The moment she saw me writing she asked me what I was doing
and then spent the next twenty minutes telling me about how she used to keep a
diary when she was a little girl and how her mother found it and so on until I
fell asleep. I actually fell asleep while she was talking. She looked hurt when
I woke up and has left me alone since. I want to go home. I want my own bed. I
want to be with Andrew.
I keep wondering if something can be
done. If there hasn’t been a mistake. Pinpricks of hope keep tricking me into
grasping at beautiful straws because I can’t bring myself to believe the
reality. It’s too cruel. And I fall for it every time. Because I want to fall
for it. Because I don’t want it to be true. “Great news Mrs Nolan, it’s a one
in a hundred shot but with the technology we’ve got today it is just possible
we could…” etc. But no doctors have come with such news and I don’t think any
doctor’s going to. Because there is no way back. And all the technology in the
world isn’t going to fix me. I expect in fifty years times they’ll be able to
do something about it but that won’t help me. I’m here, I’m now and I’m all
alone. At least until Andrew comes tonight.
This should be my last day on the
ward. The doctor is coming to see me a little later on and hopefully he’ll let
me go home. I’m trying to eat all my meals and put a smile on my face but it’s
difficult. Thoughts occur to me at my lowest moments that I know I shouldn’t
entertain them but I can’t help it.
See it’s easy to forget that while this has happened to me,
it’s also happened to Andrew too. He’ll never be a father. He’ll never kick a
ball with his son or hold his daughter’s hand. He’ll never know what it is to
have a family. And like me he’ll always wonder what might have been.
What must Andrew be going through? What must he be feeling?
Because of course this only applies if he stays with me…
But what a terrible thing to think about one’s husband! That
he could do such a thing. But if he did what would it say about me if I tried
standing in his way?
This is such a cruel disease. The doctors did their best to
cut it all out. But it’s still with me, playing its malicious games of deceit.
“How am I meant to make sure she
eats properly when she’s hardly eating at all?” I asked Tom as I cleared out
the last of the kitchen cupboards. I put all the unwanted jars, tins and
packets in a box and let Tom take what he liked – which was everything.
“Saves me a shop,” he explained.
He was particularly taken with the four bottles of red wine
I was throwing out and suggested we opened one now and had a drink.
“But what if she needs me for something?”
“Fuck me mate, I said a drink, not a drinking contest.
Christ come on, stop staring at the stairs every five minutes and have a cup of
wine. If ever I saw a man who needed alcohol, I’m looking at one right now.”
Tom fished one of the bottles of Merlot back out of the box
and opened it up (although not the nice one I noticed). He poured us two
generous glasses and raised his to Sally, who’d come home this afternoon.
“To Sally,” I repeated and we drank to her health.
“So, she’s not allowed any alcohol at all then?”
“Alcohol’s a poison too. And she’s having to put up with
enough of that already, what with the chemo, so it’s total detox all the way.”
“Cheese as well?” he said, picking out a packet of stilton.
“All dairy products really. And red meat. Big no-nos. See,
digesting this stuff uses up enzymes that are needed for fighting the cancer,”
I explained, flipping through one of the many leaflets the doctor had given me
and pointing to the paragraph to prove I hadn’t just made this up.
“Yeah, but why are you chucking it out? You ain’t got
cancer.”
“Ow come on, what am I going to do, sit here getting legless
and eating cheese on toast in front of her while her hair falls out?” I told
him.
“So, what’s in and what’s out?”
“Basically everything we’ve ever eaten up to now,” I sighed,
frowning at my empty cupboards. “Red meat, white bread, black tea, coffee,
sugary drinks, salt, curry, white rice, sweets, chips and pretty much anything
processed, plus vitamin E, ginseng, alcohol and tap water.”
“I bet you’re gutted about the ginseng, aren’t you?” he
nodded.
“The things we’re able to eat; as much fresh fruit and
vegetables as we can, preferably organic, brown rice, wholegrain bread, pulses,
beans, and seeds. A bit of free-range chicken, though not too much, organic
fish, again a couple of ounces, plus garlic, a little bit of soy, the odd egg
here and there and lots of water.”
