Thursday 9 March
A day of sudden showers, wild sunshine and breezes.
I went into work to hand in my sick note, and saw Cate and Sasha, then David in School Office. He was charming and solicitous and kept it off work and on me from the word go. He’s very keen for me to carry on writing:
‘If I had a diagnosis such as yours I’d be out of here. I mean, this is what I do when I’m well. I do hope you’re pursuing your own work, in terms of a journal perhaps, to keep you going.’
‘That’s exactly what I’m doing, yes, partly as a record, partly as an act of resistance.’
‘That’s a huge advantage I think you have. For many in your position, and I don’t mean this pejoratively, filling the time must be the most alarming aspect of the whole business because there is nothing else. Whereas you have a hinterland, a rich inner life which goes on. If I were you I’d be logging the progress of the journey at every opportunity.’
He almost looked jealous.
At one point he mentioned his friendship with the poet Jane Beeson. We’ve talked about her many times before, most recently her long 1000 line poem for the millennium in iambic pentameter. Almost as a throwaway he said he’d sent her some poems fifteen years ago, but nothing since. Recently he’d got a note from her – she has cancer too – encouraging him to send her some more. ‘When are you going to get back to your writing?’ she said. I left mulling on the fact that we all make choices. Even when some ghastly ones are forced upon us, deciding on who you are and what you want still has to come first.
It’s also been a day of gifts. Chris Richards has sent Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood ‘in case I want something a little different’; and Michèle has sent Nêuchatel poet Blaise Cendras’s Panama or the Adventures of Seven Uncles and Other Poems, in a dual translation by John Dos Passos. Which is as ‘different’ again as Ian McEwan is from Kenneth Koch. They look marvellous. But they worry me. Nowhere can I find a description of what I am going through. They sit unwrapped and proud on the kitchen table, accusing me for not being able to concentrate on their wonderfulness. At least my Amazon-order of John Diamond’s C: Because Cowards get Cancer too … has now arrived. I am desperate for it not to be jargon. I want to fall in love. I want it to show me me.
Later
Merenna in the bath, Shim playing White Stripes on the computer next door, Tatty with the girls in the telly room. Familiar sounds of water sloshing, guitar solos, laughter, and the heating moving bricks through the pipes. A normal evening.
Tatty reminded me of a faux pas in hospital yesterday while I slept on the Rituximab-Piriton cocktail. After four hours of marking children’s scripts she called out to Karl behind the desk that she ‘had lost the will to live.’ He didn’t blink apparently. On our last visit he dished out far worse himself. A very senior lady who takes up position at the other end of the ward near the telly (without switching it on) had not drawn breath all day, often having the same conversation three times over with whoever sat next to her. This isn’t because she is senile. I think she is bored. And scared. And can’t stop talking. After an unexpected 2-minute lull Karl went over to her chair, bent his 6’ 7” frame into her sleeping face and shouted ‘Geraldine, I thought you were dead there for a minute, it was so quiet. What the hell’s wrong with you!’ What made it even funnier was the sight of four nurses running, from different ends of the ward, to hide behind the desk, out of her eyesight, to piss themselves laughing.
Friday 10 March
Tatty said yesterday ‘It’s like having you with new batteries in,’ referring to the post-steroid surge of energy. I stood on the scales today and reached 13 stone, for the first time in, if not years, then for at least one year. I suppose lack of cycling plus ravenous hunger all the time can only lead to one thing. Another cake today, from Guy and Jemima round the corner. Clearly word has got round. ‘It’s one of Carol’s,’ he said. ‘We don’t bake and anyway she’s a genius.’ He’s not wrong there, a lemon sponge of the lightest consistency, oozing jam and cream. Cancer-benefit Number 34: women buy you cakes and send them round with their husbands.
Tatty brought up the issue of Chelsea losing so late in the day on Wednesday that I think Karl forgot to be scornful. Maybe the rule is we only slag each other’s teams off in the mornings. He said he didn’t watch the game as he was at ‘my nerdy geologist meeting in Cornwall.’
