After Genevieve Fox finds a lump in her neck, she turns up for the hospital diagnosis in a party frock and heels. I can’t have cancer, she thinks, I’ve done my hair. But there is another reason Genevieve can’t countenance cancer – her own mother died from the disease when Genevieve was nine years old, shortly after moving to England from her native New York. She was catapulted into an unsettling, alien world and moved from place to place, with no one to anchor her. She is in no mood for history to repeat itself, or to be lost to her own young children.
Genevieve weaves together stories of her cancer treatment with memories of her rackety, unconventional childhood. She recalls the advert placed in The Lady for someone to care for her and her siblings, her mysterious ‘step-father’ who went AWOL, and the unfortunate woman who tried to take her mother’s place.
Genevieve confronts her cancer with the same sassy survival instincts she used to navigate her childhood misadventures. She draws on humour, friendship and dogged optimism to chart a course, first through tortuous treatment, and then through the uncharted territory of remission and cancer etiquette. Do you have to be a nicer person just because you have cancer? No. Is it OK to do karaoke until 4am? Yes.
In this uplifting memoir, life’s precariousness is tackled head-on – and turned on its head.
Born in New York, Genevieve Fox lives in London where she works as a journalist and editor. Milkshakes and Morphine is her first book.
For Richard, Reuben and Sebastian
‘So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing’
from ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets,
T. S. Eliot
It doesn’t hurt, but I know it is there and I know it shouldn’t be. Interloper. I have touched it a couple of times already, clocking the chutzpah of it: how, silently and without any warning, it has taken up residence, uninvited. Nasty.
It’s nothing, I tell myself, getting ready for bed some ordinary November night. My hands, which are undoing my jeans, want to be up there, where the thing is. One hand breaks away, flies up to my face. The index finger zeroes in on my chin and traces a line across my neck from one side to the other, as if in mock execution. Halfway along, it meets the camber of the lump and stops, follows it over the top and down the other side. Whatever this is that has moved in is bigger than a pea, smaller than a Malteser, and as firm. Odd, I think, my mind having now caught up with my hand.
Richard is in bed, reading. I hurry over to him, tripping over two rolls of Christmas wrapping paper right in front of me. I am not usually nervy. Nerves have made me clumsy.
‘Feel this.’
‘What?’
I take his hand and place it on my neck, just to the right of my throat.
‘Can’t feel anything,’ he says, his eyes still on his page.
He is doing that blokeish thing with his fingers, keeping them together like a paw. He pats half-heartedly. ‘Nope.’
‘Here.’
He pats some more. ‘No. Probably your glands.’
I do occasionally get swollen glands; they have come and gone since I was a teenager. The medical term is lymphadenopathy, and it’s the lymph nodes to the right of my trachea that have been the ones to play up. Spooky, I think later, maybe they were a sign of things to come. Until very recently, I did not know the word lymphadenopathy and I have not used the word trachea since school. I’ve never needed medical terms and always tried to ignore bodily functions. I am Gwyneth Paltrow’s worst nightmare. I have never listened to my body, pampered it, fuelled it with moon food and unprocessed bounty. I don’t wear Lycra in public, drink liquidised kale or shy away from sugar as from something diabolic. I do my thing; my body does its thing. A temple it has never been.
My science teacher at school, Barney, was one of my favourite teachers. I especially loved him for letting me and a friend blindfold him on a lab stool and spin him ferociously, just for the fun of it, but I could never stomach physiology. Even now, just thinking about blood vessels and arteries and metres of colonic tubing makes me queasy. House renovations have a similar effect; when an old building is being gutted, the beams and plumbing and wiring horribly exposed, I see entrails. And so, I’ve treated my body with the same disregard I do our old boiler: I’ve simply ignored any niggling malfunctions and pressed on.
Unusual, then, that my body is the first thing I think about the following morning. What is it doing, housing this furtive, insensate lump? Although I try to put it out of my mind, by the third morning I feel the calling of that merciless oracle, Google. If I check out my symptoms online, I will be able to put my mind at rest. Then again, doing so could have the opposite effect, and so I spend the rest of the day resisting its siren call. By nightfall, I capitulate. I take my laptop to bed, shutting the door before furtively keying in ‘lump in neck’. Down comes an avalanche of possibilities. Swollen glands. Cyst. Skin tag. A goitre. Salivary calculus. Tuberculosis. Thyroid cancer. With a tap of the ‘Next’ tab more and more unseemly possibilities descend. Snow-blind, I decide to pull out while I still can: I delete my search history, slam the laptop shut on my anxiety.
On the fourth morning, I decide Richard is right. The lump is a case of swollen glands, probably stress-related.
