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Chapter 4

1 April

Tim and I returned from New York the day before yesterday, having had an amazing three days. As our original Valentine’s weekend had been cancelled by the airline (strike), we were compensated with first-class upgrades on the flights and a suite at the hotel (overlooking Central Park). Talk about how the other half lives. It was great. We saw a huge Broadway musical, Ragtime, went backstage at the Late Show (halfway round the world to see Blur!), and saw Woody Allen playing with his jazz band in a club – the highlight of the trip. Tim bought an entire suitcase of clothes and I discovered that my bum is the same size in England as it is in Saks Fifth Avenue, so bought things like stationery and camera stuff – some gorgeous paper from Cartier and playing cards from Tiffany’s.

Although I got pretty exhausted and my ear hurt on the flight, one of the best things for me was that I really felt that I was having a holiday from having cancer. I felt like a tourist having a really romantic weekend, far too busy to think about much at all.

Caitlin had a great time here visiting new-born lambs and things and apparently didn’t cry once! So no guilt either! Home to something of an anti-climax, but at least the weather is nice here. Next holiday is France – all together.

One strange thing: flying back from New York I was looking out of the window and saw us flying from sunset to darkness. We were high above the clouds and over the sea and could see nothing but golden orange fading into deep blue, then blackness. I suddenly felt stifled and desperate to turn back into the sun, as though I were dying.

New York was an incredible time for me, I loved it. Yes, it’s true, I love New York. Just overcoming my fear of flying to get on a transatlantic flight was quite a big step, but actually getting in the limousine at the other end at JFK and driving across the bridge into Manhattan was a buzz and a half. As Weeze said, as compensation for the last aborted attempt, we’d had nearly everything on the trip upgraded. For those of you who haven’t flown business class or first class, it is simply fabulous! Especially, I guess, for a luxury travel virgin like myself. Why? It’s the big seats – they’re like beds. I swear I felt refreshed when I got to New York, not tired and filthy as if I’d just travelled in a cattle truck, as I normally do. But why the fear of flying?

OK, picture the scene if you will. Weeze and I are on our honeymoon, nearly everything that could go wrong has and we’re both sick as parrots. We cut short our cruise down the Nile and decide to fly back to Cairo to just rest up in a nice hotel. Well, on the way from the boat to Luxor airport the taxi breaks down in the middle of the desert. This I should have spotted as a bad omen. The massive fat man driving us turns round and says, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, you better push.’ And he’s saying that to a couple who’ve been throwing up non-stop for ten days, for whom just staying conscious was a difficulty. But being a good English couple, rather than saying ‘Sod off, you’ve got to be joking’, we crawled out of the cab and began to push. It was so hot, and such hard work to push this taxi and this huge man that I thought one of us was going to collapse. I had visions of us pushing all day and night and having to drink the fat man’s sweat as a method of survival. Luckily, none of this came to pass. Within two minutes another taxi passed us, we hailed it and jumped ship, leaving the fat man to fend for himself. For all I know he’s just a skeleton sitting in a taxi in the middle of the desert now.

So we eventually got to Luxor airport only to find that there was no air-conditioned waiting lounge – people just sit round in the heat and get sun stroke – and to be informed that there was no plane for us. Apparently, and I quote, ‘The engine fell off your plane in Cairo, so we are without a plane.’ Well, call me an old stick-in-the-mud if you like, but I didn’t find this terribly reassuring. And I didn’t feel a lot better when they told me that there was a plane going up to Cairo that wasn’t scheduled to be taking passengers but we could hitch a lift on it if we wanted. Louise had just come back from the toilets for the third time and said she just needed to get out of there, so we headed for the plane. From the outside it looked like a normal plane, but on the inside it was a different story. There was food and litter everywhere and the air hostesses looked at us in horror as we boarded, desperately trying to tidy themselves up, applying make-up and buttoning up blouses.

‘I don’t like this, this doesn’t feel right at all,’ I said and, as if to put a further jinx to the whole flight, I added, ‘That’s exactly what people say on the telly – there’s always two people who decided not to get on Death Flight 110 because they had a strange premonition about imminent disaster.’

Weeze shook her head and said, ‘It’s this plane or the old woman who won’t give me enough toilet paper back in the hell hole of a toilet. I’m taking the plane, you do what you like.’

