Читать книгу Late Fragments: Everything I Want to Tell You - Kate Gross - Страница 8

A certain minor light may still

Leap incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then –

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honour,

One might say love.

SYLVIA PLATH, ‘BLACK ROOK IN RAINY WEATHER’

There was a moment, a decade or so ago, when I was walking across Clapham Common on a grey winter day. The sky was flat and far too close to my head. I was in a no-particular-sort-of-mood, probably on my way to spending an afternoon in the pub. Or shopping. Anyway: engaging in delightful, consumerist, meaningless modern life. And then I saw a child in a red coat, and I experienced a moment of absolute, pure wonder. Joy, transcendent and uplifting. Did I borrow this memory from the film Schindler’s List? Or perhaps this unexpected moment of joy reminded me of watching a scene from another film, American Beauty, in which the teenage anti-hero films a plastic bag with tender attention as it swirls around, suspended in the air, capturing every twist and flutter. No, I believe this memory is my own: there is wonder in the everyday, if you can only see it.

I am not pretending that I go round all the time having this kind of experience. Or that I see it only in red coats, or indeed in plastic bags. It is just that if I could give my children one thing, it would be this capacity to be astonished by the quotidian, to experience joy from the world they live in. I would work out its formula and put it into a pair of superhero glasses – me and the former dean of Westminster Michael Mayne both, who wrote in his letters to his grandchildren: ‘If I could have waved a fairy wand at your birth and wished upon you just one gift it would not have been beauty or riches or a long life: it would have been the gift of wonder.’ But it doesn’t work like that. We all have to find wonder for ourselves. All I can do is explain how wonder emerged for me as the world and I met, and how it has grown stronger and brighter even as my world has got smaller and dimmer.

I can spread my childhood memories out like a patchwork quilt. My quilt is brightly coloured, richly textured, a mix of the familiar and the foreign. My parents showed me the world from an early age, and experiencing it – drinking in the astonishing wonder it provides – has made me who I am. Because of them, ‘the ears of my ears awake and the eyes of my eyes are open’, as ee cummings put it. Aged about four, I saw a mongoose eat a snake on the banks of the Creek in Dubai. We used to go into the city on a Friday night for curry. In one corner of the garden of the small and scruffy café by the water sat a big cage. And inside the cage lived a mongoose, and the mongoose was fed snakes. After our curry we would have freshly squeezed fruit juice in a small bar staffed by nice Indian men who would pinch my fat, freckly Caucasian cheeks. I remember our weekend trips to the beach, where we would camp under enormous, starry skies. In 1986, age seven and three quarters, I lay on the cold sand with my friend Georgia, and watched Halley’s Comet fly overhead. We made a solemn promise that we would watch it together on its next cycle through the sky, when Georgia will be in her eighties and I will be long gone. During the hot, cloudless days we would blow up our inflatable lilos and drift out into the clear waters of the Persian Gulf in search of the Utter East. In the shallow seas, stingrays lurked under the rocks along with the cuttlefish. At night we children would whisper ghost stories in our tents as the heat of the day gave way to the cold desert night, until we were lulled to sleep by the sounds of our parents drinking cold beers around the campfire.

Because I was brought up far away, in a dusty, dry place where the inside of our blue Toyota was like a metal furnace most of the year round, England felt very foreign to me. Our summers spent in the Wiltshire countryside were as full of wonder as anything I experienced abroad – the everyday stuff of an English childhood rendered foreign by the exotica of my life on the Arabian Peninsula. I remember sunshine and an abundance of soft grass, so different from the scratchy Astroturf of our garden in Dubai. Smooth green banks of grass to roll down, to somersault over, to play leapfrog on. Delicate, pastel-coloured flowers waiting for me to snip them and stuff them in my flower press; flowers which for the first time in my experience looked as if they might actually house fairies, unlike the gargantuan, ferocious flora of the Middle East. Gentle, small butterflies landing on the buddleia outside Court House in our little village of Bishopstone, waiting for me to swoop in with my net. Paddling in too-cold streams with trousers rolled up, learning how to build dams.