The trouble is, I am not stressed, unless one counts fretting over a house move and its renovation and having a puppy who uses the freshly laid oak floor as a litter tray. We did leave leafy Primrose Hill for urban Tufnell Park, so the move was traumatic, for sure. But I’ve got over it. More than got over it. In fact, I am a bit Eat, Pray, Love, which is my personal shorthand for a novel feeling of being tethered, spiritually. As opposed to physically, as if I were a goat, say. The eating and the love were already sorted. I love to eat, really love it. And, to misquote the poet Geoffrey Hill, I love my husband and my children … I celebrate the love-choir. It’s the spiritual equanimity that’s taken me by surprise; years of intermittent searching and questioning and very occasional prayer would appear to have amounted to something. Also, for a while now, I have wanted to delve inwards, to take the leap into silence and see what I can find there. Three months from now I’ll be marooned inside my own head, unable to concentrate enough to read, write or even watch movies. Silence will feel like torture, and solitude – something else I often crave – its antechamber.
Five days since sensing the lump, I wake up to find it has had a growth spurt.
Richard is snoozing.
‘Feel this.’
Once again, I place his fingertips on my neck.
‘I can’t feel anything.’
I take two of his fingers and place them on the little ball. It rolls beneath my skin. Take it out and you could play table football with it.
‘Oh, yeah. It’s just your glands. Don’t worry.’
‘Hmm.’
‘Go and see the doctor, if you’re worried.’
The first appointment is ten days away, which is fine. I am in no hurry. If the ball has bounced elsewhere by then, I have the spots of dry skin on my face that I can mention instead. I have been meaning to have these sun-damage blemishes checked out for a while. I become a cyberchondriac in the meantime. I go back to Google and key in ‘lump in neck’ again. Various benign conditions come up, but I skirt over these; it’s the killer diseases I am after and so, alone in cyberspace, I catastrophise myself to death. The cyst, the stone in the salivary gland and the random benign lump all get short shrift as I move inexorably to an oropharyngeal tumour, a tumour somewhere in my head and neck, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, thyroid cancer (again), salivary gland cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer, cancer of the larynx, throat cancer. The possibilities multiply and as they do so, one thing, at least, becomes clear: if the lump doesn’t hurt, isn’t tender, moves about and is getting bigger, then it needs to be looked at. If it has been there for more than four weeks, the GP should refer me immediately to a hospital specialist.
Three days after I make the GP appointment, I wake to find the lump sticking out under my chin like a bulge in a silk pocket. The skin around it is hot and red. I show Richard. No tapping or patting this time.
‘Go to the doctor. Today. Get an emergency appointment.’
It is Wednesday, 27 November 2013.
‘Hello, sur-ger-ee.’ The receptionist’s voice is part of motherhood for me; I have been taking my children to this practice since they were babies. Her defensive, disembodied voice has just enough lilt in it to make it human.
‘I’d like to see a doctor today, please.’
‘Sorry, we’re fully booked.’
‘Please.’ My own brisk voice is gone. Something weepy and weak has taken its place.
‘Is it an emergency?’
Thank goodness. She is not inured to a plaintive tone.
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘I’ve got a lump in my neck and it’s bright red and it’s suddenly got huge.’
‘Ten-thirty with Dr Whitley.’
‘Thank you.’
An hour later I sit in the surgery and rehearse the symptoms in my mind as I wait for my name to flash up on the LED announcement strip above the reception desk. I’ve got a lump, it is growing, it doesn’t hurt, it’s firm to the touch and it moves around. It has been there four weeks, maybe more. Don’t chicken out. Don’t underplay the symptoms. Remember the statistics: 46 per cent of cancer patients are diagnosed late, reducing the chances of successful treatment. I think of my fellow journalist and late friend Ruth Picardie, who told a girlfriend and me about a lump in her breast during one of our late night powwows at Soho House and how she hadn’t done anything about it. We made her promise to go to a doctor that week. She did, had a fine-needle biopsy and an ultrasound scan soon after, only to be advised by a breast surgeon that the lump was benign and did not need to be removed. After giving birth to twins, the lump came back, as big as a golf ball this time. An aggressive cancer was diagnosed and she died within a year, aged thirty-three, just shy of her twins’ second birthday. I think of another colleague, the Telegraph journalist Cassandra Jardine, who kept coughing a few desks away from me, was persuaded to squeeze in a visit to the doctor between interviews and was given antibiotics for a persistent dry cough. It turned out to be adenocarcinoma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs. She died twenty-two months later, aged fifty-seven, leaving behind her five children, aged between thirteen and twenty-two, and her husband. Tell people you’ve got cancer, and many will list tales of survival. I know there are plenty out there; right now, I can’t think of a single one.
My name comes up on the digital ticker tape. Genevieve Fox to Room 2. My usual GP is away. The man behind the desk looks about twenty-one. Does young mean he will be a box-ticking penny-pincher reluctant to refer patients to hospital specialists unless absolutely necessary? Or does it mean he is keen and conscientious? I take no chances. When he asks how long the lump has been there, I up the count to six weeks, no question. I explain its rate of growth, the fact that it doesn’t hurt, the works. I get the urgent referral. I will be seen in two weeks, the legal limit. I’ve got this nailed, I think, as I walk out into the winter sun and get on my bike. And all shall be well, and all shall be well. And all manner of thing shall be well. Hang on a minute. What’s St Julian of Norwich doing inside my head? My subconscious appears to be short-circuiting rational thought. I’m singing next, quietly at first, then so loudly the pigeons on Chalk Farm bridge take flight as I pelt out a medley of survival disco anthems. ‘The only way is up’; ‘All Right Now’; ‘I’ve got all my life to live, I’ve got all my love to give, And I’ll survive’. Steady, I think, all you’ve done is go to the doctor. I switch to ‘It’s Raining Men’ instead. As portents go, there’s none cheerier.
