Love for Now

by Anthony Wilson

Most people who get it die within five years of diagnosis. The most common killer of all cancers, it receives the least funding on account of smoking. On the Roy Castle site it even says words to the effect of ‘If you don’t want to know the score, look away now.’

  Amazingly Glenn and Lisa were very calm. I think they realised something was up a few weeks back, when the antibiotics proved useless and when the first conversation at the hospital was with a consultant. ‘It’s called “gradual disclosure”,’ I said, sounding like a know-all. Into the space that followed this remark I wanted to pour my hard-won knowledge of the cancer sufferer, but nothing came. Even when you have lived with the possibility of death for seven months, it still hits you harder when it happens to someone else. I noticed as we sat cradling coffee cups in Lisa’s kitchen that the only person who didn’t use the word ‘cancer’ was me.

  We all went into their drawing room and said prayers for them.

  Their house is fantastically peaceful – with its art and rugs and inglenook fireplaces – as are they. ‘Whatever it is,’ Glenn said, ‘we’re OK with it and we’ll face it.’

  I can’t express how courageous I found this. I certainly don’t remember feeling the same back in February, whatever anyone told us at the time.

  Perhaps there are two kinds of cancer; the one you imagine in the abstract, and the real one you contract, out of the blue. They are both terrifying, but you only know your reaction to the latter when you’re actually given the news. I’d bet with most people it isn’t what they expect.

  Wednesday 23 August

  Before my treatment, as we walked down the corridor, the senior nurse told me she had had a bad day. (I don’t know her name, she hasn’t introdueced herself yet.) ‘That’s why I’m asking you to take that chewing gum out.’ Suddenly I was back at infants school. ‘We don’t want you choking, do we?’

  Later

  Tats and I strolled into town for a Wagamama’s lunch, leaving the kids to fend for themselves. It rained.

  When we got back Tats said we should honour our agreement to go down to the FORCE (cancer) centre on the corner of the main road by the hospital. We introduced ourselves by saying that my neighbour (Lucinda) had recommended we came, and that until now I’d not been well enough, really, to put in an appearance. They welcomed us like long lost friends.

  We were sat down on some very comfortable bamboo armchairs. There were pot plants; a Celtic harp CD played in the background. A silver-haired lady brought us tea and a plate of biscuits.

  Our introductory interview was with Brenda, who told us she is filling in for Robert, who is on holiday. ‘I just pop in from time to time,’ she said. Between questions she casually informed us she was responsible for setting the whole thing up. ‘A few years ago it was just a space on Cherrybrook Ward, and now look at us.’ She got up to fetch us some leaflets.

  When she came back she handed them out to Tatty, including the one on ‘Cancer for Men.’ She turned to me and, smiling, said something which completely floored me: ‘You look a million dollars. I’m so pleased you came.’ She went away to find more leaflets for us. I rubbed at my eyes and tried to focus on the greenery through the patio door. As Tatty used to say when I was in diagnosis limbo, ‘It’s only difficult when people are nice.’

  Over lunch Tatty looked straight at me and said ‘If you had to face mortality again would your reaction be the same?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I said, lying. Then I said: ‘I’d be more accepting of it.’

  ‘The idea of missing out on seeing what the kids become?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And what you’d become?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, if it was me, who was going to die I mean.’

  ‘I misunderstood you. I thought you meant me.’

  ‘I meant both of us.’

  ‘I’d be really worried if it was you. I think you do a much better job with the kids than I do.’

  A text from Jasper Hampson re my moustache, which he hasn’t seen yet. ‘Jimmy Edwards, Jimmy Greaves or Jimmy Hill?’ he asks. ‘None,’ I text back. ‘It’s more gay biker.’

  Thursday 24 August

  I can feel the tiredness coming back in like a tide. The soreness in my knees has returned: and my legs feel simultaneously leaden and watery.

  It’s another cool, blowy day. As the Greenbelt weekend approaches I find have very mixed feelings. Excitement at the prospect of reading to an audience again; but dread at telling people I haven’t seen for six years that I’ve been ill.

