Undying: A Love Story Read online

  ALSO BY MICHEL FABER

  Some Rain Must Fall and Other Stories

  Under the Skin

  The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps

  The Courage Consort

  The Crimson Petal and the White

  The Fahrenheit Twins

  The Apple

  The Fire Gospel

  The Book of Strange New Things

  UNDYING

  A LOVE STORY

  MICHEL FABER

  Published in Great Britain in 2016 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  www.canongate.tv

  This digital edition first published in 2016 by Canongate Books

  Copyright © Michel Faber, 2016

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 78211 854 1

  eISBN 978 1 78211 855 8

  Typeset in Plantin 10/14 pt by Palimpsest Book

  Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire

  Contents

  Foreword

  I

  Of Old Age, In Our Sleep

  Old Bird, Not Very Well

  Lucky

  [indecipherable] kappa

  Tests

  His Hands Were Shaking

  Contraindications

  Change Of Life

  Prints

  Right There On The Floor

  Remission

  Lebensraum

  Since You Last Visited Sopot

  Reward

  Gifts From Exotic Places

  Cute

  Helpmeet

  Such A Simple Thing I Could Have Fixed

  Lucencies

  The Second-Last Time

  Refractory

  Old People In Hospital

  Darling Little Dress

  Escape Attempts

  Nipples

  Ten Tumours On Your Scalp

  Switzerland

  Or, If Only

  Another Season

  Cowboys

  Fluid Balance

  Purring

  The Time You Chose

  Tight Pullover

  II

  F.W. Paine Ltd, Bryson House, Horace Road, Kingston

  Amateur

  You Were Ugly

  Your Ashes

  You Loved To Dance

  Rubbing It In

  Restraining Order

  Account Holder

  Don’t Hesitate To Ask

  They Say

  Please Leave All Baggage On Board

  The Sorrento Hotel Invites You To Help Conserve Water

  Dolmades

  My First Date After You

  (For Ann Patty)

  You Chose So Well

  Risotto

  Your Plants

  The Tower

  Do Not Launder Or Dry Clean, Do Not Use With Helpless Person, Infant Or Person Insensitive To Heat, No Serviceable Parts Inside

  Proliferation

  Barley Fields, Fearn, 16 August, 8 O’Clock

  Kodachrome (b. 1935 – d. 2009)

  Trying It On

  Our Cats No Longer Miss You

  Tamarind

  The 13th

  The Moment Of Capture

  Clarification

  Well, We Made It

  Inverurie, 30 May 2015

  Anniversary

  Come To Bed

  Lucencies (2)

  Foreword

  I used to joke that at the rate I wrote poems, I’d need to live until I was in my nineties before I had enough for a collection. Enough good ones, anyway. The only poem I felt confident to read in public was ‘Old Bird, Not Very Well’, written in 1999.

  Fifteen years later, in June 2014, I was living in Room 212 of Parkside Hospital in London. I’d been living there for several months, camped in a recliner chair next to the bed of my wife Eva. She had multiple myeloma, an incurable cancer of the bone marrow, and was struggling not only with the illness but with the cumulative effects of six years of toxic treatment. Her second stem-cell transplant had failed and her body was a wreck.

  Yet we had hopes that a new chemotherapy drug would reverse the latest relapse. With luck, she would get at least six months’ remission in which to go home, be reunited with the cats, tidy her affairs, sort through family photographs, maybe go on one last overseas trip to see her sons. I even imagined that she might survive long enough to benefit from new and ever-more-effective myeloma treatments as they were released onto the market in years to come.

  It was in that brief period of wishful thinking that – at Eva’s suggestion – I read ‘Old Bird, Not Very Well’ to her oncologist. An optimist, as I suppose oncologists must be, he chose to see it as a poem about living as well as about dying. Eva wasn’t convinced. But anyway, poetry had entered that dismal, antiseptic room.

  On June 27th, just nine days before Eva’s death, when the hope that her plasmacytomas might melt away was fading, I was sitting by her bed as usual. The neuropathy in her hands was so severe that she was unable to use the buzzer to call the nurses, so I was nursing her myself day and night, watching for every movement in the bedclothes, listening out for any murmur. But at this moment she was sleeping peacefully. On Eva’s laptop, at the bottom of an untitled Word document I’d been using for all sorts of purposes including a final copyedit of my last novel and drafts of emails to well-wishers, I suddenly wrote two poems, ‘Cowboys’ and ‘Nipples’. Both were alarmingly grim but imbued with whatever it is that poems must have in order to go deeper than the words.

  I wrote only those two poems, and then it was time for Eva’s cancer to kill her.

