Written on the Body (18 page)

In plaster up to my elbow I made a list of every hospital that had a cancer unit. None of them had heard of Louise Rosenthal or Louise Fox. She was not undergoing treatment anywhere. I spoke to her consultant who refused to tell me anything except that he was not advising her at that time. Those friends of hers I had met had not seen her since May when she had suddenly disappeared. I tried her solicitor for the divorce. She no longer had a contact address. After a great deal of difficulty I persuaded her to give me the address she had been using during the case.

‘You know this is unethical?’

‘You know who I am?’

‘I do. And that is why I am making an exception.’

She disappeared to rustle among her files. My lips were dry.

‘Here we are: 41a Dragon St NW1.’

It was the address of my flat.

I stayed in London for six weeks until the beginning of October. I had resigned myself to charges being brought against me for whatever damage I had done to Elgin. None came. I walked over to the house to find it shuttered. For reasons of his own I wouldn’t be hearing from Elgin again. What reasons when he could avenge himself on me, possibly with a prison sentence? It horrifies me to think about that madness, I’ve always had a wild streak, it starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness I can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until I met Louise. She opened up the dark places as well as the light. That’s the risk you take. I couldn’t apologise to Elgin because I wasn’t sorry. Not sorry but ashamed, does that sound strange?

In the night, the blackest part of the night, when the moon is low and the sun hasn’t risen, I woke up convinced that Louise had gone away alone to die. My hands shook. I didn’t want that. I preferred my other reality; Louise safe somewhere, forgetting about Elgin and about me. Perhaps with somebody else. That was the part of the dream I tried to wake out of. None the less it was better than the pain of her death. My equilibrium, such as it was, depended on her happiness. I had to have that story. I told it to myself every day and held it against my chest every night. It was my comforter. I built different houses for her, planted out her gardens. She was in the sun abroad. She was in Italy eating mussels by the sea. She had a white villa that reflected in the lake. She wasn’t sick and deserted in some rented room with thin curtains. She was well. Louise was well.

Characteristic of the leukaemic body is a rapid decline after remission. Remission can be induced by radiotherapy or chemotherapy or simply it can happen, no-one is sure why. No doctor can accurately predict whether the disease will stabilise or for how long. This is true of all cancers. The body dances with itself.

The progeny of the stem cell stop dividing, or the rate radically slows, tumour growth is halted. The patient may no longer be in pain. If remission comes early in the prognosis, before the toxic effects of the treatment have battered the body into a wholly new submission, the patient may feel well. Unfortunately, hair loss, skin discoloration, chronic constipation, fever and neurological disturbances are likely to be the price for a few months more life. Or a few years. That’s the gamble.

Metastasis is the problem. Cancer has a unique property; it can travel from the site of origin to distant tissues. It is usually metastasis which kills the patient and the biology of metastasis is what doctors don’t understand. They are not conditioned to understand it. In doctor-think the body is a series of bits to be isolated and treated as necessary, that the body in its very disease may act as a whole is an upsetting concept. Holistic medicine is for faith healers and crackpots, isn’t it? Never mind. Wheel round the drugs trolley, bomb the battlefield, try radiation right on the tumour. No good? Get out the levers, saws, knives and needles. Spleen the size of a football? Desperate measures for desperate diseases. Especially so since metastasis has often developed before the patient sees a doctor. They don’t like to tell you this but if the cancer is already on the move, treating the obvious problem, lung, breast, skin, gut, blood, will not alter the prognosis.

I went to the cemetery today and walked amongst the catacombs thinking of the dead. On the older graves the familiar skull and crossbones bore on me with uncomfortable gaiety. Why do they look so pleased, those grinning heads robbed of any human touch? That skulls should grin is repellent to us who come with dark flowers and mournful sober faces. This is a mourning ground, a place of silence and regret. For us, overcoats against the rain, the grey sky and the grey tombs together oppress. Here is the end of us all, but let’s not look that way. While our bodies are solid and resist the slicing of the wind, let’s not think of the deep mud or the patient ivy whose roots will find us out.

Six bearers in long coats and white scarves carried the body to the grave. To call it a grave at this stage would be to dignify it. In a garden it might be a trench for a new asparagus bed. Fill it with manure and plant it out. An optimistic hole. But this is not an asparagus bed, it is the last resting place of the deceased.

