Eventually we came to a junction. To the right was a straight, steady rise to the summit; to the left, a trail across a small plateau ended in a cairn. Magteld had begun to struggle in the last few hundred metres and wanted to turn back. She had underestimated how long it would take to recover from her treatment. My instinct was to head for the summit with the boys, staying true to our original aim. She shook her head and told me sternly that none of us was going any further. This was the turning point. We would walk to the cairn and go back down, as a family.
We picked our way across the bog and looked down at the grey ribbon that led back to Glasgow. It was a good way down; we were closer to the summit than the base. We held hands and stood silently as the coarse grass rippled around our ankles. It was time to go home, we told the boys. They cheered and scrambled back down the hill, followed by me, supporting a weary Magteld. I felt a niggle of regret at missing the summit, but I was glad we had at least tried.
Magteld would have to take tamoxifen for the next five years. It was not so much a prescription as a sentence. Every morning she woke up, cancer was sitting up by her bedside, demanding attention. Before getting out of bed, she squeezed two pills from a blister pack and swallowed them with water.
Within a few weeks she was squirming in bed, racked by hot flushes. She complained of cold, tiredness and sore knees. Her periods stopped. The drug that was guarding her against the recurrence of her disease had also triggered the onset of the menopause. It fended off death with one hand and dismissed youth with the other. Her memory wavered occasionally – only for an instant, but long enough to make her feel vulnerable. She lacked the energy to take up running, so she began swimming in the mornings, among the sprightlier pensioners. Old age had swept in, like a mugger in an alleyway, leaving her breathless and frightened.
Magteld went on television to speak about the high proportion of women who abandon tamoxifen. Why, she was asked, would they refuse to take a drug that was keeping them alive? It was the lack of preparation, she said. Patients were essentially given a prescription, instructed to take the pills and left to discover the downsides for themselves. Some found the consequences – broken nights, depression and weight gain – more onerous than the cancer treatment itself. And there was no guarantee that the disease would not return. But it gave Magteld hope, and despite the side effects she continued to take it.
It’s easily forgotten that medicine is essentially poison. Benign poison, but doctors put too much faith in reason’s ability to overcome this basic fear. Every cancer patient knows the percentage game and adopts their own strategy. Empathy, with its capacity to understand fear and pain, is a more effective communication tool than plain directives to do the sensible thing.
Magteld was due to see Miss Winter on Hallowe’en for her first six-monthly check-up. It was the last hurdle in our way. If she passed we could focus all our efforts on emigrating.
At the end of September we visited Sanneke in The Hague for Adam’s eighth birthday. At this stage our knowledge of the city was limited to the central station, Sanneke’s house and a few streets in between. A bus took us on a meandering route from our rented flat in Scheveningen through the suburbs. We looked out of the window at rows of shops, monumental redbrick churches and neatly paved streets, trying to imagine where we might live.
We took the liberty of viewing an apartment, even though our house in Glasgow was resolutely unsold. It was a curious construction, with a large living room on the ground floor, a small kitchen at the back and a corridor leading through to four bedrooms piled one on top of the other up a fearsomely narrow staircase. A hammock was slung across the patio doors at the back and immediately invoked dreams of summer afternoons spent idling in the sun, dozing off with a book in hand. The facade resembled a bell tower, a fussy arrangement of red and white bricks with two recessed balconies, crowned by a narrow turret. The three upstairs rooms had fallen into disuse because the elderly couple who lived there could no longer climb the staircase. The estate agent told us they had been waiting to move for three years. How disquieting, I thought, to be cut off from parts of your own house.
As we walked round with the agent we explained that we were moving from Scotland. Towards the end of the tour he said in a lowered tone, ‘In de afgelopen tijd is dit land wat minder geworden.’ This country isn’t what it used to be. I had got used to hearing Dutch people say this for years – particularly abroad, and usually with a pinch of humblebrag: ‘It’s the country that got small, not me’. But this felt like I was being entrusted with a vital secret. It was certainly a striking confession from someone who was trying to persuade us to buy a house there.
