Читать книгу Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You - Kate Gross - Страница 10

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.

These discussions are the other side of friendship. The conversations and the memories and the fun you have together permit you to reveal the weak, scared vulnerable self that emerges every now and again. My second operation – the one I had to chop the pesky tumours out of my liver, six months after my diagnosis and my first op – was tough. It took place in a shiny, cancer-defeating factory in Houston, because Billy’s careful research had shown that it had the best chance of successfully ridding me of cancer. We spent nearly a month there, and Stateside I was the glummest of glum girls. The operation depleted me in a way I could never have imagined. Agonisingly painful. Full of complications and miserable rehospitalisations. I finally returned home feeling drained of everything, including optimism. This was ironic, as post-operation I was in a better place, statistically, than I’d been since my original diagnosis six months previously: my odds of surviving the next five years leapt (briefly) from 6 per cent to 50 per cent. And yet for me it was the darkest part of the night. Maybe because everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and thought the crisis was over. Maybe because I was physically weaker than I’ve ever been. I don’t know why, but for several months there was a loneliness to my sadness which I hadn’t experienced before.

In that kind of situation, there are two options. The first is to battle through on your own. To grit your teeth, put your head down, and say things will be better tomorrow (whenever tomorrow comes). I call this the Scarlett O’Hara; it is a noble approach, one I’ve taken before, and one that I know appeals to the proud, quiet, maybe more masculine side of all of our natures. But I chose the second option, which was to write a list of my best women, and ask them to come and help. We sat in the garden. The tulips were out, and I howled snottily on their shoulders in a way I hadn’t before. After that I told them about my fears and loneliness, and how bloody awful everything had been. Then things got better.

Not long before the Nuisance, my fear had been that the really good times were over for these wonderful friendships. Thirty-somethings with children, jobs and partners to attend to, we were no longer as available to one another as we used to be. While I might wish we all lived in some kind of giant child-rearing commune, that isn’t the case. Friendships survive on scraps of time and emails, squeezed between the rest of life, and very often conducted thousands of miles apart. We live off well-trodden stories, the space in our lives for making new memories mostly taken up by family and work, where the real drama happens. The odd dinner, more often a cup of tea balanced precariously over a baby’s head while we converse, but never enough time for the real stuff, or for new adventures together. I always hoped there would be time for that again, if only in the Home for Neglected Mothers of Sons in which we would end up in our dotage. But now it seems that I won’t be checking into that particular nursing home. All the same, there is a happy postscript to this story, at least in Nuisance land. As one of these wise women says, quoting Mike Tyson, ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’ We all had our plans. Our paths criss-crossed as we got on with life, friendships always there when they needed to be picked up. But then my family got punched in the face, far earlier and far harder than we could have expected, and our plans melted away. Suddenly time was carved out for friendship again. So cancer has given as well as it has taken – though perhaps it is more accurate to say that our friendships take from it what they can, a collective two fingers to all the Nuisance stands for.

I have spent so much of the past few years under the spell of chemotherapy, existing in a half-life where every fortnight is split into seven days of misery and seven days of life. Aside from (temporarily) taming my cancer, the other benefit of having this wicked set of toxins poured into me is that I see more of my resplendent friends from around the world than I have done for years. I am accompanied into the chemo ward. I am visited at home. This is lucky, because ‘therapy’ is a complete misnomer for the cruel concoction of drugs which is infused into my bloodstream in an attempt to keep me alive. But it has to be done: as Claudius puts it in Hamlet, ‘Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all.’

I imagine my own desperate appliance as a particularly inept vigilante marauding through my body on the hunt for cancer cells. He shoots – he kills! Oh no. More often than not, what he has slaughtered is a perfectly healthy cell just going about its taste-creating, nausea-controlling, body-hydrating business. Chemo is all about this clumsy collateral damage and how to manage it: hence the phalanx of steroids, anti-nausea pills and so on, each of which brings its own wicked side-effects. But what I hadn’t reckoned with was the mental stuff. My vigilante seems particularly adept at shooting down serotonin, so that for a few days the chemicals replace my soul with a shrivelled black void. With each cycle the physical and emotional scar tissue deepens. I elect to return, but only just.

If I wasn’t accompanied by my very own Terracotta Army of friends, returning to the chemo ward would be harder. They make things bearable. They understand the little things. That, even facing death, for me (like Hillary Clinton and her scrunchies) it’s still all about the hair (and lack thereof). That seeing the oncologist is easier when I’m in a tough-girl leopardskin coat with a slick of bright red lippy. That though my heart’s desire cannot be granted, that doesn’t mean I don’t desire stuff. The ancient Egyptians had it right – the urge to accumulate beautiful treasures increases the closer you get to death; and I intend to go into the afterlife looking polished, surrounded by the luxury goods given to me by the best women. They understand the big things too: how I need to live in Technicolor in the time I can. They plan holidays. We visit Paris in the rain. They take me to the newest restaurants, and send me extravagant bunches of flowers and richly scented candles so that in the evening I can draw the curtains and pretend that everything is just fine.

I sometimes sit in my chair, too tired to move, too brain-dead to read or write. With my eyes closed, I feel a pleasant weight pressing on my shoulders. It is the weight of all the time Billy and I have had with our friends, enveloping me like a heavy blanket. They are brave, these people. They were there the day after I was diagnosed, uninvited, hugging Billy and regaling me with tales of dreadful in-laws that made me laugh so much my new scar throbbed through the morphine. They are there when I come out of the claustrophobic scanning machines, squeezing my hand as I fretfully try to interpret every look the radiographers give each other. They arrive at our door with elaborate dishes for lunch, and then stay to do the washing up. Part of the reassuring weight I feel from these friendships comes from the discussions we have had about Afterwards. These are the kind of friends who want to be in my children’s lives forever. The kind of friends who will buy seven-seater cars to ferry them around as well as their own families. The kind of friends who will tell stories of Mummy long after she’s gone. The kind of friends who will pick Billy up when gritting his teeth and saying tomorrow will be a better day just doesn’t cut it.