by Simon Carr
Among the dogs on the family farm was a partially insane eye-dog called Ponty. He was socially and professionally superior to the vulgar roustabouts, the huntaways, whose job it was to chase the sheep from behind. The eye-dog crouched up front to head the sheep in the right direction. They are the directors, the leaders, the aristocrats, the top dogs. Naturally, Ponty wouldn’t sleep in kennels with the rest; he barked continuously until he was tethered to a tree on rising ground above the others. He snarled at the huntaways who questioned his authority. He snapped at them when they tried to engage him in rough-and-tumble. And he got into increasingly savage fights with Mac, who didn’t accept his authority.
Finally there was the picture of Ponty on his back with Mac’s jaws round his throat, squeezing the life out of him. But he would never give up. ‘Damn you! Get off my throat!’ Ponty would blaze this through his eyes, wild, half mad, indomitable. ‘I will never give up! Damn you, I will never give up!’
As one year turned into the next, we all of us refused to accept the possibility of Susie succumbing to the disease, however bad things looked. We denounced the surgeons and oncologists, spurned the hospice visitor, scoffed at conventional medicine and pushed the X-rays to one side.
Instead, we pursued an aggressive alternative health programme. The mind is the most powerful organ. Positive attitude prevails. Only losers lose. We read Love, Faith and Miracles. Patients had cured themselves by doing what it was they most wanted to do in life. Someone stopped dying of cancer because all she did was play the violin. Another went orange because he drank so much carrot juice. Some Australian therapist given two weeks to live had been coughing up bits of bone, but he survived. If what the English doctors said was right, Susie needed a miracle. But miracles happen. We knew that. That is clearly true. Miracles do happen.
We entertained an amazing number of sales people in the miracle business: colour therapists, enema artists, aura analysts. She underwent a punishing series of mistletoe injections to the groin. We administered those at home. She had a herbalist in Auckland who diagnosed her state of health with a pendulum. ‘There’s some inflammation in your lower left side, but your liver’s stabilised and your lungs are getting better.’ On the video, his fingers were clumsily, shamelessly swinging the pendulum string.
A dowser in town asked her to come in for a consultation at her kitchen table. She was an unusually sensitive psychic because even without the aid of a map she could feel that the two hundred acres we were about to buy were carcinogenic. A system of underground springs was running directly underneath our bed. These would make everything much worse much more quickly. Water passing through underground tunnels moves in such a way as to generate a current – possibly of electricity, possibly something less tangible. Didn’t you know that? Cancer country. Get out of there. We paid our twenty-five dollars and left.
Who else? We had an unrelenting telesales woman who wouldn’t stop sobbing until we bought three hundred dollars’ worth of Herbalife. ‘Do you think [sobs] are you suggesting that [deeper sobs] I can’t believe you’re saying that I’m only interested in [convulsive sobs] your money?’
We had a psychic physicist who travelled a hundred miles to explain the fundamental problem that was eating away at Susie and which wouldn’t stop unless we listened to him: ‘There are electrical lines of force that circle the earth eighteen yards apart. One of these lines of force is going straight through your bedroom. That’s causing the imbalance in your system. I’ve seen it time and again. But it’s possible to cure it. Very possible. I’ve done it many times. Oh yes, many times. I’m going to bury this metal plate – I designed it myself – in the garden and when the electromagnetic line of force hits that strip it will bounce over the roof and have it land fifty yards away in the next paddock, where it can’t hurt you any more.’
‘That sounds very reasonable,’ Susie said. ‘What do you think, darling?’
What did I think? I didn’t think very much. I knew I had to do the necessary thing. That was my only guide when difficult or impossible things were put in front of me. I wouldn’t think about them, just try to do them at once. That was the thing that was necessary. But that didn’t include thinking. The thinking part was a distinct disadvantage when it came to lines of force circling the globe eighteen yards apart.
But she took all their contradictory advice with happy good humour. ‘There are nine ways to skin a cat!’ she said authoritatively, and then, ‘What? Why are you laughing?”
