Neil Diamond

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5dQ-uB5CK4

I'm with Trip....

(Ruth and Laura are in New York about to scatter his ashes...)

“Exactly. He never followed trends, he wasn't interested in festivals, didn't buy music magazines, didn't learn lyrics, didn't play music at loud volume on Friday nights, or make me compilation tapes. And he never danced. Thank god. In fact, he was only ever passionate about one thing to do with music in his entire life.”

“I must have missed that, what was it?”

“He loved Neil bloody Diamond. He knew all the lyrics, especially the really bad ones. 'No-one heard at all, not even the chair.' 'He ain't heavy he's my brother' was the best cover version ever, unless it was 'Midnight bloody Train to Georgia', which he took to playing when he was lying on the sofa after chemo. He even dragged me to see him once.”

“You went to see Neil Diamond?” Laura choked on her champagne.

“Yep, at some football ground or other. The old man croaked his way through his back catalogue whilst the middle aged women of England wet their gussets. Come the encore, Trip was standing on his seat roaring through the chorus of 'Cracklin’ Rosie' without a hint of irony or sense of his own ridiculousness. I pretended I wasn’t with him. Do you know, if anyone ever dismissed the sainted Neil's talents, he'd ask 'Tell me, who wrote 'I'm a Believer'?' Or sometimes he'd change it to 'Red Red Wine'.”

“That just shows his lack of cool - the fact he thought that was a winning argument.”

“Yeah, and of course when Pulp Fiction came out he could add 'Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon'. Which, to be fair, did actually dumbfound a few critics.”

“Idiot.” Laura giggled fondly.

Iain Banks Stole Our Pitch

Yes, Iain Banks is one of my favourite writers. Yes, I have lovingly collected his first editions and yes I once queued for hours in Basingstoke for his signature. But he's really annoyed me right at the death.

When Karin told me of her own cancer diagnosis, we both agreed there was one positive – it surely beefed up our pitch to agents and publishers for our novel 'Farewell Trip.'

“A romantic comedy about terminal cancer written by two lifelong friends, one of whom has terminal cancer.”

Surely that's a compelling and original starting-point, I said to her, trying to sound light-hearted, spitting in the eyes of death as our main characters do. And then I read that Iain Banks's last, as yet unpublished, novel is about terminal cancer.

As if that's not bad enough I also read that he had written 75,000 words of the book BEFORE he was diagnosed. So not only has he stolen our unique selling point but, like Karin, he also seems to have caught his illness from the hubris of writing about terminal cancer.

Bastard.

Is cancer contagious?

Of course, I'm being facetious.  But it's amazing how a little question like that can become an earworm that repeats itself deep in ones brain in the middle of the night.

When Gary and I decided that Trip, the male protagonist of our novel, should be dying of cancer, we had no thought for the future or even for our pasts.  I'd had primary breast cancer a few years before and it was all a bit 'been there, done that, got the t-shirt'.  The fact had no relevance to Trip or to our story.  Then we dictated that Ruthie should also have been touched by life-threatening illness.  I can't remember what brought us to that decision, I think it was something shallow like we wanted to show how differently she and Trip dealt with their cancers.  We certainly didn't think about the devastation two such diagnoses might have wrought in the landscape of Trip and Ruth's relationship.

Such hubris.  There we were, each of us safe in the shelter of our own happy, long marriages, happy to fling around drama and trauma and potential tragedy and to leave our poor characters to deal with it all.  Which they did.  Admirably, in fact.  Just as, I believe, we like to think we would do too: cancer?  Got it covered.  Terminal cancer?  No problem, just bring it on.  Affairs?  Pish, mere blips.  Mother died?  Never mind, still got a dad.

In the end, Ruth's breast cancer is only mentioned in passing a couple of times and, of all the parts in the book that could be based on reality, these parts aren't.  The description of her scar, her misshapen breast and the tattoos for radiotherapy are true to me, but Ruth's experience is purely hers, not mine at all.  Interesting then, that she is concerned about the 'can you catch cancer' fear.  Well, to be clear, she thinks that Trip was concerned with the catching cancer fear.

“So, what's this?” JP traces the silvery scar on my right breast, stroking the puckered skin. “Cancer?”

“Yep. Five years ago.”

“You're not bothered by it. By people seeing the scar, I mean.”

I shrug. I'm not really. Strange, considering how vain I am about everything else. It's a stark contrast to the fuss I made about having breast cancer when it was diagnosed and what a drama queen I was during the treatment. Perspective changes.

I lift my arm, show him the deep dip with its accompanying scar in the pit.

“This is where the lymph nodes were taken out. I was lucky, they were completely clear. And this -” I push his finger into the little hole. “- is from the drain they put in. I've got tattoos too, if you look closely, for the radiotherapy.”

“What, these little biro marks?” He touches each one of them, then bends to kiss my nipple. “You're amazing.”

For a second I want to cry. It's true I'm not bothered about the scars, about the way my breast is misshapen because of the tissue removed from it. But, the thing is, Trip, you weren't able to touch it, were you? Oh, you made a point of stroking it when the bandage came off and at various, horribly self-conscious, moments after that to prove to us both you didn't mind the way I looked. But after the operation, you never caressed my breast again, never pinched the nipple hard enough to make me moan, never sucked it - even though you knew how much I liked it. It just made you profoundly uncomfortable. I wondered whether you had some vestigial fear you might catch cancer from it. And then you did.

And now that I've been diagnosed with incurable cancer I have to wonder (just a little bit, in the middle of the night) whether Ruth and Trip are getting their own back.