Love for Now (5 page)

On the way back from hospital from our meeting with Gill we passed an old-school electricity station on a side alley, with yellow warning signs of flashing lightning. Next to it, in plain black felt tip, another sign in clear handwriting: ‘The Door to the Other Life.’

‘Weird,’ said Tatty.

‘How did they know?’ I said.

Gill said the hair might come back curly and a different colour.

‘As log as it isn’t red,’ I said.

‘You never know,’ she deadpanned.

Tatty describes the Haematology unit as like being in the business class waiting room at an airport. It’s very hushed, with curvy walls of different colours, a yellow one meeting a blue, and the chairs are a kind of mottled pink which probably goes under the name of ‘frosted heather’. The magazines are better quality, too: no Heat or Angler’s Monthly; it’s all Country Living and SAGA. I was reading the latter as we were called in for our first chat with Felicity. It was an interview with Ned Sherrin, who said the three essentials of life were food, drink, and taxis. The best thing about growing old, he said, was ‘slaying the beast of sexual desire’.

There’s a café in the waiting room. You get a real china mug and carrot cake ‘homemade by our volunteers’. There is a lot of touching of arms and laughter. The nurse who saw me yesterday made small-talk with a grey haired lady (a former patient in for a check-up, I’d guess) for fully five minutes, two yards away from where we sat, never once losing interest or eye contact. Karl, exuding positivity and cheeriness, bounded in at one point and made a joke about her not needing makeup because she looked so young.

Gill let us ask questions (mostly Tatty, as I had gone a bit blank), then talked through the implications of the trial. I can pull out at any time; and it all remains completely confidential. The main things to clear up were that I
won’t
be spending Wednesday night in the ward; and that I am allowed to continue to drink.

‘Of course, you may find after a while you don’t want to. Some people just lose their taste for it.’

‘OK.’

‘Or their taste altogether,’ she said.

They will want me to drink 2–3 litres of water a day, to flush out the drugs once it has started work on the tumour. And my fruit consumption will have to go up, to avoid constipation. If I go two days ‘without going’ I am to call them. Ditto if my temperature goes over 38 °C, day or night. There’s a long list of numbers I am going to become extremely familiar with. The main givens are hair loss and lethargy. ‘It’s very possible you will be knocked out a bit,’ she said.

Later Robyn and Rory are coming round to drink with us and eat beef casserole (in that order). Robyn saw Tats in the street today and said plainly ‘Prepare him to feel rubbish, I did.’ Even though the length of treatment is shorter than six months, it does frighten the shit out of me, the idea of entering the tunnel voluntarily, with barely a speck of light at the end of it.

Tatty has been reading the leaflet on NHL to me. It says by
2025 lymphoma will be as common as breast, lung, skin and colon cancer. It is increasing in Europe more than the ‘developing world’ and in the UK grows by 4% a year.

I said: ‘For the first time in my life I’m ahead of the crowd.’

A good evening last night with Robyn and Rory and Paul and Sally. Lots of banter, laughter, and alcohol. Bruschetta in the sitting room with fizz and olives, Bourguignon with mash, then Sally’s brownies and cream. They all caught the vibe brilliantly, with Paul brandishing his own bottle of pop as he came in. We talked, like all middle class parents, about schools; and as Rory and I always seem to at some level, about Monkton, but without bitterness. It was good having Robyn there. She was quite clear about the horrors awaiting me, without once being morbid: ‘They are basically going to poison you and you’re going to feel crap.’

We left the debris in the kitchen at half-midnight, then collapsed. I woke at 3, then 6, remaining awake for half an hour to an hour, before conking out till about 9. Feeling pretty shattered, increasingly so, esp. in the evenings. Someone said tonight that I must write it all down. ‘It’s a question of staying awake,’ I replied, mindful of what Felicity Carr had said to me about how I would have begun to feel ‘quite unwell’ had they not found it when they did. I like the understatement here. Also, as in her ‘pretty rough time’ to describe the effects of chemo. She’s been lovely, sparkly, and honest, her remarks like some sort of code you can only interpret by thinking of the worst thing she might be saying, then letting that be the subtext.

A shattering day.

Woke up, for the first time since being in hospital earlier in January, feeling achey, stiff, as if I hadn’t slept at all. The
pattern at the moment seems to be: drop off, then around 3, or 4, wake up for a bit, fall off again, wake up for the loo, then wake more fully between 5 and 6, dropping off again around 6.30, just as Tatty wakes up and the day begins. ‘I’m awake if you want to talk,’ she says into the darkness, waking me properly.