As a family, we are travellers. Exploring is part of our DNA, just as much as being shortsighted. We are addicted to the smell of elsewhere which hits when you descend from a plane, the excitement of buying milk in a foreign supermarket. My grandfather spent his war in the intelligence corps, in India and Burma, and returned to India with the BBC afterwards. Mum remembers the presents he brought home: exotic silks and carvings, and stories of a place which captivated him. In Kathmandu, when I was six, I saw the Living Goddess, a girl about my age who was locked inside an ornately carved wooden house, with dark kohled eyes and a shiny red and gold dress. How I envied her then, being chosen to be a goddess. But I thought she looked so sad, and as though she wanted very much to be able to play as I could. In Thailand I smelled the cloying odour of durian fruit while we floated down the khlongs of Bangkok. Butterflies of incredible size and colour flitted around me as we walked through the jungle. Black leeches attached themselves to our feet and legs as we hopped over enormous puddles and overflowing rivers in the pouring rain. As a child brought up in the desert, this was my first encounter with the many-shaded green of the tropics, the clichéd wonder of independent travel which would only grow during my university holidays.

There are so many places I wanted to take my boys. Places I have been and seen, and places I have not. To India, to see the coracles floating down the river at Hampi and to hear stories of the oldest civilisations. To Vietnam, to eat soft-shell crabs on a street corner while you watch the future take shape in the concrete flyovers and skyscrapers above you. To California, to experience everything super-sized, including the boundless optimism and confidence of the glossy-haired, honey-limbed natives. To Africa, to see the misty thousand hills in Rwanda and to understand how a people can tear themselves apart and remake themselves in a generation, because history is not a death sentence. To Egypt, or maybe Morocco, to see souks and pyramids, riads and the simple, mesmerising shapes of Islamic art. To mountain ranges where you feel the bliss of solitude as you glide in a silent chairlift amidst deep, silent snowdrifts. To tropical seas as clear as glass, where you can enter another world underwater, watching turtles and stingrays glide through shoals of magically coloured fish.

I won’t take my children to those places now. But still, I try to guess how and where they will experience the wonder that will make them see the world anew. Perhaps it has already come, in the Botanic Garden in Cambridge. There, we run round the lake, climb mountains, explore jungles and cross rivers on stepping stones, and are still only a mile from our front door. Or in the places we have already been: stretching our legs to cross the slippery stones of the Giant’s Causeway, with the myths of Finn McCool ringing in our ears. Or in the magical house in France my dad built, where it never rains, the swimming pool is always blue, and a snake called Oliver Cromwell lives under the veranda.

The point is, I don’t know how they will experience the world, any more than I can guide them through it. I hope that its breadth and variety will provide them with the endless thrill it has for me. But staying at home is fine too. I need them to know that wonder doesn’t require a passport, it only requires your attention. My dad has always been evidence of that. He’s a traveller too, and he told me once about wonder emerging for him as he surveyed the wild cliffs of St David’s in Wales as a long-haired, dope-smoking student (remember, it was the Seventies). But his truest sense of wonder has always been found in a smaller world around him. He sees things, you see, in the details: the curve of a white tulip petal, the way a tree branch stretches over a lake, the perfect structure of the green hills and the flat causse near the house he built in France. Like Emily Dickinson, his holy trinity is the Bee, the Butterfly and the Breeze. He is a man who takes joy from his surroundings, someone who like Thomas Hardy considers himself a man who notices things.

How strange, how brilliant it is that this awareness of wonder, this sense of the sublime, has been so closely intertwined with my illness as it has progressed. How incredible that Ruskin’s duty to delight in the world around has grown stronger in me as I have grown weaker.

But before I go any further, I had better tell the story of how the cancer inside me – the beast I know as the Nuisance – started, because it is the frame for everything else that follows.

I’ve always had a dodgy bottom. I presumed it was irritable bowel syndrome. I guessed it had been exacerbated by the various terrible afflictions of the innards I obtained while working in India, where I taught for a few months post-university. Within a month of arriving there I was sustaining myself only by gulab jamun, the gelatinous, sticky Indian sweets. Everything else on the school’s menu, including the inoffensive-seeming parathas, had left me squatting painfully over the stand-up loos or running out of assembly to vomit in the verdant flowerbeds. Clearly, I thought, there was some mutant worm growing inside me. I nuked it with antibiotics when I got home, but I seemed to be left with something permanently wrong down there. In a very British style, I ignored it valiantly for about seven years. By then, I was anyway busy with being a young and ambitious worker bee, and falling in love.