  They called the other night to ask me to introduce – as I know him – Michael Symmons Roberts. I said I’d be honoured. The last time I saw him in fact was the last year I ran the literature programme – its first at the Cheltenham racecourse. I had him reading with his sister-in-law, novelist Catherine Fox. They had never read together before. They put us on on the third floor at the grandstand in a room with windows which wouldn’t open. They had arranged the room so that where the lifts opened was just behind the space where the readers stood facing the audience. Their whole reading was peppered with the shouts and laughter of eight and nine-year-old boys running out of the lifts and back in again, in a prolonged game of chase. Not my best moment as a promoter of literature.

  Lisa and Glenn get more scan results today. Still no news. I don’t think that means it’s good.

  Tuesday 29 August

  Lisa had her biopsy today.

  They have found two lumps, masses I should say, one on each lung. While she’s under they’ll also drain the fluid: she only has 50% capacity at the moment.

  Last Wednesday they walked her round the bronchial cancer unit. While she has not been formally diagnosed yet, this is not something you do if you only suspect a chest infection.

  Then they told her it was going to be a case of prolonging life rather than looking for a cure. If the word ‘unfair’ was ever appropriate – and I think it should apply to everyone – it would seem to be more so for Lisa than for anyone else I can think of. Lisa, who is so quietly spoken and shy. Lisa who eats organic food and steers clear of dairy and wheat products. Lisa, who has never gone near a cigarette in her life.

  Over the weekend, at Greenbelt we caught up with people we hadn’t seen for six years as well as those we’d stayed in touch with so knew about my cancer.

  In the former group was Matt Pascoe, who I used to run the literature programme with. He hasn’t changed. Still beardy, still saying Fuck a lot, still gloomy about Spurs.

  It turns out he’s been ordained. It’s not his day job (‘I’d go mad if I did that’) but he works, ‘helps out’, he calls it, as a non-stipendiary minister in North London, explaining art and spirituality and talking to people who hate church about church.

  He had heard about the cancer, from Cameron and Simone. It also turns out he’s developed a theology of bad luck. ‘You having cancer didn’t mean “God says this” or “God thinks you need to learn this”, Anthony, it is just bad luck. Shit happens.’ This especially pleased Tatty for whom this has become something of a mantra this year.

  On Sunday I introduced Michael Symmons Roberts at his reading. He is now at that very special stage of his career where his success, the fantastic quality and depth of his writing, is actually in keeping with the buzz around his name – the prizes, the commissions, the reviews, the websites.

  He read exclusively from Corpus, saving the first three books for his ‘Nightcap’ reading in the bookshop. Listening to him I learned again what an absolutely top-drawer piece of work it is. It deserved to win the Whitbread but should have won more. Two things: the high-level sustaining of an enquiry into a particular image or metaphor (in this case, the body); then the completely unforced way that this becomes emblematic of much wider concerns: science/genetics, spirituality/resurrection/miracle.

  What he also did so well was give a generous insight into his own writing process. Quoting Don Paterson (or it could have been John Burnside?) he said: ‘If you think you have an idea for a poem,
kill it instantly. For a poem to work, you see, you need to marry your feeling about something with language or history or some other external source. That then takes you into territory you weren’t expecting to work in and the record of this becomes the poem. Otherwise you’re just writing what you already know, which kills the poetry.’ It was an exemplary reading, so good it made me feel like giving up.

  Yesterday, Bank Holiday Monday, the Oncology car park was empty. In early for my only morning visit of the regime, I got chatting to Mark, a shaven-headed man who told me he was a GP with a stage 4 brain tumour.

  ‘They’re trialling this new miracle drug on me,’ he said. ‘My life chances have soared from 4 to 24%. Amazing.’

  He asked me if I minded saying what I was in for.

  ‘Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.’

