Love for Now (3 page)

I smiled back, feeling suddenly sore.

For the first time I knew I was scared.

Groggy from the biopsy, and in a little room off the main ward, Tatty brought me a fantastic apricot and custard Danish from the hospital ‘boulangerie’ with a coffee. But I was forbidden to sit up to drink or eat.

Esther appeared in my doorway and asked how it went.

‘First it was through my back, then through my tummy, then my back again. Apparently there were three of them there behind the screen deciding which way to go. It’s obviously not easy to get to.’

I took another mouthful of Danish.

Tatty said, ‘He’ll be hating this. Crumbs in bed drive him mad.’

Esther found this hilarious.

‘Do you want a bit?’ I said.

‘I think you deserve it far more than me.’

‘Tatty’s right. I do hate crumbs. But it’s an amazing Danish. Anyway they got three plugs of stuff in the end. The only thing was, he told me he couldn’t be 100% sure they got enough because of the obliqueness of the angle they had to use. He said they might have got only dead cells, but was hopeful they had enough.’

‘This sometimes happens,’ she said.

She looked down at my hopeless attempts to sip coffee through the lid of my cup.

‘It looks like you need a straw. Straws I can do.’ And she left.

I saw James Bradley for coffee today. He came round half one-ish, just as I finished the kitchen floor.

After the usual banter (Palace lost to Preston in the Cup), we got down to brass tacks. He told me that what happens to the lymph gland is it starts splitting cells – or rather, cells start splitting within it, and this forms a solid mass. Like Dr Esther, he has no idea why this happens.

‘How close is it to the aorta?’

‘Very.’

He frowned.

‘Of course that might not be tricky, the aorta, even though it’s like a hosepipe,’ he made an ‘O’ with his fingers, ‘is extremely flexible. They’ll probably hold it out of the way while they work on the lump.’

‘You’re talking about surgery?’

‘Even if it isn’t malign, they’ll still have to get rid of it, surely,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

‘The good news is,’ he brightened, ‘it doesn’t sound aggressive. No signs anywhere else?’

‘None.’

‘They might not even need to use chemo then.’

He’s such a delight, even though his brain does move so fast. He brought me McGough’s new Penguin
Selected
, just about the perfect gift for ‘raising a smile’ as he put it.

‘I knew Birkett of Birkett’s Lymphoma fame,’ he told me. ‘Friend of mine at Cambridge. You can see his statue at Dublin airport in a line of famous Irish scientists.’

Not a bad night last night. Don’t remember waking or sweating. The first night back after hospital was dreadful, waking drenched with sweat and hardly sleeping at all. It took me back to Esther’s methodical questioning. The next night was also sweaty, but less so. Let’s hope it was nothing. It reminded me of Tom Gunn’s poem. I swear I lay awake planning and saying over to myself lines of seven syllables in homage to him: ‘On re-reading “The Man with Night Sweats”’, daft and somehow grand. I’m sure there was even a line there which rhymed ‘plague’ and ‘gay’. Not clever.

I’ve hardly been able to read anything. Hardly any poetry. I just don’t seem to want it. All I have read is the sports pages, and little bits of Jaan Kaplinski:

Bizarrely, I find this reassuring, because it is simple and not trying to ‘say’ anything. Almost refreshing in his way, and also because so little of nearly everything spends its time in the circle of the final questions. And he is not afraid to do that – like Carver and Tranströmer, who I also go back to most often. As always, I think when I read him: ‘How does he know so much about
me
?’

Dictionaries are useless. Under lymphoma it first says ‘tumour of the lymphatic system’. Under ‘tumour’ (I even know what that is!) it says ‘morbid growth’; and under ‘morbid’ all it says is ‘of death, disease’. A diseased growth on my lymphatic nodes, well I knew that. Why doesn’t my dictionary say ‘Anthony you have cancer of the lymphatic system’? I did learn that lymph is pale yellow, apparently, and alkaline, and slightly salty to the taste. Good. I wouldn’t want it to be green and acid and tasting of bile, because that would be really scary.

They told me yesterday.

I saw Alison (a GP) at the school gates with Juliette. As with the others earlier in the week she insisted not having heard was a good sign. I replied I knew it was still a week before they said they’d ring me, but couldn’t dislodge the need to
know, nevertheless. Earlier in the week Jasper Hampson had said to me in the street: ‘But if it was good news, why would they delay telling you? It’s completely illogical.’ So I bought Shimi a cake and gave him tea, and once he was ensconced on the computer, called Esther at EMU.

