She’s already called three times. She could be in Basingstoke, for all the going outside she has done. Apparently she woke up at Dover and said Hooray, we’re in France. ‘The white cliffs of Dover are in England you dur,’ she was told. The highlight was the breakfast in Calais. ‘Then I slept through Belgium and the Netherlands.’
‘You didn’t miss much,’ I said.
She rang this morning, from a shopping trip in a German mall, and spent the time discussing the insides of the Kinder egg I had originally bought for Shim.
We told Shimi pretty quickly. As he said two weeks ago, when we said I might have cancer, his first response was ‘Are you going to die?’ and then, ‘Do you feel better now you know?’ He always gets to the point. Two minutes later he was on MSN to Louis. ‘My dad has cancer.’ Louis replied ‘I am so sorry. How are you feeling?’ Not bad for a ten-year-old boy. Stored during all the phone calls to family there was a teary message from Maura re Louis’s MSN message. ‘Is it true? I only saw Anthony at 3 o’clock and he had no news at that stage.’ I phoned her back and she told me how loved I was, and brave, and how the Eric James book she’s lent me really is full of the most wonderful applied theology. ‘And I will continually hold you in the light, I promise.’
This was both comfort and accusation. Dipping in at random I found a beautiful and learned passage on the suffering of King Lear. Just my thing. But the words swam in front of me. I feel I am reduced to reading like a teenager, only able to sustain interest and concentration if the words are actually about me. I threw it across the room, where it has stayed. One day I might be able to confess this to Maura.
The worst moment was when Tatty walked in from work. I had put the phone down five minutes before. ‘Hi, darling. I’m absolutely feeling dreadful. I think it’s flu.’ And the thing I nearly said, but didn’t, was ‘You feel bad? I’ve just been told I’ve got cancer.’ I let her go on for a bit, then she said ‘Did you call them?’ And I told her. We stood for a long time hugging each other in the hall, not saying very much. I stroked her head and whispered ‘Sorry’ into her neck.
13 February
I managed a bike ride into town with Shimi yesterday, to take back CDs, then we went round the quay and stopped off for a smoothie and a bun at Mango’s.
He was intensely interested in a man driving a council roadsweeper, a miniature one, with brushes rotating at the front to sweep up the litter. The man, dressed entirely in luminous clothing, took a long time finding the right key to unlock a bin by the riverside. We watched him putting in a new plastic bag and tie up the full one onto the back of the roadsweeper.
Then suddenly: ‘Are you going to lose your hair, Dad?’ It was the first thing he had said on the night we told him, before asking if we would be poor.
‘Haven’t got much to lose anyway,’ I said.
‘Can we go now, Dad?’
‘Yup, let’s go and pay.’
Merenna gets home tonight. Since going off to Germany the main thing we’ve said to people is not to text or ring the mobile as she needs to know from us first. Poor girl, she’ll get here, exhausted and probably ill, at midnight, to be told her dad has cancer.
On Friday I was all for telling everyone, with the proviso they didn’t get in touch, but how can you do that? It’s gone against the grain, but it has been the right thing to do. Bendy must come first. She has to hear from us. And anyway, it’s not till Tuesday that we will know more ourselves, so perhaps it’s just as well. This way we can at least say on Tuesday afternoon that it’s x variety at y stage, and is treatable by z. So the phone hasn’t been ringing wildly all weekend (what bliss) but I know all of that is about to change.
I have used having cancer as an excuse for some retail therapy on Amazon. It makes you realise life is too short to go without Grover Washington in the kitchen on CD, when you only play the LP on special occasions in the sitting room.
I have re-bought the following:
Grover Washington Junior: Mister Magic
Talking Heads: Remain in Light
Nick Drake: Way to Blue
The Vulgar Boatmen: Opposite Sex
Harold Budd: The Serpent in Quicksilver
and Everything But The Girl’s Acoustic.
