I'm in Heaven Read online

  I shook my head, utterly defeated. How could you argue with logic like that? I thought to ask them if God couldn’t perhaps have chosen something less vicious than Huntington’s Chorea with which to test Mr Swindells’s faith, a wart on his nose perhaps, a boil on his arse maybe, but decided against it. They’d have some pat answer, they always do, what would be the point?

  If they had called on me a few weeks ago I would have given them the time of day. Unlike most people I wouldn’t have offered them some pathetic excuse or told them I hadn’t the time to bother with them and shut the door in their faces. I would have liked to, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to do that. Truth to tell I felt a bit sorry for them; it couldn’t be much fun, tramping the streets trying to find customers to share their delusions with more likelihood of having a dog set on them than they had of success.

  My Auntie Betty told me I was too soft with them. They had door-stepped me a few weeks ago when she’d called round with an apple pie she’d baked for me that had gone cold by the time I managed to get shot of them.

  “You should do what Reg did,” she advised me.

  I would have loved to do what my Uncle Reg did, but you have to be a bit of an extrovert for that; not me at all.

  After being door-stepped himself Uncle Reg had followed the Jehovah’s Witnesses, found out where one of them lived and at half past eleven that night had knocked on his door and asked him if he wanted to become an atheist. The ploy hadn’t been entirely successful as the Jehovah’s Witness had invited him in for a cup of tea and tried to get him to join them, but he and Auntie Betty hadn’t been bothered with them since. “I told him what he could do with his God. And his cup of tea” Uncle Reg said. “And in no uncertain terms.” I knew what Uncle Reg’s uncertain terms would be and ‘stick’, ‘up’ and ‘arse’ would be three of the words he’d employed.

  I couldn’t do that. So I just listened to them, or pretended to listen, took their Watchtower and bade them goodbye. But that was a week ago. And a week ago I didn’t know I had cancer. This week I simply closed the door on them and left them standing there.

  Cancer. I’d known it was bad news from the way the hospital consultant oncologist Mr Matthews had sucked in his breath before speaking, always a portent of bad news. “I’m afraid it’s not good news, Mr Smith.”

  I knew instinctively what was not good about the news even before he told me.

  “Cancer, I’m afraid. Cancer of the bowel.”

  “I see.” I hadn’t seen at all, I felt as fit as a fiddle. Nor had I any reason to suspect cancer, the blood test I’d had a few weeks previously had been for cholesterol (which incidentally had been fine; but what’s the use of having a good cholesterol count if you’ve got cancer?) “Is it bad?” I asked, hardly daring to.

  The doctor nodded. “It’s in the secondary stage. Terminal I’m afraid.”

  That’s three times you’ve been afraid, I thought. You’re not half as afraid as me. Shitting bricks isn’t in it. I knew my next question, I’d heard it often enough from people in films or on television dramas who had been cast in the same circumstances, the question they dreaded asking, the one they had to ask, the one I had to ask now. I steeled myself. “How long have I got?”

  “Less than a year.”

  Less than a year? What sort of answer was that? Next week is less than a year. Tomorrow is less than a year. Couldn’t he be more precise? Apart from that, didn’t you get six months? It was always six months you got. Except for the man in the joke whose doctor told him he had five months to live. “Five?” the man had complained bitterly. “Why only five? Everybody else gets six?” But this was no joke. Cancer! Christ I was no age.

  “With treatment,” Mr Matthews said, breaking into my thoughts.

  “What?”

  “Your....er, time. That’s with treatment. An operation followed by a course of chemotherapy.”

  As soon as I left the hospital I bought a packet of cigarettes and smoked five of them one after the other. I’d stopped smoking in 1992, ironically in response to an advertising campaign warning smokers of the dangers of cancer, but even twenty years on I still fancied a cigarette occasionally, so why not now? It wasn’t going to give me cancer, I’d already got it.

