Love for Now

by Anthony Wilson

  The next morning you are going to feel sick again, but won’t be. Instead you will notice how something like a nuclear reaction seems to be going off below your diaphragm. You will carry your sick bucket around the house with you, sit near the loo for long periods, and walk close to hedges when you leave the house. You will pee almost constantly. If you remember to drink fluids as we encouraged you it will run clear. If you forget, your pee will look like Pinot Noir and stink like a sewer. This is normal.

  You will lie awake at night and ‘wake up’ fully at hours previously known to you through baby-care. You will notice the dark and the cold, your thoughts clanking in your head as they pace through your skull. You will get up ‘for one more pee’ only to throw the towel in at 5.02 sitting in the kitchen leafing through old copies of The Express and Echo, convinced that you recognise the photograph of the child on page 3.

  You will take twenty minutes to down all your drugs. It is not the swallowing you find hard, just the sheer quantity. You like them best with chocolate milk. Then a banana. Then some dried apricots. Then some toast. Then some marmite, on the knife. You notice you have not been making any bowel movements. You eat more dried apricots, more toast. You ‘leave it a day’. And find you go twice, either side of lunch, which is baked beans on toast plus extra toast with bread and butter while you wait for them to cook. You find you have ‘limitless’ energy, the kind which sends you into town to the library and considering buying coffee. You smile a lot, especially at the school gate. The nuclear reaction seems to be dying down a bit. You go out for pizza. It is really not so bad, were it not for the headaches. You try a tiny sip of wine over supper. You wake with an axe through your head. This goes on all week. Except you skip the wine. You call the hospital. They tell you this is normal.

  Just when you are ‘used to things’ it hits you like a wave or sudden gust from behind a street corner. Fatigue is in everything you do. You lift your head from the pillow and it hurts. You notice your slippers make little scraping noises as you shuffle from room to room. You stay in one room, near the telly; you give thanks for the remote control. The phone rings but you do not answer it, even though it is six inches across the bed from you. You start to sleep for hours, waking from dreams about playing team sports as a teenager. But you crave sleep. You think you look good curled up.

  And then the shivers start. Somewhere in your back above your kidneys a tense pulse that begins warmly and ends in a shudder near your spine throws long electrical currents. You think of an octopus, a giant squid. You think of Dr Who. You think of Fawlty Towers, what you would give to be watching it for the first time, with your father, scarcely able to believe your luck, your luminous happiness. And then it goes. It comes back when you cook the children pasta. It is one of your best sauces ever and you are bent double. You notice you have run out of pepper. You think about ringing the hospital. While the children eat, they joke and eye you, warily. You tell them it is nothing. You go back to feeling merely exhausted. It has snowed outside. The government have won a vote. England are back in the Test. You know you will survive.

  Sunday 5 March

  Morning

  Propped up in bed listening to Tatty reading Old Yeller to Shim, one of her favourite childhood books. Amazon really is a great thing. Waterstone’s just go ‘Uh?’ at you. She does a great Southern drawl, very expressive, Gone with the Wind vs. Steel Magnolias, her favourite films.

  Saturday I had energy, until about one minute after lunch, and the day was dazzling. We walked into town with the boy, changed CDs at the library and ate paninis at BTP. I have a really heavy cold and spend most of the night coughing. At BTP a Tats-type panic over my keys, suddenly missing. They were at the library all along and I thanked them for saving my life, which is still the kind of thing I am allowed to say, even without thinking.

  Bumped into Vince and Fiona in town. Vince said ‘You looked a bit gaunt this week, I thought. I nearly ran you over to finish the job off.’ Is it just me or is doctor-banter different class?

  Sim and Is came by on Friday, stayed about an hour, then left. We sat a few minutes in the sitting room before stepping up to the café for ‘the best lasagne I have ever tasted.’ It’s lovely being with them, their warm companionable universe where nothing is really harmful, or too much trouble.