Three shiny kids dressed in matching university sweatshirts stand in front of a pleated photographic studio curtain and smile at the camera. Their arms are hanging down by their sides. The boy, who is a head taller than the two girls, has black hair cut around his ears, strong cheekbones and straight, gleaming teeth. His smile is effortless. The bigger of the two girls, who is standing to his left, has personalised her outfit: she wears striped trousers, a pair of clip-on plastic earrings that hang off her little lobes, and there’s a sheen of lipstick on her mouth. She is trying to look grown-up but the fullness of her smile gives her away. The smaller girl, whose fringe is cut sharp across her forehead, is clutching her plain trousers with one hand and grinning. Any second now the giggles she is holding back are going to burst right out of her.
The giggler is me, aged three. The clean-cut, chiselled boy is my older brother, eight, the girl with the earrings and the lipstick my five-year-old big sister. Our American father was a professor of law in New Jersey when this picture was taken, which explains the sweatshirts.
From time to time I put this real picture up on an imaginary moodboard alongside various snapshots from my early childhood in America, some real, most taken from memory since I only possess a handful of photographs from this period. I take a look, and consider whether I like what I see. If I don’t, I swap the images around, or wait until I come up with some fresh ones – composite memories created out of snatched details I pick up here and there about my first years spent in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut back when we were a family.
I like my American moodboard. It is pretty upbeat. Ideal family. Two parents, three kids, a car, a cat. I don’t have an actual photograph of the five of us together, but I can imagine the scene, and I do. I have got pictures of my parents, though, and they often look fancy, like they are about to go somewhere swanky. The woman, who either does an easy smile to camera or a self-conscious, cheeks-sucked-in pout, is sometimes wearing a long dress. At other times she is in a cocktail frock or a casual day dress with nipped-in waist. In one black and white photograph, which now sits in a frame on a shelf in my kitchen, she is in a train carriage, a fox stole around the neck of her dress coat, looking sultry. In another, she is sitting on a sofa, wearing a dark, ruched silk dress with a fresh rose on her lapel, the satin hem peeking out, and, beneath it, a hint of frilly petticoat is just visible. She’s adorned herself in another fur stole and there’s a funny white scalloped hat splodged on her head, which she is resting nonchalantly on one hand. She looks straight at the camera and pulls the same sultry face. When I look closely I can feel how soft her pale skin is and the cold of her wedding ring. The man matches her looks, dressing up in full white tie or a seersucker jacket and cotton trousers. At other times he wears jaunty short-sleeved shirts with bold graphic prints. His head is always slightly to one side and his lips are slightly parted, as though he has cracked a joke just before the camera shutter closed. The kids are similarly well turned out. The girls wear matching outfits for important occasions. In summer, they wear Peter Pan collar dresses emblazoned with hand-stitched tulips. On Easter Day they wear lemon coats and white gloves.
Two years after that university photograph was taken, we moved to England. There’s a new moodboard to go with this life, my new UK life, though I don’t like it half as much as I like my American moodboard. The snapshots on the UK moodboard are memories and a few real photographs from the first three years of our new life, the best photograph the only one of Mother with my sister and me. The picture was taken for the passport my sister and I travelled on when we flew to England, Mother all bouffant hair and a tidal wave of a white fur collar, and the two of us in matching, tartan black jackets. There is less glamour on this moodboard, and no group shots. The man – our father – is nowhere to be seen, the boy, eleven now, is rarely around. The woman – our mother – has swapped organza gowns for bright Seventies kaftans for the cocktail hour and slacks and polo necks for daywear. The girls still wear matching outfits, but only now and then. The look is different, though the colours are bright and hopeful. After that, there are memories, lots of them, and plenty of photographs of me growing up from the age of nine onwards. But they do not gel, at least not into something I want to pin up on the walls of my mind. They are better off stashed away in imaginary drawers, under beds, in old boxes.
The American moodboard continues to offer plenty to work with. I like everything on it, even the mundane stuff, the weird stuff, the stuff that suggests complications, the stuff where memories show up their true, mutable nature, changing what was into something different altogether. Here’s a photograph of my sister standing up in her cot in our apartment in New York, holding on to the railing and crying, I think in protest at me, the intruder, her baby sister, born in Manhattan fourteen months after she was born in Hartford, Connecticut. Then there’s a memory of me in a velvet dress, sitting on my father’s lap as he does up the straps of my patent Mary Jane party shoes; another of Father standing over a frying pan as he makes toffee for breakfast. Toffee, for breakfast? It can’t be true, but it’s what I remember. I also remember walking to kindergarten, located on a different floor of our apartment block, and realising, halfway down the hall, that I have forgotten to put on any pants. Then, by way of reparation, I buy a packet of Rolos, or whatever the American equivalent is, from a vending machine and I find a boy to hide with me in a cupboard. We don’t come out until we’ve worked our way through the whole tube. I remember, or think I remember, being remonstrated with, but gently so. The world was safe then. It had known parameters.