From there we took the ten-minute tram journey to the beach. What bliss, we said to each other, to have the sea so close at hand. We sat outside a beach hut in oversized wooden chairs and basked in the September sunshine as the children ran down to the shore and jumped in the waves. ‘It’s not normally like this,’ Sanneke warned us. All the more reason to savour it, I thought, as I took off my shoes and sank my feet into the warm sand.
Next year, we thought. Next year we will be here again, definitely.
The nights closed in. Our house refused to sell, and it became clear we wouldn’t be moving before Christmas.
The waiting was like plodding through a swamp in the fog. The boys depended on us to untangle the future, but we were at the mercy of one of the most irrational forces in the world: the whims of house hunters. It was too small, or had too many rooms, or was too bruised from the impact of two boisterous children. One fastidious couple condemned it on the basis of a leaky gutter. We tried to bear it bravely. After stalling for a year Magteld was impatient to rebuild her life in her own country, and we were both becoming restless.
As the flow of viewers slowed to a trickle, our sense of stagnation deepened. Magteld started to worry she would be stuck in the house. Our former neighbours on the corner, two doors away and with a more spacious garden, had taken more than a year to sell theirs. The boys were also starting to feel the strain. Adam wanted to know if he would miss his sports day, while Euan simply asked over and over again when we would be living in Holland. Easter, we said, more in hope than expectation.
In the weeks before she saw Miss Winter, Magteld consulted other cancer patients on how to deal with this new and ambiguous fixture in her life. There was no such thing as the ‘all-clear’. The disease was never banished. The best outcome was to be told that it was dormant and she could reasonably expect to live another six months. It was like a drawn-out game of Russian roulette, because if the cancer showed up in another part of her body there was no going back.
Miss Winter told her there were no signs of the cancer returning and scheduled the next appointment for the end of April. We arranged to spend Christmas in Norwich with my parents. The house-hunting season was winding down and our best hope now was that a buyer would materialise early in the New Year.
On 9 November Magteld had a farewell lunch with her friends from the local carers’ group. Many of them had been with us at the picnic in Paisley, just over a year earlier, when she was still reeling from her diagnosis. Now she could celebrate with them, raise a glass of prosecco and look forward to life in The Hague. They gave her a silver heart and a scarf: the former as a souvenir of their friendship, the latter to wrap around herself whenever she was feeling low or in need of a hug. She looked happy and bright, they said, and excited about the future.
Around the same time she developed a niggling cough. It was early November, the time of year when colds go on the rampage in Glasgow’s dank climate. Ordinarily there would have been no reason to give it a second thought, but Magteld knew that every blip in her health from now on came with unwelcome insinuations. A cough was never just a cough.
It was nothing to worry about, she told her friends. She’d just had her six-month check-up.
Early in December she visited the chemotherapy ward, brandishing a card and a box of chocolates, her hair and vitality resto
red. The nurses recognised her instantly. For a quarter of an hour she basked in the warmth and compassion that had carried her through those terrible months a year earlier.
She talked animatedly, smiling all the while, interrupted occasionally by her persistent cough.
She went swimming once a week, on Tuesday mornings, among the pensioners who glided unhurriedly up and down the lanes. It was getting harder for her to keep up with them, and she emerged from the pool panting with the effort.
You should see the doctor, I implored her, but she resisted with gritted teeth. She wasn’t blind to the dangers; she was too sharply aware of them. She wanted to enjoy Christmas with her boys, and no cough was going to deny her. If it was still there in January she would see the doctor then. She clenched her jaw and lowered her eyes. If the worst news was around the corner, it could wait a little longer.
On the day she visited the hospital the last leaves of the season were tumbling from the tops of the trees, just as they had done a year earlier when she looked out of the window from the blue chair, her head bare, her arm tied to a drip feed.