  Afterwards, as I tried to cope in a world that did not have my dearest friend in it, I wrote more. Sometimes none for several weeks, sometimes five in a day. I hadn’t known such need for poetry before. I wish I’d lived into my nineties, with Eva at my side, and never written these things.

  Just three of the poems in this collection date from before Eva got sick; two from before I knew her. ‘Of Old Age, In Our Sleep’ is a recent rewrite of a poem I wrote in the early years of working professionally as a nurse. The original 1984 version was more contrived, showcasing the names of many obscure diseases; a 1996 overhaul was more concise, and the 2014 rewrite simpler still. ‘Old People In Hospital’ appears here exactly as I wrote it in 1984, when I was an observer rather than an insider.

  The other poems were written throughout 2014 and 2015, and are arranged not in order of their composition but in their appropriate place in the narrative of losing and grieving for Eva.

  Michel Faber

  Fearn, 2016

  I

  Of Old Age, In Our Sleep

  Although there is no God, let us not leave off praying;

  for words in solemn order may yet prove to be a charm.

  Sickness swarms around us, scheming harm,

  plotting our ruin behind our back.

  Let us pray we may escape attack.

  We do not fear to die, to ebb away.

  What we fear is endless days

  of torture,

  forced intimacy

  with a body that is not our own;

  carnal knowledge

  of our cunning abuser, our disease,

  who fears no medicine

  and hears no pleas.

  Let us not leave off praying.

  Let us keep our dream close to our heart:

  that life is too high-principled

  to linger when it should depart.

  Yes, let us not leave off praying.

  Not for God our soul to keep

  but just to die, of old age, in our
sleep.

  Old Bird, Not Very Well

  By the side of the road she stands:

  old bird, not very well.

  Will she cross? – Yes, perhaps,

  in a bit, when the tiredness

  passes.

  I walk as if on eggshell,

  to delay the flit of her wings.

  But closer by, step by step, then eye to eye,

  I see there will be no such thing.

  This bird is waiting

  patiently to die.

  I am in awe of seeing a bird like this,

  standing upright in extremis.

  We think of birds in two states only:

  dead already; death-defying.

  Feathered carnage, or still flying.

  Finding her, I know I’ve stumbled

  on a moment in a million:

  a moment even ornithologists

  may never witness:

  an old bird, on the point of dying.

  Humbled, I intrude on her distress,

  her mute, attentive helplessness.

  I sit with her a while,

  a hundred times her size.

  My shoe-heel comes to rest

  inches from her breathing breast.

  My shadow lassos her personal space:

  all that remains of her domain.

  Yesterday, the unbounded sky; today

  only a fringe of dirt

  for massive cars to pass.

  One loose feather, scarcely bigger than her eye,

  flaps, passive, as they rustle by.

  She keeps eerily still,

  on the very edge

  of no longer being a sparrow.

  On the brink

  of no longer thinking

  birdy thoughts.

  Lucky

  In late ’88, not knowing how lucky I was,

  I met a woman who would die of cancer.

  I looked into her eyes, and did not see

  the dark blood that would fill them when

  the platelets were all spent.

  All I saw was hazel irises, keen intelligence,

  a lick of mascara on the lashes she would lose.

  I thrilled to the laugh that pain would quell,

  admired the slender neck before it swelled,

  and, when she gave herself to me,

  I laid my cheek against a cleavage

  not yet scarred by venous catheters.

  Tenderly I stroked the hair

  which was, at that stage, still her own.

  I spread her legs, put weight upon her ribcage,

  without a worry this might break her bones.

  I’d gaze, enchanted, at her naked back, the locus

  for the biopsies to come.

  Hurrying to meet her in the street,

  I’d smile with simple pleasure just to glimpse

  my darling who would gladly swallow

  pesticide for her future drug regime.

  I ran the last few steps to hug her,

  squeezing her arms, laying on the pressure,

  innocent of the bruises

  this might inflict one day.

  Hand in hand we walked, and I was proud

  to have this destined cancer victim by my side.

  I kissed her mouth and tasted only

  sweet, untainted Yes.

  She was lucky too, back then in ’88.

  As long as she would live, she loved my body,

  ignorant of what it held, and what it holds

  in store for me. The skin she fondled

  took pity, withheld from her its vilest secrets,

  withholds them still (for now),

  maintains the smooth façade

  on which, on our first night, she shyly laid

  her palms, her lips, her breast, her brow.

  [indecipherable] kappa

  The best doctor in our area

  went into the woods one day

  and blew his head off.

  We were never told

  why he did it; his funeral

  was in a church, and the papers

  were discreet.

  A ginger-haired bear of a man,

  all Scottish brawn and whiskers,

  he liked you. He liked you a lot.

