Staying Alive

thursday 4 december / 12.02 a.m.

I’m sitting on the sofa in my front room with the phone in my hand. Slowly and deliberately I punch out a number. This is a call I’ve been dreading.

But one that I’ve also been desperate to make.

Now that I’m out of my head on drink and unfamiliar drugs, it is perhaps the ideal time to make it.

My mother will be asleep, of course.

So what?

I’m too hammered to care.

And I’m her only child.

She lives in Spain now. Javea. It’s twenty minutes along the coast from Benidorm. But nothing like Benidorm. It’s low-rise for a start. Much smaller and prettier. Terry Venables has a house there. That should tell you something. Not sure what, but something all the same. It has a thriving expat community, actually. Brits who have, for one reason or several, given up on life here. My mum went because David, her husband, my stepfather, took early retirement. Medical grounds. He was a policeman—a detective inspector with Hornchurch CID. Twenty-five years of loyal service to crown and country. Then his back went. Just like that. You had to feel for him—he’d lost the job he loved and he would…

…never swing a golf club again.

They spent a couple of years of mooching around Essex’s garden centres. Then Mum and DI David Finch (rtd.) packed their bags for Eldorado. After putting down the deposit on the half-built villa the first thing they did was to join the golf club. My mum is a crap golfer, but she enjoys ‘a good walk’. I supposed that David was joining purely for the social side, what with his back and all.

Amazingly, though, he has managed to get his handicap down to thirteen.

I slump back with the phone to my ear. The long, rhythmic beeeeep of the Spanish ring tone is making me sleepy. Come on, Mum, answer the sodding…phone…I need to…talk…to…

4.14 a.m.

‘—is not responding…Please replace the handset and try again later…’

You what?

‘…The number you are calling is not responding…Please replace the handset and try again later…’

I pull myself upright on the sofa. The phone is still wedged between ear and neck. The mouthpiece is coated in drool. I lift my head and let the receiver slide down my chest to my stomach. How long have I been asleep? The room is cold. The hangover is kicking in. I peer at the clock on the VHS.

Jesus, Murray, you do not want to be awake at four-fourteen on a night like this.

I get up and walk to the kitchen, where I fill a glass from the tap and drink.

Where the hell is my mother? For nineteen years of my life—right up to the second she left for Spain—she was always there for me. Especially—especially—when she wasn’t wanted. Doesn’t she owe it to me—just this once—to be there when she is? My dad was rarely there when I needed him, but I’d call him now if I had a number.

He was a cop too. The desk sergeant at Hornchurch. When I was seven he came to my school assembly and lectured us on the Green Cross Code. I don’t mention that because it was a seminal Freudian moment in my young life. I mention it because…Oh, you’ll figure it out. Though I was quite proud of him that day, he wasn’t a model policeman. He smoked and drank too much, ate rubbish and he had his ideal cop job—sitting idly behind the desk as opposed to chasing down alleys after harelegged muggers. He was severely overweight, he had a perpetually raging ulcer, his blood pressure was off the scale and he had enough cholesterol coursing through his veins to open a burger stand.

They say that scientists have looked at the physics of the bumblebee and figured out that technically it should not be able to fly. Dad was like that. Technically he shouldn’t have been alive.

Everyone told him so. Mum, me, his colleagues, his mates and various doctors. Even strangers would wince and cross themselves as he walked by huffing, wheezing, purple-faced. Finally, sick of the nagging—and maybe just a little scared—he got off his backside. He did the Allen Carr thing and quit fags. He joined Weight Watchers. He kept a fastidious record of his vastly reduced alcohol intake. He joined a gym and started doing step. And one Sunday morning, not long after the start of his new regime, he stuck on a tracksuit, opened the front door and set off on a jog. He never came home. The Nissan Sunny that hit him as he lumbered across Upminster Road was a write-off, too.

Yes, I’d call him now if I could.

I drink another glass of water before stumbling into bed. I know I won’t sleep, though.