The new year’s foliage would outlive her.
It was a Friday night, late in November, crisp and black, and I was sitting at my desk with my jacket on, all set to pack up for the night. I was working two evenings a week on Scottish Television’s news website, earning just enough to keep a stricken family going. I thought of Magteld, how she was probably curled up under the bedsheets already, and the way she opened her eyes and smiled when I came home just before midnight and slipped in beside her, feeling her soft warmth and clasping her delicate hand.
On a regular Friday evening no more than five people were in the newsroom. Just as I was about to leave, a colleague came over and alerted me to a tweet from Jim Murphy, the Labour MP for Eastwood. He wrote: ‘Awful scenes in Glasgow. Helicopter crashed into a pub.’
There wasn’t much else. The photograph Murphy had taken showed a jagged black mass squatting on top of a flat-roofed building. The pub was recognisable as the Clutha Vaults, a live-music venue whose Friday-evening gigs had a strong following. It was about ten minutes’ walk from the office, and already the wail of ambulance sirens swirled in the night air. I sent my colleague down to find out more, put one hand on the phone and started scrolling through internet channels with the other.
By the time my colleague arrived on the scene it was clear we were dealing with a terrible disaster. The police helicopter had ploughed vertically through the roof of the pub. A newspaper editor, getting into his car at the top of a multi-storey car park, watched it drop noiselessly out of the sky like a dying bird. Inside, around 120 people were sitting drinking and enjoying a gig by a local ska band. They had set out from all parts of the city in the darkness, brought together by the lure of a few hours’ music and revelry. None of them had doubted they would see daylight again.
Colleagues began drifting into the office. Others surfaced online and snapped into working mode from wherever their Friday-night meanderings had dropped them: pubs, restaurants, taxi queues. Out of the chaos of facts a news story took form. Very quickly it became clear that at least six people had died, a number that climbed to nine during the night and reached its final total two weeks later when the tenth victim died in hospital.
At some point in the first hour I phoned Magteld. I wouldn’t be coming home, I told her. ‘I didn’t think you would be,’ she said. She had been watching the coverage on the television. I spent the next eight hours grinding out updates to the website. By the time I left the office at seven in the morning a bleary November sun was glowing on the horizon and ambulances were still screaming past as they conveyed the last casualties from the accident scene, a few hundred yards up the road.
Magteld’s rasping cough embedded itself like a stubborn splinter. Sometimes it subsided for an hour or two and she would declare, ‘My cough has gone!’ But the respite was always too brief. It was just a wretched winter cold, she said, and once it was gone she could look forward again.
By Christmas she was starting to retch up specks of blood in the bathroom. Once again I implored her to see the doctor. No, she said, it was just the damp Glasgow air, the draughts in my parents’ house, the stress of selling the house. How could she be so obdurate about her own health, I wondered in frustration. But her eyes betrayed the black moths fluttering in her head.
In the week after Christmas the estate agent called with more viewings. Two couples wanted to see the house on Hogmanay. We packed our bags and took the train north, sensing a change in fortunes was imminent. Her parents booked a ferry crossing to Newcastle in March, so they could help us prepare for the move.
Neither of the couples who came to the house had children, so it seemed unlikely they would take on a four-bedroom home, but we took it as an encouraging sign. On Hogmanay Magteld was too tired to stay up for the bells, so I went out into the garden alone, sat in the cold drizzle and saluted the New Year with a solitary whisky. Whatever awaited us in 2014, it couldn’t possibly be more horrific than the year we’d just dispatched.
7
For most of history, death has been woven into the fabric of everyday life, but in these more mollycoddled times I didn’t encounter it close-up until the age of thirty-three. In the last week of 2007, as the festive lights were fading in the winter gloom, my father and I caught a train to see Motherwell vs Dundee United. We weren’t regular football-goers, but taking in a match had become a Christmas tradition. Magteld stayed at home with the boys and my mother, eating homemade cake.