  I think he was a little in love with you,

  as so many men were.

  There was a twinkle in his eye

  when he’d bare your thigh

  for the pethidine shot

  in those halcyon days when migraine

  was your big disease.

  I wish his rendezvous with you

  had pleased him even more.

  I wish his ardour had been more profound.

  I wish he’d stuck around to be the one

  who diagnosed you.

  I somehow doubt he would have sent

  you home from the local clinic

  clutching a scrap of paper scrawled with

  [indecipherable] kappa,

  immunoglobin [spelling error],

  and a tip to go to Google and explore

  what ‘multiple myeloma’ meant.

  We followed that prescription

  to the letter, sick with terror.

  The words, as far as we could tell,

  meant death, in agony, and soon.

  Which just goes to show

  it matters who one’s doctor is

  on a given afternoon,

  and that the best doctor in our area

  should perhaps have been on better

  medication.

  Tests

  You tell your children

  you’re having some tests.

  They’re familiar with tests.

  You tell them

  you’re having examinations.

  They understand examinations.

  You say

  you’re waiting on results.

  They know about results.

  You are having tests, examinations, waiting

  for results, for a piece of paper stating

  how you fared.

  You’re under pressure not to fail.

  You are studying survival.

  You are ill-prepared.

  His Hands Were Shaking

  His hands were shaking.

  The haematologist

  who lifted up your dress

  and took the sample from your spine.

  Also, he blinks too often.

  You want to tell him: Look, this blinking

  isn’t helping. Either close your eyes

  or keep them open.

  It would be nice to think

  his tremble was distress

  at causing pain to one

  so beautiful and in her prime,

  and not from drink.

  In time, when these appointments grow routine,

  you’ll pray the secretarial roulette

  assigns you to a different member of the team.

  In time, the trembling blinker will retire,

  vanish unannounced and overnight,

  and you will never have to sit him down

  and say, Hey, listen, I’ve been thinking

  about the shaking and the blinking,

  and maybe you and I

  are just not right

  for each other.

  Contraindications

  You may experience

  necrosis of the jaw, the collapse

  of your spine, the disintegration

  of your skeleton, ruptures

  in the brain, cardiac arrest,

  ulcers in the guts, haemorrhaging

  sores, embolisms, cataracts . . .

  But let’s not jump the gun. Relax.

  It may never happen!

  The following are far more common:

  moon face, vomiting, exhaustion,

  puffy ankles, night sweats,

  rashes, diarrhoea, going bald,

  fluid retention, abdominal distension,

  ‘moderate discomfort’ (also known as ‘pain’),

&nb
sp; extremes of hot and cold,

  prematurely growing old,

  other gripes too numerous to mention.

  You may also, if you’re vigilant, detect

  psychiatric side-effects.

  A mood diary may be beneficial.

  At certain stages of the cycle

  you may find yourself getting tearful

  for no apparent reason.

  Change Of Life

  In our former lives, B.C.,

  all sorts of issues seemed to matter –

  like minor wastes of money, and a scarcity

  of storage space.

  Never the canniest shopper,

  you’d managed to amass

  at least two hundred menstrual pads –

  and you were fifty-two.

  We did the maths, and made a bet

  on whether you would ever get

  through all those pricey towelettes.

  Now, at fifty-three,

  you’ve started chemotherapy,

  and this, in turn, has caused

  a swift, ferocious menopause,

  or, as our forebears might have said:

  ‘the change of life’.

  Suddenly, it’s over: the love affair

  you once maintained with turtle necks,

  mock polo necks, artful layers,

  blouses, tailored outfits, fancy collars . . .

  Your chest needs air.

  A dozen times a day, you grab

  the V-necks of your newly-purchased tops

  and pull them down, revealing your brassiere.

  Panting, you expose your mottled, sweaty flesh.

  Our banter shifts: a different tease.

  You shameless exhibitionist!

  You floozy! Just as well I don’t require

  a wife who keeps herself demure.

  In fact, if you’re so hot, my dear,

  why not remove the lot?

  You stretch beneath me, sexy still,

  your clothes cast down next to the drawers

  where those superfluous pads are stashed.

  We take our time. An hour or more.

  Halfway, you briefly, indiscreetly pause

  to take a pill.

  Prints

  Like a pet that comes in wet and muddy,

  fur matted with adventure, you return,

  bright-eyed and wild, from your nocturnal jaunt.

  ‘Load the pictures in,’ you say,

  handing me your camera, cold as frost.

  You’ve been haunting Invergordon’s shore,

  photographing the rigs at Nigg.

  I slot the memory card into a USB.

  (Your work’s all digital now, and done at home.