  Sim told a great story, which could very well be made up, ‘from my days in telly’, when he got to sit in on the overdubbing into Arabic of the Eric Sykes film The Plank. The plot (‘It either makes you laugh or it doesn’t,’ interrupted Is. ‘It doesn’t for me.’) apparently involves Eric Sykes walking through a village with a plank on his shoulder. Hilarity ensues every time he turns to talk to someone. Many windows are smashed also. ‘We laughed so much in the booth, my friend and I, we got chucked out. This was in Beirut, you know. It’s all digital now.’ ‘But doesn’t someone going ‘aah!’ when they’ve been hit by the plank sound more or less the same in Arabic?’

  ‘No. In Arabic it’s more of an ‘urgh!’ To his credit he said this with the straightest of faces.

  Monday 6 March

  Sitting up on the bed admiring the sunlight and feeling slightly headachy after my mid-morning coffee.

  A poor night, waking at 3. I crept into the telly room and watched French football (PSG vs. Marseille). I did more or less the same on Saturday night, which was a toss up between boxing, Conan the Barbarian, weak comedy on Channel 4 and a John Mills Black-and-White where every accent was Mr Chulmley-Warner. I flicked between a dour lower-billed fight and the weak comedy, whose point was to make fun of rap music. A bit of an open goal, that, but you have to remember, it’s post-pub, raging-munchies telly, so showing 50 Cent videos and asking archly ‘Does rapping make you attractive?’ is probably all you need to do to be thought of as incisively hilarious.

  I switched to a documentary about volunteering at Glastonbury. They followed four young people, all doing their bit for, variously, Greenpeace (running a Free Love i.e. Blind Date service), Water Aid (‘Flushing out Poverty’), Oxfam and the hospital tent (‘After the festival Jamie also signed up to do Reading’). They all looked sunburnt and very attractive. The Oxfam-guy was a steward on Gate 7, about a mile from the main action. One of his jobs was to bring tea out to his colleagues on the perimeter fence, then relieve them, at dawn. The camera expertly sat back as they swapped stories of people trying to get in brandishing knives. ‘I was like woah, man!’ He held his hands up, palms out, in front of him. ‘You know, like, we don’t need that kind of trouble.’ ‘Did they get nicked?’ ‘Yeh, the police piled in and got him,’ he shrugged.

  Next up was another volunteer-fest, telling two very different stories of confident Caroline and camera-shy Carl. Caroline (have a guess) was blonde, wore skimpy clothes and (guess what) got to massage people (really) in an occupational therapy ward in the gloomy European backwater of Barcelona. Cue lots of shots of her cooking in her flat and clapping along to her housemates’ guitar playing. Carl ‘had a number of issues at home’ so got to work on a Norwegian commune with disabled people. ‘They get you doing all sorts,’ he sniffed. ‘Cooking, cleaning, you know. But it’s the wood chopping I’m best at. I build, you know. By the end of the day I’ve built a stack of wood and that makes me feel I’ve accomplished something. It’s a good feeling.’

  I couldn’t decide who this was aimed at. Conscience-wracked student insomniacs who haven’t sorted their summer holiday plans? Over on Channel 4 at the same time was more munchies-telly, of the baggy snowboarding variety. It consists of watching a succession of 18-year-old Norwegian and Canadian men competing to outdo each other on their ‘two-seventy turns with grip’ on approaching what look like three-quarter-inch stair-rails poking above the snow while the commentator shouts over a heavy metal soundtrack. Everything is ‘amazing’, ‘spellbinding’, ‘hugely risky’ and ‘nerveless’. It cannot be sport, because only three people watching must know what is going on. If I were 19, however, and ‘studying’ for a Sports Science degree five miles
away from the nearest bus stop, I know which of the two programmes I’d be watching as I passed round the nachos.

  Later

  I watched Planet Earth, the Beeb’s latest big budget nature programme, with Shim last night. An advert for public service broadcasting from start to finish, it was all the clichés and more: sumptuous, painstaking, breathtaking. One sequence showed the ‘Amur’ leopard from Russia (I thought it looked a bit like Speyside) of which there are about 40 left. David Attenborough deadpanned: ‘A combination of irreversible climate change and inability to adapt to its new situation has pushed this extraordinary animal to the edge of extinction.’ The footage of it – the first ever made – lasted about a minute. Television enacting the metaphor of its own message is what we grew up hoping it would be. Somehow this felt graver, sadder, more urgent, an elegy not just for rare mammals, but a whole approach to and vision of the medium itself.

