Airmail, page 23
We fetched our new retriever puppy on 1 August, the Swiss National Day, three days before I started my five-week course of combined radio- and chemotherapy.
The only other ray of light, which was to help me cope during the bleak days and months ahead, had come while everything else around me was beginning to fall apart: a publisher had accepted my second collection of stories, called aptly (if coincidentally) Fighting It.
But it didn’t seem like I was fighting. Instead, I practised letting go. The day of the diagnosis, I set to sorting out the food stocks and spices in the kitchen cupboards; I threw out everything past its sell-by date then refilled and labelled the jars, picturing the hands that would pick them up after me. My clothes came next. Some went to charity shops. A bellflower blue and white silk dress seemed perfect for a French artist friend. And then I was ready for a visit to Maggie’s Centre – such an uplifting place, in stark contrast to the nearby Cancer Centre at the Western General.
Being a writer with an overactive imagination probably helped me prepare for what lay ahead. I signed up for workshops at Maggie’s: managing hair loss (the thought of losing my long red hair was terrifying), how to look good (and feel better), and relaxation and visualisation. With a girlfriend I went to a wig shop, where I selected a couple of wigs – one with flowing long hair, the other cropped boyishly short. The former was going to be my ‘real wig’, for glamour; the latter my ‘real hair’, newly styled. That was how I planned to keep my baldness a secret – with a story of reinvention.
A few days into my treatment, I took part in two readings with my writer husband, Ron Butlin – at the National Library and in the Edinburgh Book Fringe Festival. It felt good to stand in front of packed audiences, pretending for those brief moments that everything was fine. Ten days later, though, during an event in the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I had to fight exhaustion. I felt dissociated from my surroundings, as if I was in three places at once: performing in the bookshop tent with a cameraman filming me for a promo for Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature; at our kitchen table, popping chemo tablets labelled ‘cytotoxic’ (‘use gloves when handling’); and lying immobile, half-naked, on the hard, cold surface of the hospital’s radiotherapy machine, counting down the seconds as I visualised those bastard cancer cells being laser-blasted to kingdom come. Yes, visualisation was me at my most creative in those first weeks of hell.
Increasingly, that sense of dissociation, of no longer belonging to life and the living, grew stronger. Returning from hospital one day, I passed a group of Fringe Festival clowns in the street, and their happy-go-lucky exuberance made me feel as unreal as the blurry reflection in the shop window opposite, of a woman with long red hair.
And yet, I didn’t appear ill. Sitting in a pavement cafe with Ron and a friend, I’d just taken off my sunglasses and was laughing about something when a stranger approached. He didn’t ask for money or directions. He said, ‘Are you married?’ then tried to chat me up. The encounter left me strangely exhilarated: so I was still attractive, even as my body was being ‘eaten’ from the inside . . .
Eventually, I became too weak to catch the daily bus to hospital and had to be chauffeured like a decrepit old lady by friends. (We’d sold our car years ago.) When my weight dropped below 40 kilos, I stopped checking. By the fourth week I had to be hospitalised, ending up in a cancer ward where I hid behind the bed curtains. I was taken to the radiotherapy department in a wheelchair. The books I had brought stayed in my bag. The notebook remained unopened. Nothing but my pain was real now. And my not being able to eat. But then, the food wasn’t exactly tempting.
The night before I was allowed home, a nurse suggested I go and see the festival fireworks from the ward balcony. I shivered as I watched the display in the company of two other patients, one of them an intrepid smoker emaciated to stick thinness, the other attached to several tubes on wheels. Transience and mortality had never been brought home to me more poignantly.
The treatment left me near-debilitated. Just as it finished, the builders’ scaffolding went up, shrouding our house. Workmen started drilling and banging away – and it felt eerily right, the building being attacked on all sides.
I was bedridden for a month, unable to sleep, unable to read, to listen to music, to watch TV even. Unable to write. My body was on fire from the effects of the radiotherapy – our formerly soft bed sheets now felt like sandpaper, I had an unnatural tan, and my skin began to flake off. Ron was overwrought with worry and exhaustion. Friends brought food, lent us their car, vaccinated Leila-Puppy, sent flowers, gifts, cards and emails to cheer me up. My mother flew over from Switzerland to look after us. By the time she left, I was able to go for short walks again. Other friends gave us their holiday home to stay in, because the tenement stairs were too much for me. My sister and her family arrived to lend support.
Thanks to the treatment, my tumour had shrunk to near nothing. I now had exactly two months before the operation in early December, two months I spent building up my strength and training Leila, even running up the slopes of Arthur’s Seat, and revising the stories in Fighting It. My publisher visited me with a mock-up of the cover; it was to become my talisman in hospital.
A week before my operation we moved back into our flat, only to find the boiler leaking and beyond repair. First the toilet, now this – as if the house was playing a grim joke on us, imitating my body’s faulty ‘plumbing’.
In hospital on the eve of the operation, I jotted down various ideas for stories, trying to project myself into a happier future. A few days later, due to a haemorrhage in my abdomen (an eerie echo of what had happened to our previous dog), I needed another operation.