Before the kindergarten class went out to play we had to stand in a line. The teacher would tell us to zip up our lips and we would, pinching our index finger and thumb together and running them across our mouths. Once we were outside in the playground, we did the same thing in reverse, and all those words we had been holding in for ever were set free. One sunny day, I played on the swings. It must have been a weekend, or after kindergarten was over. My English aunt was watching over me. When my toes touched the skyline, high up where she could not get me, I sounded out the letters I had heard others say. F-U-C-K. My aunt, who had olive skin, black horse’s hair and a potato nose covered in tiny holes, shouted up and told me to stop swearing. I swung my legs harder. She was my mother’s fraternal twin – not identical, I was always quick to point out later, given her appearance, and more besides – but I wanted to get away from her, even then. There was something sticky about her. She had latched on to our family like a barnacle. Instinct told me to shake her off. Three decades later, I would still be trying to do so.
Mother brought us to England in 1969. Father did not come with us because he was dead. One minute he was with us, one of us, then he was gone and we were off on an aeroplane to England, where my maternal grandparents lived. Our Siamese cat, Cleopatra Boadicea, came with us. We moved into Marine Gate, a white art deco apartment complex that sat like a luxury cruise liner on the cliffs overlooking Brighton beach, and Mother enrolled my sister and me in a Catholic convent school. My UK moodboard starts here, with a photograph of my sister posing with her head to one side, her little white teeth glinting, one hand under her chin. I am next to her, the pair of us in our navy school blazers with black and white braided trimming, white shirts and black and white ties. In the first week a nun slapped me across the cheek for saying potato chips. I should have said crisps. Don’t be impudent, she said. I was six years old and I didn’t know what impudent meant but the slap knocked my American accent out of me soon enough. The nuns were easily offended. One nun made me stand in between the legs of the blackboard easel after my alarm clock, which had been lying in wait in my pencil case, went off in class. It made a nice change to stand in there, hidden between the slabs of black. But then the gusset of my favourite tights – black diamonds on a white background – started slipping down. The nun spotted me hitching it up. Unladylike, she snapped, ordering me to come out. Stand with your face against the wall. With pleasure. It was better than washing my mouth out with soap and water, which was what we had to do after we had said something bad.
I loved those nuns. Some of them were warm women beneath their icy blue wimples. Others gave their order, the Sisters of Charity, a bad name. Rumours abounded in the playground that one of the older nuns had thrown salt into the eyes of a boarder, aged five, who was crying because she was homesick. They did like things just so. We had to genuflect when we passed the grotto where the Virgin Mary stood, come rain or shine, on the way to chapel, and wear our skirts with modesty. The main nun, the Mother Superior, checked the gap between hem and kneecap with a tape measure. Two inches was the maximum allowed. The nuns ran a shop off a side room in the chapel. The bestseller was holy water, sold in small plastic bottles; the water had come all the way from Lourdes. One afternoon, when Mother came to collect me, I clung on to the waist of my favourite nun, protesting that I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t know it then, but I only had two years left of Mother. When I rewind to that scene, as I often do, even now, I see her getting out of her car and watch myself running to the nun instead of to her. I feel the squidginess of the nun’s waist and my hands sinking into the small of her back. I cannot feel my mother, any part of her, nor can I see how I could have chosen the Catholic sister over my mother, even for a second.
The mother who drove us to school in the lemon left-hand drive she had shipped over from America was different to the one who picked us up. Morning Mother was a blur of big, messy hair and sleepiness. Sometimes, when we were running late for school, which felt like all of the time, she pulled up outside a bakery to buy something for our packed lunches. She came back with two white paper bags, one for me, one for my sister, containing a white roll, buttered, a thick layer of ham folded up inside, and a packet of crisps. The boys and girls who had school dinners ate Spam, lumpy mashed potato and salad cream. Another rumour went round that one girl, forced to eat her lunch, threw up over her plate, and was then forced to eat that too. We had milk in first break. Instead of being kept in a refrigerator, the quarter-bottles sat in crates on the edge of the playground. When we helped ourselves, peeling off the aluminium lids and dunking our straws, the milk was warm. It was how the English drank their milk, and it seemed barbarous. My sister and I loved milk so much, by the time we left America we had been nicknamed the Cats. Warm English milk was something we had to get used to, along with bright yellow butter spread thick on crusty white bread and candy sold in big glass jars that sat, out of reach, on shelves behind the shop counter. Before being put in small white paper bags the candy was weighed by ladies in aprons that were more like dresses with the sleeves cut off. Not candy. Sweets. Mother gave us 40p on Fridays to go to the sweetshop near the old gasworks and we would come back with a stash of Black Jacks, Bazookas, Refreshers, Tooty Frooties, Sherbet Dip Dabs, lemon bonbons and Flying Saucers. One day my sister and I took our secret society – code name the Bear Club, members: two (my sister and me) – on a field trip to the store. Armed with a mirror which we held in the palm of our hand at ground level, we looked up the skirts of customers. We did the same with the nuns in the playground.
