Home Truths (29 page)

When did buskers become beggars? I busked with Flint Maystone in Paris and we had a following. We made music. We were respected. I would go so far as to say we were the precursors of skiffle. But this isn't busking, it's begging and it's threatening and how can someone so unkempt and unsightly dare to stare at me?

But the chanting, ranting beggar wasn't the only person to stare at Django. Everyone who passed him gave him more than a passing, smileless glance. You'd've thought Django would have been more of a talking point, an eyesore even, in the calm backwaters of Derbyshire, than in the swirl of London where his physical eccentricities shouldn't raise an eyebrow or bat an eyelid. However, right from the start, when he moved to Derbyshire in 1969, hirsute and kaftan-clad, with beads clanking and pony-tail flowing, they welcomed him for bringing moccasins and Pucci neckerchiefs, Astrakhan waistcoats and voluminous, embroidered flared denims to their dale.

However, on the Victoria line decades later, people steered clear of Django, as if he might bark, in case he smelt. To his consternation, he realized they held him in the same regard as they held the ranting stinking beggar on the platform. He
hardly felt that a Liberty shirt, suede waistcoat and green linen drawstring trousers warranted such suspicion. Yet it made him suddenly fret that perhaps protocol dictated the wearing of a suit to see a consultant. Soon enough he was embarrassed, ashamed even, of his apparel, denouncing himself a stupid bugger and feeling miserable. Would Ben be disappointed? Would Ben have to apologize on his behalf? If he had a mobile phone, Django supposed he could have forewarned Ben of his sartorial gaffe. Perhaps Dr Mr Pisani would decline to see him. And then he could go straight back home again.

But Ben is delighted to see Django, mainly because he'd been quite convinced that he would not appear. He's been loitering around the hospital's main entrance and silently praises Django's dress sense for holding him aloft from the crowd; a beacon of colour walking awkwardly amongst the drab bustle of everyone else.

‘How was your journey?’ Ben asks, guiding Django through hallways and corridors to his own office. ‘Would you like a drink?’

‘Scotch?’ Django asks hopefully. Ben laughs. ‘Is the tea plastic?’ Django asks. ‘Do you press a button for it?’

‘No,’ Ben assures him, ‘Marjorie makes it in a teapot. She insists. It's why I gave her the job – that perfectionism.’

‘I should like a cup of tea,’ Django says and Ben calls through to Marjorie.

‘How are you feeling?’ Ben asks.

‘Oh, you know – a little like a fish out of water,’ Django confides. ‘I don't like this town at all.’

‘And how are you feeling otherwise,’ Ben asks, ‘in yourself?’

‘Oh, you know,’ Django dismisses any gravity, ‘rather good for a gent of seventy-five. Can't complain about a rickety hip, gammy knee and mischievous waterworks.’

Ben nods and smiles. ‘I didn't know you have a gammy
knee and rickety hip,’ he says conversationally, though privately this concerns him.

‘All that thigh-slapping to Lonnie Donegan,’ Django says, ‘all that toe-tapping to Namesake Reinhardt.’

‘Ah,’ says Ben. ‘I made the appointment under
Django McCabe
.’

‘Bless you,’ Django says quietly.

‘But do you know under what name your GP has you listed?’ Ben asks.

‘Well, Dr Sutton always called me
Mr
McCabe in the surgery and Django at the Rag and Thistle,’ Django tells him, ‘but that new young girl called me
D
. McCabe. So it could be the one, or the other.’

‘OK,’ says Ben, ‘don't you worry. I'll handle it.’ Ben looks at his watch. ‘Do you have any questions? About the appointment? I'll come with you – all the way, if you like.’

‘Yes, thank you, Ben,’ Django says with a light laugh that belies the slight tremor of his hand when he raises the tea cup to take a sip. ‘Will you tell Dr Mr Pisani that you are my personal physician and anything he says to me he can say to you too? I'm no good with medical jargon.’

Ben nods.

‘Thank you,’ Django nods back.

‘Cat is well,’ Ben tells him, ‘but she doesn't know you are here.’

‘Thank you,’ says Django.

‘And Fen and Pip are well too,’ says Ben.

‘Thank you,’ says Django.

Ben glances at his watch. ‘Well, I think we'll mosey on over now,’ he says and Django is so thankful that he has Ben with him today.

