‘By maintaining your spirit and your courage.’
He sighed. ‘I think the struggle stuff is there just to trick you into thinking you’ve got a part to play in all this. To stop you blacking out from sheer inanity. No one ever says how null it is, cancer. Boring. Boring avec. Don’t forget boring.’
‘And you evoke it. You’re at your desk. You’re not snivelling in a corner.’
‘No, I’m staggering round in circles. Good try, Mart, but it’s not a fight. Who or what am I fighting? My past life, my body, me myself? That’s the whole trouble with it. The patient can’t ever get away from the patient. One more lap.’
‘…Two more laps.’
He said, ‘I hope this isn’t a chore for you.’
‘Not at all. I love it.’
And I did love it. I was back with Gus (not quite three, and very consciously the younger brother), circumnavigating the roundabout in his first leather shoes. And just a week before he had been in despair about ever growing up, prostrate under the kitchen table and slowly pounding the floor with his fists (I’ll always be doing silly phings…I’ll always be with little childs), and now here he was, a few days later, Gus, mightily shod as he paced the darkening city, with his smile seeming to say, At last – at last I’m getting somewhere.
The man of God
There was a knock on the door, which was in itself quite unusual – a knock on the door to Christopher’s single-occupancy ward at MDA. Usually they swept straight in with stethoscopes flying. I answered it, and then returned to the bedside.
‘Who was that?’
‘Oh just some goddamned man of God. By the way, Hitch, I know you like decapitalising the word God, as in god is not great. Looks very iconoclastic. But you really ought to capitalise it in all talk about monotheisms. Where they’re referring to a definite bloke.’
‘…So where is he?’
‘Who?’
‘Him with a small aitch.’
‘Oh the wowser. I don’t know. Maybe he’s still out there.’
‘Well we must…What kind of wowser?’
‘I don’t know. You mean what denomination?’
‘No. What kind of bloke.’
‘Oh. The standard peanut. All aglitter. What should I do with him? I know. I’ll tell him his faith stinks and kick him down the stairs.’
‘No, Mart, ask him if he’d be good enough to step inside…Go on. What the hell. Sling him over.’
‘Are you sure? All right, then I’m off to get a coffee.’
In the central bay I attended to the hot-drinks machine. Nurses and doctors, men and women in jumpsuits holding clipboards, launderers and caterers, the conditioned and sanitised air, the tubfuls of medical waste, the cloudwracks of used linen…After at least twenty minutes the man of God slipped out, looking pleased.
‘Jesus, he took his time. Was he after your soul?’
‘Of course. All in a day’s work.’
‘Well I hope you sent him on his way with a few choice words.’
‘No, I let him meander on a bit. You sidetrack them. Steer them towards points of doctrine. I got him going on redemption.’
‘Doesn’t that just lead to conversion? Well, the Hitch is big game. Maybe he’d get a bounty or a finder’s fee. I’m amazed you can spare the patience.’
‘I’m just endlessly riveted by the religious mind. Religion really is the most interesting thing on earth.’
‘Except when the other chap believes in it. Then at the flick of a switch it becomes the least interesting thing on earth.’
‘That isn’t so. It’s far more interesting than cancer. And it’s not about me.’
I turned my head and looked out. Here, even the sky seemed enclosed. The totems of MDA, their darkened and treated windows filled with one another’s reflections…
‘Did he talk about hellfire and targeted cancers?’
‘No. He wasn’t of that chapter.’
‘Did you ask him about childhood leukaemias and infantile tumours?’
‘No. I didn’t have the energy. I couldn’t be fucked. Come on. Let’s do our laps.’
God is not impressed by death
You saw them as they were coming in or going out, the little childs, accompanied by one parent or another or by both. Now and then, if you looked through the wrong passageway porthole, you saw them in groups, gathered round a rec-room table. The in-patients and out-patients of Pediatric Oncology were all boys (they’re ‘almost entirely boys. No one knows why’); and so all the bald children ‘look like brothers’.*7 Hairless heads, and enormous, startled, blinking eyes – as if blinking off the effects of a flashbulb. And they seemed to me to be asking themselves the same question their parents were asking. ‘When a baby gets cancer, you think, Who came up with this idea? What celestial abandon gave rise to this?’
There’s the Peter Pan Ward, and there’s the Tiny Tim Lounge:
The Tiny Tim Lounge is a little sitting area at the end of the [Pediatric Oncology] corridor…On one of the lounge walls there is a gold plaque with the singer Tiny Tim’s name on it: his son was treated once at this hospital and so, five years ago, he donated money for the lounge. It is a cramped little lounge, which, one suspects, would be larger if Tiny Tim’s son had actually lived. Instead, he died here, at this hospital, and now there is this tiny room which is part gratitude, part generosity, part fuck-you.
And, if you’re a capitaliser of pronouns, then that would have to be ‘part fuck-You’.
Why does God preside over the deaths, by cancer, of the very young? The many televangelists in the neighbourhood had an answer. Namely, it’s because ‘He wants them with Him right away’. (Does He? What for? And as regards their parents, what does He want?) And the answer of the writers is no more satisfying. ‘You cannot understand, my child, nor can I, nor can anyone,’ says the priest at the conclusion of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.’ Oh, it’s mercy, is it – yeah, keep believing that, Believers…Greene was a