Observe the coffin. This is full oak not veneer. The handles are solid brass not lacquered steel. The lining of the coffin is raw silk padded with seabed sponge. Raw silk rots so gracefully. It makes an elegant tattering around the corpse. The acrylic linings, cheap and popular, don’t decompose. You may as well be buried in a nylon sock.

DIY has never caught on. There’s something macabre about making your own coffin. You can buy boat kits, house kits, garden furniture kits, but not coffin kits. Providing the holes were pre-drilled and properly lined up I foresee no disasters. Wouldn’t it be the tenderest thing to do for the beloved?

The funeral here today is banked with flowers; pale lilies, white roses and branches of weeping willow. It
always starts well and then gives way to apathy and plastic tulips in a milkbottle. The alternative is a fake Wedgwood vase jammed up against the headstone rain or shine with a wild Woolworth’s spray to topple it over.

I wonder if I’m missing something. Perhaps like calls unto like which is why the flowers are dead. Perhaps they’re dead when they’re put out. Maybe people think that in a cemetery things should be dead. There’s a certain logic in that. Perhaps it’s rude to litter the place with thriving summer beauty and autumn splendour. For myself I would prefer a red berberis against a creamy marble slab.

To return to the hole, as we all will. Six feet long, six feet deep and two wide is the standard although this can be varied on request. It’s a great leveller the hole, for no matter what fanciness goes in it, rich and poor occupy the same home at last. Air bounded by mud. Your basic Gallipoli, as they call it in the trade.

A hole is hard work. I’m told this is something the public don’t appreciate. It’s an old-fashioned time-consuming job and it has to be done frost or hail. Dig while the ooze soaks through your boots. Lean on the side for a breather and get wet to the bone. Very often in the nineteenth century a grave-digger would die of the damp. Digging your own grave wasn’t a figure of speech then.

For the bereaved, the hole is a frightful place. A dizzy chasm of loss. This is the last time you’ll be by the side of the one you love and you must leave her, must leave him, in a dark pit where the worms shall begin their duty.

For most the look before the lid is screwed down lasts a lifetime, eclipses other friendlier pictures. Before sinkage, as they call it at the mortuary, a body must be washed, disinfected, drained, plugged and made-up. These chores
were regularly done at home not so many years ago but they weren’t chores then, they were acts of love.

What would you do? Pass the body into the hands of strangers? The body that has lain beside you in sickness and in health. The body your arms still long for dead or not. You were intimate with every muscle, privy to the eyelids moving in sleep. This is the body where your name is written, passing into the hands of strangers.

Your beloved has gone down to a foreign land. You call but your beloved does not hear. You call in the fields and in the valleys but your beloved does not answer. The sky is closed and silent, there is no-one there. The ground is hard and dry. Your beloved will not return that way. Perhaps only a veil divides you. Your beloved is waiting on the hills. Be patient and go with nimble feet dropping your body like a scroll.

I walked away from the funeral up through the private part of the cemetery. It had been allowed to run wild. Angels and open bibles were girdled with ivy. The undergrowth was alive. The squirrels that hopped across the tombs and the blackbird singing in the tree were uninterested in mortality. For them worm, nut and sunrise were enough.

‘Beloved wife of John.’ ‘Only daughter of Andrew and Kate.’ ‘Here lies one who loved not wisely but too well.’ Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Beneath the holly trees two men were digging a grave with rhythmic determination. One touched his cap as I passed and I felt a fraud for taking sympathy not mine to have. In the dying day the ring of the spade and the low voices of the men were cheerful to me. They would be going home for tea and a wash. Absurd that the round of life should be so reassuring even here.

I looked at my watch. Locking up time soon. I should go, not out of fear but out of respect. The sun setting behind the rows of birch long-shadowed the path. The unyielding flatstones caught the light, it gilded the deep lettering, burst along the trumpets of the angels. The ground was alive with light. Not the yellow ochre of spring but heavy autumn carmine. The blood season. Already they were shooting in the wood.

