Love for Now

by Anthony Wilson

  I don’t remember anything I said to anyone, or anything they said to me, but I do know I wanted it to go on forever, so that I could keep using it to affirm the fact of still living, eating and having friends. Is this what it all comes down to? A few evenings in your garden with your closest, and which you know you will never forget? It was exhausting, but ordinarily, spectacularly, quietly and lovingly an evening of laughter and snatching the moment.

  Not only because I’d had a few Proseccos and peach juice, I slept the best night’s sleep for weeks.

  Saturday I sat on the doorstep and chatted to Tats while she re-organised the front door border, digging up fuchsias, moving the baby palm, putting light between the plants. I moved a few stones in the border for her and got completely breathless. Very kindly halfway through Will and Susie from over the road came to share in the good news, with handshakes and smiles. People seem to divide into those who say ‘What fantastic news!’ and those who say ‘I hope you sue the NHS!’ Lovely that they are firmly in the former category.

  Yesterday at church, Sally stood up and told everyone of her plan for them to pray for me and the family. ‘The idea is,’ she said, ‘that Ant and the family do no work whatsoever, and they feel no pressure to say how much it is or isn’t working. So, don’t email them to ask what to pray for because that makes more work for them. I leave that to you and God but some ideas are: fun, sleep, laughter, togetherness, hope and faith. And, of course, healing. The other idea isn’t that you go into a darkened room for half an hour, but that you stick a post-it note on the coffee jar, or on the buggy or on your shoes, and that when you see the post-it note, you say your prayer for them. On the other post-it note, you just write your idea, so I can collate them all together in a folder. Then they will know what is being prayed for them and at what times. Of course, you leave it anonymous.’ I listened to this brushing away tears from my cheeks, trying not to look round at people looking at me. ‘We’re doing this as the body of God,’ she said. ‘When one of us hurts, we all hurt. You don’t even have to know Ant to commit to praying for him.’

  So many memories of Friday. About half an hour after the call with Felicity, Marco Mullen came round to say, in his own words, ‘Life’s a bitch,’ not having heard the news. He stayed for coffee. Halfway through our natter, Maura came in with a card, sobbing. She gave me a hug in the centre of the sitting room, nodded wordlessly at Marco, then left, still sobbing and trying to smile. It was really quite biblical as an act of wordless support and affection; touching, and faintly comic all at once.

  My other favourite is Jockie giggling, really giggling, on the phone, just saying over and over ‘Those Wilson genes! Those Wilson genes!’, as though they had something to do with me getting better.

  Tuesday 2 May

  Propped up in bed, a lull before Sarah arrives on the train. A cold, grey day, drizzly and a little windy. I knew my new jumper would come in handy. Secretly glad that the plants are all getting watered for free.

  Light in spirit but weary in body. Despite the best night for a century – only one coughing fit, to go with my night sweats – woke up feeling as though Daffy Duck had paid another dawn visit. It was all I could do to get downstairs in pyjamas and make Tatty and Bendy a bagel. I’m puzzled – and still a little worried – by my right-side abdomen pain, where the tumour was originally detected. Sometimes it’s sharp, jabbing, sometimes a dull ache, the ‘sleeping in a draught’ ache I described in hospital on January 6th. Mostly it is in the same place, but I’ve noticed it travelling about, sometimes up, under my ribs, and sometimes approaching the middle of my back. Very weird.

  Later

  Since the good news, have become aware that events have been occurring in the outside world.

  Cancer does do this to you. Suddenly nothing much else matters. The real National Emergency is your Big Bone Pain with the GCSF kicking in, and your breathlessness after the school-walk. How dare the press not cover it? As Violet Weingarten says: ‘This is the jerkiest journal of all time. Meanwhile Vietnam falls.’ So: good news or not, I’m still infatuated with my own creakiness as I live it each day, the real living reality of feeling crap just about all the time my main song and story. And this leaves me feeling slightly guilty, diminished, somehow, on the news of my improving condition. I should somehow have risen above the chronic kindness, the diarrhoea, the runny nose, the phlegm-producing hack. The thing is, this is what having cancer feels like when you get better, still laden with iatrogenic loveliness, as it always has been.

