Love for Now (26 page)

Then she spoke intensely and briefly, about how the early stages of remission – ‘No one’s looking out for you any more’ – were much harder than the bulk of the treatment. She seems to know all about me.

‘I don’t want to commit suicide. I just wouldn’t mind being dead.’ The Stephen Fry programme on depression still needles away at me. Not only because it sums up how I felt exactly at this time two years ago, but also because it’s a neat summary of how you feel during cancer treatment, on the worst days of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, that is. It’s made me think very hard, this latest bout of feeling low – dare I say depression? – about whether there is a connection between radiotherapy and being miserable. John Diamond, if memory serves, freely admitted to being depressed while he had his radio treatment, I wonder if there are any studies on it. In spite of their (three minute) courtesy call to check ‘how I was doing’ it’s the being left on your own to
get on with it and gradually feel ‘normal’ again that I find so difficult.

What do I have? The queasiness and nausea which I get at breakfast and at 5 pm each day at last seem to be easing off. (Remember, I finished radio three weeks ago yesterday.) Touch wood etc.

The rectangle of denuded hair on my tummy looks pinker and barer by the day.

I take ages to drop off to sleep – never a problem before, even during chemo (except in the Bad News phase). And I don’t seem to sleep much beyond 5/5.30 any more. I lie there listening to Tatty breathing, feeling dreadful. The good part of this is that in this dreamy just awake state, many lines of poems seem to arrive in the half-light. The bad side is I don’t get them down fast enough, or accurately enough, before the day starts.

It’s a pretty rum state of affairs when it takes having cancer to admit that you sometimes get depressed.

We had Non for the weekend. On Friday evening Tats went out to a farewell dinner of a long-standing member of staff from school, so we watched telly with her upstairs. Somehow we got onto the Stephen Fry programmes. She’d seen one, she said, and would love to see the other. The standout line, the one all the papers quoted in their telly reviews, went something like ‘I just have this little voice in my head telling me I’m a useless cunt all the time.’

Whether or not I’ve been feeling
exactly
that recently I certainly did after hearing Andy read at the Picture House on Saturday, just as I did after hearing Symmons Roberts at Greenbelt. Basically, it’s game over. When you look at the variety in the use of forms, the copiousness of the vocabulary, the wit, the learning: it takes your breath away. And hearing them read, they’re as light as a feather, charming,
all achieving lift-off, while remaining absolutely themselves, demure, clotted, bursting. I can’t compete. My wee poems about cancer, my ‘How To Pray for the Dying’ my ‘The Year of Drinking Water’ just pale in comparison.

In the Saturday
Guardian
, a moving sequence of photos from Annie Liebovitz, of Susan Sontag. I’ll admit I had forgotten that Sontag had died of cancer. There’s one shot of her actually receiving chemotherapy – through what looks like a hickman line in her chest. Her eyes are fixed sideways onto the nurse bending in towards her. She’s smiling, but not conventionally beaming. It’s rueful, accepting, but determined as well. It made me well up as I came across it. She captures exactly that moment of ‘fighting the good fight’, of defiance mixed in with vulnerability.

Talking with Tats on the weekend I came across another analogy for radiotherapy: Ofsted inspections. They are relatively short (now) and mechanically painless experiences – but the side effects are long lasting and take ages to fully leave the system. As I watch Tatty go through the motions of hoop-jumping each weekday night – just to stand still – I know that we’re both enduring the same kind of aftershock.

We’ve entered a new era with the kids. Shimi came down to breakfast one morning last week, turned off the
Today
programme, and asked if I could find him Radio 1. It was the Chris Moyles Show: ten minutes of meaningless banter followed by the Scissor Sisters. I made their packed lunches through gritted teeth.

Poems have been arriving each day all week. But still my spirits do not lift. Bumped into Maura and Spencer yesterday on errands in town and it was everything I could do not to crack open like an egg on the pavement. We went for coffee and
gossiped about losing weight and university politics. Felt done in. Went across the road to the Oxfam bookshop and treated myself to books I don’t need (e.g. a 1991 copy of
Poetry Review
about American poetry). Also bought (in Waterstones) the new
PR
issue – my first for five or so years. It looks good. And that Jane Kenyon
Selected
which Bloodaxe have brought out. That looks good too. Spending money I don’t have.

Tats came home teary last night and Wednesday too. It just reminded me that I felt the same. Did my best to console her, certain I did a poor job. Lay in bed last night talking to the ceiling about how hard it’s been post-radio. Someone said to me in the street yesterday ‘It [i.e. radio] made my dad depressed too.’ So perhaps this is what I
should
feel.

This morning Sally appeared with a huge bunch of lilies and some hot smoked salmon from the deli to say they were thinking of us. ‘What with Lisa being so poorly and everything everyone’s taken their eye off you for a bit. We want you to know that we know you’re not out of the woods yet.’

Felt like cracking open then, too.

I don’t know what is stopping me going for counselling. I’ll go and pick up the phone now.

What is it like being told you are in remission from cancer? As when you are diagnosed, it takes a while to sink in. You’re not sure you heard it right. You want to drive back to the hospital and say ‘Are you
sure
? That it’s
me
?’