  Shim tucked himself into me – we both went wow at the slowed down footage of the Great White leaping to attack a seal – and kept lifting his head up to look at my eyes, to check if I was crying. I didn’t, but he obviously sees more than I give him credit for.

  He told me about his advert writing from last week on the way back from school today. ‘You know that advert writing, where I said I was encouraged by Cancer Research, well it worked, I got two stickers, one at the top one at the bottom. I think she felt sorry for me.’

  He’s talking about school these days more than he ever has. ‘You know when you have no idea what you’re doing and it still goes alright? I had that today in writing. It was about fishing. I didn’t understand it but it went OK.’

  Tuesday 7 March

  Last day before next chemo.

  A really crap night last night. Night sweats and coughing at 2, and no comedy telly. Just Women’s World Cup Skiing, which at least I understand, but hardly riveting. Perhaps this is just as well, as I nodded off more quickly than I had expected. At which point Tatty came to get me. ‘You must be really knackered,’ she said at breakfast, and I didn’t disagree.

  A really crappy day out there. Grey low cloud and rain, thick oily pouring wet Devon rain, with cold in it, first thing; now just incessant unsmiling endless falling drizzle, heavy, and soaking.

  Came back from the school-walk, did the bins, dusted down and watched a second of Will and Grace and a laugh-out-loud Frasier, The One Where He Pretends To Be Jewish.

  Felt gloomy nonetheless so decided to cheer myself up by watching our Shakespeare in Love DVD (I still want to say video). It was perfect, a little working stopwatch of a confection: sexy, funny and moving. What more can you want? I cried the whole way through. I don’t care what they say about Gwyneth Paltrow, she can act and do the verse. Hoped, as it drew near to the end, that The Great Script Idea would plop into my head and make me rich à la Stoppard, but none did. I’ll have to settle for poems.

  Was reminded that it closes with William Shakespeare moving on to the next project, Twelfth Night, inspired by Viola’s (Paltrow’s) journey across the ocean. It doesn’t matter that it’s balls, it’s a film for goodness sake. The dream of narrative worked for me. I might have to go onto Amazon or whatever it is and order 3 vids for £10 per month. Or even just buy some. Films I could watch now and weep a little over?

  Good Will Hunting

  Sliding Doors

  Dead Poets Society

  Truly Madly Deeply

  All About My Mother

  The Ice Storm

  Groundhog Day

  I recalled watching Twelfth Night at the Barbican with Mummy and Daddy all those years ago. It was one of those occasions, as I remember it, when he took us all out, with girlfriends, including a trip to Dustin Hoffman’s Shylock. Somewhere I have the programmes. The bit I remember was quite early on, where Viola (Zoë Wannamaker) gives the ‘cruellest she alive’ speech to Olivia. It was a great doubleheader, sparks flashing between the pair of them, verbally and physically. The end of it isn’t an important break in the play but nevertheless he clapped heavily in the pin-drop silence. I really admired him for that – going for it in the silent auditorium. It came back to me today watching Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow jousting and falling in love.

  A lovely present from Mark today in the post. The match day programme from Chelsea/Barca from two weeks ago. His note said ‘Look at the back. Do you not like the result from the Bridge?’, a reference that he got Graham Taylor to sign it: ‘Best wishes, Anto.’ It has lovely glossy photos and expensive adverts for, among other things, art. A nice piece on Joe Cole (pre match-winning performance for England) on his interest in Spanish football: ‘But Joe’s real passion, or should that be Real passion, is going to watch them play live.’ He can afford it, I suppose.

  It reminded me that it came out before the death of Ossie. Peter (Carps) emailed me that day to say he saw him once with Chopper Harris and Dave Webb in a pub in Ewell and always regretted not asking for an autograph. ‘He may not have played much for England, but he certainly drank for them.’ I replied that watching him on telly is the reason I became a Chelsea fan. I never saw him live. ‘Sometimes something comes from nowhere which makes you want to go out into a field and howl’ I said. Later that night they showed him running through the Leeds defence to score that diving header, having laid off the ball just outside the centre circle. It completely did me in.

