Tuesday 11 July
In the garden: the raspberries droop earthwards; young apples, no bigger than golf balls, litter the lawn. The lettuce close to being shot. The lavatera are poking through the fence at the front. For the first time in six months I have eyebrows again, perfect dark arcs above each eye, with none of the bleached wiry hairs of old. Young hairs on my arms, too. I haven’t tried to drink alcohol for a week now, and feel better for it – I read a story in the paper once about a stand-up comic who gave it up while she wrote her memoirs, because it helped her remain clear-headed. Whatever it takes. What’s another two months without it? Or six? Or a year? Or a lifetime? The thing is, you remember everything much better. And enjoy the mornings more. At least I still have coffee. Yesterday my first two-cup day since Christmas. Partly we were running low on tea, and partly I wanted to see if I could take it. I sailed through, as Karl would say.
The fridge magnet fairies have been back:
The language is flooded but we
leave death at luscious leg light.
I love this. It’s nonsense, or rather, as Seamus Heaney says about Edward Lear, a parody of sense. Leaving death at luscious leg light is, surely, what it’s all about, isn’t it?
Wednesday 12 July
Not really following my own advice today, or any day this week. I ring the hospital, who say they’ll chase my appointment and that a letter will come. It doesn’t come. I ring again and they say they’ll chase it again and ring me back later. It’s a bit like dealing with B&Q.
Meanwhile the nails on my thumbs and index finger are splitting. They’re now pulled out of their troughs and have started to curve back towards the ceiling. The thumb in particular is gruesome. The nail underneath is now almost fully grown, making the jagged crescent on top of it loose. It is starting to come away at the sides now. I slide a fingernail from the other hand underneath it to try and prise it off, but it does not want to come. If I catch it on a door handle or kitchen drawer before it falls off I can envisage much blood and cursing.
On my chest, 45º north-east from my nipple, a perfect round scar where my hickman line used to protrude. At a jaunty angle just above it, a scar a centimetre long, where Duncan went in to cut the tube out. Together they make quite a neat exclamation mark.
Thursday 13 July
The hospital rang yesterday. It was a new voice, Clare Murray, the secretary of Dr Perera (‘Perry’ to everyone who knows him) my oncologist. He’s the one who was missing from the MDT two weeks ago, and on whose say-so I’m being blasted. My appointment isn’t for two weeks: 26 July. Either they are very confident that there’s barely any activity on my tumour, or things have genuinely started to slow down now I’ve moved from one department to another. Feel a mixture of resignation and frustration. The former because, however scared of going back I am, this effectively puts my return to work back to late September/early October. The latter because we had hoped we would all be done and dusted before going up to Scotland. Have told them I am going away, that the holiday is inviolable. This doesn’t seem to have fazed them. A distinct lack of rush suddenly.
Friday 14 July
I have chopped off the loose thumbnail which had begun to separate itself from the new one underneath. This revealed, right at the bottom of the nail’s now enormous bulge (the trough at the foot of the hill) a groove running right across the nail. It could be the result of some over-eager use of the nail file, but I doubt it. It’s much more likely to be my final – and most extreme – beau line from the chemotherapy, evidence that the poison still hasn’t quite left the system.
With the fingernail on my right hand in such a chronic state, I’ve noticed that I’m putting my cash machine cards into my wallet with the raised numbers showing so they are easier to get a grip when I pull them out. It’s something I never do, for security reasons, but now find I’m stuck in shops and in queues for minutes on end if I don’t.
Monday 17 July
Second week of the heatwave.
We went to see Twelfth Night in the park.
The setting was great: Victorian/Edwardian dress, an end-of-the-pier helter-skelter and Punch and Judy box, the latter used to fantastic effect in the box-tree scene. It was one of those shows that bats well all down the order without anyone really stealing it. Closest in this regard came Sir Andrew Aguecheek, resplendent in a Toad-of-Toad-Hall check and blonde wig, all wobbly limbs and permanently nonplussed. He reminded me of an upper class Eric Idle, with all the confidence taken out.