A rawness in the wind today, a day for hat
and
gloves, in spite of the feeble sun. Get used to this? I don’t want to.

What does cancer do? It takes away your children’s hobbies. Shimi had already had a row with Tats about going swimming with a cold, about how Daddy’s white blood cells are going to come down and that I was going to need to stay healthy. Having had no success, he tried me, in the middle of trying to clear my desk of the last pressing work emails. I turned to him and said firmly that he would receive absolutely no sympathy, should his cough get worse. The same look of panic welled up in his eyes once again. Then I turned back to my emails, withdrawing eye contact completely, and he telephoned Sam to say when should they meet up at the pool.

Part of me really admires his obstinacy, I have to admit it.

This is not the worst moment so far. For that we thank church.

Two minutes before the service I was asked if they could pray for me. Out of politeness and surprise I said that would be fine. But I forgot to tell Tatty and the children. I do not think I can forgive myself the look of wild panic in Shimi’s eyes when he realised it would happen and there was no turning back. Merenna said later the worst bit was the line about ‘the family facing this terrible time’. ‘They couldn’t even be bothered to use our real names,’ she said.

Vicky has arrived to look after us on my first chemo day
tomorrow. She bore flowers from Non, who apologises they are all white, which in Austria would be unforgivable, because white is for death.

‘I would never have noticed,’ I said.

A fragment from supper with the gang on Saturday: Robyn holding forth entertainingly about research into chemotherapy starting after the First World War, when they noticed that gassing troops in the trenches actually alleviated certain symptoms or illnesses some of them had. I had no idea of this little-known tale. ‘They basically realised that poisoning people could have beneficial effects. That’s where the drugs found in much chemotherapy first got used,’ she said.

The other little-known fact of the evening, from her knowledge of National Trust properties, is that, because they are looked after so well, they use NT yew trees in many of the drugs that make up chemo-type cocktails. ‘So you’ll be poisoned by high-quality yew clippings from Devon,’ she giggled.

First day of chemo.

We got to the hospital early and waited, looking at but not really seeing the magazines, including the ironically titled
Devon Life
.

In the way that the world divides into people who instinctively save or kill spiders, ignore or make tea for their builder, and support either the red or the blue team on the pitch, I now know of a less spoken of club: those who have had, or have not had, chemotherapy.

My image of it until today was that a doctor wired you up to a vat of chemicals, walked away and left you to it. It’s much more intimate than that. And, being my first time, slower, too.

First there is the wait to check that the ‘script’ (hospital jargon for internal prescription) is both present and correct. Mine was neither. First Nadine, politely, and then Karl, with a flourish of Anglo-Saxon, phoned up the pharmacy. Karl winked at us with a grin while he swore at them. Putting the phone down he said ‘The trouble with the NHS is that all the wankers in it work in pharmacy. Right then, Anthony. I think you’re ready to start being poisoned.’

Everyone in the room laughed.

He gets away with it because he has been through it himself.

In the shorter wait that remained, Nadine clothed herself in her ‘blues’, protective clothing worn over the ones she had on already, including gloves, headgear like a shower-cap, and a mask.

‘What are those for?’ I asked.

She hesitated for a second. ‘Well, as you know, you know, it’s pretty poisonous stuff we’re giving you. We wouldn’t want it going anywhere. If we spilled any we’d have to close the whole ward down. It would take a whole day to clean up.’

‘They’re that nasty are they?’

‘They are indeed.’

And the subject was closed.

I was ushered into a large green reclining armchair. A pillow was placed under my arm and my blood taken. Nadine poured onto the table next to me twenty tiny cherry red capsules and a beaker of milk to wash them down with.

‘Milk?’ I said.

‘They’re your steroids. You’re supposed to take them with food, but we find a glass of milk’s just as good. You take twenty of these each day for the next five days, first thing in the morning.’

‘At breakfast?’

‘That’s right, steroids for breakfast.’

As I began swallowing them down a large package arrived, wrapped in voluminous amounts of protective plastic packaging. Nadine swivelled to Karl and read him the label out loud. After each line she paused, while he also read it, then he too read each item, my name, address, date of birth and hospital number out loud, followed by the litany of the drugs they were about to inject into me: Cylcophosphamide, Hydroxy-daunorubicin and Oncovin.