So, ignoring the psychic physicist and discarding the dowser’s diktats, we built a house on a hill with a foreground of farmland which had been Capability Brown’d – poplars, willows, artificial lakes which grew psychedelic-coloured algae – and a thousand-foot limestone crag across the valley floor, drawing the eye into the distance.
Susie designed the house with her builder; walking round the levelled-off hilltop, making large declarative gestures. This was where she excelled. This was what she was really good at. There were deep verandas and french doors, and a hatch from the kitchen window so the men could have their morning tea without coming into the house. It was her project, her investment in a dream that would draw her into the diminishing future. It was unaffordable, impractical, but there was no denying her such things. They were necessary. And I was doing what was necessary.
Not that I did, mark you. My behaviour was very far from saintly. ‘You’ve got to allow me to express my anger,’ she said and that was more difficult than I ever thought. ‘You have to believe in these people to get me better!’ There’s a test you wouldn’t like to take. How do we believe in the lines of force eighteen yards apart? Carcinogenic streams under our bed? Telesales people with their miracle cures in branded bottles?
A natural remedy was recommended to us in a letter from England: Dr Bach’s Flower Remedies. The company pamphlet said that the original doctor ‘had developed great sensitivity both in mind and body, and had only to hold a flower to sense its healing properties. He would develop a suffering in himself and then wander out to find the cure for it.’ The doctor’s remedies, so the doctor said, helped patients to do all sorts of attractive things – to be tolerant of others, to stop procrastination, to boost self-confidence. The remedy I found most appealing was labelled: ‘Normally strong/courageous but no longer able to struggle bravely against illness and/or adversity’. Give me some of that, I thought, I’ll have a double dose of that stuff. As it turned out, most of the healing properties came from the prose style.
Some people swear by these remedies; others swear at them.
You put your matrimonial assets in the balance and you are found wanting. And on top of the ordinary oscillations of marriage there was the other consuming thing. Death and the prospect of death creates a vortex which can swallow up many good things. The rage and depression that make up grief are given additional power by fear. Fear finds the smallest weakness in your relationship and can open you up like a bag of crisps.
Looking through my diary, I see an incident at the racetrack where I was behaving in such a way as to prompt Digby to say quite loudly: ‘Look, Simon, we all love Susie, and if you do anything to hurt her we’ll tie you down and I’ll piss on you.’ On balance, that was a comparatively positive approach; certainly it had a stronger effect than Dr Bach and I struggled more bravely as a result of this alternative approach.
‘So rude. So fucking rude!’ This was Susie relating her monthly visit to the hospital a hundred miles away. ‘That oncologist at Palmerston is a bloodless creep, he should be in some Dracula film. And he’s got the most disgusting moustache – I didn’t think doctors were allowed moustaches. They’re unhygienic! Especially his. You wouldn’t want to start thinking about what he’s concealing. He doesn’t get up, he doesn’t smile, he doesn’t greet you, he just sits behind his desk, shuffling papers and saying horrible things through his disgusting moustache.’
Digby used to ring most weeks. He was able to sense, he said, when I was being unpleasant and would call to cheer Susie up. ‘
You’ve got to treat these doctors like bank managers,’ he said. ‘When Poodle was insulted by our bank manager,’ (his wife is called Poodle, but don’t draw any conclusions from that), ‘I went in and thumped the table and told him, “The first thing you do when my wife walks in here is you stand up!” And I said if we don’t get satisfaction I’m not going to close my account, I’m going to move all my other accounts here and be in to see you every week!’
‘And did it work?’ Susie asked.
Digby said proudly: ‘He called for all my spare chequebooks to be brought into his office and he ripped them up in front of me.’
‘So, it worked?’ Susie said more doubtfully, but Digby just laughed.