Malvolio was good, a sour-faced butler, and a brave decision to play Feste as a seen-it-all busker really paid off.
What really struck me though, was the verse. They all get memorable lines (‘Some have greatness’ etc.) but best by far are Viola’s. It seemed to me that whenever she opened her mouth to say anything it was as if the emotional voltage of the play got switched back on to full. Not that the rest of it is set piece stuff, or treading water, just that Shakespeare really goes under the fingernails when she’s around. The willow cabin speech and the duet with Orsino (‘a bit like yours, my lord’) were simply lovely to watch, and arousing, in the best sense of the word.
Tuesday 18 July
Have padded around the house all day with nothing to show for it. Woke up late so got dressed without bathing in order to play catch up with everyone’s breakfasts and packed lunches.
Dropped Shim off then watched telly with the windows open. Then a (cold) bath and a shave. Farted around on email (i.e. deleting ones from work without reading them), then added books to my wish list on Amazon.
No cricket on the radio to kill the silence. There is, as Beckett says somewhere, … just … me. Today is the last one (Merenna breaks up this afternoon) of my life alone during my illness. From tomorrow there will be friends coming round, a different TV channel being watched, more mess. Life.
I realised as I walked Shim to school yesterday, that this was the last week of school-walks, ever. Today he told me ‘I’ve got 24 hours of this school left.’ We’re all counting them off.
I wonder what it’s done to me, this time alone? Even when I taught part-time and wrote my first book of poems for the rest of it, before children, I don’t think I’ve been so consistently on my own, in my own head. I can hardly turn round and say I’ve used it to work my way through Tolstoy or that I finally got round to Ulysses.
Neither can I claim any great insight. As Jane Tomlinson put it in the newspaper the other day, having cancer is shit. People are great, and some days are better than others, but basically, it’s a shit time. Let no one tell you otherwise. I wish I could say that I’m wiser for it, or less selfish, or better at listening, though I’d like to be.
All I would say is, I may not use them to the maximum, but I do appreciate each day more, the texture of the air at 7 am, feet on the cold kitchen floor, breeze in at the back door, the mornings of seagulls and cathedral bells. I have also noticed how unambitious I have become. For me, I mean. I’m determined to finish the novel, but if it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t. Suddenly I feel the same for the poetry. And I never thought I would say that.
What I want is to – to be present. That’s what I’ve learned. I want to strive for presence, now, here in my kitchen, with a Boeing overhead, and later at Merenna’s prize-giving as she collects her award. In my writing, as I listen to the music in a line and as my characters cause each other damage. To hear it, feel it and imagine it, as one might the shock of recognition of Thomas putting his hand in the Lord’s side. I want that ‘deep down sense of things,’ to use Hopkins’ phrase. The wild cry of shame in Shim’s voice when he comes in late and when we aren’t even angry with him. The laughter and a candlelit table which is both transitory and timeless. To spot words in Shakespeare plays that you didn’t know he used – ‘botched’ for example. To watch weird dance and good, meaty thrillers. To walk on Exmouth beach on bracing Saturday afternoons and be rugby tackled by your son and his friend. To use trains. To watch the light take leave of a roo
m. To breathe, and then breathe again, but to notice it.
Wednesday 19 July
In a flash of inspiration yesterday I went onto the net and found a great website which sells both Clairefontaine exercise books – like these, and Lamy fountain pens – like this one. You pick your colour and quantity, send them your email, then ring up with your credit card no. when the confirmation comes through. And it’s not in French. They’re based in Bury St Edmunds and have sent the books already. In the background I heard a boy shouting. ‘Someone has just discovered the Dr Who website,’ the voice said. ‘By the way, if what you want isn’t there, just ask and we’ll order it.’ I can feel a love affair coming on.
