The Boys Are Back

by Simon Carr

  I was visiting New Zealand on Hugo’s birthday. There we were on the foreshore of Lake Taupo, alone in a car. The passenger well was quite deep in family litter and Hugo began to play Whose Is This?

  It’s a simple and unpromising game. We only played it once, because that’s all he needed. This was how it went. Fifty times he held up an object and said: ‘Whose is this?’ There was nothing else to it; nothing that I could see. I was reading the paper, playing along rather than playing (‘That’s Grandad’s, that’s Uncle David’s, that’s Egg’s, that’s Flick’s, that’s Grandma’s’). In the closing moments he consecutively held up a golf ball, a blusher brush, a piece of fencing wire.

  ‘That’s mine,’ I said and, equally confidently, ‘That’s Mummy’s’ and then, putting down the paper to take in the fencing wire, I paused a moment and then said, ‘… That’s probably Geoff’s.’ Yes, that would have been Geoff’s all right. Geoff was a farmer, people were saying, and farmers used fencing wire, it must have been Geoff’s. From what I’d heard from well-wishers, Geoffrey was large and muscular, with penetrating green eyes and lethally good-looking – strong, masculine, blue-chinned. More to the point, he was Mummy’s new boyfriend. More important, Mummy’s secret new boyfriend. No, I wasn’t supposed to know about Geoff for reasons that never became clear. Hugo knew that I wasn’t meant to know about Geoff, maybe he’d been told, or maybe he’d just picked it up from the household atmosphere.

  That was the crucial point of Hugo’s game: he couldn’t introduce the idea of Geoff, he had to get me to say the name first. So, having artfully called in the names of all the principals – me, Mummy and … Geoff – he was then able to spring the big question, the real question, the question he’d been playing towards all this time. He said, ‘If I got on my bike and rode away, would you and Mummy and Geoffy all follow me?’

  His interrogation peaked with this question which, when you unpack it, poignantly asks: ‘Who really likes me? What’s going to happen? How much a part of all this am I? Do I have to take Geoff as seriously as you and Mummy obviously do? Do I have to fit in? And if I don’t, do you all forget me? And then who’s going to think about me?’ As I say, he was four.

  Years later, in another period of uncertainty, my other son from my other marriage ran through the lesson for me again. It was precisely the same lesson and brought me up short in the same way. The Lion King had come out in the cinema. Simba is cast out into the desert to starve; the spirit of his dead father, the lion king, inspires him to go home and rescue his inheritance from the hyenas. Alexander and I went to see it frequently, indeed daily for a while. Coming back in the car from our fifth visit he started on a series of questions which I largely ignored. But because he was talking, I played along.

  ‘Grandpa’s friend had a crane fall on him and he died, didn’t he?’ I said that was true, that had happened. He went on: ‘Grandpa’s old isn’t he, so he’ll die soon.’

  ‘Oh, Grandpa’s got a lot left in him yet, he’s a farmer, you see, and farmers are indestructible.’

  He asked: ‘Do you die if you don’t eat?’

  I answered, ‘Yes,’ and negotiated a bend.

  ‘Do you die if you can’t breathe?’

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated. And he went on at a measured pace asking if you died when you were sick, or died when you were old, or (finishing off on a comic note) if you died when you were eaten by a shark. Looking in the rear-view mirror into the back seat, I saw him sitting there with a fixed expression, rather analytically chewing a biro top.

  Thinking about this conversation later I remembered he’d found out about our having to call an ambulance one night because his mother had a breathing attack. ‘She’s all right, Alexander,’ he was told. ‘Mummy just had some problems breathing.’ They were serious problems but not life-threatening, not at that moment. The shortness of breath was caused by tumours which by this stage had gained so much bulk that they were squashing her lungs. They were also distending the liver capsule so much that she would suffer convulsions of pain so powerful she’d faint. Of course, her appetite was failing too; she hadn’t been eating much recently, despite her mother’s delicate food preparation. Alexander had seen some of these things and sensed others, from behind doors, from other rooms, from the corridor. Knowing he’d been excluded, he’d carefully put these questions in at number two and three where they wouldn’t be so conspicuous.