Christmas was a week away when I checked myself out of hospital, against medical advice. Although the operations and my body’s response to the treatment had been complete successes (I never even lost my hair), my salt levels were dangerously low. But with Ron and my mother and father caring for me, I was soon well enough to proofread Fighting It and to take Leila for longer and longer walks. By the end of February 2009 I was back ‘on stage’ in a fundraiser for Gaza. Soon afterwards, at the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital, I learnt how to inject myself with Iscador, a mistletoe extract that boosts the immune system and which helped me recover from a final operation, in May that year.
By then our scaffolding had been taken down, after seven months of dust and darkness. The new slabs of stone shone pale gold in the sunlight. Our roof was again watertight, and the songbirds reclaimed our garden.
It is now almost five years since that third operation. Fighting It was launched a month afterwards, and, much more recently, my second novel came out, followed by more short stories.
Yes, I am well. My body is well. But you, where are you? You are still lost to me.
Maybe I was wrong to look for you among the stars and galaxies, searching the sunlight for you, and the night. Maybe you have been here all along, waiting for something like this, a sort of confession, all the while reassembling yourself in secret, bit by broken bit: O . . . N . . . F . . . I . . . D . . . E . . . N . . . C . . . E.
Maybe it is time now for you to make your reappearance at last, time for the letter C, which no longer stands for ‘cancer’ but for ‘courage’ and ‘commitment’. Will this evening do the trick? Will you return to me, coming out into the open once more?
This is your chance. Say hello, please do.
With best wishes,
Regi Claire
Drinking with Jason, part 2: Daisy Chain
Dear Jason,
I remember you sitting in the junior primary school open area, furtively eyeing a line of girls who were filtering in from the playground, during lunch one Thursday in Primary 1.
I remember you glugging your milk with a straw, legs swinging off the adult chair where you’d been plonked for being a bad boy. You’d kicked the shit out of the book reading cubby that had Darren inside.
Mrs Hewitt – who, not one hour previous to this scene, had thwacked my palms with a ruler when I got a sum right, thus instilling a lifelong fear of numbers – Mrs Hewitt led the line with Charlotte, beaming, behind her. Blue ribbon.
I brought up the rear. Had been tacked on roughly to make up the numbers for your intended humiliation.
There were ten of us, all girls, holding a long and pretty daisy chain.
‘This,’ barked Hewitt, ‘is what people who know how to get along with others can create by working together.’
You had your arms folded, all sullen, but you were expected to respond. Expected to give some kind of right answer.
‘Well, what do you have to say, boy?’
Snickers of triumphalism.
Stand up straight, girls.
The answer to all of the puzzles set before lunch was either six or five, the workbook informed us. And the answer to the one deemed incorrect with an impatient chuff was five. It bloody well was.
But if I’d left the answer to the puzzle blank, she still would’ve thwacked me. You remember her, don’t you? She was terrifying. But knowing that there were only two possible answers, on the second try, I presented her with a spikily written six – even while knowing it wasn’t right – just to please that dragon, as I wanted to please all adults.
You never had any such desire, not even for your own self-preservation. Your shrug at her statement dismissed that daisy chain and the intended lesson, that lesson which, incidentally – I never told you – I had no part in creating.
Fact is, I had sat rather enviously on the school steps watching them create it, eating my yoghurt with a lonely receptacle. I’d uttered the timid words ‘Can I play with you?’ too many times to want to risk it again, having always been rejected as a girl who could barely string a sentence together and had a tendency to wet herself.
And I remember, you just shrugged off the scene – not meanly, just with an almost total indifference – drank some more milk in nonchalance.
Hewitt’s nostrils flared. Nine other girls besides myself – tiny we must’ve been, but adult-sized to our peers, do you remember? – standing straight, one fiddling, broke the chain. Hewitt blustered, digesting the only answer you were ever going to give her; we could see her certainty crumbling as she counted to ten inside her head: one, two, three, four, five . . .
‘Right – everyone outside. Not you, boy!’
If I’d left that answer blank, she still would’ve thwacked me. My six was greeted with a ‘Stop being so stupid!’ and a demand to attempt the puzzle again. And so I looked at the number of objects on the page, baffled, with only a five-year-old’s language to compute this. How were these five little eggs different from the other five?
Okay, I remember thinking, this puzzle has two rows: one of two eggs, one of three. The other puzzle with the answer five had been a straight line, but still, there were five little eggs. Five.
This had been deemed incorrect.
I sat there wondering if I should draw an extra egg in myself, to correct the question, to make my second answer right! But no – six had been deemed as wrong as five. In pencil-chewing worry and fear of wetting myself again, I did both. I drew in an extra egg, wrote a confused five, thinking that surely to God there would be something there to please her.
I had never been looked at with such contempt in my short five years of life.
But then, seconds into the palm thwacks, you kicked the shit out of the book reading cubby with Darren inside. As Hewitt pulled you off him, roaring, I heard you trying to explain to her that Darren had called you a black gyppo, that ‘Darren called me a black gyppo’ and it served him right.