And she felt fine. When people asked how she was she said she was better than fine, she was well, full of energy. It was inconceivable she was ill, she wasn’t even tired. Here’s a list I made one morning of the things she did: ‘Got herself up, had a bath, got dressed, cooked Alexander a breakfast he didn’t want, soothed him out of three tantrums, cleaned the house, went to the shop, washed the windows, put a load through the machine, mopped the floor, took the horse for its medicinal walk in the sea, shut him up in his paddock, hung out the laundry … and this was in the morning before picking up Rick the builder from the airport (an hour-and-a-half round trip).’
The oncologist was making depressing noises most months, spreading alarm and sometimes despondency, things were getting worse, there was nothing he could do. But because of his moustache she was positive things would be all right. She allowed herself to worry about one thing: Alexander’s love life.
He was in the supermarket and Susie penetrated his inner secret. A pinch-faced little girl he knew at pre-school was there with her mother; Alexander had waved to her offhandedly and looked away, but not cleverly enough. You actually have to be looking at something when you pretend to be looking at something. Susie stopped a moment, caught by his behaviour, and then realised. She gasped, she held her breath and then crowed, rather inconsiderately, I thought, ‘You like her! Don’t you! You like her!’ Alexander went pink and then red, and turned quickly away up the aisle. That’s the last thing a fellow wants, to be outed like that in public, at the age of four.
But the little girl was a wholly unsuitable amorous connection for someone of Alexander’s glamour. Great care had to be taken about that. The world was full of scheming little trollops who would prostrate themselves in front of his assets. She had to survive to protect her boy.
Some television people became interested in our situation and proposed a documentary about Susie. They took a title from another of her engaging malapropisms: Where There’s Hope There’s Life. When it was broadcast the small miracle of publicity made her an icon of resistance, she became a celebrity after all. The mailbag at our remote beach house, there underneath Cape Kidnappers, bulged with letters addressed to Susie Carr, Hawke’s Bay. Alexander gets out the videotape every now and then. We watch the faded images, waiting for where she says, ‘Doctors tell me that I might get another five years’ and her mouth turns down at one corner. She puts a fascinating edge of scorn into her voice: ‘I’m not interested in that. I want a full, normal life and live to see my children grow up and get married. I’m not interested in anything less.’
In addition to the well-wishers and old friends and admirers, the programme attracted yet more nutcases, more mono-maniacal miracle workers boasting of their previous triumphs, their spiritual energies, their angelic powers. They came to share their gifts and doubtless to claim the credit if by chance Susie survived. We were suddenly on a circuit with the hopeless, the ridiculous, the preposterous, the self-promoters. I was particularly put out by the healer who did his thing with Susie and then passed his hands over my lower torso and told me I had quite a well-developed case of cancer myself and that I had less than two years to live. To the extent it made Susie burst out into peals of laughter, it was worth it.
But it was the doctors who were right. That is, they were more right than wrong, their blood tests, their biopsies, their X-rays and surgical certainties.
She had two clear years before the cancer began to mobilise. And then it started in earnest. One morning she lifted up her nightdress and saw a bump halfway up her side, an irregular mass about the size of a thumbprint pressing out from underneath her skin. It was the first time we’d seen it in reality, the enemy. Hitherto, it had been a nasty threat from a malevolent doctor, a smudge on a photograph, something that had no physical presence. And here it suddenly was in the flesh. That made us shudder, then. It was suddenly formidable when we actually saw it, this man eater, this alien from inside trying to get out.
Day by day the thing grew, but she made no concessions to it. She looked after her horse, she went hunting, she went to parties. And then, quite suddenly, she started to get tired and we moved into another stage.
Val, her mother, made every meal and snack as tempting and digestible as it could be to pique her failing appetite. Of all of us, her mother never faltered in her determination to bring Susie through her ordeal.
She rallied, she declined, she came to, she drifted away, she smiled, still she smiled, and sometimes she went to parties. ‘You are incredible,’ one of her clumsier friends said, ‘going out like that, Susie, knowing how proud you’ve been of your looks. It must take real guts!’
