Someone asked me what was the best thing cancer had given me. I collapsed inside when she said that. Cancer is a pretty terrible kind of gift. It takes and takes and takes, leaving a trail of destruction in its path. It’s taken the future I had planned for myself: a career doing Good Things, travelling the world, being important and successful on the terms I had long set myself. It’s stolen the take-it-for-granted ease from my relationship with Billy. What’s easy about being thirty-six and having your husband nurse you in your dying days? We should be bickering about who takes the bins out, not having heart-to-hearts about how I want our children raised. It’s taken away my ability to care for others – by now, I should be helping out my parents, but instead they are visiting me in hospital and picking my kids up from school. They are suddenly ‘spare’ parents, not grandparents. It’s taken the reciprocity out of relationships. Suddenly I am the visited, never the visitor; the receiver, not the sender of cards and presents. And it’s taken away my ability to be the mother I want to be. Where I should be careless, bossy, energetic and distracted, now I am diligent, soft and weak, because I can’t bear to be remembered as bad cop. Every cuddle is charged with electric joy at their being there, and misery that I won’t see their future. I find myself lying in their beds as they sleep, crying hot tears into their pudgy necks.
But disease gives as well as it takes. Or, more accurately, we take from it even in the face of its efforts to take everything from us. And so my friend was sort-of-right. What disease has stolen is the normality I took for granted and the future I would have had. But I have taken from it, too. For starters, there is a feeling of being alive, awake, which powerfully reasserts itself in the moments of wellness that punctuate a long illness. I can only explain this feeling as rather like your first time on Ecstasy, but with less pounding music and projectile vomiting. Whether it is emerging from chemotherapy, or waking up after operations, I have experienced joy – perhaps even the sublime – in an unexpected and new way. The first time this happened was in the incongruous setting of Ward L4, on the night after my first diagnosis. I opened a window in the middle of the night and leaned out to feel the cold autumn rain on my face, mingling with sharp, blissed-out tears.
Then there is the way I feel about the people in my life. Billy and I have grown a love known only in power ballads, a depth of understanding and companionship which in any fair world would last us a lifetime. My parents, now closer physically as well as emotionally. Friendships which survived on the leftover bits of time have had a renaissance. And while I like to imagine that the world may have lost a future stateswoman, I have found my voice, and with my voice an intellectual and spiritual hinterland which had been lost for too long between the answering of emails and the wiping of tiny bottoms. I am woman, hear me roar.
So despite all that has been and will be taken from us, I am happy. I am really, truly happy. These last years have been so strangely luminous, full of exploration, wonder and love. I’m not sure if this adds up to a silver lining, whether it amounts to enough to balance the loss of the future I should have had. Some days it seems crazy even to suggest it. But it at least makes the scales more even.
I am writing this book to share the sum of a life. In a normal world, I would have been granted decades to say all of this. Fat, old and wearing purple, I would have bored my children and my children’s children with stories of the world I had known. Perhaps they would have asked me about the crazy Noughties, the dying days of capitalism, what it was like working in the heart of government when America was king and credit was easy. Or perhaps they would have been more interested in my stories about Africa in the bad old days of hunger and warlords, before Lagos became a place you emigrated to, not from. Maybe they would just have wanted to know what my favourite books were as a child, what my earliest memories were, about how Billy and I fell in love. But I am living at an accelerated pace now. We won’t have those conversations; but my children will always have these words.
1
The Plastic Bag and the Red Coat
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent
Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then –
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honour,
One might say love.
SYLVIA PLATH, ‘BLACK ROOK IN RAINY WEATHER’
There was a moment, a decade or so ago, when I was walking across Clapham Common on a grey winter day. The sky was flat and far too close to my head. I was in a no-particular-sort-of-mood, probably on my way to spending an afternoon in the pub. Or shopping. Anyway: engaging in delightful, consumerist, meaningless modern life. And then I saw a child in a red coat, and I experienced a moment of absolute, pure wonder. Joy, transcendent and uplifting. Did I borrow this memory from the film Schindler’s List? Or perhaps this unexpected moment of joy reminded me of watching a scene from another film, American Beauty, in which the teenage anti-hero films a plastic bag with tender attention as it swirls around, suspended in the air, capturing every twist and flutter. No, I believe this memory is my own: there is wonder in the everyday, if you can only see it.
I am not pretending that I go round all the time having this kind of experience. Or that I see it only in red coats, or indeed in plastic bags. It is just that if I could give my children one thing, it would be this capacity to be astonished by the quotidian, to experience joy from the world they live in. I would work out its formula and put it into a pair of superhero glasses – me and the former dean of Westminster Michael Mayne both, who wrote in his letters to his grandchildren: ‘If I could have waved a fairy wand at your birth and wished upon you just one gift it would not have been beauty or riches or a long life: it would have been the gift of wonder.’ But it doesn’t work like that. We all have to find wonder for ourselves. All I can do is explain how wonder emerged for me as the world and I met, and how it has grown stronger and brighter even as my world has got smaller and dimmer.
I can spread my childhood memories out like a patchwork quilt. My quilt is brightly coloured, richly textured, a mix of the familiar and the foreign. My parents showed me the world from an early age, and experiencing it – drinking in the astonishing wonder it provides – has made me who I am. Because of them, ‘the ears of my ears awake and the eyes of my eyes are open’, as ee cummings put it. Aged about four, I saw a mongoose eat a snake on the banks of the Creek in Dubai. We used to go into the city on a Friday night for curry. In one corner of the garden of the small and scruffy café by the water sat a big cage. And inside the cage lived a mongoose, and the mongoose was fed snakes. After our curry we would have freshly squeezed fruit juice in a small bar staffed by nice Indian men who would pinch my fat, freckly Caucasian cheeks. I remember our weekend trips to the beach, where we would camp under enormous, starry skies. In 1986, age seven and three quarters, I lay on the cold sand with my friend Georgia, and watched Halley’s Comet fly overhead. We made a solemn promise that we would watch it together on its next cycle through the sky, when Georgia will be in her eighties and I will be long gone. During the hot, cloudless days we would blow up our inflatable lilos and drift out into the clear waters of the Persian Gulf in search of the Utter East. In the shallow seas,