Afternoon Mother was a Seventies dream in cowl-neck jumper, slacks and slick make-up. ‘I have to put my face on,’ she would say solemnly, and I would picture her, behind her closed bedroom door, fixing a scalped face on to her own. In between waking from her afternoon nap and picking us up, her overly plucked eyebrows had turned into brown crescent moons, her lipstick was on and her hair was backcombed into something puffy that curved back over itself, rolling away like the South Downs. She didn’t wear a wig when she collected us, saving these for the cocktail hour at six. On a hot summer’s day, Mother took us to Preston Park instead of going straight home and, if the sprinklers were on, my sister and I would take off our uniforms and dare each other to run under the spray and across the spongy wet grass in our pants. At the weekends I sometimes went off on my red scooter on my own, but usually I played with my sister. One day we rang Mother from a call box and when the pips went, we shoved in the twopence coins and, putting on a fake voice, told her that her daughters had been killed in a car accident. That’s the only time I remember her being cross.
Mother displayed her three brown wigs on white polystyrene mannequin heads lined up on her dressing table. Sometimes, when she was out, I pretended to be her. I would put one of the wigs on, matching it with one of her fur coats and a pair of her wide-legged velvet trousers, ignoring the dummies watching me with their hollowed-out eyes. We all liked dressing up and I did so for my wedding to Sydney, my teddy bear, when I was seven. I wore my sister’s hand-me-down First Holy Communion dress, the one I had worn for my own First Holy Communion a few months earlier. Grandma had made it out of white lace, and it had a high neck like a priest’s collar and sat just above my knees. Sydney, who was the colour of Golden Nuggets and almost as tall as me, wore a pair of my knickers and a bow tie. Everybody came to the wedding except my brother, who had been swallowed up by something called boarding school soon after we came to England and never seemed to be around. Grandma, my aunt, my sister, Elsie our cleaner, Libra our Labrador, and of course the mother-of-the-bride all watched me walk down the aisle, which we had formed by moving around the living-room furniture to make a walkway.
I don’t know what music we chose for the occasion, perhaps John Pertwee singing ‘A fox went out on a chilly night’ from my prize album, Children’s Favourites, or something from Fiddler on the Roof or Paint Your Wagon. Mother loved those musicals and she played records all the time. She loved Maria Callas singing Schubert and Kathleen Ferrier singing Mahler, too. It’s tragic, she would say, lowering the stylus on to the vinyl, and we knew what she meant. She had told us that this beautiful woman with the wavy hair and wide mouth had died, aged just forty-one. My mother sang at the Wigmore Hall just like Kathleen Ferrier, I would say later, not knowing a single thing about the Wigmore Hall. I was mimicking Grandma: My daughter sang at the Wigmore Hall, she would say, or, My daughter studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music, to which a grown-up would respond with the ooh noises grown-ups make that capture something being both impressive and sad or of no interest at all. They could hardly say, so what? You can’t disrespect those who mythologise their precious dead.
A few months after my mock marriage, Mother sent my sister and me to boarding school, too. Moira House School for Young Ladies was a red-brick building on a hill on the outskirts of Eastbourne, a seaside town forty minutes down the coast. Brighton had the Seven Sisters cliffs. Eastbourne had Beachy Head. There was no beach on the headland, just grass, and a long drop; it is a popular suicide spot. I don’t know what Mother thought boarding school could offer over a real live mother at home. I was seven and the youngest boarder in the school. Later, I told people that Mother sent us to board because she knew she was dying; I presumed she was weaning us off her, getting us used to her absence. That’s what I told people. Three decades later, I discovered she simply thought it was the done thing. Who knows how much else I’ve got wrong about her.
I went with a new green trunk with brass buckles, a flip lock and studs around the black edges. It was packed with everything on the clothes list: seven pairs of underpants, one pair of waist-high navy gym knickers made of old people’s flannel with elasticated leg holes, one black leotard, one ankle-length evening dress (Christmas term only), two nightdresses, one bed jacket, one pair bed socks, one art smock (non-regulation), one pair pleated grey regulation woollen games shorts disguised as a skirt for hockey and netball, grey woollen V-neck sports sweater, two red Aertex shirts (winter term, white for summer), two pairs woollen knee-length grey socks; two pleated, belted navy smocks like the ones the St Trinian’s girls wore, and five long-sleeved shirts of choice. Miscellaneous: one laundry bag, one blanket, one woollen scarf, one writing case. Shoes: one pair flat day shoes, brown or black, one pair formal shoes, one pair Dunlop Green Flash trainers, one pair black gym shoes, one pair hockey boots, one pair slippers. One hockey stick (winter term). One black regulation swimsuit.
