All the Time We Thought We Had

by Gordon Darroch

  The poison cocktail was changed for the second half of Magteld’s chemotherapy regime, and with it the side-effects. The sickness would diminish, but she was warned to expect aching joints and the thing she feared most: an increased risk of infection. There was also the possibility of an allergic reaction to one of the drugs, docetaxel, in which case the nurse would have to pump extra anti-allergens into her veins before ‘rechallenging’ her. The word made her treatment sound like a grotesque twist on arm-wrestling. The good news was that the reaction would happen in the first five minutes or not at all.

  She sat back again in the soft blue chair. The trees outside, which had been thick with leaf when we first walked into the clinic, were swaying nakedly in the autumn breeze. The drip-feeding commenced. A slight dizziness overcame Magteld, but within ten minutes it had passed and she relaxed, knowing she had dodged the vomit trap.

  All the nurses recognised her by now. They called her by her name and shared a joke as she sat on the drip. How could they be so unflappable, I wondered, when confronted by a constant stream of the grievously ill? The senior nurse glided around the ward with the air of a zen master in his soft slippers, dispensing instructions to his staff, pausing occasionally to check that the poisons were being administered correctly. How did it affect them to be the guardians of these people’s lives, knowing as they did that many of them would be cut agonisingly short, despite their best efforts? How do you cope when existential dread becomes a feature of the scenery?

  Unfortunately, she was a terrible patient. She resented the impositions of sickness and treatment, hated yielding to the instructions of doctors. She resisted the role of invalid to the stubs of her teeth. She tolerated sympathy in small doses, as long as it didn’t remind her of her vulnerability. Anyone who tried too hard to lighten the load, or threw in an enquiry of ‘How are you?’ at an inauspicious moment, was met with a look of steely disdain.

  She was unforgiving to herself when fatigue overcame her. ‘I hate being this way,’ she said. A kind of ascetic masochism was evident in her reluctance to take painkillers. Accepting the medicine meant first submitting to the pain when she was determined to conquer it. Persuading her to take a couple of paracetamol tablets could become a drawn-out negotiating process. It would pass over, she said; she didn’t need the pills, she just wanted to get comfortable. Magteld worried that if she became reliant on painkillers it would soften her resistance. She preferred to fight the pain bare-knuckled. Only when every alternative had been exhausted and fatigue crept over her did she relent and take her medicine, and the storm was stilled.

  One evening two of Magteld’s closest friends asked if they could bring something round. She wanted to say no, but the eagerness in their voices when they phoned suggested this was more than just a casual visit. Half an hour later they arrived with a plastic shopping bag, which they opened to reveal a woollen bedspread, woven into coarse squares of forest green, cornflower blue and magenta. Over coffee her friends described how they had worked in tandem, crocheting the individual squares separately at home before knitting them together at the end. They synchronised their work in a carousel of phone calls over several weeks, like a resistance cell plotting an underground mission. The only reward they sought was the delight of a sick friend. When they unfolded it the fatigue evaporated from Magteld’s face and for the next hour she laughed and talked animatedly, as if galvanised. I remember how she lay on the sofa on winter evenings wrapped in it, enveloping herself in the warmth and love that were threaded into the fabric.

  Of all the things I inherited from Magteld, this symbol of friendship is among the most precious. When I take it out and unfold it at the onset of autumn, its muted shades trigger a stream of memories from those days. Perhaps there is still a trace of Magteld’s scent snared in the wool. For a collaborative project the finished piece is remarkably harmonious, but I cherish all the little imperfections, because those are the places where its story (is that loose thread a relic of the moment someone rushed to answer the door; does this one bear witness to a shocking twist in a TV crime drama?) is written.