Next Nadine tipped out two Paracetamol, handing me a beaker of water.

‘What’s this for?’ I said. ‘I haven’t got a headache.’

‘Oh, we find it helps people when we start the injections. It takes the pain away.’

‘Pain?’

‘Pain, yes. In your arms.’

‘Right.’

She began attaching the first needle.

‘But before anything else, we give you one of these as well, to take the edge of it all.’

‘What is it?’

‘Piriton.’

‘The antihistamine? Like for hay fever?’

‘Like for hay fever, yes.’

‘What’s it do?’

‘Sends you away with the fairies, basically.’

I looked at her.

‘This isn’t going to be fun, is it?’

To her credit, she held my eye without flinching. ‘No, my dear, it isn’t.’

Yesterday was raw, sleet in the air, trees black with wet against the grey sky. Rawness everywhere. Today it is trying to snow and Shimi has been for a toboggan on the moor with Sam.

We spent the day being just the two of us, mooching at home, lunch in town, shopping, then back for supper and a vid. Merenna and Shimi out the whole day, with Vix, being treated. Found I had energy, so used it.

Went to Zizzi’s, for a very good pizza, an asparagus special with mozzarella etc. for Tats. Nattered about my family, who seem to want hourly updates and are more than keen to come down at every opportunity. Slight tension in the air at the house today because of it, not because Tatty and I disagree, but because we do agree and it’s really my call to make and I don’t want to upset them.

What they won’t know until we tell them is that Tatty is an inch away from being signed off with stress; that the phone does not stop ringing; that Merenna is viral/post-viral and is not better yet, despite having had two weeks off; and that we just want to go on being normal. I certainly don’t want them coming down the day of the treatment and watch me being injected. For one thing, it’ll be painful for them, another, boring. If I suddenly get ill, then yes, please, come, otherwise can you just come for the day and possibly break the journey with Rich in Bath? It sounds awful even thinking it, let alone writing it down. But it is the truth, and we have to tell it.

Am being a good boy, eating my fruit and drinking my
water and not worrying about my calories, as Nadine said. Lunch today from Nat Thomas (10 points for no dishes to return): tortilla wraps with grated cheese, refried beans, guacamole and sour cream. ‘The best we’ve had so far’, pronounced Tats.

Lots of funny phone calls. Janet in tears to Tats, giving advice about how to deal with relatives after her own sister died so quickly, then saying let’s go for a drink. A collector’s item from Hannah, on ansaphone, ‘trying to be chipper’ and sounding like death, not surprisingly as she has flu. I wish if they felt crap they would rather not assume I’d like to share in it. A good one from James Bradley, who always uses the right biological words and gives me answers for names and drugs before I’ve dragged them from memory. Don’t think he was ready for me to confess how much my wee smells, but he seemed to have an explanation: ‘That’ll be your kidneys and liver excreting your [scientific term] so that your body doesn’t [scientific verb] an [scientific noun].’ ‘Right. Thanks.’

Becca Alexander popped in ‘on a double yellow’ as we were finishing lunch. She’s been to see her reflexologist, who has lent me a plastic wallet of alternative guff about Native American Indian methods of treating cancer etc., all of it badly photocopied. It came with a photograph-card of the NT gardens at Heligan, with an instruction ‘to return them to me as soon as you have finished with them as I don’t have any other copies.’ That’ll be today, then.

People do what they do. Reacting and acting, I think, as much for themselves as they do for you. The poets are all amazing, ‘putting out healing vibes into the universe’, some of them even promising prayers. The neighbours all offer ‘anything they can do’.

Two lovely letters, one from an old school friend acknowledging the uselessness of offering ‘anything we can do’ from Jersey; and the other from Amy, offering to sit and be with me and drink coffee, give a lift, whatever. A letter of presence and absence. As James Bradley put it ‘I’m a space person. Or
as I sometimes say, a sociable introvert.’ The rarest of people seem to have pulled this trick off so far.

Today at the doctors with Bendy waiting for her appointment with the nurse, a memory of our old neighbour Cyril in Brixton. His take on Beckett’s
Endgame
, having watched an actor-neighbour playing the part of Clov, was that it was like watching a play in an old people’s home, with all its references to painkillers.

An old lady staggered in today who was pure Beckett. She began talking randomly to the woman opposite her.

‘Was I here yesterday?’