  Written in stark black letters on a shiny white background the packet of cigarettes informed me that ‘Smoking Kills’. In the tobacconist’s shop I’d noticed the same uncompromising message written on every packet, and in such large letters that for a moment I thought it was the brand name; that there were no longer cigarettes called Marlborough and Lambert & Butler and Silk Cut, that all cigarettes were now called Smoking Kills. It came as something of a surprise as I hadn’t looked directly at a cigarette packet for years, initially so that I wouldn’t start pining for a packet, later because I’d finally stopped pining.

  While I was enjoying the cigarettes, and I really did enjoy them, I asked the “Why me?” question over and over again. What had I done to deserve it? Norman Smith? Who had never done anyone any harm in his entire life. Not on purpose anyway, not knowingly. Why not somebody else, somebody more deserving of cancer? People who deserved to get cancer never seemed to get it. Well no one deserved to get it - I’d never wish it on anyone - but it wouldn’t have been the worst thing in the world if Mugabe or one of the other dictators that Africa constantly throws up was to cop for it.

  It wasn’t as if I hadn’t always looked after myself. While no one could ever accuse me of being a fitness fanatic I had faithfully eaten my five a day, walked regularly (not being able to afford a car for the last couple of years helped), and went over the safe alcohol limit only occasionally and less than most. And yet there were people I knew, people well into their seventies, who smoked like chimneys, drank like there was no tomorrow and the only time they ever saw a piece of fruit or vegetable other than a potato was if someone was eating it on the telly they were slumped in front of all day eating crisps and swigging Coke. There was a family over the road, the Stanways, four of them, eighty stones between them if they were an ounce, all of them on benefits but each without the benefit of a brain to tell them they were eating themselves into an early grave. That last thought had made me sit up - it wouldn’t be as early as the grave I was now headed for in ‘less than a year’.

  When I arrived home from the hospital the first thing I did was ring Bob Hill, Plumber, and told him I wouldn’t be starting work for him the following Monday morning.

  Six months previously I’d seen an advert in the newspaper sits vac columns, Become a Plumber. Earn a Thousand Pounds a Week! I answered it, signed on for the course, worked hard at it and had passed the exam, easy-peasy. A friend of mine once said about the profession of Painter & Decorator that if you could piss you could paint and plumbing isn’t all that much more difficult, largely a matter of common sense and the ability to drink lots of tea brewed by grateful housewives with leaks. I had high hopes for my new occupation, imagining that being a plumber would be just the ticket. Or if not the ticket certainly better than being a wages clerk, stuck in an office all day, or at B&Q telling people that the thing they were looking for was at the bottom of aisle B or the top of aisle C or was out of stock and could possibly be coming in next Tuesday with any luck. Being a plumber would get me out of the house too, and into other people’s houses, lots of houses, which would enable me to meet lots of different people. Maybe I would be lucky enough to meet an English Rose? One never knew.

  Three weeks job searching later, just ten days ago, after nearly two years on the dole, I finally managed to get a job. I had Become a Plumber. However I wouldn’t Earn a Thousand Pounds a Week! Not now. Well what would be the point of starting work when I was going to die? Bugger that for a game of soldiers; it was my own plumbing that needed sorting out, not somebody else’s. But that wasn’t possible according to the doctor, you couldn’t simply take out the old ballcock and put in a new one, you couldn’t do that with bowels.

  I thought to ask Mr Matthews for a secon
d opinion, wondered why I hadn’t asked him for one in the first place. Anyone could make a mistake, it happens all the time, especially in hospitals. There’d been a case in the paper not long back where they’d sawn the wrong leg off somebody and if they couldn’t tell the difference between a right leg and a left leg they could certainly misdiagnose cancer.

  I phoned the hospital. Apparently Mr Matthews’ opinion was a second opinion, the first opinion having been given by his registrar Dr Cooley. “We do not take the decision to tell a patient he has terminal cancer lightly, Mr Smith,” the doctor said in a firm but not unkind manner. “There is no doubt about it, I’m afraid.” Afraid again. Was there anything he wasn’t afraid of? A benign pimple perhaps? “It’s a benign pimple, I’m unafraid.”

