Birthday by Alan Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page A

virulent wound from not seeing his son and daughter closed slowly.
    Twenty years later Melanie recognized him on the street. He wondered who this nice young woman with the big smile was, reaching for his arm. She was married, with two kids, and was as glad as all get out to see him. ‘Hello, dad! Fancy meeting you. I didn’t think you were living in Nottingham anymore.’
    He stood, near to tears but holding back all sign while they talked in a café. The kids wanted Melanie to take them home, but she encouraged them to kiss Arthur and call him grandad, trying mischievously to embarrass him, but he enjoyed it, kissed them back and gave each a pound coin. Doreen had been married again, Melanie told him, but the husband died last year, and she was running a pub with a woman in Bedford.
    Melanie and her husband Barry were buying a house on a new estate less than a mile from Arthur and Avril. Barry was a cabinet-maker never out of work, and when they called with the two kids he wanted Arthur to tell him what it had been like living in the sixties. Arthur didn’t think the decade had been anything special, yet gave a lively account of his non-attendance at a Beatles concert, and did his best to dredge up whatever else might interest his new found son-in-law.
    Harold, a year older than Melanie, had taken the trouble to locate Arthur when he was twenty-one, calling to say that Doreen had kicked him out, and he hadn’t a penny to his name. As tall as Arthur, he stood dead scruffy in sweatshirt and jeans, wore a ponytail, and sported an earring, only a parrot missing to complete the appearance of a pirate. Arthur gave him a fiver, and said he could have another after he had cleaned himself up and found a job – when of course he wouldn’t need it, as Harold bitingly reminded him.
    Arthur and Avril married not long after their divorces came through. At the same time he also found a better job and, standing at his bench one day, he couldn’t help thinking that the death of Doreen’s second husband had served her right. He knew it to be unjust, because sooner or later something gets its claws into you or, even worse, he was to realize years afterwards, into the person you love most, though Avril between bouts of chemotherapy carried on with courage and dignity as if life was normal, saying she would fight it, would never give in, wouldn’t go easily.
    His father and two sisters had been taken by the same malign illness. He secretly admired Jane, who kept it from everyone until she lay on the sofa one Friday night after work saying she wouldn’t be going back on Monday morning, dying ten days later. A scarf around her throat had hidden the swelling, and no pleading could get her to a doctor. She told her husband to mind his own business. ‘I’m just not feeling well. Leave me alone. I’ll get better when I’m ready. It’s a sore throat. One of these days it’ll go as suddenly as it came, though I don’t suppose before it’s good and ready. It’s only a cold that won’t go away.’ She was in her forties, and hadn’t seen a doctor because she was too frightened to find out what was the matter, or maybe too fed up to care whether she lived or died, which was another story.
    Avril, who at the first twinge in her left shoulder called at the doctor’s, was told it was a touch of rheumatism. X-rayed nevertheless, still nothing showed, but when the pain persisted deeper X-rays indicated something was definitely not right.
    Arthur heard that if cancer was caught soon enough you had an even chance of beating it, but how soon is soon? And how can you know? Cancer can be nibbling away for months before there’s any sign of pain, like a sly snake that finds its billet, and the gnawing goes on till it’s too late to do anything, by which time you’re dead.
    Cancer seemed to be everywhere. His sister Margaret had died of it thirty years ago, and