  An example of how the word cancer dominates everything came just the other day.

  I was having a coffee in the kitchen and caught the end of a headline about a snooker player from the world championships in Sheffield. What I heard was ‘… was defeated today, leaving him to continue his battle with cancer.’

  Two things jumped out at me: the implication in the newsreader’s voice that he should never have been at the tournament in the first place, having a far more important ‘battle’ to engage in; and, second, that it was no real surprise that he had lost because, well, cancer’s really serious, isn’t it? All of this, just in his tone.

  But you know what else is coming. It’s that word ‘battle’ again. It almost had me writing to 5 Live cc. the Director General. I cannot believe that in the twenty-first century we have not yet thought of a better way of describing the fact that someone has a particularly nasty disease. It’s the only time we ever use war metaphor where illness is concerned, it seems to me. Why? Could they not have said ‘leaving him to continue his treatment for cancer’ or ‘leaving him to continue with his cancer treatment’? Isn’t it more accurate, and, therefore, fairer, not only on the poor snooker player, who has also had a gruelling tournament to play in (of his own free will), but on the rest of us mortals who let our doctors do the battling for us? I suppose that admission is at the heart of it.

  What cancer sufferers know – or this one, at least – is that ‘battling’ the disease is the last thing you feel like doing, especially once chemotherapy starts. So we leave that to the experts, who know what they are doing. Me, I don’t want to ‘battle’ anything. I just want to be made better. Admitting that we – I – don’t want to battle runs the risk of looking cowardly and not up for the fight. It also is what really lay behind the 5 Live newsreader’s tone, an anxiety that to not call it a ‘battle’ would be somehow to label the snooker player an ordinary bloke like the rest of us, just someone with ongoing treatment of a particularly nasty kind.

  This is what the word cancer does to us. It makes us intensely worried for ourselves. Not just because of all its association with death, but because it attacks our sense of invincibility, and forces us to create a language of needing to do something, in this case fight, in order to outwit it. (Even in a long argument against war metaphor in describing cancer I am ambushed – ha ha! – by my own unwitting use of ‘attacks’ and ‘forces’: the best of us go down in the fight …)

  All of this also applies to the description, yesterday evening, on the same radio station, of a former Liverpool captain’s wife having recently ‘overcome’ the disease.

  I applaud her and her husband’s work in raising awareness and funds by holding a football match (a repeat of the 1989 cup final classic with Everton), but I object to ‘overcoming’ the disease, i.e. the media using that phrase, when it is more accurate to say ‘has successfully completed her treatment and begun remission.’ The unspoken implication, otherwise, is that there is a link between her having a famous (and talented? and fiery? and skilful?) husband and famous (and fit? and talented? and healthy?) footballing friends, and getting better from cancer. Which is tosh. I rejoice in her getting better.

  I rejoice in how amazing it feels to know one is going to spend longer living on the planet. But I’m amazed by our inability, in one of the most media-savvy countries on earth, to find a language which is a little less afraid of taking time to describe the process of getting better from cancer as it really is, and n
ot some mock-heroic epic from the medieval ages.

  Thursday 4 May

  A day of gifts: Rupert sent me the latest Billy Collins book, a ‘spare’ as he put it. I’ve just read the first quarter of it in one go, a miracle. I can’t think of anyone’s poems it is so pleasurable to live within during each poem’s duration. It may even get me writing again, an argument he makes in the title poem ‘The Trouble with Poetry,’ which is that one poem always provokes another. We’ll see. I just saw Tats’ orchid beginning to wilt in the bedroom and it gave me an idea …

  So today I am energy-man. Yesterday was chemo, my last day of it before the final two Rituximab-treatments, which finish on the last day of May. I slept through most of it, most likely because they gave me a bed. No sign of Karl, still having treatment in Plymouth. Hugs all round from Carol and Gillian, big smiles and genuine warm relief. A nice moment with Ian who made a gentle forward defensive movement, in reference to our cricket conversation from two weeks ago, saying ‘Maybe you’ll be doing a bit of this after all …’ Not much else to report.