I hurried my steps. Perversely, I wanted to stay. What do the dead do at night? Do they come forth grinning at the wind whistling through their ribs. What do they care that it is cold? I blew on my hands and reached the gate as the night security guard was clanking the heavy chain and padlock. Was he locking me out or locking them in? He winked conspiratorially and patted his crotch where hung an eighteen-inch length of flashlight. ‘Nothin’ escapes me,’ he said.

I ran over the road to the café, a fancy place on the European model but with higher prices and shorter opening hours. I used to meet you here before you left Elgin. We used to come here together after sex. You were always hungry after we had made love. You said it was me you wanted to eat so it was decent of you to settle for a toasted sandwich. Sorry, Croque Monsieur, according to the menu.

I had scrupulously avoided our old haunts – that’s the advice in the grief books – until today. Until today I had hoped to find you or more modestly to find out how you are. I never thought to be Cassandra plagued by dreams. I am plagued. The worm of doubt has long since found a home in my intestines. I no longer know what to trust or what is right. I get a macabre comfort from my worm.
The worms that will eat you are first eating me. You won’t feel the blunt head burrowing into your collapsing tissue. You won’t know the blind persistence that mocks sinew, muscle, cartilage, until it finds bone. Until the bone itself gives way. A dog in the street could gnaw on me, so little of substance have I become.

The gate from the cemetery leads here, to this café. There’s a subconscious reassurance in slipping scalding coffee down an active throat. Let the bogeys and bloody-bones, raw-heads and ghouls bother us if they can. This is light and warmth and smoke and solidity. I decided to try the café, out of masochism, out of habit, out of hope. I thought it might comfort me, although I noticed how little comfort was to be got from familiar things. How dare they stay the same when so much that mattered had changed? Why does your sweater senselessly smell of you, keep your shape when you are not there to wear it? I don’t want to be reminded of you, I want you. I’ve been thinking of leaving London, going back to the ridiculous rented cottage for a while. Why not? Make a fresh start, isn’t that one of those useful clichés?

October. Why stay? There’s nothing worse than being in a crowded place when you are alone. The city is always crowded. Since I’ve been in this café with a calvados and an espresso the door has opened eleven times bringing in a boy or a girl to meet a boy or a girl with a calvados and an espresso. Behind the high brass and glass counter the staff in long aprons are joking. There’s music on, soul stuff, everyone’s busy, happy or, it seems, purposefully unhappy. Those two over there, he pensive she agitated. Things aren’t going well but at least they’re talking. I’m the only person alone in this café and I used to love being alone. That was when I had the luxury of knowing that
soon someone would push open the heavy door and look for me. I remember those times, getting to the assignation an hour early to have a drink by myself and read a book. I was almost regretful when the hour came and the door opened and it was time to stand up and kiss you on the cheek and rub your cold hands. It was the pleasure of walking in the snow in a warm coat, that choosing to be alone. Who wants to walk in the snow naked?

I paid and left. Out here in the street, striding purposefully, I can give the impression that I’ve got somewhere to go. There’s a light on in my flat and you’ll be there as arranged with your own key. I don’t have to hurry, I’m enjoying the night and the cold on my cheeks. Summer’s gone, the cold’s welcome. I did the shopping today and you said you’d cook. I’ll call and get the wine. It gives me a loose-limbed confidence to know you’ll be there. I’m expected. There’s a continuum. There’s freedom. We can be kites and hold each other’s string. No need to worry the wind will be too strong.

Here I am outside my flat. The lights are out. The rooms are cold. You won’t come back. Nevertheless, sitting on the floor by the door, I’m going to write you a letter with my address and leave it in the morning when I go. If you get this please answer, I’ll meet you in the café and you’ll be there won’t you. Won’t you?

After the roar of the Intercity train, the slow sway of the branch-line carriage. Nowadays British Rail call me ‘You the Customer’ but I prefer my old-fashioned appellant, ‘Passenger’. Don’t you think ‘I glanced at my fellow passengers’ has a more romantic and promising air to it than ‘I glanced at the other customers on the train’? Customers buy cheese, loofahs and condoms. Passengers
may have all these in their luggage but it is not the thought of their purchases that makes them interesting. A fellow passenger might be an adventure. All I have in common with a fellow customer is my wallet.