Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You
Fast forward to October 2012. The kids are three and a bit. I am thirty-four, and something inside just doesn’t feel right. I am very, very tired. On Saturdays I stick the boys in front of the TV while I sleep. I go to the GP. I tell her I’ve had a colonoscopy. She asks when. I say 2007, and she tells me they are valid for five years. Now the problems really begin. I start getting terrible abdominal pains. These reach a peak during an excruciatingly dull interview I’m conducting for a new chief operating officer. Suddenly, it feels as if a giant boulder has rolled across my intestines – a pretty accurate metaphor, it turns out, if you exchange ‘boulder’ for ‘tumour’. But still, life continues. A return trip to the GP, who tells me I probably have a blockage down there, but it’s nothing to worry about. I wonder whether, if my problems had been in a less, well, shitty area (say my armpit) I would have fought harder over the years to sort them out. But I didn’t, and so off I go to California, to running on Laguna Beach, to that accursed United Airlines flight home, and to the CT scan and finally the operating table on 12 October when my tumour and its liverish little friends finally come to light.
I woke up after the operation with Billy next to my hospital bed. It was he who told me, then, that I definitely had cancer. He was reassuring, gentle, a little wild-eyed but surprisingly calm. I was euphoric, full of morphine, and overjoyed to see him. Terrified of my first general anaesthetic, I hadn’t really expected to wake up from the operation. But there I was, on a general surgery ward, midnight on a Friday, with a diagnosis of advanced cancer. And ecstatic to be alive.
God knows what it had been like for Billy to get my phone calls that day: first, telling him I was in hospital. Next, that I’d had a scan and was likely to need surgery. Then, just an hour later, that there was a chance it might be cancer, and that they were operating immediately. He stayed with me right up until I was wheeled into surgery, then walked away. He told me afterwards that while I was under the knife he sat in our little garden smoking and crying. The surgeon had rung him afterwards and confirmed the worst. Then, in the dead of night, Billy came in to be by my side when I woke up. And as I drifted back off into my euphoric, opiated haze he returned home to scour the internet for survival strategies, treatments and miracle cures.
Gentle reader, you may have the misfortune to know all about cancer already. If so, forgive me for what follows. Cancer comes in four easy-to-remember stages. Picture your body as a house – your ‘bone-house’, as it was called by the Anglo-Saxon poets – and cancer as your formerly domesticated dog, now running wild and intent on rampaging through the neighbourhood, destroying all in his path. Stage one is ‘local’ cancer, your dog confined to your kitchen: just the one bodily organ. Here he can make mayhem, but be relatively easily tamed and managed. In stage two, your dog has managed to outgrow the kitchen, and has burst through the wall to colonise the living room, getting his messy hairs and doggy smell everywhere. Taming this beast and removing the traces of him will now be harder. Stage three sees Dog getting all the way to the front door and bounding out (with the front door being the lymph nodes, in this tortured analogy). You can shut the door at this point, but once the blighter has tasted freedom it’s hard to contain his desire to explore the neighbourhood. And so stage four comes. Here, Dog has run amok, taken a giant crap on the pavement, eaten out of the bins and settled into the chippy down the road for a snooze. Your cancer has spread from its initial home to other vital organs. Because of our inability to speak of our rear ends, most colon cancer is detected somewhere between stages two and four, and the chances of cure decline dramatically as the patient progresses through the stages.
But in the hospital that weekend, I don’t yet know any of this. Billy researches the statistics for me. Over time he tells me that while my prognosis is poor, the numbers apply to old people, and since I am so young and healthy I am bound to have a better shot at things. The information on the internet is about five years out of date, and new treatments, surgical techniques and so on have bumped up survival rates. If the tumours in my liver can be operated on, I actually have a chance of a complete recovery – admittedly it’s still only fifty–fifty, if we even get that far. But those odds feel brilliant to us at this stage.
There were a lot of ifs, in those first few weeks. I could explain them all, and all the ups and downs that followed during the next months of chemotherapy through till my liver operation, and then the reappearance of the Nuisance all over my body six months later. But that would litter the pages of this whole book with jargon, and make it incomprehensibly, boringly medical. It is enough to say that as Billy and I looked ahead in those strange hours after my operation, we saw a landscape of uncertainty. My vision was blurred by morphine and pain. His was sharper, and he could see, more clearly than I, the life we had thought stretched before us disappear into a fog of disease, hospitals, statistics, and just plain luck.
But through the haze I had my first taste of the bitter gratitude that has accompanied my diagnosis. I have already told you about the almost transcendental experience I had feeling the soft October rain on my face as I stumbled from my hospital bed to lean out of the window after the operation, and the joyful feeling of aliveness which consumed my mind and body despite having been told I might die. But there were more practical things that brought me joy too. First, everyone else on my ward had stoma – or colostomy – bags. I never actually saw one, but I knew that they lurked under the baggy hospital gowns, catching the poo from the piece of the colon that peeked out of the stomach, a second bottom carved by surgeons in many, many abdominal operations. Somehow, my genius surgeon had managed to piece me back together without the need for one of those things. Second, though my body had let me down by allowing this cancer to take root, it had also propelled me home. Somehow, it had found the strength to travel five and a half thousand miles back to Cambridge to receive this unreceivable news in the only place I could bear it. And so there I was, the old world around me crashing down. Everything I had taken for granted swept away. And yet I was full to the brim with an irrepressible joy.
Back to now. No more smell of hot elsewhere as I disembark from a plane. Life is quiet. My joy comes from small things; no travel documents required. I watch the crocuses pop up on the Cambridge Backs, little purple and orange heralds of the winter thawing. The bare trees in the park at the end of our road look like an Aubrey Beardsley etching on the big East Anglian sky. I swim in the sea in Devon, too early in the year for those sensible people with time to spare. Breaking the oncologist’s rules, I feel the thrill of dangerous, wild nature enfold me as hypothermia rises from my feet upwards. I roll over to Billy in the morning and watch him sleep, nosily at peace. Reading Four Quartets, the words imprint my mind, filling me with amazement at how Eliot grapples with the sense of time that haunts me. ‘At the still point, there the dance is.’ I search for the still point every day, and sometimes I even manage to find some peace there, because, after all, there is only the dance.
There is wonder in my past, and in my present. As I write this book, I lay out my memory quilt to see all the dancing I have done: places I have been, people I have met. I have fitted so much colour into my short life that I wonder if I lived on hyper-speed, as if, somehow, I knew my time was limited.
Soon my wonder will come from watching the tree outside my window as it shakes in the sky, and from my children curling their small hands around mine. My world will shrink to one room. But I know wonder will still assail me.
2
The Terracotta Army
My friends are my ‘estate’.
EMILY DICKINSON
Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in a town of hills and honey-coloured stone, where putrid steam rose from ancient hot springs, and it almost always rained. The girl was called Kate, and she was a teenager. Kate was an unpleasant creature, because back then she didn’t know who she was. Really, as a foetid little grub she should have been cocooned in a dark chamber for ten years before emerging as a bright, sparkling (stealthily cancer-ridden) butterfly, but a defect in human evolution means this most unpleasant and painful of developmental stages is carried out in the glare of daylight. And it was only when Kate finally hatched out and shed her caterpillar skin that she found the people who have walked with her ever since. The people who have made life like Oz, even when gloom, pain and drugs sucked the Technicolor from the world and tried to turn it to Kansas.
This was originally going to be the chapter which provided a bit of light relief, some laughs to relieve the solemnity of a book about dying. But writing it is, strangely, more painful for me than anything else, because being a teenager – and specifically the years thirteen to sixteen – were without doubt the worst period of my life. Yes, really. Far worse than my acquaintance with the Nuisance. As far as I can tell, becoming who you are as an adult requires a period wherein you are possessed by a wicked spirit who hates everything. Your childhood. Your parents. Old friends. Your bedroom. Your clothes. Your face. It’s messy to watch, and even messier on the inside. But it’s Darwinian, a necessary stratagem for the self to evolve into something which is no longer a child, and which can survive and thrive outside the nest. So I shall provide some gruesome details of the grub years, because in every good story there is a period of despair before hope arrives.
Back to Kate, in her blue bedroom in the small, honey-coloured town, nestled amongst seven hills like a damp, Austen-ified version of Rome. I kept a diary. At the start of 1992 it began with the line, ‘It is January. But which January?’ (This arch opener because I expected my juvenilia to be anthologised one day.) But there wasn’t anything dramatic about that January, or indeed any other January at that point in my life. After the holidays I went back to my slightly-better-than-bog-standard comprehensive school. There are two pertinent facts about this school. First, the existence of a wonderful English teacher. Second, it was single-sex. No boys. This gave it a particularly rank smell of female sweat and cruelty, the sort that only gets dished out girl-on-girl. Back then, friendships were toxic, obsessional things. The wound of my first ever best friend Rosie Lee (who I loved for her curly blonde hair and extensive knowledge of Kylie Minogue lyrics) leaving me for another still smarts. One day, I was cast aside on the long walk to school in favour of Katrina. Katrina was older than Rosie and me. Worldly. But Rosie provided no explanation for this abandonment. There was no process of separation, no divorce. I trailed behind them day after day like a sad Labrador, silently ignored.
This was my first realisation that I was not one of the cool girls. It would have been hard to be cool, looking as I did in 1992. First, there was my hair, which was coloured bright orange with henna. My fringe was blunt. I had many freckles and a very round face, and even rounder tortoiseshell glasses. Then, as now, I was quite sturdy (‘Built like the rest of us Tanner gals!’ my heftily-bosomed grandmother would say brightly). Though my name sounded like hers, I was basically the antithesis of Kate Moss. The fashion, back then, was grunge, which is ideal teenage wear: grubby, shapeless old clothes, band T-shirts and tie-dye. My favourite outfit that January was a pair of bottle-green corduroy culottes paired with purple tights and one of my hand tie-dyed T-shirts (with Dr Martens boots, of course). Someone else – say, Kate Moss, or my erstwhile friend Rosie Lee – probably could have rocked this look. But it’s safe to say I didn’t really own it; I let the corduroy culottes wear me, and that is something no woman should ever write. So neither the way I looked, nor the way I dressed, was particularly beneficial in helping me to join the school Cooliverse I so longed to be part of.
My brain was a problem too. There was something profoundly uncool about being clever, at least at my school. I was one of those children who are desperate to please teachers, who work very hard and do very well. I got enough As to bump up the school’s shonky results, had enough gumption to ask interesting questions in class, but not enough attitude to be disruptive. It didn’t help that I had no cool hobbies. I never really got into pop music; books were my thing, which was marginally better than playing the trumpet, but nonetheless not conducive to being kissed. So, as time went on, I started going to ever-greater lengths to hide my nerdish and teacher-pleasing tendencies. I made a show of falling asleep in lessons, so that it looked as if I had the kind of social life I coveted. I skipped physics, because poor old Mr Whale didn’t really notice whether we were there or not. I didn’t stop getting good results – diligence prevailed, and I pored over my books outside school, where I could indulge my owlish obsessions under the safe wings of the wonderful ladies of literature my mum had wisely chosen as her friends (especially my godmother Louise and my friend’s mum Susie, both English teachers). But at school, I stopped being an interested, engaged student. I stopped being proud of what went on in my head. And worst of all, like Rosie Lee, I cast aside the friendships I had with people who talked to me about books in favour of people who talked to me about boys. The girls with whom I had laboured over a papier-mâché game of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the gang with whom I had created the fashion house NiftWear (and its lucrative sideline of FIMO earrings) – I ditched them overnight.