The biggest item was a grey woollen hooded cape with red lining and straps on the inside that you criss-crossed and pulled around your waist and did up with a button. It must have been designed by a feminist: it had an inside pocket like men’s jackets have. I used it for stashing Creme Eggs and slabs of toffee bought when, as one of the school’s four Catholics, we made a candy dash after going to Mass in town on Sundays; the poor, arriviste Protestants, or Prodidogs as my Ireland-born Catholic grandmother referred to non left-footers, had to walk in crocodile straight back to school. I pitied them. The fact that they had a groovy vicar who delivered his sermons whilst cycling around on a bicycle only deepened the gulf between us. We had gone up to London on the Brighton Belle and bought the uniform in Harrods. Mother and Grandma sewed on the name tapes. Later, when other people bought me my clothes, I would remember Grandma saying of her daughter: Thelma always bought the best for the girls. All adoring mothers of course say the same thing about their daughters, but for me it was proof that Mother’s love for us was particularly special.
I wore one of my new nightdresses on my first night. I had been put in a bedroom with three other girls on Blue Landing, where the youngest slept, and we had been instructed earlier in the day not to leave our ‘dorm’ to go to the ‘loo’ after ‘Lights Out’. Caught short in the middle of the night, I spotted a bin, hitched up my crisp nightie and peed into it, the urgent liquid sounding out against the enamel. I slid the bin under my high-legged metal hospital bed. Not far enough. When one of the older girls rang the handbell on the landing outside our door at 7 a.m. the following morning, I swung my legs into the winter darkness and straight into the bin. It emptied across the lino and spread across the floor. I had been a boarder for nearly a year when a letter arrived from Mother. There was nothing unusual about that. She was a good letter-writer and she wrote frequently, always in blue ink on blue headed paper. Three sentences in, she mentioned that she and Richard – Richard Williams, the man she had met at the golf club and who had sent her a bouquet of red roses the next day and had been visiting us for the last year, who drove a maroon Jaguar with silver spindled wheels, wore double-breasted suits and cravats, put pomade in his hair and bought us candy on Fridays – had got married. At least that’s what she told me. ‘But you still call Richard Richard,’ she wrote and I thought: I get it, you’re telling me that Richard is not our father. We are not to call him Father. That was a relief, because I thought then – and the side of me that has never let go of that picture on my American moodboard of us as the golden nuclear family still thinks – that Father could never be replaced, especially not by a man with a moustache.
Richard Williams was a Good Thing, although later, after everything ended, I never once told anybody about him, not even my best friend Louise, my accomplice in the blindfolding of our biology teacher. I struggled even to tell my own Richard, years later.
Richard Williams complicated my orphan narrative, which I would spend careful years reducing to something as brief and palatable as possible. His existence required more explanations and, as time went on, all I ever wanted was to get my orphan status out of the way and move the conversation on, away from what felt more and more like an embarrassing condition. It was easier to leave that whole chapter out. Besides, if people knew Mother had married again they might think that Father had not been perfect, which of course, to my mind, he was. Grandma and my aunt would later say that Mother marrying Richard Williams had been wrong, that he wasn’t a patch on Father. Lyttleton Fox, they would tell those who hadn’t even known Father, knew JFK. At my aunt’s funeral, her husband said in his eulogy that his dead wife’s dead brother-in-law had known JFK. I think Father might have been at the same school as the American president or met him, once, or maybe even he just saw him in a crowd. I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s Wigmore Hall syndrome all over again. Lyttleton was a gentleman, they would proclaim. Richard Williams was a Bad Man, they would mutter, he was a gold-digger. That sounded rather wonderful and like something from a fairy tale. But when they said he drank too much, I thought, that’s an odd thing for my aunt to remark upon, considering.
I think I loved Richard Williams. He used to sit me on his knee when he drank his whisky and soda. One day he gave my brother the Japanese Rising Sun flag he had taken in 1945 as an acting captain in the Indian Army during the recapture of Burma in the Second World War. He was promoted to acting major, which didn’t stop him acquiring a wooden propeller blade and a brass cylinder, both of which he also gave my brother. He often took us for spins in his Jaguar, which had leather seats and a pull-out drinks cabinet in the walnut dashboard. We drove to pubs in the countryside. Mother and Richard would go inside and my sister and I would sit on the back seat, sipping warm Coca-Cola through straws and eating crisps. Sometimes we all sat together at picnic tables in the pub garden and ate Chicken in a Basket. The novelty basket was made out of wicker and lined with a red napkin that matched the ketchup I oozed all over the chicken, which wasn’t a whole chicken nestling in a basket as if to lay eggs, but one of its legs or wings. Chips were piled up on one side. At some point, the spins assumed a different purpose: they became house-hunting trips instead. One old house we saw overlooked a graveyard and Mother looked out of a top window and said, I don’t want that view. In the end we moved to a house with a garden on one of those roads that say PRIVATE: RESIDENTS ONLY, and have gravel lanes with miniature potholes and a golf course nearby. Libra the Labrador fitted right in.
The house, in a village called Ditchling, less than ten miles from Brighton, was the storybook kind. It was a rectangle with a roof like a gym skirt, a front door bang in the middle, lollipop trees either side and a big, round sun high in the sky. That’s how it felt, at least. We were only in that house for one summer, maybe a bit longer. It was always hot. Too hot. There were glass doors on to the back garden, which had a bright green lawn that rolled out flat like a sheet of marzipan, and rose bushes either side, which Richard planted for Mother. It was the house of death. If there was a time when Mother was well when we lived in that house with its drive and its tended flower beds, I don’t remember it.