We took our seats about six rows back from the touchline, sheltering unsuccessfully from the intermittent rain and cold. It was a graceless, shapeless, typically Scottish game, but with plenty of goals to keep the crowd warm. The standout moment was a sweeping move up the park by Motherwell that culminated in Stephen Hughes firing in a low drive from David Clarkson’s lay-off. That made the score 1–0 and thereafter Motherwell took charge, scoring four more times, the best of the goals a floated chip by Clarkson, who was having a match to remember.
Twenty-two minutes had passed since Clarkson’s second goal, and twelve more were left of a game that was fizzing out like a spent firework, when the home team won a corner. The ball drifted in a slow arc, gleaming in the floodlit night sky, towards the squirming figures in the penalty area. Then, quite inexplicably, one of them crumpled to the ground. Football fans are used to seeing players throw themselves to the ground theatrically, but this fall was different. Even at a distance of fifty yards in the gloom it disrupted the game like a hand grenade landing on a concert piano. The stadium instantly fell silent. The crowd of just over 5,000, which just minutes before had danced to the counterpoint of jovial hostility, was united in horror.
The player on the ground was Motherwell’s captain, Phil O’Donnell. He was just about to be substituted: at the age of thirty-five, a veteran in footballing terms, he seemed to be tiring and had been outmanoeuvred for United’s second goal, a few minutes earlier. He would take a handful more steps and feel his heart beat less than a thousand more times before he collapsed in the penalty area.
The spectators stood and applauded Phil O’Donnell as he departed the arena on a stretcher, still unmoving. The game, incongruously, resumed, but without the hostility it was a ghastly shadow theatre, and though Dundee United scored a third goal – the eighth altogether – nobody cheered, not even Noel Hunt, the scorer. The crowd drained away from the stadium, hushed and bemused. At eighteen minutes past five, as my father and I sat waiting for a train to take us home, Phil O’Donnell was pronounced dead in Wishaw General Hospital. His heart had stopped on the pitch, and the medical staff had been unable to revive him. His life had ended right there, in the white box of a playing field, among his fellow players, the match officials and 5,227 paying spectators.
The air felt numb as my father and I, along with a few dozen other match-goers, boarded the train back to Glasgow. At this point nobody knew for sure what had happened. A rumour went round
the carriage that he had been revived in the club’s medical room, but the collective sense in the stadium that something more serious was at hand was confirmed by my mother, who had been following the news on television and confirmed that of the twenty-two players who started the game at three o’clock, one had not survived the ninety minutes.
It seemed obscene that death could pluck out a fit young man in front of thousands of spectators in that modern celebration of youth and vitality, a sports match. David Clarkson must have been looking forward to celebrating his two goals later with Phil O’Donnell, who was not just his teammate and captain but also his uncle. Instead he was catapulted head first into the land of grief.
More house viewers came in the new year. The estate agent said it was encouraging: only the hardy and the desperate would look for a new home in Glasgow in the depth of winter. Magteld booked a flight to The Hague in February and lined up as many house viewings as she could manage. Her cough still plagued her, but she was determined to press ahead with our move to Holland. We scoured the online listings and hired a buying agent (the Dutch practice is to hire advisers on both sides, so that all the haggling and horse-trading is carried out in a safe environment by trained professionals). She also began looking into suitable schools. Adam would hopefully go to the local primary school with his cousins, but for Euan we faced a mountain of forms and assessments by a whole new posse of educational experts.
Halfway through January came the breakthrough. One of the viewers from Hogmanay came for a second viewing with his partner. By the end of the week we had agreed a price. I felt like a B-movie scientist who, after months working on a rattling contraption of pipes, dials and pistons, finally gets to pull the lever. I looked up removal companies and booked a ferry. We settled on a moving date of 25 April, a Friday, just after Easter, thirteen weeks away. Magteld embellished the entry in the diary with a smiley face.
All the Time We Thought We Had Page 8