  ‘Oh NHL. You’ll be fine. It’s HL – Hodgkin’s – you want to avoid.’ He lowered his voice and leaned into me. ‘Killer. Still,’ he said, resuming his normal volume, ‘NHL’s quite benign.’

  I wanted to say ‘Not for Dave it isn’t. He relapsed. Nor Geraldine.’ Instead I just smiled.

  ‘You know the worst thing?’ He didn’t stop to hear me say ‘No, what?’

  ‘The telly.’ He nodded at the screen. ‘Flog It!’s on when I normally come. So depressing.’

  At which point they called my name.

  We shook hands again.

  ‘Best of luck.’

  ‘Best of luck.’

  We sounded like pilots from Bomber Command, off to give Jerry hell.

  Matt said to me at a party at the festival: ‘By the way, the ’tache. I mean, it’s great, but we’re all asking each other: ‘Why?’

  Today it came off. I had finally found it too irritating.

  Tatty says I look very much younger.

  As we walked into the chamber for today’s session Joanna, the radiologist who speaks to me, said ‘To be perfectly honest, I think she’s right.’

  Friday 1 September

  A lovely early September day, a bit of bite still left in the sunshine.

  On Wednesday we went in to see Lisa after her biopsy op. She had a drain on her lung, running away into a jug under her bed. Tatty wasn’t joking when she said it was the colour of a raspberry smoothie. There seemed to be gallons of it.

  She was on a three-bed ward, tucked away, in the thoracic unit on Level 2. The other patients in the room were elderly and watched television, half-asleep. She was smiley but looked winded, yellow. She was still a bit sick from the morphine, she said.

  Glenn was there, and the girls. I put my arm round him and he said he had lost it on the phone earlier to his mother-in-law. ‘I’m not coping.’ I don’t really know how to say this, but I took this as a good sign. It’s only when you let go of your own desire and need to stay in control that you really find out who your friends are.

  She went home last night.

  They get the biopsy results on Tuesday.

  On Wednesday evening, before popping in on Lisa, we went for our first massage at the FORCE centre. I admit it, I had been sceptical, even up to the point where Caz asked me to strip to my underpants and put on an ambient piano CD.

  Damascene would be to overstate reaction, but let’s just say that if I were rich enough I would pay for Caz and her friends to come and massage me and my family every day for the rest of our lives. Why isn’t it on the NHS? Don’t get me started.

  Afterwards, on the bamboo armchairs, we made another appointment then chatted to a woman called Emma, who seemed to want us to carry on talking, even though she was about to lock up for the night. We mentioned Lisa in passing; she said they had been in yesterday afternoon. Then for some reason, as in our conversation with Brenda last week, I had the most urgent need to cry. I don’t know what it is about the FORCE centre: whether it’s the building, the laying on of hands, or just the way they let you take your time when you’re describing your cancer and its effects, but it completely knocks me for six. Can this be on the NHS, too, please, Mr God?

  Cancer screws with your memory as well, I’m sure of it. Earlier, after lunch, Tats was doing the Guardian quick crossword.

  ‘The best words in the best order,’ she said.

  ‘Coleridge,’ I said.

  ‘Doesn’t fit. Six letters.’

  ‘Shelley then.’

  ‘That’s seven.’

  ‘Blank, blank, blank, e, blank, r, blank.’

  ‘Give up.’

  ‘You’re going to kill yourself. It’s ‘Poetry’.’

  Yesterday, waiting for the buzzing sound of the radiation machine to start, and having described the return of my diarrhoea, I’m sure I heard Irene Cara singing ‘What a Feeling’ on the radio in the corner.

  Saturday 2 September

  10 am. At the kitchen table, alone. Shimi back later from his holiday in Cornwall with Maura, Spencer and Louis. Tatty and Bendy still asleep.

  I woke to the doorbell ringing. It was the postman, dropping in the parcel of poems from the Tonbridge Poetry Competition, which I am judging. Haven’t looked at them yet.