That summer term I came back to it at weekends. I was a weekly boarder and Richard or Mother collected us every Friday night and drove us back on the Sunday evening. I would stand at the common room window, holding on to the bars that prevented us from falling out on to the curved drive below, and watch for the Jaguar to pull up. When I spotted the silver spokes, I would grab my white vinyl overnight case containing my teddy bear and knitted woollen rabbit, and run down the back stairs of the Victorian building, out of the side door past the kitchen bins, and down the tradesman’s steep steps to the pavement.
One Friday evening I was holding on to the bars, waiting for Mother or Richard to turn up to collect my sister and me. It was dusk. The day girls were long gone, the other weekly boarders had been collected hours earlier, and the full-time boarders had already gone down to supper. Punctuality wasn’t Mother’s strong point – I’m my mother’s daughter on that front – but tonight felt different. The light was fading and the air was very still. Sometimes, when you are waiting for someone and the appointed hour has passed, you sense that your hope is spent and that the waiting will not end. Something like desolation sets in. It set in then. The housemistress eventually came and told me that Mother was not coming. She was not well and we were to stay at school that weekend. ‘I am sorry, darling,’ Mother said later, when we spoke on the telephone, not in the dank, graffitied call-box cubicle off Blue Landing where calls to the outside world were usually made, but in the housemistress’s living quarters – a special privilege. Mother’s voice was soft and sweeter than honey. There was such love in it. I told her it didn’t matter, not a bit. But it did matter. I felt stranded, which was a new feeling. So was the realisation that I had the power to make a grown-up feel better by lying.
I was in alien territory from then on. It was as if, with that phone call, a pocket was created within the air that everybody else breathed and we slipped into it, unbeknownst to others. Mother’s dying had begun. Everything shifted to accommodate it.
My sister and I quickly became a two-girl get-well industry. We made elaborate cards and presents. They were gestures of love, not heartfelt admonitions for recovery. Grandfather, our mother’s father, had died the year after we moved to England. But it didn’t occur to me that Mother would die, not for a single moment. No one told us she had breast cancer, or liver cancer. I’ve never been sure which she had, but have somehow settled on breast. Or maybe they did tell us. Either way, it would not, could not change things. She was love, and love wraps around you. It holds you as you bend into a harsh wind or stretch towards the sun. It does not disappear. That is not what love does.
Mother was sick and she would get better. She just needed to be looked after. Libra had been hit by a car and gone to animal hospital and recovered. I had lain under the desk, Father’s desk that Mother had shipped over from America – I had lain under it with Libra, and made sure that she healed. I would do the same with Mother. Her recovery was just a matter of time.
My best gift was a miniature sickbed, fashioned from a packet of notelets which formed the mattress. Sitting on the living-room floor, the sun streaming in through the French doors, I made the sheet out of a Mansize tissue. I folded it down at the top, just like we were taught to do at school, taking care to do my best hospital corners. I added a blanket cut from a square of felt and made a small pillow out of more tissue, folded up. We used to make figures out of pipe cleaners and clothes pegs back then. I don’t remember squeezing a figure under the sheets. I only hope I didn’t.
By this time Mother was upstairs in bed, under her own sheets. I remember the roses on the wallpaper that she said were driving her mad from the counting of them, the shiny chestnut bureau and my grandmother – and my aunt – flapping through the house. Richard Williams was there, too, of course, but it is the women I remember and their well-intentioned whispers. One night Mother walked from the bathroom to her bedroom and I overheard Grandma say to my aunt: ‘She shouldn’t have such hot baths. They’ll kill her.’ Oh good, I thought, if it is only a matter of skipping a hot bath, then there can’t be that much to worry about.
I was happy for Grandma to be in the house, but I didn’t like my aunt being there. She had a habit of swooping in on Mother’s life, no matter where we lived, as if her own, liquor-fuelled life weren’t enough to keep her in it. Her twin’s illness legitimised her parasitical habits. As for her husband, a man who is repeatedly scratched out of any photographs, real or imaginary, he was mercifully absent. Before, back when he was still alive, Father had banned my aunt’s husband – we never called him ‘uncle’ – from our home. I didn’t know then what his offences had been, aside from repeatedly borrowing money, but his grey and white greasy hair, side-parted, the strands piled on top of each other, his nylon slacks and his temper alone marked him out as undesirable. Once, during a picnic in America, he choked on a chicken bone and some Boy Scouts hung him upside down and cleared his airways. It was hard to forgive them for that.
The morning they came to tell us Mother was dead my sister and I were camping in a tent on the marzipan lawn. I knew she was dead when my aunt unzipped the door of the tent: it was an act of intimacy not ordinarily in her remit. Later that morning, she took us for a walk down the private gravel road. She extended her clammy hand and I knew I had to take it. Grandma took the other one. That was my first taste of my new state: being hostage to the whims of adults.
