We had a late lunch in the dunes above the beach at Bamburgh. It was blowing a gale and sand skittered across the surface of everything, finding its way into every mouthful. The breakers were truly impressive, wild, white and relentless. The beach was empty, the massive castle glowering over it.
Paul, Jack and I and the boys set up a game of cricket, but the boys soon lost interest. Donning their togs, they raced into the freezing ocean and proceeded to spend the best part of the next half hour dodging and riding the waves. Jack joined them, and, briefly, Tatty.
‘I don’t believe we’re doing this,’ I shouted to Jack through the wind, as we staggered up the dunes to find a sheltered spot for our picnic. ‘We may as well, now we’re here,’ he grinned. I couldn’t help feeling he was right. Sometimes you just do daft things. I bet it’s what we’ll talk about five years from now. ‘Five years from now’: what a fine phrase that is. It’s days like today which make you grateful – and greedy – for more.
A lovely luminous drive back from the airport with Tatty after dropping off Bendy on Tuesday. There didn’t seem to be the need for rushing all of a sudden, the A7 twilight at once local and timeless, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase.
We put on an old Barry White tape – I still say ‘tape’, even when I mean ‘CD’ – and talked barehandedly about our love for each other, our children and how proud we were of them. I confessed to the thought that I considered them to be the main achievement of my life so far.
Monday 14 August
Bendy back in the house. Tats and I drove to the airport to get her last night. Security everywhere. You can’t take a sausage on to the plane, now, without it being removed. At the foot of the escalators up to the departure lounge lay a shallow cardboard box. It was filled with biros and cigarette lighters, the new weapons of mass destruction.
We saw her standing on the other side of two sets of sliding doors, in her blue Flybe sleeveless vest, looking tired and sunburned, now a teenager. I signed the document, showed the man my driving licence, and she was ours again. A slight lean of the head, into my kiss, so I catch the top of her forehead. ‘I had a wicked time,’ she said, without smiling. ‘Your moustache is well dodgy.’
Tats has gone into town to Boots to get her ‘Children’s fight sequence’ of photographs developed. I feel I am fast becoming the luddite in the family, listening to myself explaining to guests: ‘It’s really incredible you know, you just take in your disc, you know, out of your camera, leave it with them, then come back in three days for your shots.’ They look at me blankly for a minute, trying to gauge if I am stupid or trying to be ironic. ‘Yes,’ they say, ‘we’ve been doing it for a year now.’
It’s the first time I can remember getting photos back while we are still on holiday. The key word here, of course, is ‘remember’. A good article in the weekend Guardian by Tim de Lisle outlining how photographs not only aid memory, but over time actually become or even replace, the thing or event remembered. Thus: we get the photos back while still being ‘away’ and already talk about ‘the day the kids fought on the grass and Tatty photographed them’ as though it had already passed into family legend, the act of photography both preserver and event in its own right.
What you remember is very unreliable of course. This was made clear to us the week before we came away, when we saw Mummy and Daddy in Exeter, with Marie-Claude and Claude, on a long detour back from the Lakes. As always happens with Daddy, a packet of photographs was passed around, including the family shots of Granny’s 100th birthday weekend in Lymington. They were just over a month old. What we all said, on looking at me, bald and very pale, was how terrible I looked. The thing was, during the weekend itself, I spent a lot of the time saying thank you to everyone who said how well I looked. Here was evidence that I looked completely exhausted, overweight and strained.
Tuesday 15 August
Yesterday we went up into the woods above the house and cooked sausages, sweetcorn and potatoes over a fire. Marshmallows for pudding which we ate first; juice and beer and ketchup. We spent hours up there, the kids flying off to add to the two dens either side of the fire-circle. We came back stiff from squatting on logs and reeking of smoke. I took the best part of a roll of film – they all said, ‘Oh, it’s film’, as though I’d just got out a square wheel – as I did with the boat ceremony five years ago, almost to persuade myself that holidays can really be this magical, and relaxed.
Everyone on good form. Paul and I drove Nell and Patrick into town last evening to catch the bus to Edinburgh, then went onto Morrison’s to buy ingredients for Ant’s Big Curry Evening. It was the first time I’d really cooked properly on a grand scale for a while. It was exhausting, but also uplifting. As if reprising my former life I drank beer in small glasses while Paul acted as sous-chef, secretly topping me up.
The curry was a success – a bastardised version of the Jalfrezi – but the beer was a disaster. I was hung-over, on three small glasses, before we had even finished eating. I may as well accept it: for the foreseeable future I will have to live without drink.
We topped the evening off with an increasingly absurd game of Ex Libris, in which Jack thrashed the rest of us. Useless to try and repeat the jokes – you had to be there. The best material was a Dick Francis novel and Pilgrim’s Progress. Quietly chuffed to have guessed the right opening to V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in The River, never having read it.