Thursday 20 July
7.15, no one up
A great evening last night. Paul and Sally, Claude and Lauren, Steven and Kari. Courgette bruschetta with our drinks, melon from the continental market with Serrano ham from the deli, Ant’s famous chicken salad, and raspberries from the garden. Didn’t even go near a drink and can remember everything.
Slowly I am realising how much of a crutch it was before I had cancer. Secretly guzzling a glass or two of Chardonnay while cooking before the guests arrived. The constant feeling of worry the next morning that I had shouted or been rude or just crashed out. Tats said over breakfast just now: ‘Don’t worry, you haven’t done that for ages.’ I woke this morning feeling exhausted and instantly thinking two things: I’m not hung-over and Did I really behave? As though I haven’t yet trained myself to relax and trust that I can get through a supper without being sloshed.
The other thing I noticed, as when I had chemo, was the alcohol on other people’s breath. Not that anyone was steaming. It made me faintly nauseous, a kind of chemical memory laid down in the poisoning that I thought I had lost or moved on from. (I was in Spar early in the morning the other day, during the baking-hour, and felt much the same, still, nearly gagging at the cooked pastry smell.)
The reading I did back in June, the Richard Ford novel, turned out to be a false dawn. Stuck at the proverbial p. 63. You get into it, but don’t persevere (am I being too harsh on myself?). It is nothing to do with the writing, and everything with my concentration, or lack of. Another book flies across the room.
Saturday 22 July
Has having cancer changed me? I talk a good game of it. But I’m not sure really. Suspicions remain that I am still the same airheaded husband of old. Not malicious, just not very good at listening and doing what I’ve been asked.
This was made brutally clear to me the other night when Tatty asked: ‘Did you get the alcopop and Pimms for my classroom assistants?’ I went cold.
Spar was able to help with the Smirnoff, but no joy on the Pimms. I had to make do with a Valpolicella from the wine rack instead.
Tats was explosive, but, considering, quite restrained, reminding me of my utter disregard for her and that my focus remains trained on myself, which is especially selfish as I am hardly busy. I took it on the chin (‘Don’t even think of saying sorry. “Sorry” isn’t good enough.’) and stayed quiet for the rest of the evening.
You see, you think you’ve emerged blinking into a new life of selflessness, where only others’ needs come first, but you haven’t. You still say to your daughter ‘Can you say that again, I missed it?’ and to your son ‘I can’t read to you tonight, I’m too tired’. In the street, meanwhile, you bump into friends and neighbours, and smile. ‘Yes, it’s going well,’ you tell them, ‘I’m improving all the time.’
A good conversation with one of Shim’s former teachers at the school barbeque the other night. She was saying how a few years ago she had a lump somewhere. It turned out to be harmless. She said: ‘It still took a couple of weeks to get the results. I can’t describe the feeling of relief when they came through.’ I said it must have been a shock, the whole process. ‘Well, that’s it really,’ she said. ‘You realise what’s important to you. Deep down. You must have had that.’ I nodded. ‘I’ve been trying to hold onto that feeling ever since, just of being grateful and determined not to get stressed over the little things.’ She paused. ‘But it’s difficult, isn’t it? You tell yourself you’re lucky to be alive, but you still get swallowed up by it.’
My lovely Clairefontaine exercise books have arrived from Bury St Edmunds, fresher than fish. Not quite the same as the one I am writing in now, but beautiful nonetheless. This one has a one-and-a-half-inch margin and one centimetre squares filled with four tiny rectangles. My new ones are the classic half-centimetre ‘maths squares’, right across the page. Stunning colours, too: lime green, and violet. It’s quite possible I like writing only because I liked stationery first.
Daddy always used to say ‘You really know summer’s arrived when it’s The Open.’
On the front of yesterday’s Guardian a picture of Darren Clarke, whose wife is ‘critically ill’ with cancer. After this tournament he will be playing no golf ‘for the foreseeable future’ in order to be with her. Good for him.