As her energy levels fell she got up later, rested longer, went to bed earlier. Her defiance became more amazing as the tumours came to be the largest thing about her. It was clear the miracle cure would have to be ever more miraculous. But it was never any part of her plan to die.
Moving became more difficult but she scarcely compromised; a wheelchair was brought in to get down the corridor to the sitting room. She bathed daily, although it was a trial; the water level couldn’t cover the tumour. Maoris came by with a rather disgusting indigenous poultice that had to be changed three times a day, but she struggled through it. Another healer offered a mysterious machine that discharged different phases of electricity but it was too valuable a piece of equipment to let out of the house overnight. Neighbours drove three hours to pick it up and three hours to bring it back again for the treatment. Susie held the shiny metal cylinders and dials were turned. After a cup of tea, the neighbours started the six-hour round trip again. They did this three days in a row until the ridiculous mechanic allowed the machine to stay with her.
These attempts at remission might have been reassuring and yes, where there was hope there was life. But it seemed to me that there came a time, when the end approached, when hope did become false hope. Anger mixed with defiance were her heroic sticking points. An icon of resistance she was, but at the end she became trapped by it. There was no room in her reputation to come to terms with the facts of life.
Her legs suffered from fluid retention and so we massaged them with oil to try to push them into shape. ‘It was the one good thing about this fucking disease, that I got the legs I wanted, and now even that’s been taken away,’ she said with style, wit, humour even.
It was a four-year struggle fought without quarter.
Whereas homes should revolve around five-year-olds and their careless laughter, ours was dominated by a covert and incommunicable sense of disaster and Alexander was moved out of the centre where five-year-olds naturally expect to be.
You couldn’t count the ways in which Susie loved her son and yet it’s also true to say that in her final months, confined to bed, her wheelchair and the sofa, she detached from him. In the depths of her weariness his five-year-old games became ever more difficult to play: ‘What’s A for, Mum? What’s B for? What’s C for, Mum? What’s C for? What’s C for, Mum? Mum! What’s D for, Mum? D. D. D. What’s D for? Mum? Mum!’ And without ever admitting the worst, she grieved for leaving him, for never being able to see how he’d grow up or whom he’d marry, or being able to stop him getting involved with one of those unsuitable girls who would pursue him, so good-looking, so funny, so like her.
And he? He su
ffered in his own way because we never told him what was happening. A hospice paramedic advised us to tell him. They know about these things. It seemed obvious that he should be told. We communicate these days, we don’t leave children out of things just because they’re young. And anyway, how could we hide this great, looming disaster? The tumours came more and more to be the most obvious thing about her. Once they’d started, they suddenly, rapidly, gained in bulk. And then – by a ghastly irony for one who so wanted more children – she looked nine months pregnant. She lay on the sofa watching Sale of the Century as her hands stroked the underside of that fatal bulge, as though caressing the life of her next child.
We reasoned our way out of telling Alexander. Fighting the disease depended on keeping her spirit. We couldn’t risk, we decided, Alexander going to her with the collapsing question, ‘What’s all this I hear about you dying, Mum?’
I developed another line on it. ‘Why tell Alexander now and put a shadow over his young life? Why have him wake up every morning dreading the future? Why not wait until the last moment when even Susie will have accepted it and then tell him; the shock will be bad but it won’t last as long that way.’
It’s not an argument that carries much weight now.
Susie was a powerful woman and never more so than in her last days. She was fighting and would prevail. She was too young to go. Newspapers were reporting advances in oncology every day, all she had to do was hold on. The cure was round the corner. Next year she could get on a trial. There was to be no defeatism, no surrender. That was the script and we all played the parts we had been assigned.
Outside this gathering darkness there were still moments of the blithe life that is a five-year-old’s right in our fabulously advanced society. I’d take him down to the holiday park in the town where there was a railway system, a go-kart track and a boating lake.
He sang a song he’d made up in collaboration with Annabel from down the road: