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 sl
eep.
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’),
; 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.