Why live without what you know will make you happy? The thing is, I can see myself needing a lot more therapy soon. It’s addictive, the one-click business, and so easy; I’m going for the Best Of the Go-Betweens and some of those late Talk Talk LPs Tatty winces at.
It’s also made me track down all the Van and Cocteaus and Blue Nile CDs I’ve been too lazy to listen to all this time. It turns out I own far more Van Morrison than is actually legal. This week alone I’ve been reacquainted with Hard Nose the Highway, No Guru, No Teacher, No Method, Into the Music, Common One and Irish Heartbeat. I’ve genuinely had pleasure from them all, especially Common One, which seems (sorry) seamless, a whole, a complete work, as Mart would say, and Into the Music, the last three tracks particularly. There’s a moment on ‘And the Healing Has Begun’ when he yells at his band with an instruction, and he gives a little yelp as he does it, the piano taking a lovely fill at the top of the keyboard, a signal that he intends his musicians to Go For It Or Else that is somehow bossy, sexy, gorgeous and hilarious all at once. It’s one of my favourite moments in music, and I bet he rehearsed them raw to get there.
Rich was good on the phone on Saturday. We talked about the England v. Italy rugby game and cancer, in that order.
He asked me, ‘What’s it like telling people?’
Good question. ‘Not easy. I find I just go in and say it.’ Like I’ve been doing it all my life.
‘How do they react?’
‘Well, quite a lot of “Oh I’m so sorry”, but I’ve also had two “Oh shits.”’
‘You could do a survey.’
‘A research project. Fantastic idea. Work would be proud.’
Mummy and Daddy on the phone a minute ago. A local doctor friend of theirs has told them: ‘Anthony is the same Anthony he was before. He hasn’t changed.’
‘Haven’t I?’ I said.
‘Well, no, you have, I mean you have this thing inside you we wish wasn’t there, but you’re still you, you’re the you you were before we knew, that’s what she was saying.’
‘Right, I see,’ not seeing at all.
15 February
We went to see the consultant yesterday, walking hand in hand. A bright, dazzling day, too bright, actually, to look into the light, or even lift your head up from the pavement.
My consultant has twinkly eyes behind little steel-rimmed specs, and discretely expensive clothing. Her name is Felicity Carr. I addressed her from the off as Felicity.
I saw her before I met her formally, as they were taking my blood. In the bloods room a woman in a white coat sat in front of a computer next to which sat an enormous machine like an overgrown breadmaker. She poked her head around the door beaming and cradling a blue mug of coffee. ‘You must be my new young gentleman,’ she said. ‘I’ll be seeing you in a minute.’
‘I’m sorry to have to see you like this, under these circumstances,’ she began, ushering us into the chairs behind her broad desk. Her hand moved across to a dictaphone and clicked it to ‘ON’. ‘Tell me your story, why you’re here.’
So I told her, eventually running out of words, through nerves, at the bit about my biopsy, as if it isn’t still fresh in my mind. Thank God for Tatty being there.
She is charming, but very direct. The most difficult moment occurred just as Janette, the specialist Haematology nurse, joined us. Felicity turned to explain to her: ‘This is my new young gentleman, Anthony Wilson, he has a high-grade lymphoma.’
‘I’m sorry, what did you say, was it “high-grade”?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry, I haven’t explained. It means active, aggressive actually.’
This had the effect of moving the conversation on rapidly. She had said it was non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and that, yes, it was a cancer, but that
it was highly treatable, with a more than 83% success rate. Funnily enough, she said, Exeter was a bit of a hot spot for it, with 40–50 cases last year. I was going to have the opportunity to be part of a trial if I wanted, in my treatment.
‘So does that mean it’s bad?’
‘Well, actually, paradoxically, it means it’s easier to treat.’
‘Because?’
‘Because the low-grade or indolent variety are common to people older than yourself and they can last for years.’
‘Right.’
‘And you have B-cell, not T-cell, lymphoma, which, let me assure you, is much better.’
‘Good. But it is aggressive?’