  Felt done in (as usual) on returning home (couldn’t have done a poetry reading, even out loud, propped up in bed …) but wasn’t sick, though have just noticed that am still burping last night’s meals-on-wheels Moussaka, which Tatty kindly said was all mine when she saw a third of it was left at the end. This I will not miss about cancer treatment. (It is 25° today, apparently, the hottest of the year so far. I should be outside under my umbrella, on the new garden furniture, only it hasn’t arrived yet …)

  Duncan, yesterday’s doctor, decided against giving me more antibiotics for the cough, as the diarrhoea has been so bad with it. I agreed with him. However, I did spend all of last night in the same bed, no trips to get codeine at half-two, and no ejections to the sofa. Another miracle … Let’s build on it.

  Monday 8 May

  Friday seems an aeon ago now – that sun, energy, able to get out – and today is gloomy, cold, damp. The blossom is out now, both lots, crab and apple, former catching up with the latter as always, just a week later. I hope it doesn’t rain too strongly and wash it all away.

  Later Orla came round with some daffodils, though by then it was too chilly to sit in the garden. I really got caught short with diarrhoea, so left a ‘back in five minutes’ sticker on the door just in case. Good job I did.

  Saturday Shim had Louis over to stay. They played on the computer and Playstation most of the morning while Tatty and I slouched in our PJs and read the paper and drank tea and waited for Merenna to get ready to go into town. They left. Then a fry-up with the boys while listening to my fab new digital radio in the kitchen (from my birthday money). It does indeed have Sports Xtra, which seemed to be hiding when I began playing with it on Friday evening … maybe the reception in the kitchen is better … my afternoons listening to the cricket are safe.

  I think the rest of the day was quite lonely, really. M & T out in town, the boys at the park (till it began raining). Lots of telly in the evening, catching up on recorded episodes of Without a Trace and Murder City, none of which I felt I watched properly, as I had to go out and rescue Shim from a disco party (!) he’d been invited to. A rubbish night, lots of coughing, followed by a very early wake-up. Not as bad as Friday night, though, where I ended up on the sofa.

  Sunday morning crept about downstairs eating 3 breakfasts and reading last week’s Observer Review till Tats shouted down that she was awake. Came up and over more tea reminisced how when they were little, I would beg the children to be quiet on those early shifts ‘so mummy could sleep’. ‘The thing is’, I told her ‘they always ran back to you in the end. Somehow, when I wasn’t looking, they’d charge upstairs and jump on you. There I’d be, grasping at their ankles on the stairs shouting “Be quiet or you’ll wake mummy!” which of course woke you up.’

  ‘Funny’, Tatty said, ‘I have no memory of that time at all.’

  ‘And now I have cancer, I’m doing it all over again, still trying to finish the paper, only now I can, because no one else is up.’

  Sunday Tats went out. I sat in the garden, with my hat, under an umbrella, and read this week’s Observer, all about the reshuffle, the new digital radio for company. You can get used to mornings like that. But it was oddly lonely, again. Shim happy on the computer in his last few hours before SATs next week, Merenna out at a canoeing party. I came in and put some vegetables on for roasting for couscous, then spent the rest of the morning shuffling in, then out, unsure if the sun was warm enough or not. The boys vanished to County Hall on their bikes, and, while Tatty went to fetch M from the kayaking party, I did some edging and got breathless. Good to have done it anyway, especially before the rain, which inevitably fell later.

  Have felt very strange on this latest round of steroids. Very hot and headachy, with an orange-steroid-man head and face. Also, hungry as a trouper. Marmite on toast a speciality. Lots of fridge-raiding as well. Blocked up all day Saturday then raging diarrhoea last night, to the extent I just lay on the bed, sweating, listening to Miss Marple through the door and realising I hadn’t washed their uniforms or filled their sock drawers. Not a good end to the weekend. However grown-up you are, you still need clean school uniform on Monday mornings.