‘Yes you were.’

‘Was I? Here? Yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think I was here yesterday. At least I think I was. I said to him I’ll never move like this again. And that was ten years ago.’

‘You were here yesterday.’

‘Thought I was. I told him.’

A day of gifts.

We began with tears as I couldn’t face doing my injections, even into my leg. ‘Nurse Tatty’ took over, as if she’d been doing them all her life. She filled up the little vials, carefully squeezing the air bubble so it wouldn’t start squirting, matter-of-factly saying ‘These are the ones that save your life.’ It’s called GCSF (or Lengorastin), for the build-up of white blood cells. Amazing to think there’s a French cyclist somewhere right at this moment doing the same thing to build up his red ones, then an injection to take away the traces so he won’t be caught cheating.

A lovely letter, the first in years, from Dale in Harringey, who
has taken up fishing again and has a slug-infested allotment. He sounds on energetic and generous form, warm-spirited and open, as I remember him (‘but then I’ve always had a good life.’) He’s got high cholesterol so’s had to give up dairy, which I can’t believe, as I still see him chomping through the cheese counter, methodically trying out different varieties of cheddar as a student, and layering every piece of toast with double-butter.

His mum has died (of cancer) since we’ve spoken. He says the end was good, in spite of the rubbish prognosis, that he got to nurse her ‘with real nurses’ for the final months. I’m sad to hear she’s gone. She was the one I nervously rang up to ask where he was living so I could ring him five years ago. I think she even bought my book.

And a friend of his, having recovered from chemo, says he now has more energy than for years. ‘Who knows’ he says, without adding a question mark.

A lovely card from Dana, too, complete with ‘4 chemotherapy treatments.’ 1 is a landscape, 2 is a poem, 3 is a prayer and 4 is laughter, a collection of George Bush’s bon mots regarding literacy education. The poem is one I don’t know, by Brian Patten, called ‘After Frost’:

I sat reading it at the breakfast table in a kind of hopeful silence, the one I always bring to a poem I don’t know, in expectation that it will do something. I didn’t have long to wait to feel the hairs on my arms prickle or my eyes to start stinging. The thing is, I apprehended it at first purely musically by its sense, not really aware of the meaning at all. But I found it so moving, aware that here were some very simple words laid out in a straightforward way in such a combination as to lift you out of everything for a minute, while putting you more at the centre of that thing than anything before. It’s the mystery I constantly chase and crave, as reader and writer.

The prayer is good too, by Carmina Gadelica (III):

Again, completely simple, but devastating.

Then the George Bush-isms: ‘You teach a child to read, and he or she will be able to pass a literacy test’ (February 21, 2001). Hilarious. Chilling. And then this:

Bizarre to say it, but find I can be up at six writing, making tea and eating bread and jam creeping round the house like the old days waiting for the heating to come on.

Not a good night. Woke with night sweats once and had to pee at least twice. Knew it was useless around 4.25, but stayed in bed hoping sleep might come, turning slowly not to wake Tatty. Finally threw in the towel at 5.45.

The night sweats do scare me as they are – fatigue aside, plus the pain of the tumour on the urethra, which isn’t the same thing as the tumour itself hurting – the only symptoms I clearly have. Somewhere on an envelope there is a scrawl I made at four-something about three weeks ago. I was wide awake but desperate to get back to bed, aching and shivering. I don’t know if there’s mileage there. Probably not. But what made me do it was the fear, plus the certainty, of losing those lines if I didn’t get them down. I may have all tomorrow night to work on them, if I want.

Another great thing about having cancer is that you look in the mirror and there’s Brian Eno staring back at you.

We performed the hair-ceremony with the honorary slapheads in my life – Claude and Nicky Fagan – bringing the tools of their trade. In Claude’s case a simple set of professional clippers; in Nicky’s razors, creams and oils, which I am not ready for.

In the end it was Shim who did the job. Fearless, he plugged in the clippers and began shaving my head, expertly shielding my eyes from falling hair with his hand across my forehead, and changing angle of attack like a natural. Tatty took photos on her mobile (Charlotte says I look like De Niro in
Taxi Driver
in one of them) and the boys and Bendy looked on, bantering and eating Claude’s biscuits. Bendy finished the
whole thing by placing a sample of hair inside an envelope with the inscription

which sounds a little previous but it is just her way of dealing with it: ‘so mum can keep some of it.’