sounds of crying.

  I unburdened as much as I could on Tom, first of all at his place and later at Camberley Leisure Centre while we both trod water (part of Tom’s rehabilitation), but for most of the time these thoughts were mine to fret over alone.

  So I did what I could to keep them from my mind and found that the best way was to fill my mind and my days with positive action.

  Because unlike my parents, it wasn’t right that Sally should die before me. And not just because she was younger, healthier and had Mother Nature’s three year bonus that women always got over us men, but because there were things that could be done; practical things. And by me. I might not have been a doctor, I might not have been a radiographer and, as my old friend at Frimley Park had correctly pointed out, I certainly wasn’t a nurse, but I could still help all the same. He was right about that, just as he’d been right about everything.

  And so that’s what I did; I helped. Or at least, I tried to. And the more I did, the more I found there was to do. And the more I found there was to do, the more it felt like I was actually helping. And the more it felt like I was helping, the further I was able to pack those awful unthinkable thoughts back into the shadowy corners of my brain.
r />   So I dedicated my days to doing what I could and I made this my routine.

  Though more accurately it could better be described as my therapy.

  Sally’s Diary: May 11th

  I’m now completely bald and pastier than I’ve ever been in my life. I look like a deflated Michelin Man and feel like one too. When the doctors warned me about hair loss, I thought they were just talking about my head, I didn’t realise they meant all of my hair. But that’s exactly what’s been disappearing down the plug each this week, and a pink and peculiar version of myself it’s left behind. Still, as Andrew is constantly trying to drum into me, you have to put a positive spin on everything, so here goes:

  Take two bottles into the shower? Not me, I just use a chamois leather. And how wonderful it is not to have to shave my legs or armpits anymore. What a chore that had become! My legs are now naturally silky smooth, if a little knobbly around the knees, and my pits are stubble free. As for my eyebrows, I no longer have to pluck, I simply erase and redraw until they reflect my mood, although I need to get a lot speedier with the pencil if I’m going to convince people with my look of surprise.

  And my bikini line? Well, I guess Andrew finally gets one of his kinkier wishes after all.

  Chapter 20. Don’t Ask The Family

  One of the trickier aspects of Sally’s illness was what to do about her parents. Sally had been reluctant to say anything before her surgery because she’d been hoping to waylay the inevitable “all hands to the panic pumps” with reassurances that everything was fine and that the cancer had been dealt with and that it had only been a minor scare and that there was no harm done and lots of good news etc etc etc – but unfortunately, as things turned out, everything wasn’t fine, and the cancer hadn’t been dealt with, and it hadn’t turned out to be a minor scare, and there was considerable harm done, and the resultant news was anything but good.

  Which threw up a difficult dilemma.