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

‘with real nurses’ for the final months. I’m sad to hear she’s gone. She was the one I nervously rang up to ask where he was living so I could ring him five years ago. I think she even bought my book.
    And a friend of his, having recovered from chemo, says he now has more energy than for years. ‘Who knows’ he says, without adding a question mark.
     
    A lovely card from Dana, too, complete with ‘4 chemotherapy treatments.’ 1 is a landscape, 2 is a poem, 3 is a prayer and 4 is laughter, a collection of George Bush’s bon mots regarding literacy education. The poem is one I don’t know, by Brian Patten, called ‘After Frost’:
    It’s hard to tell what bird it is
    Singing in the misty wood,
    Or the reason for its song
    So late after evening’s come.
    When all else dropped its name
    Down into the scented dark,
    Its song grown cool and clear says
    Nothing much to anyone.
    But catches hold a whisper in my brain
    that only now is understood.
    It says, rest your life against this song,
    It’s rest enough for anyone.

    I sat reading it at the breakfast table in a kind of hopeful silence, the one I always bring to a poem I don’t know, in expectation that it will do something. I didn’t have long to wait to feel the hairs on my arms prickle or my eyes to start stinging. The thing is, I apprehended it at first purely musically by its sense, not really aware of the meaning at all. But I found it so moving, aware that here were some very simple words laid out in a straightforward way in such a combination as to lift you out of everything for a minute, while putting you more at the centre of that thing than anything before. It’s the mystery I constantly chase and crave, as reader and writer.
     
    The prayer is good too, by Carmina Gadelica (III):
    God to enfold me,
        God to surround me,
    God in my speaking,
        God in my thinking.
    God in my sleeping,
        God in my waking,
    God in my watching,
        God in my hoping.
    Again, completely simple, but devastating.
    Then the George Bush-isms: ‘You teach a child to read, and he or she will be able to pass a literacy test’ (February 21, 2001). Hilarious. Chilling. And then this:
    I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-orientated administration, because I believe the results and focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that’s responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be – a more literate country and a hopefuller country.

Sunday 26 February
6 am
    Bizarre to say it, but find I can be up at six writing, making tea and eating bread and jam creeping round the house like the old days waiting for the heating to come on.
    Not a good night. Woke with night sweats once and had to pee at least twice. Knew it was useless around 4.25, but stayed in bed hoping sleep might come, turning slowly not to wake Tatty. Finally threw in the towel at 5.45.
    The night sweats do scare me as they are – fatigue aside, plus the pain of the tumour on the urethra, which isn’t the same thing as the tumour itself hurting – the only symptoms I clearly have. Somewhere on an envelope there is a scrawl I made at four-something about three weeks ago. I was wide awake but desperate to get back to bed, aching and shivering. I don’t know if there’s mileage there. Probably not. But what made me do it was the fear, plus the certainty, of losing those lines if I didn’t get them down. I may have all tomorrow night to work on them, if I want.
27 February
    Another great thing about having cancer is that you look in the mirror and there’s Brian Eno staring back at you.
     
    We performed the hair-ceremony with the honorary slapheads in my life – Claude and Nicky Fagan – bringing the tools of their trade. In Claude’s case a simple set of professional clippers; in Nicky’s razors, creams and oils, which I