  Went back to bed and lay there pretending to sleep and that I didn’t have a raging headache. (I’ve noticed a large increase of the latter recently – don’t know if it’s connected to being irradiated. Perhaps I should ask.)

  A dull, blowy day, splinters of rain at the window. Not the kind of Indian summer Devon specialises in.

  As I lay awake in bed I thought back to talking to Emma at the FORCE centre the other night and why I seem to need to cry when I go there. It’s not as if I’ve kept quiet about my cancer, or hidden myself away – more than I’ve needed to at any rate. I feel like I’ve talked to anyone who would listen, whether they have wanted to or not, about little else. But it struck me today: perhaps I haven’t really talked about it yet, not properly, not how it’s affected me deep down. The verbal form of this crosses my mind not in terms of ‘why?’ but ‘how?’, as in ‘How on earth did we get here?’

  Have started to flick through my Macmillan Cancer-Relief-published Men and Cancer booklet. In amongst the facts and figures (NHL is no. 7 in the men’s cancer chart, with 4% – 5,504 cases/year and no. 6 for women with 3% – 4,377 cases/year) and the useful glossary, the real gems are the bits in bold type, which are quotes from real living people:

  I am more aware of life now. I seem to be noticing and enjoying things that were always there but that I took for granted before.

  I think this pretty much sums it up.

  But here is an interesting one, from a ‘health professional’:

  On the whole, men are very good at finding out in more depth about things like what is known about their particular cancer or what a treatment involves. They also tend to confront the cancer in a more aggressive way, looking on it as the ‘enemy’. They may prepare themselves to fight cancer by taking extra care of their general health.

  Now I know why everyone – my doctors, friends, colleagues – look so surprised when I tell them I only ever visited one website on lymphoma. I am no John Diamond, genning up to become the world’s expert on what I suddenly have. I also now understand their frowns when I tell them I am not ‘fighting’ the disease. The booklet doesn’t go into God in great detail, but I’m sure if it did there’d be a section on ‘Asking God “Why me?”’ – I’d fail that test, too.

  Sunday 3 September

  A slow morning, like life before cancer in fact. Tea and muesli in bed, a shuffle through yesterday’s papers.

  At the kitchen table now, with the Macmillan Cancer Relief booklet open in front of me.

  I find I’ve only just become inquisitive, for instance, about visualising the size of my tumour. The spark for this was reading a review yesterday of the paperback edition of Alan Bennett’s Untold Stories. Apparently he was told by his doctor that it was the size of ‘An Average Rock Bun’, the name he gives his essay on the topic. I have been consistently told that my tumour was 4–5 cm in bulk, ‘bulky’ being the operative word.

&n
bsp; Without ever having got out one of Tatty’s plastic school rulers to find out what ‘4–5 cm in bulk’ looks like, I know that I’ve been cheerily going through the summer describing it as ‘about the size of a tennis ball.’ This is a lie, told, I’m sure, to make my cancer sound more serious. The truth is, 4–5 cm is more like a large lime, or one of the ripe figs Tatty has just bought from Lidl.

  I’m told that, pre-radiotherapy, the tumour had shrunk to 1–2 cm. I’ve been describing this as ‘the size of a kidney bean’. This is a lie, too. Looking at Tatty’s ruler in front of me, it’s more the size of a conker, albeit a small one.

  This is odd. First I go round saying how big it is, then how small, exaggerating on both occasions. Consciously or not, it would appear I needed it to be bigger, then smaller, than it actually was.

  ‘Fear underlies what most people feel about cancer.’ This, on p. 17 of the booklet, under the subheading ‘Feeling afraid.’ It cannot be overstated, the simple and profound truth of this statement. If we began all our discussions about cancer by acknowledging the fact of our fear, it wouldn’t be such a difficult, embarrassing, awkward and emotive subject to talk about. Yet we persist in toughing it out, sprinkling our speech with phrases like ‘prognosis’ and ‘staying positive’ as though by some strange force of alchemy they will make us feel stronger, more in control.