Authors: Anthony Wilson
You see, you think you’ve emerged blinking into a new life of selflessness, where only others’ needs come first, but
you haven’t. You still say to your daughter ‘Can you say that again, I missed it?’ and to your son ‘I can’t read to you tonight, I’m too tired’. In the street, meanwhile, you bump into friends and neighbours, and smile. ‘Yes, it’s going well,’ you tell them, ‘I’m improving all the time.’
A good conversation with one of Shim’s former teachers at the school barbeque the other night. She was saying how a few years ago she had a lump somewhere. It turned out to be harmless. She said: ‘It still took a couple of weeks to get the results. I can’t describe the feeling of relief when they came through.’ I said it must have been a shock, the whole process. ‘Well, that’s it really,’ she said. ‘You realise what’s important to you. Deep down. You must have had that.’ I nodded. ‘I’ve been trying to hold onto that feeling ever since, just of being grateful and determined not to get stressed over the little things.’ She paused. ‘But it’s difficult, isn’t it? You tell yourself you’re lucky to be alive, but you still get swallowed up by it.’
My lovely Clairefontaine exercise books have arrived from Bury St Edmunds, fresher than fish. Not quite the same as the one I am writing in now, but beautiful nonetheless. This one has a one-and-a-half-inch margin and one centimetre squares filled with four tiny rectangles. My new ones are the classic half-centimetre ‘maths squares’, right across the page. Stunning colours, too: lime green, and violet. It’s quite possible I like writing only because I liked stationery first.
Daddy always used to say ‘You really know summer’s arrived when it’s The Open.’
On the front of yesterday’s
Guardian
a picture of Darren Clarke, whose wife is ‘critically ill’ with cancer. After this tournament he will be playing no golf ‘for the foreseeable future’ in order to be with her. Good for him.
Further down the piece it describes her ‘continuing fight for health’, followed by Clarke’s claim that she is ‘a real fighter
and is battling on.’ Winning The Open, or getting well from cancer, which is the tougher? I wondered whether this is what goes through his mind as he makes the turn at one over.
I don’t blame Clarke for resorting to war metaphor: that is what sportsmen do. The pressure to describe it otherwise must be overwhelming.
A refreshing antidote to this was to be heard on the BBC2 commentary, by Peter Alliss, famous ‘voice of golf’. Alliss is one of those instantly recognisable broadcasters, like Richie Benaud, or even John Peel, who appears to be saying much more than he actually does. In Alliss’s case you also have the added benefit of finding out whatever the
Daily Mail
is thinking at any given moment. Mostly I block him out. But yesterday, in a short gap between shots, he was passing on the best wishes of himself and ‘the team’ to a former green keeper (or such) ‘currently suffering from cancer’. I actually thought that was a brave thing to say. We prefer ‘the battle’ or ‘the fight’ with cancer, to shy away from the fact that it is painful. Sometimes you do need a member of the gin-and-blazer brigade to cut through the bullshit surrounding a topic to tell it like it is.
One last thought on the above – then I’ll shut up. It occurred to me about a day after I’d written it that ‘the battle with cancer’ is nearly always used in the past tense, i.e. after someone has died. If it
isn’t
used in the past tense (as with Darren Clarke’s wife) it seems to me it’s a shorthand for saying ‘losing battle’ or, which would be more accurate, ‘poor prognosis’. But we can’t say ‘poor prognosis’ because that is to make it sound too fatal, too grim. So we make it into a battle, making it clear we expect the patient to ‘give it a good go’, even if they cannot, even if that is hopelessly unrealistic. What all this comes down to, as John Diamond says, is the deeply misguided idea that it is the patient’s responsibility to get better, not the doctor’s. This is such a damaging concept for the
culture to go on promoting because it means if the battle is lost it follows that it is somehow the patient’s
fault
for dying. It is pure romantic bollocks. The ‘fight’, real or otherwise, is not glorious, it’s bloody exhausting. If you
are
lucky enough to win, it’s the doctors who need thanking.
There is having cancer, and there is your Freeview digi-box breaking down. Suddenly we only have four channels to watch. I confess to feeling utterly bereft (though not as bereft as I am at Channel 4 having taken off
Frasier
from its 9.15 a.m. slot just because it’s the school holidays). Luckily BBC1 was showing
Billy Elliot
. (I also confess to not feeling overexcited at this prospect, having seen it, and rather agreeing to the ‘
Kes
-with-tapdancing’ tagline it has acquired). It was much better than I remembered it being.