  As Christmas approached, the damp of November sharpened into winter proper. The sky turned a piercing blue, frost was sprinkled across the ground and the cars in the street, and plumes of foggy breath bloomed from people’s mouths as they spoke. Magteld felt more confident going outside in the bracing cold than in the mild, wet weather where she sensed disease in every droplet. One Sunday afternoon we went for a walk in Pollok Country Park. The half-hour stroll in amber-coloured sunlight, as the children zigzagged between the hedgerows and skated across frozen puddles, felt like a major excursion after weeks of being virtually housebound. Just being outside seemed liberating and challenging, a small victory for life. We would not give up; we would not forget. Here was the world, ready to welcome us back once our year in hell was over.

  Not since childhood had I anticipated Christmas so keenly. After an autumn whose rhythm was a three-week cycle of deepening austerity, isolation and fear, the seasonal rituals gave us a much-needed focal point. My parents were visiting, and Magteld’s treatment was nearing its end. In the first weekend of December I took the boys to buy a tree, carefully inspecting the stock for volume and needle retention. (Christmas-tree selection is an essentially male pastime, like barbecuing, and reflects the same obsession with technical specifications. Nobody considers ‘leaf retention’ when buying a beech hedge.) Later that week we went holly scrumping in the small park near our house, where the monstrous holly bush groaned with berries by mid-December. In the darkness of mid-afternoon we sneaked in with a pair of shears and clipped away a clutch of branches from around the back of the bush.

  Christmas Day fell a week before her final treatment. Her aches and pains had eased enough to join us for what was, we hoped, our last Christmas dinner in Glasgow. After lunch she went back to bed, but she had participated, that was the main thing, and for a few hours we could remember what normal, unthreatened life felt like.

  Former routines were creeping back in at the edges. Magteld was walking most days now and cooking when she could. I still did the shopping and the laundry, which Magteld resented in the latter case, since hanging out the washing had been a form of therapy for her. A carers’ centre had arranged for a cleaner to come in once a week to give both of us some respite. And so we limped, like parched desert explorers glimpsing the oasis, into 2013.

  5

  Our home for the last seven years had been a roughcast red sandstone terrace house on Beaufort Avenue, typical of Glasgow’s suburbs, with trapezoid bay windows to catch as much of the scant sunlight as possible. Magteld spotted it in the newspaper one morning, and though we felt no great urgency to move out of our ornate Victorian flat on the edge of Queen’s Park, the pull of suburban living proved too strong. Euan was three years old, Adam nearly one, and we had acquired a new set of priorities, almost by stealth: docile streets, reliable schools, neighbours we knew by name, and a garden.

  When we moved in, the house had a unkempt quality. The wood panelling and stained maroon carpet in the dining room gave it the air of an amateur rugby-club bar. The bathroom was a black-tiled cave equipped with a spa bath that wheezed and spluttered when I tried to make it work. All the light fittings had the bobble-ended switches that I recognised from 1970s period dramas. The first three feet of lawn were a parched brown, a curious sight in the middle of a soaking wet September. When we first viewed it the previous owner sheepishly admitted that he had accidentally treated it with weedkiller instead of fertiliser.

  We fashioned it into a home, one room at a time. We ripped out the wood panelling, pulled up the grotesque leylandii hedges that had sucked the daylight out of the neighbours’ garden, rewired the electrics and gutted the bathroom. We replaced the lawn, uncovering a mass grave of broken bricks and rubble just below the surface, and Magteld took charge of the garden, planting a maple tree at the end and restoring order to the flowerbeds. After two years we converted the attic into a bedro
om for Euan. Adam was inconsolable when his brother moved out, until he realised that it meant he had a room to himself as well.

  Suburbia was rigid and unchanging compared to the transient life of the city tenements. It took time to acclimatise to the steadier pace, the boundary walls and picket fences, the roar of lawnmowers and hedge trimmers on a Sunday afternoon. But with two children soon to start school, it had become our natural habitat. Many of our neighbours had lived contentedly in the same house for several decades and knew each other better than their own relatives. When one of their daughters got married, the whole street turned out to wave her off on honeymoon.