The lunch bell rang. The rest of the class were ordered outside, and I sat alone on the school steps watching Charlotte order people to help her make ‘The World’s Largest Daisy Chain’. Everyone was scared of Charlotte – do you remember? During the daisy chain making, she called Stacey an idiot at least twice, Megan cried, and she ordered Katie, Rachel and Cherlene to add their own smaller chain to hers, even though they had started theirs at break, and even though they hated her.
Ten girls together faced you in that open area, and you dismissed that daisy chain and the intended lesson in the way that they deserved. I’m not sure anyone ever told you that.
Since then, I have never trusted motivational speakers, especially ones with props. Have had no time for puzzles with only two options, and have found false sincerity the biggest of all put-offs.
And since then, I have also regularly fallen in love with men who shrug in the face of dragons. I’ve always wanted to tell you that.
Lots of love,
Jenny
PS But, you have never enjoyed building things with others. The lessons we learn are always unintentional.
To my missing puzzle pieces (or not)
Dear Daniel and Rosalind, dear Flossie and Auden, dear Sylvia and Billybob,
This is a letter to the children that I do not have. I am nearly thirty-two years old. This is the age that many of my friends have begun to have children, which I think is true for many in my generation. My oldest, closest friend had her first child nearly four years ago. This was an experience both alarming and exciting, from the luxury viewpoint of the one not actually having the child.
LITTLE MAN (FOR LEO)
Your stomping solidity cannot be ignored.
I remember when you could not speak,
just turn your head to bawl
and the strange and heavy warmth of you.
Today you handed me words like ‘duck’ and ‘shoe’ and not quite ‘bsksquirrel’
and the face you raised to me all at once
has eyes, half-fat cheeks and a chin line
I already know.
Your parents are dear to me
and I have known them before you ever did.
Ask them someday, when you are older,
about nights spent bouncing frantic souled
in circles upstairs in sticky bars.
Ask about staggers homewards in the small hours
past the heritage bakery that existed
for us to steal still warm loaves
from backyard shelves.
Ask about love like firecrackers, little man,
like firecrackers we danced down the street,
raucous joyful in one another’s company.
Little man, ask about these times
and know that your coming into them
makes us richer,
unquestioning in the wonder of you.
We are cemented heavier together with you, little man,
and I cannot wait to hear the words you will have tomorrow.
(Written December 2011)
To all those of my friends who now have (or are about to have) children, I salute you.
Dear Peter and Lizzie, dear Jamie and Arya,
I am nearly thirty-two years old and I do not have any children. I’m okay with this. Even in today’s supposedly liberated world (who supposes?), there is the sense that having children represents the ultimate achievement of adulthood. This is the pinnacle. This is when you have made it as a mature adult. And without, you are missing . . . something.
I don’t hold to this.
Dear Jack and Minnie,
You are not my missing puzzle pieces. If the overarching metaphor of this evening is of life as a jigsaw – well, let’s play with that a little.
My twenties were characterised by a lot of scattered pieces. Someone had picked up the box and gleefully upturned it all over the table. And then messed it about with their hands some more. I think half the pieces were under the table. Sure, there was a patch of sky over there, and I think that cluster might have been someone’s foot, but there wasn’t really a sense of a picture emerging.
And I never could find the lid of the box. It could have been a picture of a lake in watercolours, or a My Little Pony number, or kittens in a basket. Who knows? I was too busy dancing.
Coming into my thirties, it turns out some of the pieces are starting to come together. I’ve been staying in one place for a while now, and it seems like a picture is building up from the centre out. There is the start of a career in there, and a community in which I know my place. There are friends and there is love. I believe that we are socially constructed creatures, when it comes down to it . . .
A very old poem! Somewhat teenage in its self-assertions, but it’s what I believed in. I still believe in it.
ARCHITECTURE OF ABSENCE
We are the shape of our borders
An Escher tessellation
repeating against one another
in infinite variety.
The edges of the other making our shapes irrevocable
Each meeting
Each memory
holding us in the form we are.
We look different from every angle
and we are all reflecting light.
(Who claims to have a light inside them, in all this dark?)
We do not exist if no one views us.
It is because it is regarded.
And if we are not seen over all our time?
Our edges begin to trail out and off
Drift and dissipate
as wisps of smoke.
There are no child-spaced pieces in this jigsaw of mine. It does not feel incomplete for that.
Dear —— and ——,
Let’s stop the poetic side-slant for a while. You are not here today, —— and ——. If I had made different decisions in July 2011 and in January 2013, you would have been here. You would have been two years and three months old, and just over seven months old. This is not a theological or spiritual argument over when life begins; it’s just a biological fact.
I am nearly thirty-two years old. This is a letter to the children that I do not have. I know why I made the decision not to have these children, and I am grateful every day that I do not live in one of the seventy-five countries in the world where abortion is illegal or considered immoral.
I am incredibly grateful that the NHS exists, meaning that the decision not to have these children was made by considering whether I was in the position to give the time, the energy and the money to raising them (I was not) rather than considering physical, financial or socially acceptable factors in choosing not to have them. Neither of the decisions were easy to make. The second time was particularly difficult. There is a guilt. I am old enough to make the life necessary to have borne these children. But I have made the decision not to.