Mr Pisani's appearance surprises Django who had envisaged an elongated Frankie Dettori. The consultant is in his late
fifties, short and round with a very shiny pate ringed by a smile of neatly slicked grey curls. He's wearing a suit with an orange tie, has a wedding ring on his plump finger and looks like a bank manager. His accent is Scottish and his voice is quiet. Django likes him immediately though the imminence of the examination dampens much banter on his part.

Notes are taken. Information is given. Django tells Mr Pisani that Ben is his personal physician. Ben nods but also offers to leave the room, anticipating that Django might play down his symptoms if he is there. But Django says, Please stay, and he furnishes Mr Pisani with a host of details – apologizing intermittently about whether they are relevant or not. He admits that perhaps his hips and knees aren't so much rickety or gammy as really fairly painful. His lower back too. And he adds that he has steered clear of beetroot so yes, he's fairly sure it's blood in his urine.

‘Prostate problems are common,’ Mr Pisani smiles as if Django has something akin to a simple cold of the gland. ‘Today, I'll be determining if your prostate is enlarged. And if it is – which I expect it is – what the reason may be. Most chaps over the age of fifty have an enlargement, you know, and mostly it's simply a benign condition. I'm going to take blood too. With those results – and the findings of the examination – we'll be able to see what's what and what to do.’

‘Righty-ho,’ says Django, looking to Ben for the nod and smile which he gives.

‘I think Ben has alerted you to the procedure?’ Mr Pisani asks with a sympathetic raise of his eyebrows. Suddenly, Django is concerned about the plumpness of Mr Pisani's fingers, and wishes for a tall thin Frankie Dettori. ‘It may be uncomfortable – but it shouldn't be painful.’

‘Django?’ Ben asks, noting the colour has drained from his face.

‘You will stay, won't you?’ says Django.

Ben tells Django fascinating anecdotes about his time with the professional racing cyclists; he speaks quickly, jauntily and in great detail, maintaining eye contact with Django who is lying on his side. And, without asking, Ben takes his hand at the opportune moment, holding it firmly yet tenderly, talking at Django the whole time.

‘Thank you, Mr McCabe,’ Mr Pisani says eventually. ‘I'm done. Do dress. There are tissues there. Take your time.’

‘Can I help?’ Ben asks Django.

‘No, that's OK,’ says Django. Ben sees he has a tear coursing its way down his nose.

‘You did brilliantly,’ Ben tells him as he pulls the curtain around to afford Django his privacy. ‘Take your time.’ Ben takes a seat and glances at Mr Pisani who raises his eyebrow and busies himself with his notes.

Oh Christ, thinks Ben.

‘Now,’ Mr Pisani says chattily when Django reappears and takes his seat, ‘generally speaking –
generally
speaking – an enlarged prostate ought to feel firm and smooth. Yours feels rather hard and knobbly.’

‘I see,’ says Django, though he doesn't know quite what he's meant to be seeing, or what Mr Pisani was meant to be looking for.

‘This may suggest something a little more serious than prostate problems,’ Mr Pisani continues, ‘which is why the blood test is important.’

‘OK,’ says Django. ‘You can take an armful, if you like.’

Mr Pisani smiles and nods and says a test tube will be plenty. ‘Now, you see the
symptoms
of both a benign enlargement and
a malignant tumour are similar. And you have presented those symptoms. But a malignant tumour
feels
rather different to a benign enlargement.’

‘A malignant tumour?’

‘Most prostate cancers grow very slowly indeed, Mr McCabe.’

‘
Cancer?
’ Django stands up and looks at Ben in bewilderment. ‘Who said anything about cancer? It's my waterworks. I'm just old.’

Al and the Girl from Purley

Despite all manner of skewed rationalization, Fen felt uncomfortable and at a loss. In the past, at such times, there was always Derbyshire to escape to – even if only in the realms of her imagination – but now not even that seemed an option. She was hardly likely to phone Django, nor did she consider the cause of her discomfort an appropriate topic of discussion between sisters. What was she meant to say? She told herself her sisters wouldn't understand – they'd go on about rocky patches and she didn't want to be judged or lectured.

