Cancer

At the age of 59 I thought it was time to get my body thoroughly examined. So last week I trotted off to a health clinic in west London. Not surprisingly, I got a mixed report. Mostly As and Bs, a couple of Ds, and several must-try-harders. The health check consisted of an hour with a man in green hospital scrubs, who I think was a nurse, followed by an hour with a female doctor. It was all trundling along nicely – my weight and BMI were both within the ‘healthy’ range – when something unexpected happened. After attaching electrodes to my body for the purposes of carrying out an ECG, the nurse asked me if I was pregnant. ‘I’m sorry?’ ‘Are you pregnant?’ he repeated.

After commuting to Marseille for nine days of radiotherapy, I spent the week alone in the cave, in bed, in a mess of morphine foils and empty coffee cups. Sister Catriona was in the UK overseeing the birth of her first granddaughter. Friends and neighbours kindly kept me supplied with staples. Every day the sun shone. The astounding insolence of the mosquitos and flies in this Indian summer has to be seen to be believed. Maybe I ought to change the sheets. The martins who live up here on the cliff are enjoying the unseasonal airborne feast, circling and swooping just outside my permanently open bedroom windows. Far below, the village celebrated its annual quince fair. From up here I could hear music and cheering.

Our neighbour Michael is a keen and knowledgable attender of vides-greniers, the equivalent of our car-boot sales. His focus is on old bottles, full or empty, and old china, but he’ll pick up anything that piques his fancy. Some months ago, for example, he bought for €1 a glass tube of opium tablets issued to the French infantry during the Great War. Last week he reissued me with three of these little brown pills knowing that I had an abiding interest in the first world war and was using a modern version – white crystals of morphine sulphate in a red gelatine pill – to mask the pain I was experiencing due to the metastases in my bones.

At eight o’clock in the morning a nurse injected me with a radioactive marker and told me to go away and amuse myself for three hours. The metal chairs in the waiting room were uncomfortable and there was nothing to rest my head against. So I wandered outside the 19-storey hospital to look for somewhere to lie down. Every outside space was taken up with parked cars, thousands of them everywhere you looked, some of them jammed in opportunistically at fantastic angles. Eventually I found a patch of rough grass between two car parks. The grass was strewn with stones, rubble and litter but I lay down gratefully, resting my head on my folded hoodie.

Two football friends, brothers, Mick and Pete, came to visit last week. We’ve been going to matches together since 1969, aged 12, in the good old skinhead days when the police enjoyed a punch-up as much as anybody. We used to travel all over the country on Lacey’s Coaches for away games and looked up to the older hooligans as gods. Those dockers were good honest scrappers, kind, fearless and very fun, in an era long before the sociologists or politicians started paying attention or hooligans wore designer jumpers. Mick still goes with Arthur, his son. Me and Pete haven’t been to a game since the team moved to its soulless new stadium. They were staying in Languedoc and made a day-long detour to see their old mate, whom they’ve always known as Clarice.

In Frederic Manning’s classic Great War novel, The Middle Parts of Fortune, the shattered battalion shambles out of the line after battle to parade briefly before being dismissed. Noting a general loss of soldierly comportment as the infantrymen limp into camp, a watching NCO urges: ‘Come on, get hold of it now.’ As my bone pain worsens, passing milestone after milestone with dismaying rapidity, Manning’s anonymous fictional NCO speaks that expressive army phrase into my mind. He gives the order sternly, with unmistakeable undertones of regimental pride and kindliness.

My days pass largely in a state of inanition. The fit and able-bodied express their sympathy, claiming it’s much the same for them. ‘How are you?’ ‘I’m sleeping all the time.’ ‘Oh, but so are we in this terrible heat!’ Meanwhile the young get browner and more beautiful every day while going on with their energetic lives as if affected by the heat scarcely at all. For instance, I look at the cheerful lads digging up our road, putting in fibre broadband in 40 degrees of heat. I want to run up to them and implore them, with the fervour of a dying man preaching to dying men, to enjoy it while it lasts. When I was a binman elderly people used to come to the back door and say that to me often.

‘But you look so well!’ How many times have I heard that lately. Kindly meant by most, but for a few it’s outrageous, after all they have heard or read about my health, and they feel cheated of the mushrooms growing out of the side of my head that they’d been hoping for. Either way I’m surprised by the compliment. Yes, the tan and this expensive shaving balm Catriona bought me, and now hair again, make me appear unravaged from the neck up.

The main side effect of the six-month course of chemotherapy was ‘fatigue’. The main side effect of the three-monthly hormone injection is ‘fatigue’. The one and only side effect of the expensive, new-generation, last-chance-saloon anti-prostate cancer drug that I’ve been started on is ‘fatigue’. I’m clapped out. At night I sleep for 11 hours and wake up tired. Then I have about three hours to spend doing things in an upright position before lunch. After lunch I sleep for another two or three hours. After a long afternoon nap I wake up tired again. But I can read lying down on the bed or the terrace recliner. Then it’s a gin and the crossword, supper, and I’m looking forward to going back to bed for another 11 hours.

On the morning of my last day in England, I drew back a curtain and there in the garden, browsing one of the flower beds, was a brown hare. It hobbled cautiously but not timidly among the spring bulbs, choosing thoughtfully like a discriminating shopper. I leaned on the window sill and watched it for perhaps ten minutes. The hare was in the process of exchanging its tatty winter fur coat for a shorter, smoother, lighter-brown one, visible underneath. Overnight late spring had turned to the softer air of early summer and I was sorry to be leaving the country at the exact point of the season’s changing. In the bedroom I regretfully set about packing my trolley bag for the flight back to Nice.