‘What, you study rocks?’
‘Oh yes, and collect them.’
‘What, like, in little boxes with labels in display cases.’
‘Yes, in little boxes with labels in display cases.’
‘And you travel all over for rock samples?’
‘Yup. Cornwall’s especially good. Was up in St Just the other day with my mate Rick and suddenly his Geiger counter goes off the scale. And it just looked like a brown bit of rock, so we smash it open and there it is, perfect specimen of radon. He took one half, I took the other. Made a special lead box for it and stuck it in the roof. Week later I realised radon is heavier than air, and it was right above my head, where I’d put it. What you need is a big airy loft, one of those big houses.’
John Diamond’s C has arrived from Amazon. In his intro he tackles the issue of war-metaphor head-on. I was right. I was sure I had read this before, in one of his Times pieces. At the risk of using another useless war metaphor where none will do, he blows the whole idea of ‘fighting’ cancer apart:
My antipathy to the language of battles and fights has nothing to do with pacifism and everything to do with a hatred for the sort of mortality which says that only those who fight hard against their cancer survive it – the corollary being that those who lose the fight deserved to do so.
Saturday 14 March
To Northwood, to see Mummy and Daddy and everyone else. We drove up last evening, after Tats had been to Hayley for her hair. Hayley has given me a free treatment with her friend who is an ‘Intuitive Holistic Therapist … Bringing Mind, Body and Spirit Together (Body Massage, Hot Stone Massage, Reiki, Chakra, Crystal and Colour Healing: Available soon … Aromotherapy and Reflexology May 2006).’ She read me the blurb as we sped up the M4: ‘Reiki is the natural life force energy that lives and breathes within and all around us, without it we cannot exist,’ at which point I asked her to stop. ‘Hot stone massage sounds nice,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘They put hot stones on you.’
‘Right.’
‘But it’s got to be better than reflexology. Touching your feet, euggh,’ she said.
We wolfed sausage casserole and baked potatoes with coleslaw, tomato salad and cheese. The kind of meal you dream awaits you when you enter the house of your birth. Mart popped round and hugged me heavily in the doorway. We talked about cycling into DK on The Strand each day, the kind of gear he needs and prefers. ‘As long as it’s Gore-Tex you’re all right,’ he frowned. He’s sold one piece from last week’s private show, lots of enquiries for others.
Once Tats had gone up with the kids we got down to it a bit more, but not really. He didn’t like the photos we’d sent of my shaving ceremony. ‘I found it shocking to be honest,’ he said. ‘It brought it all home.’
Shim was sick today at breakfast. He still isn’t right, really, a shadow of his usual bounce and energy. He spent most of the morning watching the last ever episode of Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow, under a rug, with a little red bowl to be sick in again if he needed to be. It’s exactly the same sick bowl I used to be given thirty years ago. Tats, who ‘does not do sick’ gingerly went with him to the loo while he went through the worst of it. ‘Did you hear me flushing each time? Incredibly brave if you ask me,’ and I knew she meant herself, not Shim.
Meanwhile I sat with Mummy and Daddy in the kitchen eating cold toast and taking the last fistfuls of drugs. I drew them little diagrams to explain the layout of the ward, then wrote down the names of the drugs I’m given, the ones I’ve learned at least. Rituximab (the R of R-CHOP) came first; then cyclophospham
ide (which just screams poison), the C of CHOP; then Vincristine (which is the O of CHOP under another name). (I expect R-CHVP is much more of a mouthful than R-CHOP, sounding like a suburb of Gdansk, or a Russian submarine port, plus you don’t get the irony of the word ‘chop’, because this cancer treatment involves no surgical intervention at all.)
I explained the process to them for the first time. There’s the one that makes your bottom itchy; the one that looks (and makes you pee) like Ribena; the one that makes a cold burning ache up your arm; the one which is syrupy and takes twice as long to squirt into you.