Fen had long had an idiosyncrasy of looking from one hand to the other when weighing issues which irked her, to assist her in making a choice. Some saw it as an affectation, but it had proved a fail-safe method for her. For the second time in his life, Matt unknowingly was being held in Fen's left palm. Four years ago, a man called James Caulfield had been in her right palm. For a while she fought against having to choose, railed against her sisters' accusation of immorality, disputed their allegation of duplicity. She'd made her choice only when she realized the love she felt for Matt was more ordinary, thus somehow deeper and more true. And she has never looked back, never wondered
What if
, never doubted
her decision. But now Matt is unwittingly back in one hand, and this time Al – whose surname she doesn't even know – is in the other; yet this time they weren't unsuspecting pawns competing for Fen's love. Love wasn't coming into it at all. On the one hand, Fen feared love was lost from her relationship. On the other hand, she feared the lure of lust. Left, right. Love, lust. Right, wrong. Her scale of values was unbalanced and tipping dangerously in favour of Al.

The easiest way to keep guilt at bay and to give her feelings for Al credibility, was to blame Matt for the irritation she felt increasingly towards him. She begrudged his freedom to go to work but also resented him for not being around more, for not helping enough, for not spending quality time with Cosima. Yet when he did, his ways got on her nerves, he got in her way and ultimately, she didn't trust him to be doing things quite right so she brushed him away, did whatever it was herself, felt put upon, then resented him. In Fen's eyes, Matt couldn't win, and she felt that this was his fault. She didn't like the sound of him eating and yet she'd never noticed it before. At night, she slept with a pillow half over her head because the incessant sound of Matt sleeping kept her awake. She didn't like the monotony of their communication; his daily question of ‘And how are my girls?’ set her teeth on edge – Fen didn't like it that he lumped her and Cosima together, that he only half listened to her answer anyway while he opened post or checked the television listings in the newspaper. He didn't seem to notice if Fen's hair needed a wash and she was wearing stained clothing, or there again if she'd made an effort with mascara and had changed before he arrived home. She was aware that her friends and sisters would proclaim her lucky indeed to have a man who never judged her on her looks but Fen interpreted it as Matt not really noticing her at all.

Left hand, right hand. Good, bad. Right, wrong. Harmless,
dangerous. Fen's scales appeared to be peculiarly calibrated at best; at worst downright faulty. On the one hand, the marks Fen placed against Matt became blacker, on the other hand the warning signs she'd seen in Al became fainter. Taken together, their collusion was dangerous and deluded, exacerbated by the fact that it had been almost a week since she'd seen Al and she'd heard nothing. Al's desirability increased the longer the message box on her mobile phone remained empty. The less he appeared to want her, the more she wanted to pursue him. These last few days, during which she'd consulted her phone with frustration and growing insecurity, and analysed the palms of her hands with increasing regularity, Fen had reinvented Al and invested him with much more bearing than his actual gaucherie. She reassessed his shared living arrangements in deepest darkest Camden as funky and intriguing, and in her mind's eye he'd become far more buff and beautiful. She had transposed her previous image of him as a fairly nondescript young bloke, into a vision of an arresting enigma. When Matt attempted to travel his hands over her body last night, she'd initially flinched but then an image of Al's hands came into view and even all the silver rings suddenly seemed achingly sexy. So she fucked Al while Matt made love to her. She squirmed away from Matt's post-coital cuddle and then she'd put the pillow over her head to block out the warning bells as much as Matt's breathing pattern.

Fen convinced herself that her self-esteem depended entirely on Al desiring her, that if she could just seduce him, her sense of her own femininity and self-worth would be restored. And, with her head under the pillow muffling any sound of chastisement or ridicule, she gamely justified that it would do her disintegrating relationship with Matt the power of good. She'd often read about stale relationships being rejuvenated by one or other partner having no-strings
secret flings; heartening accounts of how people fell in love with their partners all over again in the aftermath of affairs. If she had a fling with Al, she'd see sense, wouldn't she? A fling with Al would prove what Matt truly meant to her, wouldn't it? A fling with Al would have a positive impact on her libido and this in turn would have a positive effect for Matt. Fen was convinced that if she had a fling with Al, she'd be doing everyone a favour.

But it had been three days since she'd seen him. And because it had been three whole days and because she'd heard nothing, Fen found it easy to transform Al from a bad idea best forgotten into an exciting challenge. She convinced herself that actually, hadn't
she
told
him
that she'd be in touch?