  Wednesday 10 May

  My hair is ‘long’, according to Tats, which means I’m not shaven-headed any longer, but now have that sparse, light-wispy growth which is the giveaway of the true cancer patient: neither bald nor thinning, it sticks out palely (is it grey or blonde?) looking as though the slightest gust might blow it away for good. I don’t really like it. I might gets Tats to take my razor to it one of these days …

  Still have a raging appetite – for the most odd things, as well. Was making Shim’s cream cheese and tomato sandwich for school on Monday and decided I had to have them for lunch as well. Ate half a Danish loaf of lovely fluffy white bread without blinking. Am losing the taste for things I previously munched on/drank like breathing: olives (suddenly too bitter); pesto (makes me feel sick); cheese (ditto); and coffee (just can’t face the taste of it at the moment). (Ditto wine, though I let that one go months ago.) The coffee especially is distressing. I was halfway through a bowl yesterday with a nice pain au raisin and it was all I could do not to puke. Is it because of the association with the ward? (I had a pain au raisin during treatment last week.) Quite possibly. I’m still very keen on apples and bananas, though, and marmite. Can you plan for this stuff? You can’t, you have to go with it, however counter-intuitive.

  The biggest difference between this week and the last is that I’ve started reading again. That is, holding a book open and getting from one end of the poem/essay to the other. Don’t think I’m up to the long haul of fiction yet, but first things first. Have been going back over Carver’s last poems (A New Path To The Waterfall) and his posthumous No Heroics, Please, especially the pieces on his poetry and the short stories and others. There’s a lovely line in his introduction to a book of ‘best of’ North American short stories where he says that a short story should contain what we all know but what no one is talking about. I like this very much, that kind of ‘guilty thing surprised’ sort of idea. He makes the whole thing, the hard work of constant revision included, seem doubly important and vital. I should send off my short story off to the Bridport Prize. What on earth do I have to lose?

  Before I go … just heard the first real sound of summer, a bee knocking, twice, into the window pane, as loud as a finger tap, and, somehow, as hopeful.

  Thursday 11 May

  A gorgeous May day. Golden and green, as Frank Keating would say. Big Bone Pain and shivers kicked in just after lunch. Slept, and was woken by the phone ringing. How many times has that happened recently? Each time I want to throw it through the window, but answer it dutifully, desperate not to offend whoever-it-is. When I say ‘yes’ when they ask me if they woke me up I still feel bad that they feel guilty.

  So: have been doing what I have been doing all week: dropping off Shim; taking tiny
steps home; watching Frasier; looking at (and mostly not answering) emails; opening mail; then lying on the bed till lunch, unable (and unwilling) to move; eating a quick sandwich; then falling back onto the bed again – I know I’ve said it before – completely breathless. Then, around half-two, tiptoe to the shops to get the kids a bun; then collapse for a minute; then go and get Shim and collapse again, pointing him in the direction of said bun in its wrapping while I lie on the bed again. Exactly the same for days now. Aching for it all to end.

  Monday 15 May

  England making heavy weather of it at Lords. A grey (and briefly sunny) day. Last of the apple blossom clinging to the upper reaches, the crab apple already ragged. As Ted Hughes would say, the beauty contests don’t last long. At least the lilac is still out; I give it another week, at the outside.

  I haven’t begun and finished a night in the same bed for three nights. It goes like this: cough mixture, settle down, sleep for an hour or two, then wake coughing, at only half-midnight or one, say, wake Tatty, who has words, then disappear to the sofa. The funny thing is, once I’m out, I hardly cough at all, sometimes never. This happened last night, which I spent on the big blue sofa by the telly, with only one cushion. Tats suggested when I came back at 6.45 that I only go out for half an hour or so, wait for it to calm down, then come back and rest. I’m not sure. I genuinely think I relax more when I’m elsewhere – why else don’t I cough, when lying flat, on only one cushion, my knees around my chest? Very, very odd.