Free Love for Now by Anthony Wilson Page B

ones are forced upon us, deciding on who you are and what you want still has to come first.
     
    It’s also been a day of gifts. Chris Richards has sent Haruki Murakami’s
Norwegian Wood
‘in case I want something a little different’; and Michèle has sent Nêuchatel poet Blaise Cendras’s
Panama or the Adventures of Seven Uncles and Other Poems
, in a dual translation by John Dos Passos. Which is as ‘different’ again as Ian McEwan is from Kenneth Koch. They look marvellous. But they worry me. Nowhere can I find a description of what I am going through. They sit unwrapped and proud on the kitchen table, accusing me for not being able to concentrate on their wonderfulness. At least my Amazon-order of John Diamond’s
C: Because Cowards get Cancer too
… has now arrived. I am desperate for it not to be jargon. I want to fall in love. I want it to show me me.
Later
    Merenna in the bath, Shim playing White Stripes on the computer next door, Tatty with the girls in the telly room. Familiar sounds of water sloshing, guitar solos, laughter, and the heating moving bricks through the pipes. A normal evening.
    Tatty reminded me of a
faux pas
in hospital yesterday while I slept on the Rituximab-Piriton cocktail. After four hours of marking children’s scripts she called out to Karl behind the desk that she ‘had lost the will to live.’ He didn’t blink apparently. On our last visit he dished out far worse himself. A verysenior lady who takes up position at the other end of the ward near the telly (without switching it on) had not drawn breath all day, often having the same conversation three times over with whoever sat next to her. This isn’t because she is senile. I think she is bored. And scared. And can’t stop talking. After an unexpected 2-minute lull Karl went over to her chair, bent his 6’ 7” frame into her sleeping face and shouted ‘Geraldine, I thought you were dead there for a minute, it was so quiet. What the hell’s wrong with you!’ What made it even funnier was the sight of four nurses running, from different ends of the ward, to hide behind the desk, out of her eyesight, to piss themselves laughing.
Friday 10 March
    Tatty said yesterday ‘It’s like having you with new batteries in,’ referring to the post-steroid surge of energy. I stood on the scales today and reached 13 stone, for the first time in, if not years, then for at least one year. I suppose lack of cycling plus ravenous hunger all the time can only lead to one thing. Another cake today, from Guy and Jemima round the corner. Clearly word has got round. ‘It’s one of Carol’s,’ he said. ‘We don’t bake and anyway she’s a genius.’ He’s not wrong there, a lemon sponge of the lightest consistency, oozing jam and cream. Cancer-benefit Number 34: women
buy
you cakes and send them round with their husbands.
     
    Tatty brought up the issue of Chelsea losing so late in the day on Wednesday that I think Karl forgot to be scornful. Maybe the rule is we only slag each other’s teams off in the mornings. He said he didn’t watch the game as he was at ‘my nerdy geologist meeting in Cornwall.’
    ‘What, you study rocks?’
    ‘Oh yes, and collect them.’
    ‘What, like, in little boxes with labels in display cases.’
    ‘Yes, in little boxes with labels in display cases.’
    ‘And you travel all over for rock samples?’
    ‘Yup. Cornwall’s especially good. Was up in St Just the other day with my mate Rick and suddenly his Geiger counter goes off the scale. And it just looked like a brown bit of rock, so we smash it open and there it is, perfect specimen of radon. He took one half, I took the other. Made a special lead box for it and stuck it in the roof. Week later I realised radon is heavier than air, and it was right above my head, where I’d put it. What you need is a big airy loft, one of those big houses.’
     
    John Diamond’s C has arrived from Amazon. In his intro he tackles the issue of war-metaphor head-on.