  He had lined up his ducks and now he started on the real content. ‘It’s just as well Mummy didn’t die, or I wouldn’t have a mummy,’ he said out of the blue. Then he paused to let it sink in. It was as if to say, ‘Is there something you want to tell me?’ and when I stayed silent he held the pause, sitting there sucking the top of his biro. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?’ Suck, suck. ‘Why don’t you, for instance, tell me Mummy isn’t going to die?’ Suck, suck.

  Instead of taking up the unspoken dialogue I said, ‘Be careful sucking that pen top, little one, if you inhale it you could choke.’ That wasn’t what he wanted, exactly, but it was enough to turn to his purposes. He asked what ‘choke’ meant and I said, ‘You wouldn’t be able to breathe.’

  ‘Would I die then?’

  ‘You could do.’

  ‘Is it bad, dying?’

  ‘Well, it’s something everyone has to do sooner or later, but it’s sad for the people who are left.’

  ‘If I die, you’ll have to wait for another baby to come along.’

  ‘Ah-oh!’ I protested in that up-and-down five-year-old way. ‘But I want my Alexander!’

  He thought about this. ‘You could call the new baby Alexander?’ he suggested.

  And looking back it couldn’t be clearer what he meant. ‘Look. We haven’t been to see The Lion King five times this week just because we like it. This dying thing is actually something we can talk about. I know something very serious is happening to Mum at home, I’m not as frightened about it as you think I am, so for Pete’s sake, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?’

  I wasn’t able to take him up on his offer. And he never made us go into detail about the doctors and the healers, and why Mummy was spending more and more time in bed. How deep can diplomatic feelings go in the mind of a five-year-old boy? Now we know.

  Alexander’s mum

  Susie was a bird of paradise that had flown out of one of New Zealand’s remoter farming districts: an exuberant redhead (‘not red, auburn!’) with her own physiotherapy business, her own premises, her own client list.

  She was a country girl with all the virtues that go along with that. She could call dogs across two hillsides; she could prepare a dinner party for billionaires; she could navigate a racing boat. She could dance all night and work all day. She was the first female physio to go away with a New Zealand national team, to the America’s Cup challenge in Perth. She drove her zippy little car faster than her male contemporaries who were stockbrokers (they were driving Hondas – she bought the Alfa against her accountant’s most expensive advice). She was uniquely endowed with beauty, rowdiness, sympathy, sex appeal, energy and, as it turned out later, cancer.

  She was marvellous, marvellous in all her parts, except perhaps her ankles – the only thing she blamed her father for. She was one of the glorious fresh-air girls New Zealand produces, with her colouring and vigour, her sense of humour and ferocious tribal loyalty.

  ‘Obviously New Zealand is the best agricultural land in the world,’ she once told me, ‘but some parts are better than others, and other parts are much better.’ She looked at me. I asked her for her analysis of New Zealand’s agricultural base.

  ‘Well,’ she said firmly. ‘You can’t live in the South Island, so let’s not even think about that.’ She had been engaged to a big-time South Islander but had broken it off because he wanted her to live down there (too conservative, too well-mannered, not rowdy enough). ‘North of Auckland the land is pretty scrappy. Down the west coast south of Auckland is dairy farmers.’ She made a face you’d under
stand if you saw it. It referred to people who had to get up early every day and milk their own animals. That couldn’t be right. ‘The bottom of the North Island is windy and very heavy soil. The people are dour. You can’t drive a new car south of Woodville. So realistically, you’re left with Hawke’s Bay.’ Susie and her family came from Hawke’s Bay. It had been the glamour capital of the country when farming paid, as recently as ten years before. ‘The plains are the most fertile land in New Zealand, but they drought. To get good growth for sheep and beef you have to go up into the hills where the rainfall’s better, and the further up the hills you go the better the country. Selby’s got good country’ (Selby was her handsome neighbour two miles down the road) ‘but the best rainfall is at the top of the Marae Totara, actually, where Dad’s farm is. That’s the best farming land in New Zealand.’