  It seems absurd now, but my greatest worry was that our love would perish in the stagnant atmosphere of suburbia. In fact we were on the brink of turbulent change. Both our children would be diagnosed with autism, emigration graduated from an aspiration to a matter of urgency, and cancer was about to emerge from the shadows to menace us. My fear that Magteld and I would fall out of love was grounded in a naive understanding of the word.

  The start of 2013 brought dispiriting but not unexpected news from Dr Barrett. Magteld’s tumour had resisted the firestorm of chemotherapy. Its shape had changed from a round pebble to something more like a pumice stone, but it was otherwise unscathed. The minuscule chance of her breast being spared was gone.

  Magteld accepted the loss with mixed feelings. Her breasts had sustained the lives of her two children, but now one of them was threatening her existence. The operation was set for early February, giving her five weeks’ respite before the radiotherapy started.

  Her chemotherapy was concluded on 2 January, a public holiday in Scotland. Ordinarily the department would have been closed, but the cancer nurses came in for an extra half-day to deal with a backlog of patients. The mood was laidback and cheerful, sprinkled with anecdotes of Hogmanay. Once Magteld was finished at 2 p.m., everybody went home. The ward had become a place of sanctuary. She knew the nurses like good friends by now; they had guided her through her treatment and given her quiet encouragement. They had talked to her, shared jokes and made her feel she was still a person as well as a patient.

  We knew cancer was a percentage game. Consultants could offer prognoses and talk about likelihood of recovery, but the outcome for the patient is binary: you live or you die. Whether your chances of surviving are 5 per cent or 95 per cent, if you die you’re still just as dead. And if 95 per cent sounds like good odds, transfer it to the context of a crowd of 5,000 people attending a concert, a political demonstration or a football match. If 250 of them die in an accident it’s a disaster, even though 95 per cent of the crowd has survived.

  The Victoria Infirmary was a grand old lady of a hospital: slightly aloof and intimidating, a gothic labyrinth with wide staircases and cavernous corridors. It was built on a steep hillside, round the corner from Queen’s Park and next to the site of the Battle of Langside, where the deposed Mary, Queen of Scots made a last hopeless lunge for her old crown.

  Magteld’s mastectomy was booked for 8 February. She packed a hospital bag and a book for the waiting room, but when she arrived she discovered she was first in the queue. ‘The good thing about it was I had no time to think,’ she wrote on her blog:

  I talked to the anaesthetist and changed into a hospital gown and surgical stockings. When I was ready I was taken into the theatre, and when I woke up from the anaesthesia I looked down to see my breast was gone. I felt relieved, as I was finally rid of the tumour that has been a constant reminder of the cancer.

  After school the boys and I went up to the hospital, where Magteld had bagged a single room on the cancer ward. She pulled down her top to reveal the tip of the scar beneath the bandages. It was a test, to see if I would flinch from the sight of her ravaged chest. All I felt was gratitude that the hateful, hostile tumour was gone, that I would never again have to feel that lump squatting beneath her skin.

  The surgery was tidily done, but the skin around the scar was bloated and yellow. The boys peered at it for a moment, then went over to check out the commode in the corner of the room. She looked up at me and asked if she looked like a freak. No, I said, her life was more important. She smiled and kissed me, hesitantly.

  She was outraged to find that the hospital had no fresh fruit, despite an abundance of vending machines stuffed with sugared drinks, crisps and chocolate bars. The next day I returned, laden down with apples, bananas, grapes and blueberries. I arranged them in a bowl and watched Magteld devour them like a famished jackal. I brought a bunch of flowers from the Valentine’s Day selection and arranged them in a vase. It was a rare treat to be able to bring her Valentine’s flowers, since in her old job she would stay up all night binding red roses to meet the demand for commercially ordained gestures of romance.

  Magteld was impatient to be back home, with her boys, and eating the grilled salmon I’d promised for that evening. The doctor thought she should stay the night. He tried to persuade her, in that diligent manner peculiar to doctors, like a dog guiding sheep into a pen. She was free to choose, he said. The room was hers for as long as she needed. There were real concerns, too. During Saturday night her blood pressure had fallen so low that she collapsed on the commode. But she persisted. The best the doctor could achieve was a promise from her to come back and see the breast nurse in the morning.