‘Is it on a drip?’ they said.
‘Through a cannula, on a saline drip.’
‘How do you spell that?’ said Daddy.
I spelled it for him.
‘And they leave it in all day?’
‘All day.’
‘You must be shattered.’
‘What’s the worst part?’ said Mummy.
‘The half hour when you get home of not being sure if you’re going to throw up.’
Have been enjoying my John Diamond. It reads, as they say, like a thriller, even though you know the outcome already. Propped up in bed last night with it a little bookmark fell out the back, one I hadn’t noticed when I unwrapped it from its parcel. It turns out I ordered it from a Used and New seller called Killer Books. Of course I did. How appropriate.
Monday 13 March
What is having cancer like? You think that you’ll spend the morning finally getting down to discovering what ‘East Coker’ is about, or re-reading Life Studies, or Isaiah; then spend the afternoon in contemplation of Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia before picking the children up from school, pausing on the way home for a hot chocolate with whipped cream. Instead you encounter three people on the way home, each of them stopping to ask how you are while their child pulls on their coat behind them. You assure them you feel fine. In truth, you are cold and feel tired to your bones. All you want to do is run – run! – home and watch Will and Grace and Frasier reruns. You watch the traffic very carefully, only crossing when it is safe. You watch the Will and Grace and Frasier reruns, savouring every embarrassment, every excess of linguistic frippery, determined to repeat them to your loved ones when they return home. You have a marvellous time, hearing your laughter in an empty home, nothing outside but the wind. Five minutes later, during a documentary programme on T-shirt sellers at Camden Lock, you realise you cannot remember a syllable of the dialogue, an iota of the plot. How ironic: you have longed for whole days like this, left to your own devices, no toys to tidy, no child batting the tent of your newspaper every ten seconds, and you cannot concentrate on a thing, even the T-shirt sellers of Camden Lock. A colleague emails to say they will call first and bring cake. They do neither. Instead, a friend rings up saying he has made you a rap CD. He brings it round and you listen to it, sipping tea. You tell stories about your children and when they were ill. Somehow this makes you feel better.
Tuesday 14 March
Not one of my best days.
I notice, just writing the date down, that it is a month since we went to see Felicity Carr. Amazing how routine illness can become. The routine I’m now settled into seems inescapable, repeating itself through the side effects like a series of well-placed dominoes falling one after the other in one of those record-breaking attempts on children’s television: 5 days of Radioactive Man, followed by 7 of Completely Shattered Man, followed by 2 of Almost-Back-To-Normal Man, at which point, it starts again.
When did I get this?
Was it there on Christmas Day as I carved the turkey wearing my lovely stripy shirt given to me for my anniversary? Yes. Was it there when I played football two days after Christmas and got bollocked by Pug’s friend Tristan because I was slow, useless, had no first touch and let in three quick goals? Yes. Was it there when I cooked chicken with lemon and olives for my students? Yes. Was it there when I struggled into work a week later feeling fluey and everyone said kindly how terrible I looked? Yes. It was there when I burned CDs from the library and it was there when I lit fireworks in the garden for the kids. It was there when I went to the dump with Shim and it was there when Bendy and I shopped in the January sales. It was there at Boston Tea Party, over latte, and it was there at the family curry. It was there when I cycled to work and it was there when I strolled round the quay. It was there when I emailed colleagues and it was there when I sent apologies to meetings. It was there when I lectured students and there when we met 1:1. It was there in my initials in their files. It was there when I went for bread, when I made love, bought cheese, scanned the sports pages, picked up a poetry book, posted a postcard, had my haircut, made porridge, called the builder.
It was there, uninvited and growing, in the dark. I did not ask for it. I did not deserve it. It is not fair. But it found me, and I accepted it.