Before it came on, Freeview box RIP, we sat through a
Strictly Come Dancing
special, hosted by Bruce Forsyth, live from Trafalgar Square, a newly-white Nelson’s Column looking the other way in the background.
Moving from the ‘nation at ease with the foxtrot’ (Forsyth) to scenes of the miners’ strike in mid-80s Co. Durham was quite jarring. I wondered if five or even ten years ago such an event would have been possible, let alone twenty. It also came to mind as a rather apt metaphor for what we have become: celebrity-obsessed, post-modern-irony-aware, and, of all things, dance-literate. But what do we make? We no longer send miners down into the ground to dig up coal which is too expensive to bring to the surface, let alone use. For all its witty, moving and unsparing laying bare of the masculine psyche, I doubt that the kind of men – and boys – the film portrays could have foreseen a world where it would come to be seen not only as ‘normal’ but explicitly celebrated to have a job which, in their eyes, involves no ‘real work’ at all. Watching it I felt intensely proud to be part of a nation which has changed so much, and so quickly. At the same time I couldn’t help wondering a) whether it was all just on the surface, and b) what we have replaced the ‘traditional’
industries with. Your call is in a queue and will be answered shortly.
I think Tats blubbed solidly for the last 20 minutes. The bit that really got me, however, was when Billy has to bring a collection of objects to show his dance teacher (Julie Walters) from which he is to build a dance sequence.
The key object is a letter, written to him by his mother when she knew she was dying, to be opened when he reached the age of eighteen. The advice and the sentiment were simple: ‘No matter where you go or what you do, I’ll always be proud of you. Find what you are good at and do it. It has been the greatest privilege of all, to have known you. Love, Mam.’
No amount of Bruce Forsyth in a tuxedo can stop you being cut in two by this, especially if, like me, it is exactly the same letter you wrote in your head to your own children three months ago, when you also believed you were dying. Two parallel tears carved their way down my cheeks. I looked across at Bendy to see if she saw me, but she was slouched low on the other sofa, the laptop on her knees obscuring her view.
Yesterday lunchtime to the hospital to see Felicity, who turned out to be Duncan. A bit of a chat, a bit of an examination, a bit of World Cup banter (‘Last time I saw you, you were poking about in my chest during Korea vs. Togo.’ ‘Yes, it’s left a hole in my life.’ ‘Not like it did in my chest.’) and off we go. Three quarters of an hour reading old National Geographics (did you know ravens mate for life?) then ten minutes being seen. The real deal is today, at 2.30, in radiology.
Duncan didn’t seem to think there was any real activity left. ‘It was a really easy decision at the MDT meeting in the end,’ he said. ‘We just looked at it [the scan result] and said, Yes, let’s blast it a bit. You’ll probably only need a
couple of sessions.’ This was a surprise. Having spoken to Felicity I was expecting 2–3 weeks’ worth. Maybe I’ll be going back to work sooner that I thought. An elating and terrifying thought.
Later I was up at the uni to ask about my disability pay (my statutory sick pay is about to end). The JobCentrePlus people (Department of Work and Pensions) didn’t want the form the uni had sent me and just gave me a pink leaflet with a phone number on it. The uni were nonplussed. I found my way to the office of Velma who I’d spoken to on the phone when the form came through.
She kindly rang the number for me and suddenly I was being formally interviewed, to assess whether I was eligible or not.
My answers went something like:
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Anthony.
With an ‘h’, yes.
Wilson.
One ‘l’.
Charles.
EX2.
That’s right.
Yes.
Yes.
Tatiana.
T-a-t-i-a-n-a.
Wilson.
Yes.
Yes.
I haven’t got it on me I’m afraid.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Merenna.
Wilson.
M-e-r-e-n-n-a.
That’s right.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Shimi.
Wilson.
Yes.
Aren’t they?
S-h-i-m-i.
Correct.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes, it’s here on my sick note.
First of July to the first of September.
Yes.
Yes.
It’s non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. It’s a blood cancer.
H-o-d-g-k-i-n-apostrophe-s. Lymphoma: l-y-m-p-h-o-m-a.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
No.
No.
I don’t know.
‘How are you diddly doodling?’
I looked up from my National Geographic article on ravens. It was Faith, an auxiliary nurse for whom the phrase ‘larger than life’ was probably invented. ‘The last time I saw you you were
ill
,’ she beamed, referring to my all-day recovery from the procedure to put my hickman line in.
This was no post-Simpsons post-modern attempt at irony. I really
had
been ill then, back in April, officially at any rate, and still under the cosh from the chemo. It’s funny how everything becomes relative on a cancer ward. Of course I was ill, you want to say, I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been. What Faith meant was: ‘Don’t you look well!’ Truly, I thought, I have arrived.
