On Top of Everything (15 page)

And it wasn’t.

By the time Young Nick rang and told me, I did know it, I had sensed it.

On top of everything, I had the ‘measles’.

Some days I just want to chuck it all in and buy a yacht and go sailing around the world.

The week Florence was diagnosed with colon cancer, I had already lost three patients: one to old age, thank Heaven, but one in her forties to breast cancer and one in her fifties to a heart attack at the Porchester Baths.

It’s devastating all round obviously, this sort of thing, well, you know, death, but I think perhaps it’s particularly awful for the seemingly healthy ones who are diagnosised and have to live with it. Dropping dead at the Porchester Baths is a terrible shock for everyone else but for the one dropping dead, well, it’s almost entirely pain and anguish free. A patient hears the word ‘cancer’ though and their life is never the same again and the awful thing is, once it’s been diagnosed, there’s nothing I can do. I’m just a GP, I’m the know-a-little-about-a-lot chap. By the time the patient has had the right test and talked to the right specialist, they already know more about whatever it is they’ve got than I do. How can I help? Apart from the odd sleeping pill here and anti-depressant there, I’m all but useless.

Of course, if you’re going to get cancer, the bowel, or colon as we call it, is quite a good place: a lot of it can be removed without too much inconvenience to the rest of the body and often that gets rid of the cancer for good, as long as it hasn’t gone through the bowel wall.

I didn’t know how advanced Florence’s cancer was, as the histology didn’t really tell me. What I did know was that she would need to have the tumour and surrounding part of her bowel removed and have the lymph nodes tested to see if the cancer had travelled. If it hadn’t, she had every chance of living a long healthy life.

Even if it had travelled, her condition still wasn’t necessarily terminal, although the survival rates certainly drop dramatically if the cancer isn’t detected early enough. Chemotherapy would still treat it in her case, is what I thought, and modern drugs can do a wonderful job of, if not of getting rid of it, keeping the dreadful bloody disease at bay.

People think we have all the answers, about medicine anyway, but what we know is only a drop in the bucket. It’s terrifying how little we know. Utterly terrifying. In fact, if I thought about it too much I simply would not get up out of bed in the morning. I don’t know how Dad did it for sixty-odd years without getting totally depressed. Mind you, he did hoe into the Scotch most nights, rest his soul.

I’ve not headed down that road — yet — but I came bloody close when I got cc’d Florence’s colonoscopy report. It came in the morning mail so it can’t have been past eleven o’clock. The poor thing had had so much to deal with in the past few months and then this. She was a lovely woman in seemingly good nick. My Dad was always immensely fond of her.

As a doctor of course you don’t wish illness on anyone but there are at least two cantankerous old hypochondriacs who in an ideal world should have got colon cancer before Florence Dowling.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I’ve seen
Beaches
, I’ve watched that other thing with Debra Winger and Shirley MacLaine, I cried for months when my own grandmother died of the measles, but here’s the thing about actually having them yourself.

It doesn’t hurt and it’s not sad.

It’s just plain terrifying.

When I put down the phone after hearing from Young Nick that my tumour was the bad sort, that I needed to see a surgeon as soon as possible, that his nurse could make an appointment for me, that time was of the essence, that I should get a friend or relative to come and sit with me as I’d just had a terrible shock, my eyes stayed stretched wide open, unblinking and dry.

My heart thumped in my ears, my breath came in shallow little puffs, I sat frozen in a hunched position on the end of the bed.

I was sick. I was deeply sick. I was deeply
mortally
sick. I had the measles.

My thoughts started to tumble about in my head nonsensically, not gripping on to anything, hopping from hospital beds to graveyards to images of diseased body parts to Rose’s funeral, time sliding by as if it suddenly hadn’t just become the most precious commodity, something I’d frittered away without so much as a by-your-leave my entire life and now had nothing left of.

Sparky slunk across the floor as though he too had heard Young Nick’s dreadful news and slid behind my legs, twisting his head to rest it on my foot, staring up at me with his huge mournful eyes, his stump of a tail wagging slowly, hitting the bottom of the bed like a muffled glockenspiel.

My body felt strangely removed from my thoughts. It was an unpleasant sensation, unconnected and hollow. I forced my dry eyes down on to my hands, spread out as they were on either of my thighs. I didn’t recognise them. Were my fingers really that shape? Long, and knobbly around the knuckles, with veins that stuck out and a big freckle by my now empty ring finger? Surely I would have noticed that freckle before if those hands were truly mine. Surely I would have nicer nails than that.