Later
That phrase. It isn’t fair. Apparently it’s what Gabe said to Misty when I had emailed her with the news. ‘He’s never hurt anyone, that man,’ as though that makes it more injurious. Apart from showing that Gabe doesn’t know me that well, the logic, while instant, is all too terrifying. It is as though there are men and women down the road from me far more deserving of cancer because of their careers in crime or tendencies towards bullying at school. Or, to put it another way, that I am less ‘deserving’ of cancer than someone with a bit of a cruel streak in them or who knocks their kids about. It’s preposterous. It both isn’t fair and has nothing to do with fairness at all. It isn’t a competition I entered for secretly then forgot about: ‘Bad luck, Mr Wilson, your numbers came up this week. Bet you thought you’d cancelled your subscription. Well, it’s still running, and you’ve been chosen as this week’s winner.’
It just happens. And if I live and recover, as everyone keeps saying they are certain I will, that has nothing to do with fairness either. It doesn’t make me a better ‘fighter’ of the disease if I survive; or a weaker, weedier person if I don’t. It just means the treatment will work for me, or it won’t. Of course I want to live. But I don’t want anyone saying within a mile of me that it’s unfair I got it. It’s unfair on everyone who gets it, if it is at all. I’d rather say ‘tough’ as in ‘it’s tough for every person who has it’ and just leave it at that. Just as it is good if you recover – though ‘good’ will never adequately cover it – and very tough if you don’t. Though that doesn’t cover it either. Let’s say a Kray twin, or Hitler, they get it, then die. I know they’d feel they had just as much right to ‘conquer it’ as I do. And according to Gabe, I never hurt anyone. Little does he know.
Wednesday 15 March
My hair – such as it is – started falling out today. I was sitting in the bath when I noticed it. A faint grey scum just above the water level. On closer inspection it was made up of tiny, 3½ millimetres, say, strands of hair. It reminded me of what my bathwater used to look like the day after a visit to the barber’s as a boy. I called out to Tats and she came in and confirmed it. When she went back to the bedroom to fix my syringes I pinched hard on my scalp. They were there, too, at the end of my finger, lifeless iron filings that, because of their size, seemed heavy and fragile at the same time. It is very odd seeing it ‘go’ at last. It’s not like I leave great clumps of it lying around (though if you look hard enough you can see it on my pillow), nor that huge discs of pink appear on my scalp where there were none before. I have lived with the prospect of it ‘going’ for ten years or so, since a short haircut became a necessity, not a question of fashion. But now that it is falling out for real I find I mourn its passing, in spite of the pre-emptive haircut with the boys, and in spite of the compliments from women (the main difference between men and women? Women say ‘Don’t you look gorgeous!’. Men say: ‘You never had much to lose anyway’). It is one more sign of the process taking hold, one little step further away from looking (and feeling) like the person I was before I had cancer.
Racing through the final pages of Diamond. It will be a loss whe
n he goes/when I finish. I like his logician’s mind very much:
It’s the idea of taking spiritual responsibility for a disease once it’s been diagnosed which annoys me. For it leads to the idea of the survivor as personal hero that only those who want to survive enough get through to the end, and the implied corollary that those who die are somehow lacking in moral fibre and the will to live.
There’s another lovely bit where he’s listening to the usual suspects on some ‘jocular’ Radio 4 programme, where they have to work out the medieval recipe for quince jelly by following some sort of Sanskrit riddle, and he hears the old him for the first time. I love the very real double take here, but also the idea that the pre-cancer Diamond seems to have no idea what is about to hit him:
He was the one who didn’t realise what a boon an unimpaired voice was, who ate his food without stopping to think about its remarkable flavour, who was criminally profligate with words, who took his wife and children and friends for granted – in short who didn’t know he was living.
It really does take a special book – a book about dying – to make you notice your life more closely.
I must have seen twenty people today. First James Bradley came round for coffee, then half an hour later Linda Southwood. She brought daffs (as did James) and a stick of French bread from Tesco’s. ‘I found that the one thing I wanted to be friends with was this,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘You read my mind,’ I said.
Love for Now Page 7