The secretary was efficient, calm. ‘Does she know you?’

I could hear her passing the phone, asking if she needed my notes. I could hear Esther saying No, she wouldn’t.

‘Hello, Esther, I just had one quick question if that’s okay?’

‘Mr Wilson. You’ve saved me a phone call actually. I was going to call you later.’

‘Well, shall I ask my question? You might be answering it anyway, in a minute, if you know what I mean.’

‘Fire away.’

‘Well, I was first wondering, does not having heard anything mean anything one way or the other, I mean, I know you said two weeks.’

‘It’s academic now, in any case. We’ve had your results. It is lymphoma, as we had thought.’

There was a silence.

‘Well thank you for letting me know. That’s good. I mean, it’s not good, it’s good of you to tell me. Thank you.’

‘Do you have a pen? I need to give you some details about next week, who you’re going to see next.’

‘Yes, right, a pen. Thank you.’

Then she told me I was going to see a consultant haematologist, on Tuesday, in area A, Level 1, at 9.30.

‘Thank you for everything.’

‘That’s alright. Goodbye.’

A great blankness came over me as I pressed the red button on the phone. I went to the window overlooking the road and thinking (not at all over-dramatically, I thought): How many more times will I witness this perfectly ordinary scene of people walking back from school, parking their cars and standing talking on the pavement? Then I took another
circuit of the room and wondered why I did not feel more anguished. I almost said out loud ‘What am I supposed to do now?’ I plonked myself back down on the sofa, picked up the
Guardian
I’d been reading five minutes before, and continued scanning the album reviews, as if I’d just put the phone down to my mother. As it happens, I’m not really bothered what the
Guardian
(or anyone else) thinks about the new Miles Davis outtakes box-set, as it is music not aimed at me, and he doesn’t need me to help him. But at that moment it took on a vital new significance, What the
Guardian
Thinks Of The New Miles Davis Outtakes Box-Set, as if it had become part of my new and as yet unsaid resistance to having cancer. I cannot remember a syllable of that article. But I do know that the sun came out, briefly, that a car went on being parked, that the house made its usual ticking noises, and that I felt utterly empty, nonplussed, lost in thought and completely thought-less at the same time.

I went and stood by the other window, then sat on the bed for a few pages of
The Stone Diaries
until I heard Tatty’s key in the door. I haven’t picked it up since.

Later I phoned round the family. Both Mummy and Daddy said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ Mummy cried quite a lot. ‘We love you, darling.’

When I phoned Mart he went even quieter than normal (I can hardly hear him on the phone these days). ‘I’m sorry, Ant.’ Rich said, when I told him it was lymphoma, ‘Wow! Ant! What is it? How are you feeling?’ And Sarah, back at Grove Road, having heard it all on speaker phone, said she was sorry too, and maybe they could come down sometime soon.

Then I went to Robyn and Rory, and the Olsens. All I remember is what they were eating. The Laceys some kind of vegetable broth, with dumplings, all five of them seated round their tiny square table like that Van Gough picture of the potato eaters. Robyn put her arm round me. ‘It’s not the
end, Ant. Look at me. I’m still here. You’ve just got to write off a year of your life and get better.’

Adam had three flat fish all ready for the oven: ‘Two Dover Sole and one fat Brill.’

‘I love Brill,’ I said. Since his cooking course he’s obviously going for it, the table full of plates with chopped veg and ingredients. Military planning in his mises. They gave me hugs and said if there was anything they could do, anything, and I said we certainly would. The main thing is that none of them text Bendy, in Germany on her school trip. We have to tell her face to face.

She’s already called three times. She could be in Basingstoke, for all the going outside she has done. Apparently she woke up at Dover and said Hooray, we’re in France. ‘The white cliffs of Dover are in England you dur,’ she was told. The highlight was the breakfast in Calais. ‘Then I slept through Belgium and the Netherlands.’

‘You didn’t miss much,’ I said.

She rang this morning, from a shopping trip in a German mall, and spent the time discussing the insides of the Kinder egg I had originally bought for Shim.