There is something profoundly sad about not being able to show people who you really are, and about having friends who don’t reflect the inside of you. Of course, every one of us is lots of people over the course of our lives. We try on different selves like outfits for different occasions, and wear different friendships for different outings. There are friendships which only revolve around doing stuff together. Friendships which, if you held a mirror up to them, would reflect the people we want to be at a certain moment, not the people we are inside. Some of that exploration is fun. Some of it is painful. But these disparate selves are occasionally only connected to the real us by a frail thread, and never more so than during the grub years.
It’s lucky, really, that I didn’t die in 1992. I don’t think people would have had the happiest of memories of me, especially my long-suffering family, who had to put up with the smell of martyred saint wafting around our house (I pretended it was weed, but actually it was mainly joss sticks and the smell of my pain). There would have been some hand-wringing about my dying so young, but as a teenage grub I hadn’t done much for the world. Something happened, of course, to change things. Call it evolution. Or maybe just growing up. Anyway, I escaped my girls-only torment and went to a different school. Things were better there. I didn’t mind wearing my brains on my sleeve so much. Somehow I was accepted into the Cooliverse, even though my wardrobe remained ludicrous. (I must have been the only teenage raver who wore the clothes of a middle-aged woman. Why, when I actually had the body for it, did I not wear actual hot-off-the-streets fashion?)
And then, of course, university, where for the first time things were defined differently. The metric for cool was no longer the number of boy-racers you could kiss, the amount of cider you could drink or whether you had the moves to dance on podiums. Instead, people seemed proud of who they were inside their heads. I met girls who had posters of William Shakespeare on their bedroom walls back home, and were proud of it. Girls who knew who Kant was, even if they pronounced his name cunt (ah, the dangers of being an autodidact). Here it was OK to try hard. It was OK to want to impress the grown-ups. These things contributed to, rather than depleted, your cool status. This was a huge relief for me, though I was overawed too. Who were all these confident young people who were both kissable and clever? What rare alchemy had created them? There was an alarming correlation between private schooling and those who emanated this glow. We products of the state school system seemed chippier, more aggressive, less polished, perhaps less comfortable with ourselves. But in any case, here was a place where I could hatch out in safety. With the friction of trying to be something I wasn’t removed, and the waves of adolescent hormones calming down, I started to settle into myself.
I was not the only grub who hatched out at around this time. I think of our university bedrooms as a series of little cocoons – messy, sweaty little pits of essay-writing, cigarettes and drunken liaisons from which butterflies eventually emerged. We entered our hatchery in different states; not everyone has their ghoulish period between thirteen and sixteen. Some have it earlier, some much later. And different grubs had different coping strategies. Two I know very well spent their teenage years in hock to a particular brand of Christian evangelism. Now, I have nothing against evangelism (that’s not quite true, but let’s not go into that now), but religion for them was a mechanism for entering some kind of Cooliverse, since they were excluded from popularity by their nasty little classmates at school. It was a place of certainty and security, while at home a cold war of marital decline reigned. So instead of hanging around their local park drinking White Lightning and lusting after boys doused in cheap aftershave, they directed their unrequited love towards Jesus and his ministers here on earth, handsome young men who played the guitar and whipped up devotion in their female followers. And then they entered the hatchery, there was glasnost (or bust) at home, and the tambourines and guitars no longer seemed quite so necessary.
Another grub arrived with his lank brown hair in curtains, a greasy face and large round spectacles, an oversized Harry Potter without a wand, outwardly full of bonhomie and jollity, inwardly wrestling with whether he wanted to kiss boys or girls. Eventually he decided that boys were his thing, but let’s not pretend the hatchling period was easy for him. It was long, messy, and largely private, except for one memorable phone message all his friends received about 4 o’clock one night: ‘Ecstasy! Little ginger man! I just want to kiss all the boys. And you! And you!’ After that great revelation, things got better.