5.26 a.m.

I was right. Sleep is out of the question.

I go to the kitchen and fill a glass with orange juice. Maybe that and the three ibuprofen I pop from the blister pack will do something to attack my headache. They’ll do nothing to slow my heart though. I can feel it hammering against my ribcage. I wish it had something to do with all the coke I put up my nose. But the rush has long gone and I can no longer plunge myself into the blizzard of denial that comes free with every line.

This is purest, uncut panic.

I go to the PC in the corner of my living room and switch it on.

Come on, come on—so slow.

I click on the Explorer icon and listen to the beeps and burbles as the machine goes online. I call up Lycos and type one word into the search box. The same word I’ve tapped out every single sleepless night since Friday 21

November:

cancer

6.23 a.m.

Brett Topowlski claims the Internet is responsible for taking mankind—by that he does mean mankind; women are excluded from this hypothesis—to the next stage of evolution. ‘Look at it this way,’ he contends. ‘There’s an entire generation of blokes who’ve become ambidextrous. They’ve had to master the art of wanking left-handed because their right hands are too busy manipulating the mouse.’ He should know. He and Vince spend their working lives being virtual sex tourists—and, fair’s fair, I’ve spent a little time glancing over their shoulders. (I defy anyone to wander into their office with a Schenker research debrief for their immediate attention and not look at the image of, say, horse and rider engaging in a spot of role-reversal.)

But over the past fortnight I’ve made a remarkable discovery. The porn sites haven’t taken over. They’re outnumbered—dwarfed—by ones that deal with the C-word, the six-letter one. Tonight I carried out an experiment. I typed tits into the search box and hit go. It came up with a staggering 3,199,658 matches.

It is nothing, though.

Because cancer got me 18,073,389. Over eighteen million mentions of the disease that will afflict one in three of us and kill one in four.

I haven’t been keeping count, but so far I must have visited several hundred cancer sites. I now know more about it than I ever did. (Not saying much, granted.) I know, for instance, that one per cent of breast cancers occur in men; that a Calgary businessman claims he was brought back from the brink by an ancient cure used by the Ojibway Indians; that over eighty per cent of lung cancers are attributable to smoking, yet only thirteen per cent of smokers will get lung cancer; that on the day Philip Morris—in an expensive corporate con—changed its name to Altria, some web wag re-christened lung cancer Philip Morris; that drinking milk produced by cows treated with bovine growth hormones increases the risk of colon cancer; that Hosen is the Hebrew word for strength and is also an acronym for Cancer Patients Fight Back; that frequent masturbation reduces the risk of prostate cancer; that frequent sex increases it; that shark cartilage, liquefied and given a pleasant fruit-style flavour, is the miracle that will revolutionise cancer treatment…

6.55 a.m.

The trouble is that I’m none the wiser. I fly around the web hoovering up facts, seizing on speculation and clutching wildly at every out-of-its-tree conjecture. I’ve looked at countless pictures of tumours the size of kumquats…nectarines…grapefruits…watermelons (which strikes me as wholly inappropriate. Why is it that, when dramatising their size for their dumb patients, medics invariably compare tumours to fruit? Fruit is tasty, nutritious, life-enhancing. Tumours, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, are not. Better, surely, to state that Patient X is host to a malignant growth the size of, say, a hand grenade, or a decomposing, maggot-ridden rat). I’ve waded through turgid papers posted by academics and heartbreaking poetry penned by mothers coming to terms with their children’s leukaemia. Yet I’m no closer to dealing with the only cancer I really care about.

My cancer. The one that will kill me.

‘ It isn’t possible to say without a lot more tests, but without treatment you’ve maybe got between three and five months.’ That was how Doctor Morrissey put it in her sweet, slightly yokel voice.

Between three and five months…

I consider myself a truly average individual—to the point, actually, of being totally un-individual—so I’ve gone for the middle ground.

I give myself four months.

Working forward from the day they told me, that’s 21

March.