Later
At the airport the other night I put into practice John Sutherland’s advice in the Guardian from his recent How to Read a Novel. To tell whether we are going to enjoy a book or not, don’t read the opening paragraph but page 69. If you like it there’s a good chance you’ll like the rest. I tried it out with the new Rachel Cusk, which I loved; the new John O’Farrell, which seemed utterly lazy; the new Maggie O’Farrell, which seemed too much like writing, to use Elmore Leonard’s phrase; and A Prayer for Owen Meaney, whose tone and voice I adored, without understanding a word. Then I tried the nearest slab of airport bestseller which just sent me to cliché-induced sleep. Apparently you can only buy a book to take onto the plane with you once you’ve passed through security. I wonder if it’s wall to wall Jodi Picoult through there, or if there’s a few Cusk-like bits of gold glinting in the muck.
A piece in yesterday’s Guardian about breast cancer by Dina Rabinovitch, someone, I’m ashamed to say, I’ve never heard of. She is in New York, feeling hot, having a hickman line fitted to ease intravenous administration of experimental drugs and starting treatment with a new doctor. She admits to waiting three years before coming forward to talk about the lump. She describes with great precision the look of heartbreak – and disappointment – on the doctor’s face as she says this: ‘I am still amazed they care.’
The book this comes from isn’t out till March next year, by which time … who knows? … I should be well again, about to have a second three-monthly check up, at a guess. About to celebrate being 43, all things being equal. (We should have a party, at the very least to wave off being 42, which has been lousy.) About to finish my novel? About to get a contract? About to complete what I set out to do? Do it today, don’t wait around.
Rabinovitch’s writing is classy: you can’t help but be charmed. I look forward to seeing her story in print – and to reading of her survival while enjoying my own.
Radiotherapy
16 August
The moustache is really coming on.
I began it partly in jest, partly to see if Jack would come with me. Behind all of this was a dare to myself that I would actually follow it through. Tats has said to friends it’s to celebrate having hair again: and I have heard myself say ‘It’s for Al and Dude’s party in September’ (actually a month away). Whatever. I suspect the real reason is Shimi’s chiding: ‘I bet you won’t do it, Dad. You never do what you say you’re going to do.’ So, to prove him wrong, I’ve not shaved for eight days or so.
In town for lunch today with Jack and Jena at the Drum café (a second-hand Jenn
ifer Johnston for £2.50 – I don’t need to read p. 69 to know that she is a genius). Jack asked Jena to walk between us so the citizens of Hawick wouldn’t think we were an item.
Jack’s ’tache makes him look like a Dodgeball-era Ben Stiller. The person I most closely resemble is Welsh poet Steven Knight – not famous, but at least he uses the language properly.
Back in Exeter at half-eleven last night; to the Oncology department this afternoon for a ‘verification appointment’. This began with a twenty-five minute session on an X-ray table under a large periscope-like device, with three women drawing lines on my tummy in thick felt tip. The positioning of these is crucial. I have to lie in exactly the same position for each of my twenty radiotherapy visits, so they had to get it right today. I asked, in the name of comfort, if I could have a triangular cushion for the space under my knees, as with the PET scan.
I am already dreading it.
Not the pain – of which there isn’t any – but the relentless mechanised atmosphere of the place, so different from the warmth across the corridor in Haematology.
That’s not to say the radiologists clucking round me today weren’t nice (‘7.6 across and 1.2 down – is that OK?’ one said above me) or attentive, just that I feel I am now on a conveyor belt of care, far from home.
Saturday 19 August
This was made most clear to me by the reactions to my questions about possible kidney damage. Every person I have mentioned it to blinks back at me wordlessly. For me it has been the only question I really want answering – will I come out of this with kidney damage? – but it is as though that part of my conversation with Dr Perry has not reached their notes. ‘I’ll go and have a look for you,’ they smile, kindly, without knowing what I am on about. At last one of them comes back – was it on the notes, or a computer screen? – and says that my kidney is not in the field. My turn to look back blankly. ‘It means it won’t be radiated, no. Of course, we can’t absolutely guarantee that because it’s an organ and organs move around. But no, it should be fine. Is that all?’
I miss Felicity’s twinkle and Karl being rude. Just before going out I phoned up Ian, who is in charge of my stem cell collection. They are moving it to November now, as I can’t be radiated and have bone marrow collected at the same time. ‘Hello Ian, it’s Anthony.’ He knew who I was straight away.
The scary thing about the Oncology dept is that everyone is obviously really ill. They are in Haematology, too, but, apart from the hair loss, don’t look it – except Geraldine, who looked iller and thinner each week. Everything there is on the inside. In Oncology, you see a man whose face looks like it is melting, layer by layer. Or a woman with a red, almost purple, neck, swathed in bandages. People in wheelchairs with no hair, in hospital gowns.
Perhaps for this reason, in Oncology, they use the telly. In Haematology I only saw it on once, during the World Cup, the day I had my hickman line out, and the only people I saw watching it were doctors. (In fact, I’m sure I saw Karl shouting at a nurse to move Geraldine’s armchair left a bit so he could watch the game from behind the desk.) In Oncology it’s on all the time: Flog It! followed by Diagnosis Murder, appropriate for a hospital waiting area, somehow. You think you’re ill, but you could be having treatment from Dick Van Dyke, and his son, Barry.