  This sincere and deeply held belief that you were born and brought up on the most favoured square mile in the world is a great source of self-esteem.

  In those early, innocent years she had the looks and manner, the presence, of a pre-celebrity – a film star smile, flashing eyes, a marvellous bosom. She had a manner that combined warmth and gaiety in the most intimate way. She had a star quality, a radiance and she came within an ace of being the royal family’s physiotherapist.

  We honeymooned in Manhattan; Alexander was conceived in the New York Athletic Club. We came back to London where mortgage rates were doubling and we didn’t have any money. Six weeks after Alexander was born Susie was back in action. She had regained her weight and set up a visiting physiotherapy business in central London to set the family budget on its feet.

  Fifteen years before she’d worked for Miss Howell’s Harley Street physiotherapists. They were the Charlie’s Angels of physiotherapy, driving round London to attend to clients so rich they didn’t have to walk. She still held the parking ticket record for that time. In her new career she achieved a rapid cure on a patient, who was practically living on her back because it hurt too much to stand up. So relieved and grateful was the patient that she set about promoting her saviour as a miracle worker. She had many useful contacts for her campaign, not least a GP whom she shared with Fergie at a time when that wasn’t as risible as it later became.

  A vital fact: the very week of the miracle, Buckingham Palace’s existing physiotherapist left for her native Australia. There was a clear gap in the royal household for a southern-hemisphere glamour-pants who could do backs and ligaments (and perhaps a bit of marriage counselling at the same time). Who knows? Their breezy common sense allows New Zealand women to pass unsnagged through the thickets of the English upper classes – who knows how history might have been changed had Susie twinkled her way up the steps of the royal household?

  But that was also the week we found out what her stomach cramps really meant.

  We’d been married two years; Alexander was one; there were these gripping abdominal pains – stress, obviously, we diagnosed it as stress. There had been no pain when she went to New Zealand for her holiday, the pains returned when she came back to the traffic, the rain, the lead emissions and the general carnage of London life. ‘Have you had a baby recently?’ her doctor asked. ‘You have? That’ll be it. How old are you? You’re far too young to have anything sinister going on. Far too young,’ she emphasised.

  The cramps continued. It’s hard to go to your doctor and say, ‘I think there’s something terribly wrong. Find out exactly what it is and then tell me I might be dying.’

  But it didn’t go away. On the contrary, the pain started coming regularly, weekly. And then it went further. We were leaving a friend’s fiftieth and the pain stopped her on the steps coming out. She doubled over, crouching down on her haunches in her evening dress, one hand gripping the black London railings. The next day we rang a specialist and while he said there was nothing at all to worry about, he called her in immediately.

  We were coming up to Christmas. The doctor gave her a barium meal. I was at work. The staff had gone to the pub for lunch. Then a call came through from home. The au pair was sobbing. ‘Come quickly, come quickly. It’s Susie! Come quickly.’ She had collapsed in Leamore Street, under the bridge. Faint with pain, she had struggled up the railings to the house; she collapsed again in the hall and the terrified au pair helped her to bed. After I got home I ran up the stairs in twos and found her in bed, faint with pain, half gone. A doctor came, injected a painkiller and said she’d be back in six hours. She left. But the pain erupted again and I called an ambulance.

  They rushed her through the afternoon traffic with sirens going. At the Westminster Hospital they wheeled her into X-ray and then directly into emergency surgery. ‘What is it? What could it be?’

  It was as though she was in labour; the barium meal had met a massive obstruction, but it was trying to force its way through. ‘What could it be that’s not dangerous?’

  A young doctor searched for something to say. ‘It could be some sort of fibrous growth,’ he suggested.

  ‘Fibrous growth? Good. That’s what it’ll be, a fibrous blockage. They’ll remove it and her cramps will disappear. That’s good, then. Fibrous.’

  It was two days before Christmas when she went into surgery. In the ward, some hours later, I was waiting for her to be wheeled in from the operating theatre. Alexander was being picked up by our au pair. I was reading a political periodical at the ward table. Two men in white coats, doctors, surgeons, asked my name. They said they wanted to speak to me and were looking for a suitable place to do so.