So off we set and everything was going fine for a good twenty minutes. I was looking down for the first time at the beauty of the desert. Images of Peter O’Toole on the back of a camel floated through my mind and then we suddenly dropped five hundred feet out of the air. One second the engines and the wings and all the little flashing lights and knobs had been keeping us airborne, the next minute we were heading for the sand. My stomach, which I’d left some five hundred feet above, took a good few seconds to catch up with me. I turned to Weeze and managed to say, ‘Fuck me, that was a bit scary, what …’ when we hit another series of turbulence pockets, the plane dropped and bounced all over the place and I started to freak out. Singing and laughing as loudly as I could, I tried to remember all the names of the Egyptian gods we’d heard about on our travels. ‘Horus, erm … Horus, ermm, Amon, Ra, ermm, look any of you, help me and I’ll believe, I promise, I’ll believe, and I’ll make others believe, please oh gods, please help …’

Weeze, on the other hand, always became calm in the face of adversity and with Zen-like peace she whispered to me, ‘Tim, we’re all frightened, now keep it down a bit.’

At this point the captain came on the tannoy. This was what I wanted, news from the man in charge that things were OK. What I’d hoped for was a very upper-class BA pilot saying, ‘I’m terribly sorry, ladies and gentlemen, it’s the teensiest bit choppy up here, but we’ll soon pass through it and Jeeves will bring round the Earl Grey tea.’ But this was not BA and what we got was an Egyptian pilot who sounded more scared than I did: ‘It very bad, we try to get out of it.’

At this point the plane went into a severe dive. I could see the dunes getting closer and closer and closer and at what I assumed must be somewhere near the last minute he pulled out of the dive, levelled off and we proceeded on our way more or less without incident. I was so petrified by the experience that when we landed I found myself not only unable to clap and cheer along with the rest of the passengers, but unable to walk. I stood up and found my legs had turned to jelly. Much to Weeze’s amusement, I weaved my way down the aisle like a drunk man.

Ever since then, flying has been a somewhat nerve-racking experience. Except in first class on the way to New York. That was a dream and Weeze was stunning all weekend. She was radiant, gorgeous and – most importantly – alive, really alive, glowing, absorbing every experience. We did the whole Big Apple thing, we went up the Empire State Building at night, wandered round Times Square in the rain, went to the Metropolitan Opera House – it was all so New York.

Weeze suffered from jet lag or was just getting more tired, but overall she was on top form. In the mornings she had trouble getting up and there seemed to be no need to push on too early. I, however, got up each morning at five and didn’t really know what to do with myself. I would spend half an hour or so watching her sleep. She looked really peaceful, as if she’d left the cancer behind her in England. But the longer I watched her, the longer I felt I was pushing my luck. After a while I would inevitably be hit by a melancholy, as I realized that one day I’d be alone and that she wouldn’t be with me, in my bed, sleeping peacefully. At this point I’d put on some shorts and my trainers and head off for a jog round Central Park in the early morning light. It was chilly and frosty and surprisingly empty. It felt like it was my park. And as parks go, that’s a pretty good one to have. The cold air was sharp and chilled my lungs as I ran. I loved running round to Strawberry Fields, then out of the park over to Lennon’s apartment where he was shot, then down to the Met Opera House, down further to Times Square and then back to the hotel. Normally by the time I’d finished my run it was still only 6.30 so I’d find a café and chill out there, just watching New York life for an hour or so.

When I’d had enough of gawping, I’d make my way back to the hotel and wake Weeze with a kiss and a coffee. We shopped like there was no tomorrow. Or rather, I did, while Weeze bought the odd little thing that would come wrapped in a beautiful paper bag. I bought eight pairs of Levi’s, thirty t-shirts, baseball hats, shoes – you name it, I bought it. I don’t know why, I usually hate shopping, but New York just had everything I wanted by the bucketload.

A lovely friend of ours, Sally, had more or less organized the whole trip for us. She was so sweet. All our dinner appointments were at the grooviest restaurants and everywhere we went we got VIP treatment – it made us both feel very special. But there are some times when being treated like a VIP is a good thing and other times when it can all backfire. One of the things we were most excited about was the fact that Sally had got us tickets to see Woody Allen play jazz at this little club. So we got all dressed up and headed down to the venue. When we got there we hadn’t realized the lengths Sally had gone to. We thought we had to wait with everyone else, pay for our tickets and then squeak in at the back. So we spent half an hour out in the cold with the other people queuing up on the off-chance of picking up a ticket. Getting cold and losing patience, Weeze told me to go and check up front to see if Sally had left us tickets to pick up. So I managed to push my way through to the maître d’ and apologetically asked if there were tickets for Tim and Louise. This slightly camp guy gushed, ‘You’re here, at last you’re here. Fabulous, where’s Louise? Come on, quickly bring her in. Quickly, the show’s about to start.’