Just back from meeting with the oncologist. We met with Dr Nicole McGregor (standing in for Perry), an extremely nice woman, in an office across the corridor from Haematology.
Minutes before, we’d popped in there to hand over a bag of unused drugs, and stood chatting with Gillian, Karl and Nadine in a doorway of the ward. A homecoming of sorts, we bantered about Karl’s recent safari-trip photos. We asked after his recent radio treatment: it’s been successful.
Tatty noticed immediately the unearthly hush across the corridor in Oncology, the distinct lack of banter in doorways. But Nicole was just that right mixture of old-school bedside manner and modern efficiency. I’m to have four weeks of radiotherapy, probably starting in September (so much for Duncan’s two days). The main side effects are cumulative, as we’ve been told to expect, and they include tiredness, indigestion and irritable bowels. The longer term side effects are anyone’s guess: possible long-term kidney damage, and possible malignancy in cells in the radiated area some twenty years hence. But, as she delicately put it: ‘We have to deal with the problem in front of us first.’
We asked about returning to work. ‘Well, September’s out with treatment, then you need a good 2–4 weeks after that. End of October I should think.’ Tatty and I looked at each other without speaking: just enough time to miss the Ofsted inspection, we thought.
Nicole left the room to let us peruse the consent form and to try to book in a ‘practice scan’ (it’s tomorrow at 10.15) before we go away. While we sat there trying to decipher her writing I said: ‘I suddenly feel mortal again.’ ‘We are mortal,’ she said. ‘That’s why we have to make the most of the time we have.’
To the hospital early this morning for a ‘radiotherapy planning scan’. This is using CT equipment (giant polo and ironing board) but without the fasting, drinking disgusting drinks and nausea-inducing injection. Piece of cake. Two ladies come in, ask you to roll up your T-shirt and loosen your shorts. Then you lie on the ironing board and they make three dots on your body with felt tip pens, one below your tummy button and the other two just above your hip bones. (I’m sure I caught one of the ladies taking a peak under my boxers at how far my pubic hair had come back.) Then you slide into the polo for a bit (no injection, no automated voice saying ‘Breathe in, breathe away normally’) and then out again. The ladies re-emerge from their hidey-hole and draw over the felt tip dots with Windsor and Newton permanent Indian ink which they transform into tattoos by pricking your skin with a sharps needle. ‘Some wives leave their husbands when they get one of these, even though it’s only a full stop,’ one of them says. As you’re going they tell you ‘We’ll see you again on the 18th August, for a treatment verification meeting. It’ll be about half an hour. We’ll go through the whole thing then, including side effects. Treatment should start end of August/beginning of September. See you then.’ Then you’re out of there, 15 minutes from start to finish: exactly what it says on the appointment card.
Yesterday Nicole described the radiology machine as ‘a giant hairdryer which can zap you from above and below.’
‘Like something out of
Dr Who
?’ I said.
‘If you like. It’s on a swivel, so it can spin round and zap your back, without you having to roll over on your tummy.’
It made me think: Did they have this kit, ten, twenty years ago? What did they do then?
Lying in the polo again today, while trying to take everything in, I caught myself rather revelling in the attention. No sooner had this thought faded than I once again longed for everything to be over. It won’t be, not during the holidays, not in September, not even when I next see Felicity again, in mid-October. I still have cancer, but feel better than I have done since February.
At Colislinn.
Everything good.
Have begun trying to read again:
American Short Stories Masterpieces
. Some of the best quality stuff you would want to find anywhere. ‘Fever’ by Raymond Carver a favourite so far, though the opener, ‘Sonny’s Blues’ by James Baldwin completely took my head off. I see it is as a series of vital set pieces: a passage about brothers, a passage about race, a passage about drugs, and the climax passage about jazz. It is as though the piece itself is jazz, beginning slowly and thoughtfully, and gradually building in intensity until you almost cannot bear to continue reading, mesmerising, poetic and sad.
A Scandinavian jazz CD in the dining room. Coffee. My girls bouncing in from a shopping trip – baseball boots with sequins for Bendy, and a new rucksack.
Then lunch in the garden: salad, cheeses, humous, crudités, wine for the grown-ups, J2O for me. Newspapers litter the table and the lawn. Conversation: about whether or not to have a moustache-growing competition and Jena saying ‘Did you lose your hair
everywhere
?’ Tats’ reply: ‘He lost his pubes, if that’s what you mean.’