  ‘How about here?’ I said, indicating the bed that had been reserved for Susie.

  ‘We need somewhere private,’ one of them muttered.

  ‘We could draw the curtains?’ I suggested.

  But he said vaguely, ‘No, let’s have a look out here.’ I couldn’t see why. The doctor opened a door off the corridor and we went into a storeroom for medical supplies. The two of them leaned against a shelf carrying cleaning agents. I sat on the edge of some drum and started to listen to what they had to say.

  They came to the point without preamble: they had found tumours, lots of tumours – two in her intestine and certainly three but equally certainly more than three in her liver. ‘No,’ they said in answer to a question. ‘It’s terminal.’ If left untreated she’d live a year, but if she consented to a new procedure they were developing they were fairly sure they could offer her another year. If there’d only been two tumours in her liver she would have had a greater chance. Four liver tumours indicated that the disease had probably spread to her lungs. There was no possibility of error in their diagnosis, no possibility of an extension and no possibility of a transplant.

  You don’t hear these things for a moment, as on a delayed tape. You black out a bit. Then they come at you with great certainty. You ask a question and you see that they’re waiting for you to finish because you can’t speak. You are trying to speak but nothing comes out, you are gulping and then suddenly it’s like being sick, only these thick, convulsive sobs emerge.

  They see this a lot, you have to think, these bearers of news like this. They must have hardened themselves, or grown some sort of shell to protect themselves. It’s like they look at you through special shades to keep out the glare. Because when people get this sort of news they go off like bombs.

  On the other hand they do it so much you’d think they’d be better at it. Their manner really seemed to be designed to crush you into submission. Later on, the surgeon would say: ‘You must have absolute faith in everything I say.’ And considering the death sentence he was offering you couldn’t quite see the upside of doing that.

  But the further we went into the system, the worse the manners became. A young nurse breezed into Susie’s room the day after this diagnosis trilling: ‘What a lot of flowers in here! It looks like a funeral parlour, doesn’t it!’ There was really nothing we could think of to say to that, in case she pouted and said, ‘You’ve made me feel awful, you have, you’ve made me feel really awful!’ S
o we just looked down and she waded through a deepening silence to get out of the room.

  When Susie came out of her anaesthetic, after her first operation, I was holding her hand in that curtained cubicle. I remember her smile to me. And her first question: ‘Have they put a bag on me?’ I said they hadn’t and she said, ‘Thank God!’ She was so relieved because now she’d be able to swim and lie on the beach, and our holiday in New Zealand could be extended so she could recover all summer from the operation. All this before she understood what was happening to her. Before she felt the crushing power of what the surgeons said. Putting her hand to her eyes she uttered a cry that came from the depths of her.

  She was a farmer’s daughter; she was blessed with inner powers. It was two days after this diagnosis that she laughed out loud. One of the hospital visitors, someone called Basil, put his head round the door on Boxing Day and asked her whether she knew the result of the Chelsea match. ‘Have you heard,’ he enquired with a sort of institutional eagerness, ‘what’s happened between Chelsea and Arsenal?’

  ‘It’s soccer,’ I prompted her out of the corner of my mouth.

  ‘Oh, God! I hate soccer!’ she declared, rather magnificently in the circumstances.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Yes. And how are you feeling? I’m Basil, by the way.’

  ‘Well, Basil,’ Susie commented, ‘I’ve had happier Christmases. How are you feeling?’ He told her and then she said, ‘Don’t think it isn’t nice to see you, but shouldn’t you be with your family?’

  ‘I’m just, er, doing my Christmas round.’ He started to look as though he’d rather be on the other side of the door. ‘The Lord be with you.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ she called after him as he left, ‘but I can’t say he’s been doing much of that just recently. Who was that, anyway?’ she asked as the door closed.

  ‘He was a priest. Didn’t you see his collar?’

  ‘Do they have priests called Basil?’ She sounded incredulous.