It’s a day not unlike the one eight months and two days ago, when I was first diagnosed. You put the phone down, say ‘oh’ to yourself and go back to trying to read the paper. You feel a little flat, rather than shell-shocked, in despair. News of remission’s much the same. Outside it is raining. As on the day of diagnosis, there is a child at home, watching telly, only this time off school with a cold. You don’t feel like punching the
air. You maybe do cry a little, but only when you tell people, and they start crying, on the phone. It’s a normal day. You feel a little numb. You think,
Did I really come through this? Was it real?
It’s still as though it’s happening to another person.

It’s the news you’ve longed for, but, you think, maybe I should just check my email.

It’s a very grey day.

Tatty and I waited for an hour before Felicity saw us at 11.45. She asked after me, beaming her lovely smile as always.

I explained about the tiredness and she asked if Perry had told me to expect it. I told her he had, but that I’d hoped it would be over by now.

In truth it was I who used the word first. ‘I was hoping that it might be easing off now, as I edge remission.’

‘You’re not edging into it. You’re in remission.’ She smiled.

‘Really?’

‘Yes, as far as we’re concerned, unless you show signs of the disease coming back, you’re better. That’s it.’

‘Wow. Great. Wow.’

She said they’d scan me in November, as expected, and that, for the first year at any rate, they would see me in clinic every three months. ‘But we won’t scan you each time. I don’t think we’ll need to. We don’t want to overdo it.’

She examined me very briefly, for lumps.

As I put my shirt back on I told her I’d been feeling a little flat recently. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word ‘depressed’. Felicity had no qualms. ‘Well, we can always get your GP to prescribe some sleeping tablets or a mild anti-depressant.’

I looked at Tatty.

‘If it helps,’ Felicity said.

Tats read my mind and said ‘Let’s give it a couple of weeks, see how we go.’

On the way out she found me a leaflet for the Haematology specialist support counsellor. ‘Her name’s Alex, she’s lovely, brilliant, actually. I’m surprised we never told you about her.’

‘You probably did but I probably didn’t take it in.’

‘Well that’s it. You’re so concerned with what’s in front of you that you’re just dealing with that.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And when you think about it, you’ve been through an enormous amount of stress. And now maybe you’re just realising just how much.’

‘Exactly.’

‘It’s not uncommon you know. We worked with a psychiatrist on a project some years ago who found that over 30% of our patients feel depressed after their treatment is over.’

‘I’m not surprised.’

‘Like you, especially after radiotherapy.’

She handed me the yellow leaflet.

I wanted to say what an outstanding and perceptive doctor she’d been. I wanted to hug her.

Instead, clumsily, I mumbled ‘Thanks again for everything.’

It was tipping when we got outside.

Nic has just been on the phone. I said to her, ‘Just as you don’t fall apart when you’re diagnosed, you don’t exactly begin popping champagne corks all over the place when the news is reversed.’

Lisa rang as well. She sounded terrible. She hadn’t read the email, so I had to tell her. ‘Oh Anthony, that’s
fantastic
news,’ the warmth in her voice tangible. I felt only guilt.

Part of the flatness – nothing to do with rain, nothing to do with tiredness – is knowing that I live while others choose not to. Ellie, who has been typing the first thirty pages of this manuscript out for me, committed suicide yesterday afternoon.

She had a visit from the crisis team earlier that day and
urged them to admit her so that she could begin Lithium treatment ASAP. They declined.

Between the time they left – lunch? – and Philippa returning from work at 5 she must have decided enough was enough.

She was emailing me only last week asking my advice on the pamphlet of poems she’s been putting together. I said I’d be delighted to help her – and then didn’t, of course. ‘Too tired, too busy,’ I heard myself say to Tatty. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘I think she meant it this time. It’s nothing to do with what you thought of her poems. She knew you loved them.’

I did something previously unimaginable yesterday: I rode my bike. Not my old bike, which got stolen from the garage a couple of weeks ago, but my super-dooper new Marin hybrid with mud guards and a kryptonite lock. I took it for a spin around Fore Street, near the Bike Shed shop, threw the gears on a hill start and felt deeply foolish. There are some things you
can
forget. Second time round it rode like the wind and I said ‘I’ll take it.’ Got a new helmet too, and I know it won’t be long before I go back for an Altura Nevis jacket in fetching luminous yellow. As Ruth Picardie says, sometimes retail is the only therapy that will do.

Have just been up to the deli for olives and salami for a sandwich. Who should I bump into but Felicity? We had one of those it’s-a-small-world moments as we discussed the fact that her daughter rows with Abigail (Ellie’s sister) for the UCL medical school. We discussed Ellie at length. Felicity said she’s known several people who’ve killed themselves, one of them a brilliant oncologist. I described how the crisis team had come round and seen her that day, but obviously decided against admitting her. ‘Why can’t they do more for these young people?’ she said, looking teary.

Then we stood outside in the cold chatting about the ward, and I admitted to her that I’ve been keeping a journal about
the whole thing. She looked teary again. ‘You have nothing to worry about, Felicity,’ I said, ‘You came out of it brilliantly.’ Then I asked what Karl’s surname was. ‘I’ve written him a poem, you see, er, about blood.’

‘He’d love to see it, I’m sure.’

Saying goodbye I thanked her and said again she had nothing to fear. For a split second I toyed with the idea of stooping a little to give her a kiss on the cheek. As a friend. And because I will never stop being grateful to her, not just for her skill but also her great humanity. But no. I crossed the road and she disappeared into the flower shop.

The sun has just popped out, after a heavy shower; the washing line a string of pearls.

It’s time to live.