Love for Now by Anthony Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

phone calls. Janet in tears to Tats, giving advice about how to deal with relatives after her own sister died so quickly, then saying let’s go for a drink. A collector’s item from Hannah, on ansaphone, ‘trying to be chipper’ and sounding like death, not surprisingly as she has flu. I wish if they felt crap they would rather not assume I’d like to share in it. A good one from James Bradley, who always uses the right biological words and gives me answers for names and drugs before I’ve dragged them from memory. Don’t think he was ready for me to confess how much my wee smells, but he seemed to have an explanation: ‘That’ll be your kidneys and liver excreting your [scientific term] so that your body doesn’t [scientific verb] an [scientific noun].’ ‘Right. Thanks.’
     
    Becca Alexander popped in ‘on a double yellow’ as we were finishing lunch. She’s been to see her reflexologist, who has lent me a plastic wallet of alternative guff about Native American Indian methods of treating cancer etc., all of it badly photocopied. It came with a photograph-card of the NT gardens at Heligan, with an instruction ‘to return them to me as soon as you have finished with them as I don’t have any other copies.’ That’ll be today, then.
    People do what they do. Reacting and acting, I think, as much for themselves as they do for you. The poets are all amazing, ‘putting out healing vibes into the universe’, some of them even promising prayers. The neighbours all offer ‘anything they can do’.
    Two lovely letters, one from an old school friend acknowledging the uselessness of offering ‘anything we can do’ from Jersey; and the other from Amy, offering to sit and be with me and drink coffee, give a lift, whatever. A letter of presence and absence. As James Bradley put it ‘I’m a space person. Oras I sometimes say, a sociable introvert.’ The rarest of people seem to have pulled this trick off so far.
     
    Today at the doctors with Bendy waiting for her appointment with the nurse, a memory of our old neighbour Cyril in Brixton. His take on Beckett’s
Endgame
, having watched an actor-neighbour playing the part of Clov, was that it was like watching a play in an old people’s home, with all its references to painkillers.
    An old lady staggered in today who was pure Beckett. She began talking randomly to the woman opposite her.
    ‘Was I here yesterday?’
    ‘Yes you were.’
    ‘Was I? Here? Yesterday?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I think I was here yesterday. At least I think I was. I said to him I’ll never move like this again. And that was ten years ago.’
    ‘You were here yesterday.’
    ‘Thought I was. I told him.’
Saturday 25 February
    A day of gifts.
     
    We began with tears as I couldn’t face doing my injections, even into my leg. ‘Nurse Tatty’ took over, as if she’d been doing them all her life. She filled up the little vials, carefully squeezing the air bubble so it wouldn’t start squirting, matter-of-factly saying ‘These are the ones that save your life.’ It’s called GCSF (or Lengorastin), for the build-up of white blood cells. Amazing to think there’s a French cyclist somewhere right at this moment doing the same thing to build up his red ones, then an injection to take away the traces so he won’t be caught cheating.
     
    A lovely letter, the first in years, from Dale in Harringey, whohas taken up fishing again and has a slug-infested allotment. He sounds on energetic and generous form, warm-spirited and open, as I remember him (‘but then I’ve always had a good life.’) He’s got high cholesterol so’s had to give up dairy, which I can’t believe, as I still see him chomping through the cheese counter, methodically trying out different varieties of cheddar as a student, and layering every piece of toast with double-butter.
    His mum has died (of cancer) since we’ve spoken. He says the end was good, in spite of the rubbish prognosis, that he got to nurse her