  I don’t think we’ll win tonight. I think we’ll try very hard, probably get one of the two goals we need, but will get caught on the break. I’m out of time. Time to go and get Shim from school.

  I want to live.

  Wednesday 8 March

  Second day of chemo.

  Back from hospital propped up on the bed not feeling too nauseous and rather smug. My haemoglobin has remained normal – a score of 14 – and they all love me to bits. ‘I’m keen to keep the pattern of two weeks going, Tony,’ Karl said, ‘so if you’re ready, we’ll start poisoning you.’

  As Lizzie, today’s nurse, talked me through the side effects, he butted in loudly on entering the room with ‘what’s all this about a cough? You’re not being male about this I hope.’ He declared my chest clear and gave me ‘5 days, oops, seven days, slip of the pen’ of antibiotics. So far so good.

  Lizzie smiled when I told her about the shivery achy back pain, from the Granocyte. ‘Oh that’s a good sign,’ she said. ‘It means your large bones are making lots of white cells. We like that in a patient.’

  There was poetry in the way Frank Keating remembered Ossie, on the back page (where else?) of the Guardian:

  In 1961, as sports editor of the Slough Observer and at a boys’ cup final to present the trophy, I was riveted by a building-site tea boy, a cheery, cheeky, spindly gawk playing with a carefree dash for the winners, Old Corinthians. Just 15, his aura of lithe grace and balance matched a bravura of power.

  […] I heard from his uncle Bob that my rave had helped him get a trial at Chelsea. He was, of course, Peter Osgood, the great and now, alas and so suddenly, the late. But imperishably, the smiling Old Corinthian.

  Elsewhere, a nice piece on Ivor Cutler, another hero who died last week. I went to see him once, at the Bloomsbury theatre, with Dale and Mart, in our shorts and string vest phase. The gig was in support of Gruts, which I still have somewhere. It made me glad that I’d finally bought Life in a Scotch Sitting Room, Vol. 2 on CD, which I think will go down as his masterpiece.

  When the kids were little I used to make tapes for the car with titles like ‘Everyone Happy’. The format would go something like: Smiths Song, Nursery Rhyme, Jackson 5 Song, Magic Roundabout Song, Blondie Song and so on. Once, on a whim, I included ‘Episode 2’ from Life in a Scotch Sitting Room. It became an instant family favourite, not least because it allowed us to shout ‘Look! A tree!’ whenever we were driving through countryside. To this day I have not seen it written down, but know large chunks by heart.

  Bendy and I quoted lines of it to each other over Di’s marvellous roast chicken and plum pudding meal
s on wheels supper:

  ‘Down The River Clyde,’ I added.

  For which impertinence I received a mighty buffet, bleeding my tender nose with his vast white knuckle. How was I to know I was mouthing obscenity? But the blood soon dried and I had the pleasure of picking the clots.

  What’s great, on the live recording we’ve got, is that you can hear him losing the plot and corpsing in the pauses. Marvellous. One of my greatest achievements as a father is that Bendy has the whole album in her Ipod, and also knows most of it by heart: ‘Grandma came round and scraped a lump of coarse salt onto each girl’s tongue. If a fleck of spit hit you, the illusion was complete.’

  Mark Radcliffe said today that Cutler’s popularity make a mockery of ‘youth programming’, championed as he was by John Peel on late-night Radio 1. Apparently on one of his first sessions for Richard Skinner he was told to ‘Take it away, Ivor!’ by the DJ, only for Cutler to reply ‘Take what away?’ Radcliffe says, eloquently, that he was no more or less eccentric than the rest of us, only more focussed. ‘He realised that you don’t need to be a Renaissance man, that mastery of one thing was enough.’

  Overheard on the way back from dropping Shim off today at the school gate: ‘Dishwasher tablets are like gold-dust in our house.’