So we were ushered past all the waiting fans like we were film stars and taken into the room. It was tiny and could have seated no more than a hundred people, all of whom were already seated and drinking at their tables. Much to our disbelief we were led to the front table. It was no more than two feet away from the small dais where the band would be playing. Champagne and glasses were rushed to the table by numerous waiters and everyone in the whole place looked at us as if wondering who we were. Then in came Woody and the band. And there he was, sitting right in front of us, literally within an arm’s length, one of the century’s greatest filmmakers.

In fact, he was so close it was almost embarrassing – wherever you looked, there he was, exactly like in his movies, nervy and twitchy, fiddling with his clarinet’s reeds, looking nervous and uncomfortable, ill at ease with the world. Then he was playing and his clarinet sang. His furrowed brow relaxed and he entered his own world, oblivious to the packed room in front of him. Oblivious to the hundreds of flashes from the cameras that everyone seemed to have smuggled into the club. So many, in fact, that I kept checking Weeze, worried that they’d have some kind of strobe effect and send her into a fit.

I’m no jazz expert, as my good friend and ex-jazz editor for Time Out Linton will tell you (I thought Duke Ellington was eighth in line to the throne), but he sounded wonderful – quite raw, quite unschooled, but the music was coming from somewhere deep inside him and as such was transfixing. Each player in the band took their turn to show off their own musical virtuosity and after each break the crowd applauded and cheered their appreciation. Midway through the gig Woody took a middle eight and swung out some angel licks which made me laugh with joy. As he finished, the crowd stayed quiet and one solitary English voice could be heard to shout out, ‘Nice one, Wood!’ Why the crowd chose that moment not to cheer, and why I chose those very words, so very loudly, is a mystery. Why I couldn’t have said ‘Woody’ or ‘Woody Allen’ or even ‘Mr Allen’ – anything would have been better than the over familiar ‘Wood’. A flush of horror came over me. Louise, ever the supportive wife, turned her head away from me and pretended for the next half hour that she wasn’t with me but was with the big fat Mafia boss to our left who was fondling a very young Russian girl. Yes, she’d rather have pretended to be a mobster’s hooker than be with the geeky English guy who shouted out ‘Nice one, Wood!’ at the top of his voice.

Outside she laughed about it, then got in a cab with the old guy and the Russian princess and headed off up 42nd Street. She got back to the hotel at about five in the morning, stinking of pasta and cheap caviar, and had a large roll of notes tucked into her bra. OK, the last bit isn’t true but I was just seeing if you were paying attention. It wasn’t really that large.

When I look back on New York I look at it as being the big trip, the big gesture. It was luxurious, extravagant and joyful. I can still see Weeze’s face as she first opened the door to the suite we had in the hotel and walked from room to room. ‘Tim, look, there’s another room, and look at the view, wow, we’re right on top of Central Park.’ We drank champagne in bed and made love late into the night – it was three of the best days of my life. But, as with all good things, it had to come to an end and as we flew home both of us felt the slight sick feeling of knowing we were flying back to our real life, flying back to the cancer. The image she talked about while looking out of the plane window became a very strong one for her and she often found herself dreaming of being dead and floating on clouds in a strange golden sunset light. She found it very peaceful, she felt released – no longer held to the ground by the pain of a mortal body, she was soaring, pure spirit, pure joy.

3 April

The world is a strange place; one day it is so sunny and I can think of a million things to miss and to prove what a wonderful place this is and the very next day the sky is a blank wall of grey and everyone seems to be talking about war. Now even more than ever before I just cannot understand war. And at the moment I don’t want to think about it. The news just upsets me without making me feel more in touch with the world.

Next week off to France. Keep on running!

4 April

I’m watching The Big Chill and feeling nostalgic. Although for what, I’m not sure. The last time I watched it I was much younger and I assumed that I had years and years of … I don’t know. Everything. Of doing things, of being idealistic and then growing cynical and disillusioned and doing more stuff and discovering inner wisdom and … you know, all the stuff they do in movies.

Films give us such extraordinary expectations. There is the expectation of extraordinary lives or that we can draw wisdom from our ordinary lives or that they will have a plot. There is a part of me that feels that if my life is really rounding to a close, all those loose ends should be tied up neatly; I want to know what happens in the end to everyone I’ve ever known.

Emails to the afterlife please.