  Suitably admonished, and not bothering to seek a third opinion, I apologised for wasting the doctor’s time and went out and bought another packet of Smoking Kills. “Is there any brand that kills quicker than the others?” I asked the girl behind the cigarette counter at the Co-op. “Double tar perhaps? Only I’d like to get it over with.” She either didn’t hear me, likely, as she was still talking to the previous customer about her holiday in Ibiza, or concluded that I was some sort of nutter, because after sending the customer on her way with the information that Ibiza was ‘shit hot and she couldn’t wait to get back there and out of this fucking hole thank fuck’ she just passed the cigarettes over and asked me if I had a loyalty card. Is it possible to be loyal to the Co-op? The Co-op is the shop you go to when there’s nowhere else open or for something you’d forgotten when you went to Tescos.

  The following day I told Auntie Betty and Uncle Reg the bad news.

  I think the world of my Auntie Betty, my mother’s sister, and wish she’d been my mother. My mother had been a pain, a half empty glass person long before the expression had been coined. True, she had been a semi-invalid, but then so were lots of people, and they didn’t go about all day with a face like a week in Wigan.

  My mother was the most contrary woman I have ever known, could ever imagine knowing, more contrary than Mary, Mary. If it had been my mother who had done the gardening at 12 Hugh Gaitskill Street it wouldn’t have been silver bells and cockle shells all in a row that she grew but deadly night shade and hemlock or something equally noxious.

  One of the many memories I have of her perverseness was the time we’d gone to the seaside for a week’s holiday, Bridlington as I remember, although it could have been Scarborough or Whitby or any of a number of North Yorkshire seaside resorts she dragged me to once a year, all of which she had said were “Very nice but I wouldn’t go again”. I’d seen a boat trip advertised for later that week. Ten miles up the coast and back in The Good Ship Saucy Lee, stopping off at an island for swimming and lunch. I’d really fancied it. I like swimming and I like lunch. I knew my mother would raise all sorts of objections if I told her I’d like to go on my own, leaving her to fend for herself for the day. I also knew that if I suggested we both go she’d find ten reasons not to - the boat would break down and we’d be stranded for hours on end; there’d be a storm and we’d be washed overboard; a sea monster would emerge from Davy Jones’s locker and swallow us whole; it would be another Poseidon Adventure and that had made her poorly just watching it, and don’t mention Titanic. With this in mind I contrived to walk her past the sign the following morning. Pointing it out I summoned up a suitably derisive look, curled my bottom lip and said, “Huh, I don’t fancy the idea of that!” Five minutes later tickets had been booked for the following day, sailing at 10 prompt, no refunds, bring a pakamac and waterproof footwear.

  At dinner in the boarding house that evening my mother refused to eat anything. “I’m going on a boat tomorrow, aren’t I,” she said, as though it was all the explanation necessary.

  “So?”

  “Well I’ll be seasick if I’ve got food inside me.”

  “Now you’re being silly.”

  “Don’t call me silly, I’m your mother.”

  “Well you are being silly.”

  “I am not. It stands to reason a body will be seasick if she’s got food inside her and the boat starts rolling about the way boats do.”

  I sighed, long-suffering. “We’re sailing up the north Yorkshire coast, Mam, not shooting the rapids.”

  “Are you trying to tell me it won’t roll about?”

  “Well it’s a boat, it’s bound to roll about a bit, that’s what boats do, it’s part of the fun.”

  “There’s nothing funny about being seasick, it’s horrible. People never eat the night before they go on boats if they’ve got any sense.”

  I tried reasoning with her. “How do you think people who go on fourteen-day ocean-going cruises manage? They eat every night before going on a boat the following day. And every day. Breakfast, dinner and tea. If they took any notice of you they’d go the whole fourteen days without having anything to eat. They’d come off the boat starving to death. I mean the main attraction of an ocean cruise is that you can eat all day every day if you’ve a mind to. And a lot of people do. Some of them came off a stone heavier than they went on. If everyone thought the same as you hundreds of people at P and O would be out of a job.”

  “Well that isn’t my lookout; and anyway what’s it got to do with the post office?”