  By the time we visited the nurse, Magteld’s chest cavity was pale and swollen, and she felt tired and uncomfortable. She was referred to the doctor and we waited in the canteen, trying to soothe our anxiety with coffee and shortbread. The doctor diagnosed a haematoma. The fluid needed to be drained immediately, before it went septic. That meant another operation, under anaesthetic, and another night in hospital.

  Magteld was taken to a waiting room, while I went home and made up an overnight bag, in what was becoming a well-drilled routine. When the boys came home from school I had to tell them Mum was back in hospital. I bundled them, bewildered, into the car and we set off. But when I parked at the hospital and opened the car door Adam refused to get out. This new intrusion of his mum’s illness had wrecked the version of events we had carefully constructed for our children. He wanted to see her at home, not in hospital, so he sat immobile, as if waiting for reality to blink first. If Maurice Sendak had been in the car he would have tutted and shaken his head.

  When we finally got inside we found Magteld in the waiting room, wearing a surgical gown and looking pale and exhausted. She seized my hand tightly. Her surgery would be in the late afternoon. I could see from the boys’ distressed faces that a full-scale meltdown was looming. I wanted to stay with Magteld, but she saw that they needed their routine of supper and bedtime. Go, her eyes said to me. I’ll be fine. I kissed her and gave her a stack of magazines donated by our next-door neighbour, the kind that seem to be written specially for people about to undergo major surgery.

  ‘Once they left I became very scared,’ she wrote. I still shiver when I think what must have been prowling in her mind during those hours. The encroaching blackness, the whiff of the abyss. It was the first time, she told me some weeks later, that she had gone to sleep without the assumption she would wake up again.

  After I had cooked and put the boys to bed, the hospital phoned. Magteld had come round from the operation and was recovering on the ward. We went to see her the next day, bearing more armfuls of fruit. Though she was visibly tired, some vibrancy had returned to her face. She had lost around a quarter of her blood and needed a transfusion in the night. The single room she had so avidly given up was no longer available, so she was in with a dozen other cancer patients. Nearly all of them were at least twice her age. Some had long lost their sense of daily rhythm, so the night was punctuated by the sound of bedside buzzers and nurses gliding softly through the ward.

  She came home a week later. ‘The sky has been blue for the last few days and although it is cold it feels as if spring is on the way,’ she wrote. ‘I’m more relieved than mournful about the loss of my right breast. The most imp
ortant thing is I’m alive and able to enjoy life with family and friends.’

  When Euan was three and a half, not long after the nursery staff had entranced me with his card-sequencing trick, the manager asked if an educational psychologist could come and observe him. I was vaguely stunned. I didn’t know what an educational psychologist was, but it sounded ominous.

  ‘Are you worried about him?’ I said.

  ‘A wee bit,’ she replied.

  I told Magteld. We were concerned but also relieved that someone else had noticed. Because in truth, Euan’s habits weren’t always so endearing. His speech development seemed to have stalled. His habit of singing by the radiator while his breakfast sat neglected on the table was setting us on edge. He responded to questions with blank stares or bypassed games of pass-the-parcel to absorb himself in the workings of the CD player. His days were built around obscure pernickety routines, and any deviation could precipitate a furious, limb-twirling rage.

  Autism is unfairly blamed for wrecking marriages. Yet the seeping realisation that your child is fundamentally different has a coruscating effect on a relationship. Parenting is a middle-class bloodsport, and the sight of your child lagging behind in his development brings on feelings of shame and disappointment. Euan’s autism placed an extra strain on a relationship that had started to fray. We blamed ourselves, and blamed each other. It was easier to believe that his behaviour was caused by bad parenting than accept that his brain was wired differently. Why did Magteld insist on replying for him when someone asked a question, without giving him a chance to speak? Why wasn’t I taking him to sports clubs at weekends so he could run about with other boys?