With great effort, I twiddled the fingers of my left hand just above a splodge of chocolate on my jeans and with some relief felt the corresponding drumming sensation on my thigh. My hands suddenly looked ridiculously familiar again, exactly the same as they had half an hour ago before I picked up the phone. Long fingers, knobbly knuckles, slightly ragged nails, my ring finger freckle.

I wiggled that finger. I could clip that nail, if I wanted to, I thought. I could clip all of them. I’d have to find the nail
clippers first but when I did, I could clip them. They were mine, those nails. They were on my body and they were part of me. I was in charge of them. I was in charge of moisturising my skin too, even though I had chosen not to, or forgotten. I was in charge of deodorising my armpits and combing my hair and nourishing my body with food and drink and removing the hair from it and strapping up my bosoms to stop them getting in the way. I was in charge of going to a gym and getting muscles if I wanted them. I was in charge of going to a tanning clinic and getting a spray tan. Or not. I could have Botox. And collagen injections. I could exfoliate every time I had a shower. Those dead skin cells were mine to exfoliate, after all. I was the boss of me and totally in charge of everything to do with myself.

And yet I was in charge of nothing.

This was the shocking truth. Somewhere in the recesses of my mind where I never actually bothered to explore such things I had somehow assumed that when you got a terrible illness you had more or less asked for it. Smokers asked for it, miners asked for it, people who worked in asbestos factories asked for it, poor people asked for it, old people asked for it, hypochondriacs asked for it, people sitting around in their damp bedsits eating cat food asked for it.

As much of an unformed theory as it was, I had never had reason to doubt it. Well, I had never even had reason to properly form it in the first place.

Until now.

Because here I was a healthy person who had not smoked, mined, worked with asbestos, been properly poor, or eaten cat food — and I was far from old.

Yet somewhere deep inside me lurked a hideous disease that could rise up and kill me, actually kill me. Cancer. My stomach
lurched at the thought of the hateful word that encompassed that hideous, common disease. The cheek of it! As far as I could fathom I had not done a single thing to encourage it, invite it in, feed it or welcome it. It had just barged in and made itself at home and now I had to deal with it somehow.

Well, how bloody rude. And how bloody awful. And how … how everything. How nothing. How what difference did it make? If your body could turn against you like that without so much as a whisper of warning — other than a perfectly understandable bout of teeth-clenching constipation — then really, what was there to be done?

I have never in my life, not even during the recent bit, which had spiralled so quickly out of my control, felt so utterly helpless.

Suddenly, all my other problems dropped away like pearls from a broken necklace and bounced insignificantly off into the distance, to gather dustballs in foreign corners.

I mean I could always get another job; after all, I was already on to that, construction issues notwithstanding. I could even get another husband, which secretly I thought was pretty unlikely but that didn’t mean it was impossible. Fat, ugly people with bad teeth on reality TV got husbands all the time so there was no reason why I couldn’t if I wanted to. I could even get another son, for that matter, if Monty really turned against me, which I prayed to God he would not, but it was not beyond the realms of possibility to add a sibling if I so desired. I would need a small fortune to spend on IVF or to go to Africa for a little black baby like Angelina but I could still do that. I was still able.

But I only had one body. This was it. This strange assortment of personality and hair and flesh and blood and bone was me. And without it …

I’d always been under the impression that I had my place in the world and that it was somehow guaranteed. This assumption had been rocked by recent events but still I felt … well, ‘important’ isn’t the right word. If there’s a word like that but with less arrogant overtones, that’s what I felt. That someone like me, someone sort of worthwhile, shouldn’t be fired by her partner or left by her husband or betrayed by her son. Worthwhile? What a joke!

Now I felt so bloody trivial that a flea could breathe on me and I’d disintegrate. I was suddenly overwhelmed by my total insignificance in the great scheme of things, a scheme which as it turned out was being manipulated by the same people that operated the Thunderbirds puppets, for all I knew, and for all they seemed to care.

I would die, I think I knew that then. I knew that I was not enough of a battler and that I didn’t have the thing that measles survivors who lived to write books about coffee enemas and macrobiotic diets had. I didn’t even have a husband. Not that everyone needs one, but I needed mine, and the fucking bastard was out there being gay while I was at home being attacked from the inside out by rogue cells carrying loaded guns.

Worse, Monty would be left motherless. My heart contracted at the thought, although I had to admit that with Crystal on the scene, now was probably a good time for me to die. He would be devastated, despite our current problems, but that tight Australian certainty of hers would hold him up, help him through, get him past the horror, the pain.

Mum and Dad would be shattered but they had Poppy and transcendental meditation. Actually, they’d be OK, my parents. They were quite robust in their eccentricity. There’d be a lot of chanting and incense and genuine grief but eventually,
they would be OK.

