‘And avoid it is exactly what I didn’t do. Oh, and I can tell you now why it always is ex-girlfriends. I mean, you wouldn’t go after someone new, would you. You don’t want any surprises. But with an ex, a long-serving ex, whose body you know as well as you know your own…It’s weird. The familiarity, the snugness, the sameyness – it flips. It goes all heady and hot.’
‘And there’s no fear of failure…Well Mart, you listened, but you didn’t learn. What were you doing in the bathroom with Phoebe Phelps?’
‘I know. That’s what I was ashamed of. You cautioned me, and the very next day I…I embraced an occasion of sin – of blazing crime.’ I said, ‘The trouble was I found the prospect of being tempted tempting in itself. I was irresistibly tempted by temptation. Because I felt sure I could deal with it. How was I to know she’d come on so, so Grand Guignol?’
‘How was I to know. See? That’s precisely the wrong attitude. Okay. I want the long version. Concentrate. It’s amazing the persistence of sexual memories, don’t you find? And the clarity of contour. I suppose, I suppose the memory’s so sharp because those are the times when you’re most alive. Begin.’
‘Well. There I was in my new flat, Leamington Road, minding my own business. And she rang from the airport and –’
A knock, and another hairdo round the door.
‘Ah,’ said Christopher. ‘Good afternoon, my dear.’
This was the pain lady, or the painkiller lady (something of a cult figure at MDA; and Christopher’s neck, I knew, was hurting, and so were his arms, and so were his hands and his fingers). And he was now readying himself for relief (‘a sort of warming tingle with an idiotic bliss to it’). As I was edging my way out she said,
‘Mr Hitchens! Good afternoon! And how are we today?’
‘Well, Cheryl, you’re obviously in top form. As for me, I have some uh, discomfort, as they call it here. But I felt twice the price the moment I saw your face…Ten minutes, Mart. Then the long version.’
The cancer pincer
Out on the main deck I was beckoned into an alcove and found myself in an informal, water-cooler symposium convened by Christopher’s carers – or perhaps convened by Blue, who was asking many questions. By now she was up to PhD standard on Oesophageal Cancer, Stage Four (she knew the names and doses of all the drugs), and so the talk was mostly above my reach. But I soon fell into a whispered exchange with the blue-smocked figure called Dr Lal…Dr Lal was the most attractive of all the MDA oncologists – a lean Indian gentleman with a poet’s face, full of sadness and humanity, a face formed over many decades and many bedsides: Dr Lal was that increasingly rare kind of specialist, one who engaged with the patient, and not just with the patient’s disease. He said in an undertone,
‘Mr Hitchens is now faced with a choice. To stay here or to go home.’
I said, ‘You mean home to Washington?…No, I suppose not, or not yet. Home to our friends’ house ten minutes away? He could do that, could he?’
‘Theoretically, yes. He has the, the option of going home. Let me briefly explain.’
Christopher was caught in the double bind of his sickness: the doublecross of cancer. The tumours had been shrunken, scorched, and effectively cauterised by chemicals and protons; but the patient too was much reduced (and his immune system ravaged). Dr Lal went on,
‘He is without defences. And if he stays here, a secondary infection will certainly follow. It’s not if or when. It’s when.’
‘Then I don’t…What could be the reason for staying here?’
On the one hand, home, Michael’s: the material and emotional comfort, the padded density, the numerous staff (including the two security men who courteously and affectionately materialised to help Christopher from the car to the house, and then rematerialised to help him upstairs to his bedroom). On the other hand, MDA: the stasis, the locked windows, the false smiles and false sparkle, the hairless children – and the invisible but inevitable gigabugs, biding their time in sinks and drains…
Dr Lal arched his back, saying, ‘You see, there is the psychological element. And the fact remains that Mr Hitchens doesn’t want to leave.’
Why? What possible counterforce would make him want to stay?
The answer was that he somehow felt less threatened in hospital. And here we have to imagine a sense of limitless frailty – unquantifiably worsened by a state of mind always characterised, first and foremost, as one of overwhelming fear. It was a double bind within a double bind.
…Another, older name for battle fatigue is soldier’s heart. And whenever I try to evoke that fear I think of what soldiers say (and write) about the hours before battle. The heart is full of love, but the physical instrument, the outward being, is full of fear; my neck is afraid, my shoulders are afraid, my arms are afraid, my hands are afraid, my fingers are afraid.
Lord of the Flies
You housefly, you horsefly – did he who made the lamb make thee?
There were no insects at MDA, not even in its slightly frowsy cafeterias at the close of a long weekend. No insects. So what lay in my view was without doubt an illusion; solemnly, stonily, I sat through it, waiting.
First, though, let us make terms with the actual. There was Christopher in his dressing gown, and he was already ill, additionally ill, as ill as I’d ever seen him, as ill as I’d ever seen anyone. Coughing, stiffly twisting in his chair, rocking from side to side, tipping himself forwards, his face wearing a light sheen of silvery sweat in the afternoon grey: that was the actual. He wasn’t groaning, he wasn’t complaining, he wasn’t swearing, he wasn’t even saying Christ. No, he was using his voice to respond