It was only when I paused and left London that I vowed to get my health sorted out. We had moved to Cambridge – home of Billy’s technology start-up, which he’d founded the very month he and I went on our first date, in 2004. It was my turn to do the commute to London, but I was avoiding that, and indeed reality in general, by going back to university to do a Masters. Being a student again gave me plenty of time to go and get things checked out. After I had described my symptoms to my GP, she sent me off to hospital, where they put a little camera up my bottom. The nice consultant found nothing to worry about, and told me to eat more fibre to regularise things down there. Little did I know, not being the bottom-health expert I now am, that I had only had a sigmoidoscopy: in layman’s terms, a camera that peeks only partway up your arse, rather than exploring the whole lot. If the camera had poked a bit further round my innards, the consultant probably would have found an adenoma, a pre-cancerous little polyp in my colon. He would have cut it out, I would have been booked in for regular screening, and life would have proceeded to plan. But that didn’t happen. To make matters worse, I always confidently told subsequent doctors I had had a clear colonoscopy, and that everything down there was Just Fine.

In any case, the ensuing years were eventful for other, more pressing reasons. With (I thought) my health problems sorted, I got pregnant in 2008. My twelve-week scan revealed two little swimmers thrashing around in my uterus. Twin boys. Billy and I were petrified. Like cancer, twins didn’t run in the family. What were the chances? One in eighty, apparently, significantly greater than the one in twenty thousand chance of getting colon cancer aged thirty-four. But back to the story. In May 2009 my little swimmers emerged, full-term and healthy. Motherhood took over my body and my mind, as is its way. I was swept along on a wave of oxytocin, and apart from the sleep deprivation felt happier and healthier than I ever had.

Being a mother consumed me, and what energy was left over I applied to work. Halfway through my Masters I had set up the Africa Governance Initiative, working again for our former prime minister Tony Blair. Not only was he the smartest, kindest and most relaxed politician I had ever worked for, he also had a belief in the role of government as a force for good which profoundly appealed to my public-servant heart. He wanted to use what he’d learned in ten long years in power for the benefit of some of the poorest people in the world, by working with the leaders of Africa’s emerging democracies, countries coming out of years of war and mismanagement. As someone who had always seen myself as a bureaucrat with the heart of an explorer, this seemed like a perfect fit. With Tony working alongside presidents and prime ministers, the charity we founded put teams of international staff – capable, passionate, bright young things – into the heart of burgeoning democracies, countries like Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. There we worked with many incredible African public servants, sitting alongside them in bombed-out, sweltering buildings, with more chickens in the corridors than staff in the offices, assisting with the task of rebuilding a country and shaping a fair, effective and clean government. Between wrangling with twins and being CEO of this new enterprise, I didn’t have much time to worry as my old bottom troubles worsened. Anyway, it was all too easy to blame things on the Rwandan goat brochettes.

Fast forward to October 2012. The kids are three and a bit. I am thirty-four, and something inside just doesn’t feel right. I am very, very tired. On Saturdays I stick the boys in front of the TV while I sleep. I go to the GP. I tell her I’ve had a colonoscopy. She asks when. I say 2007, and she tells me they are valid for five years. Now the problems really begin. I start getting terrible abdominal pains. These reach a peak during an excruciatingly dull interview I’m conducting for a new chief operating officer. Suddenly, it feels as if a giant boulder has rolled across my intestines – a pretty accurate metaphor, it turns out, if you exchange ‘boulder’ for ‘tumour’. But still, life continues. A return trip to the GP, who tells me I probably have a blockage down there, but it’s nothing to worry about. I wonder whether, if my problems had been in a less, well, shitty area (say my armpit) I would have fought harder over the years to sort them out. But I didn’t, and so off I go to California, to running on Laguna Beach, to that accursed United Airlines flight home, and to the CT scan and finally the operating table on 12 October when my tumour and its liverish little friends finally come to light.

I woke up after the operation with Billy next to my hospital bed. It was he who told me, then, that I definitely had cancer. He was reassuring, gentle, a little wild-eyed but surprisingly calm. I was euphoric, full of morphine, and overjoyed to see him. Terrified of my first general anaesthetic, I hadn’t really expected to wake up from the operation. But there I was, on a general surgery ward, midnight on a Friday, with a diagnosis of advanced cancer. And ecstatic to be alive.

God knows what it had been like for Billy to get my phone calls that day: first, telling him I was in hospital. Next, that I’d had a scan and was likely to need surgery. Then, just an hour later, that there was a chance it might be cancer, and that they were operating immediately. He stayed with me right up until I was wheeled into surgery, then walked away. He told me afterwards that while I was under the knife he sat in our little garden smoking and crying. The surgeon had rung him afterwards and confirmed the worst. Then, in the dead of night, Billy came in to be by my side when I woke up. And as I drifted back off into my euphoric, opiated haze he returned home to scour the internet for survival strategies, treatments and miracle cures.

