Louise always wanted to be a writer – the people she most admired were writers, poets and artists – and her diary was really her last chance to join the ranks of those that so enriched her life. As with all of us, she always thought she had time to do things later, a novel perhaps or a collection of poetry or something. She had an artistic spirit and in her final year she blossomed. Nothing focuses the mind like a deadline, I guess. She wrote and wrote, and took up photography with remarkable results and basically knuckled down to working. Without the cancer I’m convinced she could have spent the rest of her life saying ‘I must get round to writing something soon’. As it was she was desperate to get everything out of her. For the first time in her life she felt like she had something to say, things she wanted to communicate to people, and indeed she did. This book contains some of that, something of her, but not all of her, of course. We were interviewed by the Independent about Louise’s website a few months before she died and the lady interviewing us over the phone asked me, ‘What one thing will you most miss about Louise, Tim?’ At the time I remember wanting to throttle her for such a stupid question, but I took a few deep breaths and said, ‘There’s not one thing, it’s all of her, it’s every single thing of the billions of things which make her what she is that I’ll miss.’ And that’s still the truth. And with this book it will only give the reader the tiniest insight into who she really was, but that’s good in a way because that means that there’s lots of her that’s still mine and not for public consumption.
Why write the book? Good question. Louise always wanted to write a book, and when she started the diary she always hoped that one day it might get published. So when the nice people at HarperCollins approached us about writing a book Louise was over the moon. I remember her dancing around the kitchen then getting dizzy and falling into a chair laughing. ‘I can’t believe it – a book, a book! And they want you to write half of it, can you believe it?’ It made me laugh that she was so excited about sharing the project. She loved sharing things. At the time when we were planning the book it was going to be somewhat different to the way it has turned out now. It was going to be less a book based round the diary and more a book led by subjects which have come to the fore in our lives since Louise was diagnosed. It was going to be a book about us, our lives, our love, the cancer, being parents and loads of other stuff. Louise was very interested in the reactions her illness caused and how people responded to us, from religious friends who set up prayer groups, some of our younger friends who cut themselves off from us and we haven’t seen since she was first diagnosed, and a thousand other responses, some lovely, some less so. She also wanted people to start talking about death and dying – she hated the taboo nature of the disease. She couldn’t believe that people still referred to it as the Big C or called it ‘It’, as if merely saying the word cancer would somehow give it power.
She also wanted to shake people out of complacency. Life is about living and she couldn’t bear to see people wasting their lives, or whingeing about them. ‘Life’s too short not to be doing something you love,’ she would often be found saying over dinner to any number of our friends who had simply mentioned in passing that they weren’t quite as fulfilled at work as they might like to be. Her illness made her reckless with her evangelical advice. She was unafraid of telling people to change, to take control of their lives, and several people we knew ended up leaving their jobs and even partners after a particularly good session with Weeze. This wasn’t to say that she wasn’t kind and gracious and understanding, because she was all of these things, which meant that when she told you something you tended to listen more readily and really take it to heart.
Unfortunately, just a few days after we’d negotiated the contract for the book, Louise’s condition took a turn for the worse. What we’d at first envisaged the book to be became impossible. There was no way as she got weaker and weaker that she could write and the mental energy needed to talk thought the issues made it harder and harder. Eventually it became clear that Louise’s input to the book would mainly be entries from the diary she’d already written, with me fleshing out some of the issues with a kind of commentary. So this is what I’m going to do. I only hope I can do justice to her, but we’ll have a go.
Before we start I’d just like to say one thing about Weeze. She was no saint. This isn’t an account of a perfect woman, whose noble heart and pure soul brought light into the world. Weeze was a funny, strong, beautiful lady who made my whole life worth living, but I’m not going to idolize her or put her up on a pedestal. She would have hated that, so I promise I’ll try to be as honest as I can be. It may sometimes be painful and sometimes I’m sure I’ll fail, but as I set out it’s important that I intend to tell it as it was and is. If we are to learn anything from our experiences it’s important that we are truthful about them and the things that happened. Having said that, even now I can feel my mind working overtime trying to rewrite and alter the images of the last few months to protect me, so I’ll write fast and try to get everything down before Time the great healer begins to mess around with my already unreliable memory.
In the summer of 1993 I was a svelte – well, OK, not quite svelte, but not as big as I was to become with Louise’s excellent cooking – long-haired recent graduate. As I looked out on to my future life it all seemed clouded in an exciting mystery. I started working with a group of local misfits in a comedy impro outfit called ‘The Bucket Cabaret’. Each week we’d spend hours sitting round drinking wine and lager, trying to come up with more and more ludicrous sketches. Naked chefs, freakish gameshow hosts, twisted rappers, became part and parcel of my everyday life. We played to audiences of varying size and varying enthusiasm. There were, however, some devoted regulars, most of whom knew or were going out with someone in the show. Louise was one of these. Her ex-boyfriend Lewis was one of the performers and because of him mainly she came down to lend support.
This quiet, shy, pretty lady always sat somewhere near the front and always smiled rather than laughed out loud.
I’d known her vaguely for years. When we were fifteen or so she’d been on the other side of the group of friends I hung out with. She was at that time a Goth chick who dressed in black make-up, short skirts and fishnet stockings that attempted to hide her magnificent long legs. She always scared me – she was a woman with older men for boyfriends up in London, while I was a geeky guy whose whole life revolved around a very poor rock band and playing various Shakespearean characters in school plays. Whenever I spoke to Weeze then I got tongue tied, felt incredibly short and ugly, and was generally relieved when it was over, although I fancied her more than any other girl in our town. Funny how we perceive ourselves. I was always convinced that she didn’t really like me. She later told me that she was just shy and that she saw me as this confident pop singer – she liked me, but as I always had a girlfriend she never thought it was worth pursuing. Not that she fancied me at all, as she would often say during our relationship. ‘I didn’t fancy Tim at all until we kissed then I instantly fell in love with him.’ It’s a strange backwards compliment. On the bad side she hadn’t fancied me, on the good side it must have been some kiss.
So let me tell you about the kiss. After one of the shows, Louise invited the whole team back to her house for an after-show soirée. We all sat round in the kitchen and I made a shameful attempt to impress. Over the past few weeks I’d been talking to her ex about all the things she liked, from books and films to music and behaviour in men. That night I used all my accrued knowledge to win her over. Whatever subject came up, I made sure I was the first to speak about it,