Even bloody Sparky would be OK. He’d miss me more than anybody else would but he’d still be OK. Monty would walk him and he loved Will and Stan, the new male blood in the rumpty old house. Maybe Will would even adopt him.

Will! I sat up straight and one lone, wet sob escaped me. My hands flew to my face, covering my mouth, teeth biting down on my bottom lip beneath them. Now I’d never get to have sex with Will!

I take it back, maybe it did hurt, the measles, and maybe it was sad. I was sad. I’d never get to have sex with anyone again. I’d die an almost virgin, having only slept with one man my whole entire life; and with him being gay, he probably wasn’t even very good at it, although I’d had no complaints but what did I know? What had I been missing out on? I should have shagged Eddie Carmichael at the toga party. I should have shagged the entire first XV. And the cricket team. And the water polo players who had bad hair but lovely shoulders.

Then they could all come to my funeral, in their various sports uniforms, and the cricket team could form a guard of honour through which my coffin, a Union Jack one sort of like Austin Powers’ Mini only obviously a box, would be carried by the England rugby team with Jonny Wilkinson at the helm. Or even sitting on top like an old-fashioned king.

I was surprised, to be honest, at how clearly I saw my own funeral. I’d never given it a moment’s thought before, that I could recall, but now it was unspooling in my head as clearly as if I was sitting in the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road watching it on the big screen.

Mum was there, dressed in bright orange, weeping dramatically and rattling her jewellery. Dad was clinging to her, stunned, in a purple cheesecloth shirt with one of those
awful Chinese collars men of a certain vintage so love. Why I imagined so clearly what they were wearing, I can’t say. Maybe it was the colour. So vibrant. They looked like flowers. Poppy was, strangely, in black and crying quietly, her freckles floating in front of her sad little face, her eyes dull and empty, as she held a little basket of rose petals. She’d had one at our wedding, she’d thrown the petals in front of us as we walked into the reception. I’d loved it although Harry complained afterwards that the petals stuck to the bottom of his shoe and went gooey, causing him to slip later on the dance floor.

His dancing was a bit gay maybe, I idled. Something to do with his hands?

Anyway, in the film version of my funeral, my former friend and partner Charlotte was there, clutching at Martin while her three gorgeous daughters all howled with anguish, Abigail crying that she wished it was Charlotte who had died, not me, even though I’d not been in touch with her since I left the shop, which quite possibly made me the most terrible godmother.

Still, I figured Charlotte was more terrible for what she had done to me. So I edited Whiffy O’Farrell into the church to sit next to her and annoy her with his odour while he cried quietly and said a lovely blessing, the one about not standing at the grave and weeping. I loved that.

Oh, Marguerite was there, with her twins! And Sinead, lovely Sinead who used to clean the shop. I made an extra mental note to find out where she lived so I could get in touch with her before I died or she might feel awkward coming to the funeral.

Would Harry’s miserable parents bother, I wondered? Would his tight-sphinctered brother come down from Scotland with his thin-lipped wife and their pale, churlish children? And
where would Harry himself be?

I imagined him hiding behind a pillar at the back of the church with a sheepish Charles. I had decided Charles was ginger, not a rich beautiful ginger like Poppy, but a harsh carroty ginger with piggy blue eyes. He was sort of Uriah Heep-ish, hunched over and fawning. Harry would be devastated at my passing and so he bloody should be. The last few weeks of my life and he had ruined them. I gave Charles very ugly facial hair. And a limp. And a tiny little dog that he kept in the pocket of his bright green chequered suit. He was hideous.

And then I realised that in real life I was no longer statue still, hunched on the bed, but was trembling from head to toe. My hands quivered on my jiggling thighs and it only occurred to me just in the nick of time that I needed to dash to the bathroom to avoid losing the contents of my stomach on poor Sparky’s head. I supposed the measles had spread from my colon already, that those pirate cells were bouncing their way around the pinball machine of my internal organs. I supposed I might die at any minute right there as I lay on the bathroom tiles, chipped and not especially clean, without having even had the chance to reacquaint myself with the people I would soon rely on to mourn me. 

Sparky was outside the closed bathroom door and scratched at it, as was his wont. I heard his disgruntled body slump against it and slide to the floor with an agitated sigh. Young Nick was right: I needed a friend or relative to come and sit with me because I’d had a terrible shock and could not now stop imagining my funeral. It was getting grander and grander with every passing moment. There was a choir of little boys singing George Michael songs now. And George Michael was there himself, although he was very emotional, so upset to be losing
me when he’d only just got to know me. In my imagination I made sure that Harry had left by the time George Michael showed up or otherwise he might have whisked him off and ruined my funeral as well as my whole life leading up to it.