‘Yes. Which means – I’m sorry – we are going to need to start treating you straight away. I’m afraid it’s going to be quite tough going for you for a while.’ She blinked, once. By this time I was fiddling with my wedding ring, my default nervous reaction, and I dropped it. And that’s when I felt the urge to cry, except I was trying to pick up my ring while holding eye contact.
I needn’t have worried. Tatty had got there first. There was a lot of searching for tissues, with Janette having to leave us eventually for a box she perched on the corner of the desk in front of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Dr Carr. ‘I know this is big stuff for you both to deal with.’
‘Thank you. No. Yes. I mean, it is.’
Dr Carr introduced us to my ward doctor, who will oversee my chemotherapy ‘infusions’. His name is Karl. He showed us the rooms where I will sit when they wire me up each Wednesday. A long line of men and women sat propped up with pillows and cushions, attached intravenously to drips, reading and doing crosswords and looking for all the world like they were at the hairdressers. I did ask her about the hair, as it was something I knew Shimi would ask later. She blinked again. ‘Yes, you will lose your hair. And there may be other side effects too, but we won’t worry about those for now.’
Karl is tall, skinny and almost shaven-headed. ‘It’s no secret,’ Dr Carr whispered two seconds before introducing him, ‘that Karl has had chemotherapy himself. For Hodgkin’s. He knows what you’ll be going through.’
‘So you’re Anthony?’ he grinned. ‘And you must be Mrs Anthony.’
He turned to me again. ‘Don’t expect politeness here,’ he smiled, nodding backwards at the room.
‘I’ll bring my Chelsea scarf then.’
‘You and I are not going to get on,’ and he gave me a half-hug, his arm reaching round me, pulling my shoulder into him.
‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘I wouldn’t want you being nice.’
Dr Carr had finished by saying ‘Not the nicest news on Valentine’s Day. Take each other out for a nice lunch, if you can.’
‘I have to get back to work,’ Tatty said.
Which we had predicted, so had had a romantic lunch at Dart’s Farm the day before, steak (her) and Mediterranean chicken (me) with – shock – wine. Delicious. A mosey round the shop for bread and chocolate, then home.
We sat watching the curling at the Olympics. The commentator referred to the ‘ever-increasing tension’ of the game, while his partner, not to be outdone, claimed ‘the curling has been pretty aggressive this afternoon, unbelievable in fact.’ Tatty looked at the screen and said ‘It’s a housewives game! They’ve all got highlights, they stand around gossiping, then get to work with dusters and brushes.’
Unlike many of our friends and family we have restricted ourselves to looking at a single website, lymphoma dot org, the official site of the Lymphoma Association.
You download a PDF file which tells you all the variants of the disease, their symptoms, treatments and side effects. I had no idea lymphoma was such a large family. I lost count of the different varieties, hungry only for information about what the hell was happening to me.
I learned three things. The first, which Dr Carr had also told me, is that no one knows how you get NHL, or where it comes from. Second, the kind of NHL I have, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) is the most common kind, with about 3,000 new cases per year. Lastly, NHL is a cancer of the white blood cells. In my case, it is the white blood cells which produce the antibodies which fight off infection. Both literally and metaphorically, my body has attacked itself. No wonder people reach so easily for the description of cancer as a ‘battle’ which the patient must ‘fight’.
I toyed with finding out the difference between large B-cell lymphoma and large T-cell lymphoma but gave up, my E at O level biology coming back to taunt me. All I need to know, really, is that I’m very ill and that the treatment to make me better is going to make me feel even worse.
Later we watched Bruce Almighty outtakes with Bendy, who is off-school. There’s a deleted scene where Bruce is being shown by God the outcomes of his having said ‘yes’ to the world’s prayers. One lady, on being told she was bankrupt, slipped on some milk in a supermarket, sued and bought a condo in Florida. But God said that if he’d answered the prayer properly she’d have had to swallow her pride and talk to her sister and learn some humility. A boy routinely being bullied at school had his prayer answered and became a wrestling champion then a steroids addict instead of the outstanding poet of his generation. ‘The bullying was his material and you took it away from him. Sometimes,’ he went on, ‘to make a good picture you’ve got to use some dark colours.’