Some grubs arrived at university appearing to be butterflies already. Taken in at first by the cool girl who lived below me, with her leopardskin coat, London accent and directional hairstyle, I didn’t realise until much later that this was her armour – underneath she was every bit as much of an uncertain, pained little thing as I was; she had just developed better ways of camouflaging herself than me. You had to in the big city, I guess. Gradually, over a seemingly endless supply of Jacob’s crackers, cheese and Marlboro Lights, she showed me what was under her London armour. A brother disabled from birth; a wealth of anxieties (surprisingly not related to her directional haircut); a little disability here and there of her own. Even through her cocoon I could see that she would end up being my best woman.
I count my time at university as precious not just because it is where I hatched, but because it is where I made the friendships that have accompanied me ever since. I love the company of men. Especially Billy. But for me there is something special about female friendship, and it was at university that I began to meet the women who have really mattered to me. I have photos of us back then with wide eyes, big hair and a series of questionable cocktail dresses. We sat around smoking fags, plotting our futures, confident that the world would unfold its riches before us. Like the friends described by Wallace Stegner in Crossing to Safety (which is, incidentally, one of the finest novels about friendship I’ve come across), we ‘cut the future into happy stars and circles like little girls making Christmas cookies’.
Together, we were an unstoppable force. Our grubby insecurities and doubts were lost in a haze of cigarette smoke and weak lager, surrendered to the noise of the college jukebox as we shook our cheaply-clad bottoms to the sounds of Nineties girl power. We took our terrible haircuts around the world for adventures; squashed them next to chickens and market ladies in day-long bus journeys; showed them off in the big city in summer temping jobs; flattened them under hats in ski season. When we weren’t together, we spent our time writing endless email epistles to one another, recounting tales of our disastrous love lives, moaning about our parents, and generally avoiding the data-entry jobs we were being paid to do in the stifling heat of summer in the city.
While other relationships might define us more – with our parents, partners, or children – for me female friendship has been the steady tick-tock of adult life. And maintaining these friendships over decades was a sign that, finally, I knew who I was inside. The fine thread between myself and my self had thickened and settled. I was one with me.
I wonder what it is about women’s friendship that is so important. A thousand glossy-magazine articles on the subject haven’t helped answer this question. I think conversation is at the heart of it, and it is certainly a truism that there is a lot of verbiage when this particular estate is gathered. Some themes are rather ubiquitous, like a song we keep remixing over the years. Our bodies, whether our thighs look like sausages in leather(ette) leggings, how many sweets have been consumed in the past twenty-four-hour period, whether anyone can see the new-found hairs under our sagging chins. We peer into other people’s lives, and yes, we can still be mean girls when we do this. We talk about men, of course. Back in the day, ‘Is he into me?’ (Usually with an inverse relationship between how into you he was and how much you talked about him.) Now, more mundane: ‘How can I teach him to see dirt?’ ‘Whither the romantic mini-break of old?’ I find that parents, and especially mothers, get a decent crack of the lady-chat whip. Children get a look-in too, but not till they are either wanted or have arrived. To the outsider listening in to our discussions, our world might appear limited, narrow, superficial. But listen more carefully. These discussions are just the bacon fat in the stew. They bring things together, keep the friendship well lubricated, make everyday fodder tasty. But without the rest of the conversation that this intimacy permits – the big discussions about life and our place in the world – our friendships would be no more than the dreadful pass-the-time chats had at the back of toddler groups.
I cannot speak here for friendship between men. It is not within my jurisdiction. Billy has been known as the most over-friended man in Britain, and as someone who exercises no judgement at all over his friendships. Perhaps the two are connected. In any event, his smiley face and enjoyment of whisky have gathered around him a bunch of people nearly as interesting, funny and kind as my own friends (some of them I love enough to winkle away and add to my entourage). I don’t know what binds him to his menfolk. I don’t pretend to understand what they talk about when I’m not there. My suspicion is that they have their own kinds of conversational bacon fat, perhaps revolving around electronic gadgetry, sex and bottom jokes – but like the female equivalent, it is just the grease in the engine of the more profound discussions.