Cricket in the garden with the boys (one lost ball so far), badminton net bulging in the breeze, swimming in the river. People reading chunks of the
Guardian
out to each other;
swimwear drying on the lawn; housemartins overhead, miniature spitfires. All of the advantages of being in the Dordogne – heat, spending half the day in pyjamas – without actually having to get out there. I’m on the verandah steps and can see GK Chesterton’s
Autobiography
and Ian McEwan’s
Atonement
lying next to each other in the sun. It probably doesn’t mean anything.
It’s very, very good to be alive.
Sally and Paul arrived late last night, given their flight was delayed due to an imposter. Not some Al-Qaeda fanatic, but an old lady trying her luck on the Newcastle flight. Lots of banterly speculation that it was Piers Morgan’s mum going for a terror-on-internal-flight scoop.
Before that, the drive with Tats – our first, weirdly, when you think of all the years we’ve been coming here – to Edinburgh airport to drop off Bendy for her unaccompanied minor flight back to Ex so she can attend her festival. They call them ‘U mins’ (unaccompanied minors). In the context of being up at the house it was a defining coming-of-age moment. There was my little girl, who only five minutes ago was celebrating her first birthday here on the lawn, suddenly grown-up and nervously making her first big journey on her own. Her next birthday, in three days, marks the threshold into the teenage years. She will spend it without us, in a field with friends and loud music, eating cake from a shop. I hope someone remembers to buy her candles.
We had about an hour to kill at the airport. We mooched around Global News (i.e. Smiths), Bendy ogling uninterestedly little Pentel gift-boxes for
£
4.99 comprising a gel pen, two biros, a clicky-clicky pencil, a ruler and what they now call ‘eraser’ – she was especially taken with the ‘World’s best Jock’ socks and plastic mooing cows with ‘authentic farmyard noises’, a sure reminder that she is still a child, entertained by worthless tat.
She went over to look at the magazines and I looked at books by Gloria Hunniford, on her daughter Caron Keating, who died of breast cancer, and Lance Armstrong, the cyclist and cancer-survivor. I looked at each extremely cursorily, almost giddily anticipating the moment when I would first encounter the words ‘brave’ and ‘battle’. I didn’t wait long, needing to look no further than the blurbs. It has taken me all this time to realise it, but what the culture seems to demand is bravery from cancer patients
whether they die or not.
Again, I’m sure this must be a coping mechanism. If the person in question does die (e.g. Keating) at least we can console ourselves that it was a brave death. I wonder if this is another way of saying ‘unfair’, which is possibly connected with the fact she was attractive, talented, had two lovely boys and a famous mum. But it’s unfair, whoever gets ill. There are mums on housing estates bringing up two boys with no partner and no famous relations who are equally brave, but who have no one to tell their story.
If we fail to say she was brave, therefore, it is as though we are saying she deserved it or, slightly less harshly, that she wasn’t very tough. ‘At least she was brave,’ we say, momentarily feeling better.
The problem with ‘brave’ is that it’s a word designed to make the observer or commentator feel better, not the patient. Also, it obliterates complexity. I’m sure there were days when Keating was brave. But I’m also sure there must have been days when she wanted to curl up and for it all to be over, one way or another. I know this because this is what I have felt.
People have told me I am brave, to face what I have, especially the bad news phase. But brave isn’t what I felt. Shit is a word I would use. And overwhelmed, when I stop to think about it. The rest of the time I try to enjoy what’s in front of me. Is that brave? I don’t think so. It’s somewhere between common sense and determination. But don’t call me brave.
Brave is, actually, what Lance Armstrong did. The blurb gets it right. But it still leaves me unsatisfied, even though I remain respectfully in awe of his achievements. (What I
hadn’t realised until picking up the book is that his testicular cancer was stage 4 – yikes.) It is as though we say: ‘Well, Lance Armstrong, he decided to fight it, and not only did he beat it, but he won the
Tour de France
to boot. Fighting a disease must really work!’
Perhaps all I am complaining about is language in the end. We call Caron Keating brave because she died. We call Lance Armstrong brave because he fought – and won. She didn’t deserve to die, we want to say. But in saying that, we also admit that he
did
deserve to win. Sometimes it’s not about choices.
My fingernails are still a real mess. Tats has taken to coating them with lacquer, which hardens and protects them fantastically. The groove on my right thumb has become a deep crack, and the once-smooth edge is now crenulated. The other day I was pushing out some ice cubes into a G & T for Tatty and I just watched the nail break in two, along the dotted line as it were, while still remaining attached to my hand.