“Bottled?” Tom speculated.
“Well, it’s not ideal. I mean, who knows how many nuclear
power plants the lorry driver’s driven past on his way over from France. No,
they recommend you fit something called an osmosis water filter to your water
system and boil it all if you can and make it pure and all that, for best
results.”
“And are you?”
“Should be here at the end of the week,” I said.
“All this stuff must be expensive. You know, water pumps and
organic food and all that.”
“Yeah well, let’s just say we’re dipping into the kids’
college fund with a clear conscience these days.”
“Oh. Sorry mate,” Tom grimaced. “Is Sally still in a bad way
about that?”
I took the bottle off Tom and topped up both our glasses.
“She’s always wanted kids. Me too, come to that, but it was
always one of those things that we were going to do when the time was right.
Next year. Maybe the year after that. Don’t worry there’s plenty of time, we’re
young and nobody has kids until they’re in their thirties these days anyway.
Sally’s only thirty-four and now the time’s never going to be right. Ever. It’s
something I don’t think she’ll ever get over.”
Tom said nothing. Perhaps there was nothing to be said.
I’d found all the above out when the doctors had broken the
news to Sally in her hospital bed. It was the thing she’d feared most and the
thing for which there were no possible words of comfort. It was without doubt
the worst moment of my life. I can’t even begin to glimpse how terrible it
must’ve been for Sally.
What a dreadful, dreadful day.
“I just don’t know what to do. And I don’t know how to make
her better, because she’s never going to be better,” I welled, fighting to
suppress my tattered emotions in front of a mate. I wiped my eye and drank my
drink, then apologised. Tom told me not to be such a dickhead. For a moment, I
thought he meant I was being a dickhead because I was on the verge of tears,
which I remember thinking was a bit harsh, even by Tom’s standards, before
realising he meant for apologising.
“You know the ridiculous thing,” I said, when I found my
voice again. “Is that Sally keeps calling herself half a woman. I mean, it’s
ridiculous, isn’t it?”
“It’s like a bloke calling himself half a man because he
gets his nuts shot off, I guess. Amounts to the same thing,” Tom reckoned.
“I don’t know. Maybe, whatever it is though, it’s
ridiculous.”
And I couldn’t have meant that more. For me, never more than
this moment, Sally was the epitome of womanhood. She was kind, she was pretty,
she was affectionate and caring and in need. And I so desperately wanted to
take care of her and lavish her with love and devotion for the rest of my life.
I know that description of womanhood might not go down that
well with the nutty Labour fatties in the local Town Hall, who’d like nothing
better than to see me and my car clapped in irons for expressing such an
outrageous opinion, but they could go to hell on a broom handle as far as I was
concerned. I was all out of political correctness and patience for anyone who
was anything other than a help to Sally and bollocks to anyone who wasn’t.
“And what about you?” Tom then asked.
“What about me?”
“How do you feel about all this? About the possibility of
never having children?”
Tom let that question linger in the air so that I’d spot the
significance of what he was getting at and I could think of only one way of
answering him.
“If Sally doesn’t eat ginseng, then I don’t get to eat
ginseng either,” I told him.
My home looks unnervingly spotless,
almost like it’s not my home. Andrew has definitely been working on his OCD
while I’ve been away and has even taken to folding the ends of the toilet roll
into a little arrow. As far as the rest of the house is concerned, this evening
I’m going to eat my supper off that bit of floor behind the fridge, simply
because these days I can, and afterwards I’m going to spend the rest of the
evening scouring the house for our last surviving germ.
I’ve also decided to expose Andrew for the charlatan he is
and collapse unexpectedly to try to catch him out. If I do this a hundred times
I think it’s safe to say he’ll not be hovering at my side to catch me at least
once. Maybe.
I shouldn’t mock, he means well and he’s working so hard.