Some really shitty news yesterday, not in the pile of post-holiday mail, but buried in the avalanche of email, just as I was beginning to wane from wading through it all.
A man I tutored on the Arvon course last year has committed suicide. He was Australian, a retired sociology professor who came on the course on a whim. Someone had dropped out and at the last minute he filled it. He was on a grand tour of Europe, visiting ancestral sites, the trip of a lifetime. He said he hoped Arvon would change his life: his last email, in October last year, said that it was still too early to say if it had, though he had continued writing.
I got the news from Jean, who had forwarded it from Alan, another participant. Andrew was such a lovely man. He was always the one, in our workshops, who would lob in a depth charge of a comment, right at the end of a discussion of a poem, which would have us either speechless with laughter or in amazement at its wisdom. His poems ranged from left-field extemporisation to straight-under-the-fingernails lyrics which it seemed he had waited his whole life to write. I remember clearly telling him to locate that voice and do his damndest to hold onto it, because it was compelling. Even that, though, wasn’t enough. It turns out his wife had recently left him and that he had fallen into despair. He left this, one of the last poems Alan had received from him:
Listening
While her mother is far away
the child we never had
is sitting up with me
in the firelight, listening.
It is way past your bedtime.
Don’t you love the sound
of the frogs?
More poignant poetry, left on the fridge door:
If all of you said
ready to go to sleep
but never did
so please do cry
yet use your will
to fast through
the sad bitter trudge
away from the void
A revelation about poetry day today as I lay in the bath admiring my luxuriantly hairy arms and thighs (previously blond): that, having escaped the ultimate rejection slip of death, the whole business of writing new poems will come, eventually, but in the meantime, I feel I couldn’t care less. This new – and shocking – feeling of indifference came to me as I flicked through the new edition of a poetry magazine in the mail-pile yesterday morning. I could almost feel it creeping up my arms: So what? And this, despite the fact that I spotted the names of friends and acquaintances, including a tutee from last year’s Arvon in the index. Exactly the same sensation occurred – it wasn’t a feeling, it was a physical reaction – as I looked at the programme notes to the poetry festival I read at four years ago. An impeccable array of poets, workshops, readings and talks. I felt it bounce off me, the need to compete and say, in the words of the old actor/light bulb joke, ‘That could have been me up there’ completely absent. Cancer nearly killed my immune system; instead it seems to have nuked my literary ambition, a proper miracle.
Monday 21 August
First radiation in the bag.
The verification people on Friday were right: it takes about a quarter of an hour, 10 minutes of which is spent making sure you are in the right position, and the rest positioning the machine and then firing the rays. The latter takes 20 seconds, twice.
You lie down on the slab, under the periscope/hairdryer. They press a TV remote control and you move upwards, till you are about shoulder height with them, a foot and a half below the eye of the machine. Lots of clicking again and calling out of numbers. Out come the felt tips. One of them squidges your tummy, pulling one side down a bit while pushing the other up towards your ribs. Another moves your feet five centimetres to the right. So it goes on.
Then, with an invisible nod to each other, they appear satisfied – and vanish.
The lights go off for a second. You become aware of lines of red light criss-crossing the room. One of these is coming from a slit in the ceiling above you. You notice a yellow sticker next to it telling you not to look into the light. You look away and try to banish thoughts of James Bond films. You become aware that Radio 2 is playing in the corner of the room. The lights come on again.
Then there is a buzzing sound and a click.
Your big toe goes all fuzzy.
The radiologists reappear, chatting. They ask you to keep lying still, while explaining that the hairdryer is now going to swivel to a position underneath the small of your back. Out comes the TV remote control.
You try not to think of Dr Who.
They smile.
Then vanish again saying I will feel nothing.
And suddenly they’re back, saying you can climb off now Mr Wilson and see you tomorrow.
On the wa
y out I noticed that the handrail that runs both sides down the corridor from the waiting area to the radiation room is completely plastered with Thank You cards, stuck on with sellotape. Many depict flowers and sunsets: most are a bit yellowing. It struck me very hard that so many have obviously forged bonds here – and which so far have eluded me.
On the way in, a young porter/male nurse walked me down the corridor, routinely checking my name, date of birth and address before asking me to wait. Then he said: ‘And how are we feeling today?’ It was the first time I’ve been asked that question since crossing the corridor. I could have cried.
Tuesday 22 August
‘It’s a fight every day’: new slogan for a spot-removing cream from an ad on telly last night. If proof were needed that war metaphor has seeped into all aspects of language about health, surely it has arrived with this. Below the surface, as with all advertising, is the premise that you can’t do without it; and underneath that lies the fear that life isn’t worth living if you don’t buy what it tells you to.
Tatty came to bed late last night. She’d been on the internet all evening, having read Glenn’s email on Lisa’s CT scan, looking up lung cancer. We drove out with Sally to Cheriton Fitzpaine to see them this morning. It doesn’t look good.
Love for Now Page 21