More worrying are my toenails, especially my big ones. There’s a semicircle at the base of each where the old nail seems to have vanished. The new nail growth beneath seems hard enough, but yesterday I picked at my left one and nearly took the whole thing off. I’m determinedly walking round the house and outdoors with shoes on as a result: not my first choice in the summer, but I’m terrified of catching them on a chair leg and having to go to A & E.
I am a poet but I have no poem to write, as Heaney says somewhere. I have a book out in the world, but no profile to promote because I am ill. I haven’t written anything since last November and have no lines pulling through my mind to begin anything new with. If something does come, it doesn’t settle, always one of the first tests of whether anything is worth pursuing.
And then this happens.
My great fear is that, with my last real burst of writing now two years ago – I spent most of last year tidying up, shaping and editing – I have nothing left in the tank. I know what the answer is, of course: ‘If you want to write, write!’ You have to start splurging again, at some point, to make anything happen, I know that. Somewhere I have a draft of the beginning of a poem called ‘Speaking in Tongues’, which, as soon as I started it, I sensed could be the title poem of a new collection, something I’ve never felt before so early on in the process. It seems to me that if I am to take my own advice about going for it and living life to the full, I will have to begin again at some point, and it may as well be soon.
Jack’s moustache is really coming on. My top lip is darker than his, but his handlebars are stronger – more defined – than mine. Let battle commence!
Today to Lindisfarne, on Holy Island, and then to Bamburgh beach. It meant getting up at seven in order to leave by 8.15, so we could catch the tides. Tilly, aged 3, kept asking where the ponies were. She thought we were going to ‘Linda’s Farm’.
A good drive up the border, the rolling agricultural land from Kelso onwards looking especially lovely. Not the sunniest of days – by late afternoon, the time we got to Bamburgh, it was distinctly grey – but good banter and humour by all. I walked from the car park to the castle with Shimi. He managed to tell me, in the time it took to get there, the entire plots of the last three Simpsons shows he had watched. He described it very cinematically, that is, paying attention to what was said exactly and to how these lines moved on the plot and character development – though he would not describe it in these terms.
Much laughter in the castle dining room with Paul. I was
having a quiet breather on one of the chairs in the corner when a man came up to me and, looking up from his guide book, asked if ‘they really did eat in here?’ The thing is, Paul had just been telling me that if I sat there long enough someone would eventually ask me a question. It reminded me of the time my father was stopped in John Lewis and asked where the haberdashery department was, merely because he was wearing a blazer and tie. All I could think of to say was a rather bland ‘Apparently, yes.’ But I must have said it authoritatively enough, for he turned away instantly and went on his way, apparently satisfied.
We had a late lunch in the dunes above the beach at Bamburgh. It was blowing a gale and sand skittered across the surface of everything, finding its way into every mouthful. The breakers were truly impressive, wild, white and relentless. The beach was empty, the massive castle glowering over it.
Paul, Jack and I and the boys set up a game of cricket, but the boys soon lost interest. Donning their togs, they raced into the freezing ocean and proceeded to spend the best part of the next half hour dodging and riding the waves. Jack joined them, and, briefly, Tatty.
‘I don’t believe we’re doing this,’ I shouted to Jack through the wind, as we staggered up the dunes to find a sheltered spot for our picnic. ‘We may as well, now we’re here,’ he grinned. I couldn’t help feeling he was right. Sometimes you just do daft things. I bet it’s what we’ll talk about five years from now. ‘Five years from now’: what a fine phrase that is. It’s days like today which make you grateful – and greedy – for more.
A lovely luminous drive back from the airport with Tatty after dropping off Bendy on Tuesday. There didn’t seem to be the need for rushing all of a sudden, the A7 twilight at once local and timeless, in Seamus Heaney’s phrase.
We put on an old Barry White tape – I still say ‘tape’, even when I mean ‘CD’ – and talked barehandedly about our love for each other, our children and how proud we were of them.
I confessed to the thought that I considered them to be the main achievement of my life so far.
Bendy back in the house. Tats and I drove to the airport to get her last night. Security everywhere. You can’t take a sausage on to the plane, now, without it being removed. At the foot of the escalators up to the departure lounge lay a shallow cardboard box. It was filled with biros and cigarette lighters, the new weapons of mass destruction.
We saw her standing on the other side of two sets of sliding doors, in her blue Flybe sleeveless vest, looking tired and sunburned, now a teenager. I signed the document, showed the man my driving licence, and she was ours again. A slight lean of the head, into my kiss, so I catch the top of her forehead. ‘I had a wicked time,’ she said, without smiling. ‘Your moustache is well dodgy.’