Slowing Down (6 page)

I didn’t however relish the small nozzle they had inserted into my arsehole. It was attached to a tube, itself connected to an air pump which then blew air up my intestines and into my stomach. Despite having been gay and then bisexual well into my twenties, I never took to anal penetration. At school, on the back stage of the puppet theatre he used for trysts on the art master’s and mistress’s day off as he had a key, a bigger boy, in every sense of the word, tried it and I fainted. During the fifties, when I had caught a dose of
clap, a nice Scottish doctor, the image of my favourite housemaster as it happened, wanted to examine my sperm. He put on a rubber glove, well greased, and inserted a finger. I fainted again. He told me when I came to that by the manipulation of some gland he’d got what he wanted. He added, as I dressed, that I was clearly the active rather than the passive partner.

They didn’t find anything they now call ‘threatening’ in my examination. A few nodules and a small fissure was the best they could do, but even so they have decided to repeat the exercise, this time with an enema, in the near future. I’ve only had one enema in the past and didn’t like it either. It was after I’d had a burst ulcer in the sixties. A large cheerful West Indian nurse was in charge of the operation. She was always asking me, even at this point, when my ‘bit of spare’ was coming to see me.

Some people, presumably passive gays, like enemas, and will even pay for the privilege of having one. Indeed there was a nurse who advertised her services in the personal column of a national newspaper. She’s no longer there. I imagine they suspected her of canvassing non-medical cases, of attracting a non-prescribed clientele.

On this occasion, the scan discovered a nodule at the bottom of my lung. This was my second nodule; the other, higher up my lung, had vanished previously of its own volition. This new growth, however, very much interested my consultant, the totally admirable Dr Kohn, the ideal medico in my view. Of maybe Chinese or certainly Asian origin, and speaking perfect English without that harsh rapidity which so often accompanies Far Eastern origin, he explained again in full the possibilities of this phenomenon
and then asked me what I wanted to do about it – a probe, chemical treatment or an immediate operation if the surgeon was prepared to do it, given my irregular heartbeat and other physical deterrents. Dr Kohn and his assistant, a nice woman, equally frank and in touch with Diana, told us that this last would, if it
were
cancer and I had a successful operation, put me professionally out of commission for at least, the very least, five or six weeks. It so happens that December and January I was meant to be very busy singing and, if I had to cancel my full date-sheet, it would not only harm my band-leader Digby Fairweather and his musicians but would prove a form of professional suicide. Bookers would be reluctant to renew their offers on the grounds that I could fall ill again.

Diana said I mustn’t be influenced by money. We hadn’t all that much as such, but two houses and lots of pictures, books and objects of, or so I believe, some concrete value. She would hate me to feel I might be not poor exactly, but broke. She wants me now to do anything I choose and, within my physical limitations, to enjoy myself. This time round too, she seemed less upset. During my first alarm she had asked several of her circle of friends, including my beloved sister, about my desire to have no treatment and they all without exception agreed I had made the right decision. Yet again, I said, ‘No, no treatment, no tests, no medication, nothing!’

Dr Kohn said all right. He told us many patients in my position were prepared to try any possibility of a cure, no matter how painful or possibly unsuccessful, but others, like myself, were not. Of course I’ve taken into account I am in my late seventies. At under, say, sixty, I’d possibly have been
less adamant – but more likely not either. Above all I want to avoid becoming an old fool, like several very senior citizens of my acquaintance (what a load of verbal under-the-carpet-sweepers we have become). I’ve seen too many ‘senior citizens’, Conroy Maddox for a recent example.

Selfish? What of those who’ll miss me? Well, they’ll do that, I suppose, whatever I die of. In my experience, however, they’ll get over it. Affection eventually replaces grief. Anecdotes, usually humorous rather than adulatory, supplant tears or are proof of diminishing loss. One’s moment of death is not in one’s hands anyway. It’s fate which kills you.

‘He rambled and he gambled and the butcher had to cut him down.’
Old New Orleans funeral chant

I also have incipient emphysema, a killer with no cure, which prevents breathing. As it progresses, oxygen helps, but finally there’s nothing. You drown in your own waterlogged lungs. I’ve read a certain amount about it: the late and remarkable Ken Tynan crawling about the floor battling for breath; a friend of Digby’s, who, he told me very reluctantly only when I pressed him, on his final visit was projectile-vomiting blood at the walls of his hospital room. So I’ve two horses galloping towards Death’s losing post. I’d prefer cancer as at least they drug you with morphine, and to die a happy junkie is surely preferable to redecorating a hospital ward.

The good Dr Kohn, after the reappearance of this second white nodule, had the entire lungs re-scanned. He told me that if I continued to smoke, the emphysema was certain to accelerate. I do smoke. My struggle (not very heartfelt) against it, despite the support of Diana, has failed several
times, but that is a fairly recent issue. I’ll bet then, I hope, on a cancer pipping the post.

Aside from degenerating hearing, weaker eyesight, occasional difficulty with stairs unless they have a banister, feeling faint if I get up too fast from a chair or bed and other minor difficulties, I’m not, they tell me with some surprise, in bad nick. There is, however, one last disadvantage, and not for those with a refined sensibility. For several years before my general physical degeneration I have been occasionally caught by an unexpected attack of violent diarrhoea. Among other places this happened twice in Liverpool, my home town, in a very primitive publictoilet on Exchange Street East station and, as was so often the case, I was just too late, and another time when staying at my dear Uncle Alan’s flat, but, worst of all, in the Victoria and Albert Museum. I’d gone there after lunch with a friend but, once inside the front entrance, I knew the curse had come upon me. On asking, I discovered the gents was at the other end of the building, past about forty collections of Ming china and other exhibits. It was impossible (I was now desperate) to even contemplate trying to make it, so I dived, jumping from foot to foot and clenching my bottom, into the ladies. Too late even so, but luckily there was plenty of paper to clean up both me and the cubicle. I didn’t dare use the wash-basin, however, for fear of encountering a stern woman academic here to study Meissen hard porcelain, and taken short.