16 February
On Merenna’s last night with us before her trip – the night of the trip: I had to drop her off at the school at half-eleven – I made everyone’s favourite, lemon chicken with pesto, rice and peas. They destroyed the lot. Shim said ‘It’s the only good chicken recipe you do. The rest is rubber.’
While making it I played A Walk Across The Rooftops, and was astonished to find that it is still the Great Album I thought it was when I sat up half the night convincing anyone who’d listen as a student.
There’s a lovely bit in Giles Smith’s Lost in Music (the Cocteau Twins chapter, as it happens) when he describes the album as ‘painstakingly miserable’, the music ‘scrupulously pared away to the noise of someone tapping despairingly on a radiator’. And then this: ‘it’s an astonishing record, especially if you’ve got cancer.’
I’d forgotten that part of his story. The bit about the radiator is true, though, even if he is wrong about it being miserable. Like me, he finds he can still listen to them: ‘they proved too good, too resilient to be used and disposed of.’ Listening to it again, I know why: there’s hardly anything there. The key phrase of Smith’s is not the radiator being tapped, but the ‘pared away.’ Their gift, it seems to me, is chiefly one of suggestion. The music feels full, but is essentially spare. This is true of their lyrics too, which I see now more as an extended free verse poem which somehow has been made to sound like a narrative. It is beguilingly intimate, yet you never really find out what on earth is going on.
When I recover from this disease I will celebrate by writing an essay with the title: ‘Minimalist Urban Odysseys: The Blue Nile’s Debt to William Carlos Williams’s Red Wheelbarrow.’
Why did it take me so long to buy it on CD? I find it works just as well as it ever did, though I am embarrassed to say I can remember exactly the kind of thing I used to write about it (who was I writing for?), with phrases like ‘crystalline brilliance’, ‘superbly crafted’ and ‘heart-rending’. As a soundtrack to falling in and out of love, it was perfect. As a life-affirming soundtrack to coming to terms with cancer – or just cooking chicken – it is the real thing.
‘What’s it like, telling people?’ said Rich on the phone, again.
‘It’s like watching a film in which you are also the main character. You’re not pleased with your performance.’
I felt this especially yesterday, when I went in to work to tell my students, moving from room to room. Pin-drop silences, and lots of very wide eyes. I slipped in the gag that with my youth and fitness – and good looks, ha ha – the prognosis is 80%+; and that anyway it’s not like I have much hair to
lose. One girl I found outside afterwards in tears being comforted by a friend. ‘It’s just that my mother’s cancer’s just come back. It’s in her liver and lungs and bones,’ she said. It wasn’t easy.
I said to Rich, ‘The other kind of lymphoma, the low-grade sort, just sits around all day watching Channel 4 Racing. Much harder to deal with. My sort wants to go to Ibiza and sleep around. They can tackle that one head-on.’
Later I was on the phone-marathon. Nic called my email ‘beautifully crafted’; and Charlotte said they were like poems: ‘Keep them, they’re fantastic.’ But nothing prepares you for the lack of preparedness in someone’s eyes when you tell them face to face. ‘Oh my God.’ ‘Fuck.’ ‘I’m so sorry.’ ‘Is there anything we can do?’ My most frequent response to this is: ‘Don’t lose touch.’
17 February
The great thing (there are so many!) about having cancer is the retail therapy. I had my Christmas-money-copy of Pink Moon on when Made to Love Magic arrived. It’s like having a rather talented but otherwise monosyllabic older brother busking in the drawing room. I played it the morning of going to see the consultant, suddenly spooked by Drake’s barehanded admission of his need of others. ‘Black Eyed Dog’ didn’t exactly improve things later on. I’m still glad to have it around, though. That Larkin thing about a good poem/song about despair being better than a bad one about happiness.
Love for Now Page 3