  My argument didn’t make a scrap of difference. I knew it wouldn’t. She didn’t have anything to eat that evening, nor did she have breakfast the following morning. When we arrived at the top of the gangplank she asked the man taking the tickets how long we’d be on the boat. He said six hours. She told me she was already starving hungry, she couldn’t go that long without food and went back down the gangplank. Back on dry land she turned to me, still at the top of the gangplank, and said she hoped I didn’t think I was gadding off enjoying myself and leaving her on her own all day. I told her I wouldn’t be enjoying myself, I’d had something to eat the night before in addition to a big breakfast so I’d probably be spewing my ring up every five minutes. She called me a cheeky young bugger - I was forty- six at the time - and told me to get off the boat this minute.

  I did as she commanded, much as I would have loved to stay on the boat and call in at the island for a swim and lunch; I knew that life just wouldn’t have been worth living if I hadn’t.

  When my mother was alive I often wondered if life was worth living.

  Things didn’t improve much after she died, three years ago. What difference her passing away made to my future life was effectively taken away from me less than six months later when the firm I worked for as a wages clerk, Hargreaves & Son, went to the wall, taking Hargreaves, Son, me, and two hundred jam and preservatives workers with it. A slogan I dreamt up without too much trouble, ‘No jam tomorrow’- I’m not bad at that sort of thing and once won a holiday for two in Cornwall (“Very nice but not as nice as Scarborough”) - was chanted daily by the redundant workers outside the factory gates, in a vain attempt to save their jobs.

  Hargreaves and Son was an old-fashioned firm, steeped in tradition, which was the main reason it had gone under. One of the traditions it was steeped in was having an antiquated wages system, which I found to my cost when I tried to obtain a position as a wages clerk with some other firm and quickly learned that my wage clerking skills had been taken over by a technology of which I knew nothing. What was a spreadsheet when it was at home? A computer at Hargreaves’s was as rare as a poor dentist and lacking a computer of my own - when I needed the services of one, usually for Googling something, I used the one at the library - I’d never come across spreadsheets, nor any other modern aids to wage clerking for that matter.

  It soon became clear to me that even if I’d had the necessary skills to get a job I would almost certainly not have been allowed to practice them, as at the age of fifty two I was deemed to be too old. This seemingly arbitrary restriction also applied when seeking jobs other than that of a wages clerk. Jobs were thin on the ground anyway. One week all the Job Centre had was a vacan
cy for a Father Christmas. “But it’s only seasonal.” the clerk said, which if nothing else made me smile. I didn’t smile an hour later when I was turned down for the Santa Claus job because I wasn’t fat enough.

  “I could be a thin Santa,” I argued. “Where does it say he has to be fat?”

  “The Santa costume is for a fat Santa. It would hang on you, it wouldn’t look right.”

  “I can fill it out. Stuff old clothes and things down it to fill it out.”

  “You can’t fill your face out. You’ve got a thin face. And it isn’t jolly; Santa’s got a jolly face.”

  “It’s not jolly because I can’t get a bloody job.”

  An oasis in the desert of unemployment appeared to be B&Q, a company that has a reputation for finding employment for people of sixty years old or even older. I applied to them but failed to obtain a position, and came away with the distinct impression that the reason I’d been turned down was because I was too young. It dawned on me that I was trapped in an eight year limbo, from age fifty-two to sixty, from which there was no escape. Maybe a job as a limbo dancer? I was certainly low enough to be adept at it, even if only metaphorically.

  Fortunately I have been blessed with an enquiring mind - when I was ten my mother, in the ungracious way she had of saying anything even slightly complimentary, told me that I ‘wanted to know the ins and outs of a cat’s arsehole’ - but unfortunately I had never used it to enquire into the possibilities of adding to the three GCE certificates (Eng. Lang, Eng. Lit, History) I had obtained at school. Nor since leaving school had I sought any further qualification that might have helped me better myself. It wasn’t that I lacked ambition, more that I couldn’t see much point in being ambitious if I wasn’t going to benefit from it; the effort just wasn’t worth it, there’d always be the smothering presence of my mother to put the mockers on it. In the light of recent events I wished I’d had more ambition, but you are what you are, so I’d gone my own sweet way. Then, when I’d finally been unshackled, it was too late to do anything about it.