Gentle reader, you may have the misfortune to know all about cancer already. If so, forgive me for what follows. Cancer comes in four easy-to-remember stages. Picture your body as a house – your ‘bone-house’, as it was called by the Anglo-Saxon poets – and cancer as your formerly domesticated dog, now running wild and intent on rampaging through the neighbourhood, destroying all in his path. Stage one is ‘local’ cancer, your dog confined to your kitchen: just the one bodily organ. Here he can make mayhem, but be relatively easily tamed and managed. In stage two, your dog has managed to outgrow the kitchen, and has burst through the wall to colonise the living room, getting his messy hairs and doggy smell everywhere. Taming this beast and removing the traces of him will now be harder. Stage three sees Dog getting all the way to the front door and bounding out (with the front door being the lymph nodes, in this tortured analogy). You can shut the door at this point, but once the blighter has tasted freedom it’s hard to contain his desire to explore the neighbourhood. And so stage four comes. Here, Dog has run amok, taken a giant crap on the pavement, eaten out of the bins and settled into the chippy down the road for a snooze. Your cancer has spread from its initial home to other vital organs. Because of our inability to speak of our rear ends, most colon cancer is detected somewhere between stages two and four, and the chances of cure decline dramatically as the patient progresses through the stages.

But in the hospital that weekend, I don’t yet know any of this. Billy researches the statistics for me. Over time he tells me that while my prognosis is poor, the numbers apply to old people, and since I am so young and healthy I am bound to have a better shot at things. The information on the internet is about five years out of date, and new treatments, surgical techniques and so on have bumped up survival rates. If the tumours in my liver can be operated on, I actually have a chance of a complete recovery – admittedly it’s still only fifty–fifty, if we even get that far. But those odds feel brilliant to us at this stage.

There were a lot of ifs, in those first few weeks. I could explain them all, and all the ups and downs that followed during the next months of chemotherapy through till my liver operation, and then the reappearance of the Nuisance all over my body six months later. But that would litter the pages of this whole book with jargon, and make it incomprehensibly, boringly medical. It is enough to say that as Billy and I looked ahead in those strange hours after my operation, we saw a landscape of uncertainty. My vision was blurred by morphine and pain. His was sharper, and he could see, more clearly than I, the life we had thought stretched before us disappear into a fog of disease, hospitals, statistics, and just plain luck.

But through the haze I had my first taste of the bitter gratitude that has accompanied my diagnosis. I have already told you about the almost transcendental experience I had feeling the soft October rain on my face as I stumbled from my hospital bed to lean out of the window after the operation, and the joyful feeling of aliveness which consumed my mind and body despite having been told I might die. But there were more practical things that brought me joy too. First, everyone else on my ward had stoma – or colostomy – bags. I never actually saw one, but I knew that they lurked under the baggy hospital gowns, catching the poo from the piece of the colon that peeked out of the stomach, a second bottom carved by surgeons in many, many abdominal operations. Somehow, my genius surgeon had managed to piece me back together without the need for one of those things. Second, though my body had let me down by allowing this cancer to take root, it had also propelled me home. Somehow, it had found the strength to travel five and a half thousand miles back to Cambridge to receive this unreceivable news in the only place I could bear it. And so there I was, the old world around me crashing down. Everything I had taken for granted swept away. And yet I was full to the brim with an irrepressible joy.

Back to now. No more smell of hot elsewhere as I disembark from a plane. Life is quiet. My joy comes from small things; no travel documents required. I watch the crocuses pop up on the Cambridge Backs, little purple and orange heralds of the winter thawing. The bare trees in the park at the end of our road look like an Aubrey Beardsley etching on the big East Anglian sky. I swim in the sea in Devon, too early in the year for those sensible people with time to spare. Breaking the oncologist’s rules, I feel the thrill of dangerous, wild nature enfold me as hypothermia rises from my feet upwards. I roll over to Billy in the morning and watch him sleep, nosily at peace. Reading Four Quartets, the words imprint my mind, filling me with amazement at how Eliot grapples with the sense of time that haunts me. ‘At the still point, there the dance is.’ I search for the still point every day, and sometimes I even manage to find some peace there, because, after all, there is only the dance.

There is wonder in my past, and in my present. As I write this book, I lay out my memory quilt to see all the dancing I have done: places I have been, people I have met. I have fitted so much colour into my short life that I wonder if I lived on hyper-speed, as if, somehow, I knew my time was limited.

Soon my wonder will come from watching the tree outside my window as it shakes in the sky, and from my children curling their small hands around mine. My world will shrink to one room. But I know wonder will still assail me.