And everything he’s done he’s done for me, but he must be exhausted. I know I
am and that’s just from watching him. It’s so good to be home again that I’ve
almost remembered what colour happiness is. In fact it feels such a relief that
I’ve decided to make a concerted effort not to be unhappy any longer, because
it’s doing neither of us any good, least of all Andrew. I need to take what
good I can from this situation and stop concentrating on the negative. It’s
important – for both of us. After all, if the orchestra can play
Abide With Me
as the
Titanic
goes down, why can’t I play
Monopoly with Andrew?
You know, it’s bananas when you
think about all the crap we eat (bananas perhaps not being the best example). I
was thinking about this the other day after my first couple of organic dinners
and it’s no wonder we’re all ill and fat and dying from different diseases.
See, with me, I used to be one of those blokes who would
look down his nose and sneer at vegans and vegetarians and organic fanatics and
such like and dismiss them all with one regal wave of the chip fork as idiot
nut-jobs, tree-huggers and sissies. I mean, what was wrong with a bit of bacon?
And not just bacon; steak, chicken, bangers and mash? Baked beans, fried eggs,
white bread and butter? Mince pies, pork pies, sausage rolls and pasties?
Cheeseburgers, hamburgers, fish fingers and chips? Roast lamb, tinned soup,
corned beef and gateau?
And that’s not even including all the condiments we splatter
on top of our dinners the moment they’re laid in front of us.
Salt, pepper, mustard and ketchup. White sauce, brown sauce,
mint sauce and vinegar. Mayonnaise, salad cream, tartar and chilli. Raspberry
sauce, chocolate sauce, custard and cream. And if that’s not enough to get our
dinners tasting okay, heaps and heaps of sugar and a couple of chocolate
flakes.
It gives my guts somersaults just thinking about it all.
See, I was thinking that we are actually a very finely
balanced organism. I know we all like to think we’re hard as nails and can
handle a hand grenade vindaloo and ten pints of Kingfisher no problem, but
really we can’t. Not regularly. Not without doing ourselves untold damage.
Not even Geordies.
See, we are the end product of millions and millions of
years of fine tinkering by Mother Nature. Evolution. That’s the word I was
looking for.
We have, as a species, evolved over millions and millions of
years to become the animal we are today. That is, unless you believe in God, in
which case we only took the click of a couple of big fingers and were something
of an afterthought as it was (Eve even more so than Adam). But let’s forget
about God for the time being because He completely undoes all my theories.
So evolution.
This is an incredibly gradual process. It takes millions and
millions of years and only ends when a species becomes extinct. Nature doesn’t
sit still, but then by that same token she doesn’t exactly break any speed
records either, because change is a dangerous thing and it usually takes a
great deal of time to bed down. Consequently we’re a very finely balanced
animal. As indeed every animal is.
I heard someone on the telly once say that evolution takes
into account three things – diet, environment and culture, and I can
totally believe this, especially about the diet and environment. See, the way I
reckon it is this: if you took my old friend caveman Ug from fifty thousand
years ago and some olde worlde John Bull yeoman off the land from two hundred
years ago, sat them down and gave them a couple of medicals – and I mean
the works – I bet you’d find that there wasn’t much between them. Yeah
sure, one of them might have bigger teeth, more hair and fingernails he could
scratch his feet with while standing upright but I bet you’d hardly be able to
tell their livers, hearts, kidneys and lungs apart. And that’s because, if you
think about it, life has hardly changed for either of these blokes and everyone
in between for thousands of years. They both breathed the same air, drank the
same water and ate pretty much the same foods (fruit, veg, grain and meat
– all organic) and they both toiled and sweated for their daily bread.
But you can’t say that about us today.
The air we breathe has crap and pollutants in it that were
never around in either Ug or John Bull’s day. The same goes for the water and
the land we cultivate on. Pesticides, chemicals and toxins. And that’s not even
mentioning all the microwaves, ultrawaves, radiation and mobile phone masts
cooking our brains twenty-four hours a day. Then there’s the food; additives,
colourings, preservatives, enhancers, monosodium glutamates and
rehomogenisation. What the hell is homogenisation? And why the hell does it
have to be done twice? And to my dinner? Genetic engineering, intensive
farming, cross pollination, best before dates and brown sauce.