I always try to cover my tracks as far as I can, but a full shower and change of clothing are hardly ever immediately available. After one disaster in Digby Fairweather’s partner’s car, I now, on Diana’s insistence, pay whichever member of
the band is driving me ‘danger money’ and sit on a blanket or old towel.

I have elsewhere (in
Hooked
, my fishing memoir) talked of the unsought laxative effect of wearing breast-waders. I have checked with other elderly fishermen and found much confirmation. This, too, explains why my father always pocketed a substantial wad of loo paper before going down to the river. I’ve taken, therefore, to wearing grown-up nappies held in place not by a pin or adhesive band but by a pair of strong but gossamer-like underpants. Since I’ve had them, and I put them on now every day even when not fishing, there’s not been a trace of the trots – naturally! This could, however, be due to the wisdom of Dr Watson, who not only prescribed them, but after listening to my symptoms said it sounded like constipation. ‘Surely the reverse!’ I cried in disbelief. She explained that, on the contrary, water, which I have to drink in great quantities to replace the amount pissed away each disturbed night by my anti-water-retaining pills, seeps into the blockage of constipated matter and breaks it up into a loose but irresistible force, in which case it’s back to the V & A ladies or its equivalent. Now, if I miss a day, I swallow a mild laxative, a pink powder whisked round in a glass until it dissolves, and perfectly pleasant-tasting too, and it would seem (touch the wood of the loo) to prevent this disaster recurring. There are certain foods which seemed to sabotage my intestines in my pre-nappy days. They are bacon and potted Morecambe Bay shrimps, on both of which I dote but still mistrust, and, like citrus fruit, tomatoes, strawberries and wine, which give me arthritis, I still avoid.

*

‘I have elsewhere… talked of the unsought laxative effect of wearing breast-waders’

For several days recently I’ve been staying with one of my oldest and closest near contemporaries, Andy Garnett, who makes later and fuller appearances in our shared dotage. During the night there I’ve been woken many times over four hours by my anti-water-retention pills – the loo is just across the corridor in the very comfortable converted out-house of his handsome ex-farmhouse in Somerset. I kept by me, as I always do, a book I can dip into if I can’t get back to sleep. This time it was ideal, the unexpurgated sixties diaries of Cecil Beaton.

He was a puzzling and interesting man, endearing but irritating, snobbish but denying it, waspish yet unsure of himself, desperate when a lover dumped him to go back to America, a royal fan yet sympathetic towards the young and their work, a friend of Mick Jagger (not for nothing was he satirized as Rip Van Withit); a workaholic (nasty but sometimes accurate word), yet, mysteriously, often broke. But the passage in the diaries which fascinated me most was the revelation that he had at the time suffered from the same diarrhoetic disorder as I did, the trots – the bum-clutching, the explosions, the social embarrassments.

He put it down to overwork and exhaustion, perhaps correctly. Once, the equivalent of my V & A experience, he was forced to evacuate the contents of his bowels on one end of a Parisian seat in a public park At this point I felt total identification with this fastidious dandy. In the end, though, he recovered.

I’m finished now with shitting and pissing, unless either of them has a part to play in the dance of my eventual terminal appointment in Samara.

6. The Fairies and the Goblins

I told him very loud and clear

I went and shouted in his ear.

Lewis Carroll

Now the smelly goblins must give way to the malicious and ever-active fairy-brain surgeons in their war with my mind and vocabulary, with forgetting what I’m looking for and the names of people I’ve just met or known for ages. Young people will, I guess, groan, if indeed they are reading this at all, and mumbling ‘boring old fart’ reach for their mobiles, especially if they have a grandfather or ageing relative who bangs on endlessly and repetitively about their experiences during the Blitz. But for those of middle age who can remember the eldritch wail of the sirens night after night, and especially those who still have most of their marbles but are beginning to recognize the slow but steady attentions of the fairies and goblins, and the possibility of being mugged by the demons of the heart attack or the stroke waiting in the wings, I hope it will at least give them the comfort of knowing they are not alone as they enter the shadow of the valley of death. First among my reminders of eventual oblivion is my escalating deafness. Like gout, shingles or piles, but unlike blindness, deafness is considered a more allowable subject for jokes.

Here’s an example. Two men were sitting together in a
publichouse, one deaf, the other not. It was the deaf man’s turn to buy a round. On reaching the bar he ordered two pints. After a lot of shouting on the part of the barman, this was established.

‘How much?’ asked the deaf man.

‘Six pounds,’ was the eventual demand, grasped by the deaf man only when six fingers were held up to confirm the amount.

‘That’s a lot for two pints,’ said the deaf man as he opened his wallet. The barman acknowledged that it was, but pointed out it was to pay for the entertainment.

‘The what?’

‘The entertainment.’

After a bit, the barman wrote down a fairly complicated explanation.

‘Oh, the entertainment,’ said the deaf customer, when he’d finally understood. ‘What entertainment?’

‘Country and Western,’ yelled the barman. The deaf man seemed to hear that.

Returning to his friend, he put down the drinks, complaining that they had cost six pounds. The other man was appalled. ‘Six pounds!’ he said, in that not especially loud but slow and clear enunciation which, in a man’s voice at least, is more effective than escalating shouting. ‘Why six pounds?’ He only had to repeat it twice.

‘To pay for the entertainment,’ his friend explained.

‘What entertainment?’ his mate demanded (three repetitions were needed this time).