We told Shimi pretty quickly. As he said two weeks ago, when we said I might have cancer, his first response was ‘Are you going to die?’ and then, ‘Do you feel better now you know?’ He always gets to the point. Two minutes later he was on MSN to Louis. ‘My dad has cancer.’ Louis replied ‘I am so sorry. How are you feeling?’ Not bad for a ten-year-old boy. Stored during all the phone calls to family there was a teary message from Maura re Louis’s MSN message. ‘Is it true? I only saw Anthony at 3 o’clock and he had no news at that stage.’ I phoned her back and she told me how loved I was, and brave, and how the Eric James book she’s lent me really is full of the most wonderful applied theology. ‘And I will continually hold you in the light, I promise.’

This was both comfort and accusation. Dipping in at random I found a beautiful and learned passage on the suffering
of King Lear. Just my thing. But the words swam in front of me. I feel I am reduced to reading like a teenager, only able to sustain interest and concentration if the words are actually about me. I threw it across the room, where it has stayed. One day I might be able to confess this to Maura.

The worst moment was when Tatty walked in from work. I had put the phone down five minutes before. ‘Hi, darling. I’m absolutely feeling dreadful. I think it’s flu.’ And the thing I nearly said, but didn’t, was ‘You feel bad? I’ve just been told I’ve got cancer.’ I let her go on for a bit, then she said ‘Did you call them?’ And I told her. We stood for a long time hugging each other in the hall, not saying very much. I stroked her head and whispered ‘Sorry’ into her neck.

I managed a bike ride into town with Shimi yesterday, to take back CDs, then we went round the quay and stopped off for a smoothie and a bun at Mango’s.

He was intensely interested in a man driving a council roadsweeper, a miniature one, with brushes rotating at the front to sweep up the litter. The man, dressed entirely in luminous clothing, took a long time finding the right key to unlock a bin by the riverside. We watched him putting in a new plastic bag and tie up the full one onto the back of the roadsweeper.

Then suddenly: ‘Are you going to lose your hair, Dad?’ It was the first thing he had said on the night we told him, before asking if we would be poor.

‘Haven’t got much to lose anyway,’ I said.

‘Can we go now, Dad?’

‘Yup, let’s go and pay.’

Merenna gets home tonight. Since going off to Germany the main thing we’ve said to people is not to text or ring the mobile as she needs to know from us first. Poor girl, she’ll get
here, exhausted and probably ill, at midnight, to be told her dad has cancer.

On Friday I was all for telling everyone, with the proviso they didn’t get in touch, but how can you do that? It’s gone against the grain, but it has been the right thing to do. Bendy must come first. She has to hear from us. And anyway, it’s not till Tuesday that we will know more ourselves, so perhaps it’s just as well. This way we can at least say on Tuesday afternoon that it’s x variety at y stage, and is treatable by z. So the phone hasn’t been ringing wildly all weekend (what bliss) but I know all of that is about to change.

I have used having cancer as an excuse for some retail therapy on Amazon. It makes you realise life is too short to go without Grover Washington in the kitchen on CD, when you only play the LP on special occasions in the sitting room.

I have re-bought the following:

Grover Washington Junior:
Mister Magic

Talking Heads:
Remain in Light

Nick Drake:
Way to Blue

The Vulgar Boatmen:
Opposite Sex

Harold Budd:
The Serpent in Quicksilver

and Everything But The Girl’s
Acoustic
.

Why live without what you know will make you happy? The thing is, I can see myself needing a lot more therapy soon. It’s addictive, the one-click business, and so easy; I’m going for the
Best Of the Go-Betweens
and some of those late Talk Talk LPs Tatty winces at.

It’s also made me track down all the Van and Cocteaus and Blue Nile CDs I’ve been too lazy to listen to all this time. It turns out I own far more Van Morrison than is actually legal. This week alone I’ve been reacquainted with
Hard Nose the Highway, No Guru, No Teacher, No Method, Into the Music, Common One
and
Irish Heartbeat
. I’ve genuinely had pleasure from them all, especially
Common One
, which seems (sorry) seamless, a whole, a complete
work
, as Mart would say, and
Into the Music
, the last three tracks
particularly. There’s a moment on ‘And the Healing Has Begun’ when he yells at his band with an instruction, and he gives a little yelp as he does it, the piano taking a lovely fill at the top of the keyboard, a signal that he intends his musicians to Go For It Or Else that is somehow bossy, sexy, gorgeous and hilarious all at once. It’s one of my favourite moments in music, and I bet he rehearsed them raw to get there.