Further down the piece it describes her ‘continuing fight for health’, followed by Clarke’s claim that she is ‘a real fighter and is battling on.’ Winning The Open, or getting well from cancer, which is the tougher? I wondered whether this is what goes through his mind as he makes the turn at one over.
I don’t blame Clarke for resorting to war metaphor: that is what sportsmen do. The pressure to describe it otherwise must be overwhelming.
A refreshing antidote to this was to be heard on the BBC2 commentary, by Peter Alliss, famous ‘voice of golf’. Alliss is one of those instantly recognisable broadcasters, like Richie Benaud, or even John Peel, who appears to be saying much more than he actually does. In Alliss’s case you also have the added benefit of finding out whatever the Daily Mail is thinking at any given moment. Mostly I block him out. But yesterday, in a short gap between shots, he was passing on the best wishes of himself and ‘the team’ to a former green keeper (or such) ‘currently suffering from cancer’. I actually thought that was a brave thing to say. We prefer ‘the battle’ or ‘the fight’ with cancer, to shy away from the fact that it is painful. Sometimes you do need a member of the gin-and-blazer brigade to cut through the bullshit surrounding a topic to tell it like it is.
Thursday 25 July
One last thought on the above – then I’ll shut up. It occurred to me about a day after I’d written it that ‘the battle with cancer’ is nearly always used in the past tense, i.e. after someone has died. If it isn’t used in the past tense (as with Darren Clarke’s wife) it seems to me it’s a shorthand for saying ‘losing battle’ or, which would be more accurate, ‘poor prognosis’. But we can’t say ‘poor prognosis’ because that is to make it sound too fatal, too grim. So we make it into a battle, making it clear we expect the patient to ‘give it a good go’, even if they cannot, even if that is hopelessly unrealistic. What all this comes down to, as John Diamond says, is the deeply misguided idea that it is the patient’s responsibility to get better, not the doctor’s. This is such a damaging concept for the culture to go on promoting because it means if the battle is lost it follows that it is somehow the patient’s fault for dying. It is pure romantic bollocks. The ‘fight’, real or otherwise, is not glorious, it’s bloody exhausting. If you are lucky enough to win, it’s the doctors who need thanking.
There is having cancer, and there is your Freeview digi-box breaking down. Suddenly we only have four channels to watch. I confess to feeling utterly bereft (though not as bereft as I am at Channel 4 having taken off Frasier from its 9.15 a.m. slot just because it’s the school holidays). Luckily BBC1 was showing Billy Elliot. (I also confess to not feeling overexcited at this prospect, having seen it, and rather agreeing to the ‘Kes-with-tapdancing’ tagline it has acquired). It was much better than I remembered it being.
Before it came on, Freeview box RIP, we sat through a Strictly Come Dancing special, hosted by Bruce Forsyth, live from Trafalgar Square, a newly-white Nelson’s Column looking the other way in the background.
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br /> Moving from the ‘nation at ease with the foxtrot’ (Forsyth) to scenes of the miners’ strike in mid-80s Co. Durham was quite jarring. I wondered if five or even ten years ago such an event would have been possible, let alone twenty. It also came to mind as a rather apt metaphor for what we have become: celebrity-obsessed, post-modern-irony-aware, and, of all things, dance-literate. But what do we make? We no longer send miners down into the ground to dig up coal which is too expensive to bring to the surface, let alone use. For all its witty, moving and unsparing laying bare of the masculine psyche, I doubt that the kind of men – and boys – the film portrays could have foreseen a world where it would come to be seen not only as ‘normal’ but explicitly celebrated to have a job which, in their eyes, involves no ‘real work’ at all. Watching it I felt intensely proud to be part of a nation which has changed so much, and so quickly. At the same time I couldn’t help wondering a) whether it was all just on the surface, and b) what we have replaced the ‘traditional’ industries with. Your call is in a queue and will be answered shortly.
Love for Now Page 19