It’s funny reading this one because, of all the people I know, Weeze’s life was the one most like a movie. She truly lived an extraordinary life. OK, so it was a tragedy in the end, an ending that leaves the audience in tears and feeling drained, but happier for having had the experience. It’s also interesting because I think for a lot of the year it felt like it was a film for us, we felt like the whole thing was unreal – it was so intense that it couldn’t possibly be real. I can remember how much of a fraud I felt when I told people about Weeze’s illness.

‘Yeah, have you heard about Louise?’ Pause, meaningful look, slight sadness behind the eyes. ‘The cancer’s back. There’s nothing they can do this time.’ Another pause for effect to let the audience fully appreciate the dramatic moment. ‘They say she’s got a year, possibly two at the most.’ More sad looks, possibly think about squeezing out a tear.

It all just sounded so over-dramatic. I couldn’t take it in. Well, that’s not true, sometimes it crashed in on me and I just couldn’t stop crying and then breaking the news to someone was soul-destroying. However, a lot of the time I’d be having a good day, bumbling around the way you do, and then I’d bump into someone and they’d ask how I was and I’d have to make the decision in my head – do I just say fine and keep on moving or do I tell them that I’m facing losing everything and that things couldn’t really be any worse? Both Weeze and I found this a real dilemma, because people’s reactions were often overwhelming and we didn’t want to put people through it. And we could never tell how any particular person was going to react. Some of the strongest people we know just burst into tears, while others who we thought would have been unable to handle it were fabulous and very matter of fact in their sympathy. For some reason, I always found telling people over the phone the hardest thing to do. Still do. I don’t know why, but I have trouble saying Weeze has gone on the phone without blubbing my eyes out. Often I can tell people face to face without it really affecting me. Answers from any psychologists on a postcard please.

12 April

Well, the Cathar castles are spectacular, the food is by and large delicious, and we spent last night in the loveliest hotel I’ve ever seen, but it feels artificial being here. Caitlin is having a great time and is really enthusiastic about everything, and I should be able to think of this as an ordinary family holiday to France in the Easter holidays, but somehow I can’t. I feel as though I ought to be absorbing every experience more, as though these holiday memories for Caitlin and Tim are super-loaded with significance. As a result, I don’t feel terribly relaxed. I am exhausted and dizzy. But the food is fabulous. And so cheap! And Caitlin is a joy to travel with. She is so adaptable and enthusiastic about everything.

Wow, what an amazingly succinct entry. The French trip was a cock-up, but for a few beautiful high points. We got the train over to Paris and picked up a large people carrier. We drove down south in a couple of big chunks and late on the second night we turned up at this house in the middle of nowhere, deep in the Pyrénées. My dad, who came with us on the trip, had arranged to borrow this place that he’d been to before one summer. But when we got there it was somewhat more remote than we had imagined and it was cold and wet and full of spiders. Weeze walked round the house like a haunted woman trying to find one room she could feel comfortable in to settle down, but found no solace. Bless her, she was great at a lot of things, but slumming it wasn’t one of them. My dad kept us smiling and said he’d sort it all out, get a fire going, and we’d all be toasty before we knew it. But neither Weeze nor I could see ourselves staying there for two weeks. In fact, we couldn’t see ourselves staying there for two nights. We climbed into our tiny double bed, with wet damp sheets and a musty smell, and Weeze broke down. She cried and cried. It wasn’t just about where we were, it was about everything, but the place certainly didn’t help. Within about two minutes we’d made up our minds that we weren’t going to stay any longer than that night and this seemed to cheer Weeze up a bit, and made me incredibly relieved as well.

We shut our eyes for what seemed like seconds before Caitlin, lying between us, woke up crying, and not just crying, but screaming, rolling around the bed holding her tummy. Lights on, action stations. I spent an hour cradling her in my arms, carrying her around, giving her Calpol, singing to her, dancing round with her, anything to make her feel better, but nothing worked. I could take Louise being in pain, I knew we were in it together, but I can’t bear it when Caitlin’s in pain, I go berserk. I have to keep really calm and just hold her and hold her. After an hour I’d had enough and decided we had to get her to a hospital. It was only then that I realized quite how stupid this choice of holiday home had been. We started our drive at one o’clock in the morning, at three-thirty we made it out of the mountains, at four o’clock we got to the first town. We followed the signs for the hospital, only to be told when we got there that this was a hospital for the insane. Well, we think that’s what the guy on the door was trying to tell us with his strange goggly eye motions and tapping of his head. He told us where the nearest proper hospital was and an hour later we were there. Caitlin had been screaming for the best part of five hours, Weeze was distraught, I was in hyper-calm Dad mode and my father was trying his best to keep things light in the car. It turned out she was severely constipated, she was given a rectal examination, and everything was sorted out.

