Birthday by Alan Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page B

might still be alive if the doctor hadn’t told her it was only backache. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Pull yourself together, and take these tablets.’ When she could stand the months of pain no longer he sent her for an X-ray. She didn’t have a chance. You aren’t grown-up if you think doctors know anything.
    Jenny’s husband lived donkey’s years after having the guts crushed out of him by a slab of iron, and couldn’t even die when it was the only thing he wanted, while other people fight every inch of the way, and it gets them just the same. Maybe Jane had been right to thumb her nose at the cancer. What he would have done in her place he didn’t know, nor in Avril’s now that she had got it, though he wanted her to beat it more than anything in the world. If it did get him he would take Jane’s way out and say fuck you to God, let the disease do as it liked, the sooner the better, it would be quicker that way, because even though the doctors knew you were going to die they still had you tortured with chemotherapy.
    Thank God Avril wasn’t like Jane. He would stand by her whatever happened, because she didn’t seem too bad at the moment and might well come through in the end. She looked more or less the same as anybody else on the street, making it hard to believe that she had such a thing, though doctors don’t lie, with X-ray machines to prove what they see. She had it right enough, and it was no use thinking otherwise.
    Basford Crossing went bump-bump under his wheels, but he didn’t need to be reminded about the nightmare that had them by the throat. Everybody had their troubles, and we all have to die, tramps as well as emperors, but we want to put it off as long as we can. Even if we’re old we don’t want to say goodbye to all that we’ve sweated for.
    Women live longer than men, so it was puzzling why Avril had got cancer and not him, though if he had any say in the matter he would gladly take it on himself. Cancer was eating her, and worry was eating him. She didn’t worry, and he hadn’t got cancer, which was strange if you weighed it up. Worry wasn’t fatal but cancer nearly always was, though worry could lead to cancer if it went on for long and got too deep inside.
    It was like roulette: as you crossed a busy road a double-decker missed you by inches, but while you were laughing at the fact that you were still alive cancer had dug its claws into your tripes when you were halfway over, and you hadn’t noticed. Some illness or other was always lurking to get at you.
    He wondered whether Avril pined after Fulham where she’d lived till she was eighteen, but she told him, and he had to believe her (because she was the sort who knew her own mind and would always speak the truth), that she was happy anywhere providing she loved the person she was with.
    She had managed a factory canteen for over ten years, then got laid off when the place closed. Maybe that hadn’t helped, but she knew the healthiest things to eat, planned all the meals for taste and goodness, so you couldn’t say eating the wrong food had caused the cancer, otherwise why hadn’t he got it as well? When you were young there either weren’t mysteries or you were too busy living to let them matter, but as you got older they wouldn’t be kept in place, and plagued your life.
    A daughter from Avril’s first marriage lived in London, and her son worked as a heating engineer at a brewery in Nottingham. The only other relation was her cousin Paul, the indispensable chief fitter at a factory, who kept all sorts of ailing machines going, a skilled job that paid good money. He’d been married to a woman called Adelaide, who had three kids from a previous marriage. After they’d had one of their own she went to work in the office of a place making bedspreads, and that was where the trouble started.
    Paul was tall and thin,