After Father was gone, there had been Mother. It had mattered, not having a father. It was awkward – different – and no child likes to be different, particularly if the nuns have marked your card and there are some boys in the playground who track you down for speaking in a weird way. I missed him, in a not-knowing-what-I-missed way. But my world was essentially still whole. Now Mother was gone too and it had a puncture in it. Out there, in the new world, there was nowhere to take cover. We were animals in flight.
The Interloper has a life of its own. It is doing well, for now, enjoying its moment of glory. But soon it will be history. I’ve had two lumps already, in my breast, and they sent me reeling, too, if only for a short while. The first appeared two months into breastfeeding Reuben. In the four days between finding the lump when we were on holiday in North Wales and seeing a consultant on Harley Street, paid for with an American Express card, I thought Mother’s breast cancer had finally come for me. The lump was a milk cyst. So was the next one, which I found just before Bassy’s first birthday. Life, birth, tissue mass, milk ducts, benign cysts. What is alarming invariably turns out to be routine cell tissue stuff.
The referral letter arrives. Please come to the UCLH Macmillan Cancer Centre, it says. No thanks. Not necessary. I haven’t got cancer.
Macmillan. Coffee mornings. Cake sales. I am doing a coffee morning for Macmillan because they were so marvellous when my mother was dying. A friend said that to me only months earlier. I go and see my GP because the Interloper has got bigger and I want to see if she can have the Macmillan appointment brought forward. Understandable, she says, but you’ve got nothing to worry about. I had a lump on the side of my face and it turned out to be benign. I want to believe her because I’ve known her for years and we have mutual friends and she has young children too, all of which makes her real and what she says believable. But I don’t believe her. I have such a bad feeling about the Interloper. I ask her why it’s the Macmillan Cancer Centre. That always worries patients, she says. It doesn’t mean you’ve got cancer. It is just where you go.
Before the appointment, in the first week of December, my old friend Fliff drops round for breakfast. I’ve known her since I was sixteen, when I switched from my girls’ school to Canford, then a boys-only boarding school in Dorset that took girls in the Sixth Form, 44 of them, in a school of 500 boys. When I walked into my first English lesson I saw a copy of Plato’s Republic sticking out of a tweed jacket pocket belonging to a boy with foppish hair; the first time I walked towards chapel for the morning service a voice bellowed ‘Hands!’ as in, get them out of your pockets; a term later, three boys from my house turned me upside down and rammed me head first into a laundry basket of worn Y-fronts. The Plato boy – Billy – became my best friend, but the girls lived together, and stuck together. Since then, Fliff and I have talked about everything life can throw at you, from heartbreak and how she’d had the chance to twist Margaret Thatcher’s head off when she did her make-up at Downing Street, to the Dutch thinking it’s normal to buy sex toys for their teenage daughters. No topic is out of bounds. Until the Interloper. I can’t bring myself to mention the fact I am off to the hospital later that morning to get it checked out. Instead we discuss how avocado on sourdough has become the breakfast rage, how Tufnell Park is full of litter, and whether she should ditch ceramics for midwifery. Then, just as she is leaving, I mention the lump. It’s nothing, I say, just a stone in my salivary gland. Of course it is, she says, and I watch her eyes widen as she clocks my worry. Call me later, when it’s all over, she says, and we’ll have a laugh.
I get to the UCLH Macmillan Cancer Centre and wish she had come with me. I am seen by the consultant head and neck and reconstructive surgeon. His jawbone is as fine as her first jock of a boyfriend’s, and he has olive skin and dark hair. This is a good omen: handsome and cancer don’t go together.
Weeks later, I tell a friend that my Greek oncologist is a dish. Richard, who is with us, grimaces. How could I even notice the consultant’s looks at a time like that? No time like the present, I might have said, but don’t. The fact is, there is a disconnect between what I say and the tinnitus of fear in my head. I don’t know how to explain any of this to him, how to articulate it. When, in the weeks to come, people ask me how I was told I had cancer, I include the initial consultation and throw in the handsome oncologist. They don’t expect it and it makes them laugh, which gives all of us a reprieve. It also moves the camera away from me for a moment. I am a shameless extrovert, usually; now I abhor all the attention I am garnering. With cancer, you learn early to be careful what you say to people: you edit your thoughts, mindful that it is selfish to be relentlessly truthful.
Dr Dish looks down my throat.
‘Can’t see anything,’ he says. ‘You’ll need an ultrasound.’
I could have told him he wouldn’t be able to see anything just by looking down my throat. The GP tried that and couldn’t get a good enough look either.
‘Fine. When?’
‘There’s nothing til next week.’
‘The GP said I would get an ultrasound today,’ I whine. ‘He said I would get an answer today.’
Maybe the GP didn’t say that, but this is what I think he said, this is what I am expecting. Dr Dish says that if I take the form he gives me to the lady in the ultrasound department over in the main hospital, she may be able to fit me in the following day. But I am working at the Guardian the next day. I should skip it and take the appointment next week. I stand on the street, undecided, before erring on the safe side. The ultrasound receptionist is friendly and helpful. She explains that the list is full but if I do come back tomorrow at twelve sharp she will bump my appointment request to the top of the radiographer’s waiting list and, fingers crossed, if he has time, he will fit me in. She’ll put in a word for me, she adds.