Sitting in the waiting room in Carcassonne, I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and a feeling of stupidity. OK, Caitlin was all right, but what on earth would we have done if Louise had been taken ill, if something had popped in her head and she’d needed immediate help? I determined that that was it. I just wanted to get my family home as quickly as possible. We stayed in the house one night longer and then started our journey home. We took it nice and slowly, staying in lovely hotels, eating in only the best restaurants and going to see all the castles and beauty spots we wanted to. But it felt good to be heading home. This was a holiday too far and we would never again go away. We popped into Disneyland Paris for Caitlin, and had a miserable and boring time standing in queues for hours, and wondering to ourselves why on earth we were there. Especially because we’d gone there two years before and had an equally miserable time. So we stayed there all of three hours and then headed into Paris, the most wonderful city in the world.

13 April

I am writing this from the best hotel I’ve ever been in, or imagined. It is the hotel, in Paris, that Oscar Wilde died in. Of course, it has been done up somewhat, as he died in poverty, and is now the most amazing four-star place. It is the only place I have ever stayed in that combines luxury (I have just been drinking champagne in a lovely old marble bath) with feeling like you’re staying in someone’s house. The someone, mind you, being a good deal richer than anyone you actually know. My state of relaxation tonight has, I think to do with the fact that Caitlin fell asleep an hour ago, so I have a chance to catch up with myself, to think selfishly, to write this. I am used to having a bit of time to myself each day, so this week of keeping the same hours as Caitlin and letting her catch up in the car has been emotionally, as well as physically, exhausting for me.

Home tomorrow, I think, back to life, back to reality. And the space to be miserable if I feel like it, and to talk to Tim without having to couch it in terms that Caitlin won’t understand.

15 April

Home. It’s strange, but I got kind of lured into thinking I was better. Today I was talking to a friend about my whole situation and I got really sad. Tim was there and he said he felt the same way afterwards: as though the crisis had passed and now it’s back. Perhaps the family holiday thing did work. Or perhaps one simply can’t sustain the intense ‘Oh-my-God, I’m dying’ feeling forever and now and again you simply forget about it.

16 April

A very ordinary mum kind of day with Caitlin. Tim up in London lunching with his friend Linton, talking about film scripts. Caitlin and I spent the day playing with each other and with my friend Uschi and her son Pete. Caitlin and I were playing doctors and she was pretending to remove her doll Madeline’s appendix and then we had the following conversation:

Me: ‘Who do you know who’s ill and gets dizzy and has nosebleeds?’

C: ‘You.’

Me: ‘Do you know why?’

C: ‘Your head. What is it?’

Me: ‘There’s a bit of my head that’s growing in the wrong direction and it’s pressing on things which makes me dizzy.’

C: ‘Oh.’

She then carried on playing, but a bit later she did an operation on a clown’s head to ‘take out the bit going in the wrong direction’. I told her my doctor in London had wanted to do that, but couldn’t. When she asked why not I said it was too tricky. She seemed to accept this, although the clown got fixed up because ‘I have tweezers’ (from her plastic doctor’s kit)!

I felt really good after the conversation, as though I had broached the subject properly for the first time. I am sure now that she knows something is wrong with me. I am torn between feeling that it will be a relief when she knows – for me, in that I won’t need to hide my feelings at all – and a desire to preserve her wonderful, happy, innocent world for as long as possible.

I love her so much.

Of all the multitude of things we worried about as a couple over the year, Caitlin was the most common subject of conversation, and one of the only things that always brought both of us to tears. I hated, and still do hate, the idea that this little angel that I live with will grow up not knowing her mother. Lots of people tell me that she’ll remember a lot about her, and that through things like the books and the website and all the people who knew and loved her, Caitlin will always remember her and know her. But that’s just not true, is it? I know that on some level there’s sense in that, but in a very real way Caitlin will never know Weeze. She’ll never know the physicality of Weeze, and that’s gone for ever. However much I hug her and kiss her, which is far more than an independent-minded little four-year-old would like – ‘Dad, get off me, stop kissing me, Dad, I’m trying to watch Dexter’s Laboratory’ – it’s not the same as a hug from your mum. Nothing is. As I was growing up, whenever things were really bad it was my mum that I called for, it was her arms that I wanted to be in, and even in later life when I’m equally as close to my father as I am to my mum, there’s still something special about a cuddle with your mum. They’re just good at it, fact, and Weeze was really good at it.