The Man Who Didn't Go to Newcastle Read online

  These are the ones who meant so much to him. The core people. The ‘A’ listers. The inner circle of friends he loved and thought about – even in the face of death. All present. Welsh Phil who went on a pub-crawl with him every Saturday night. Carol and Carole, Bryony, Phil Gullifer with his family, Den and Chris from Warwick, John Commerford, Mart and Lindsay, Mac and Minnie, all from our home town, even Clive Mason, who I’d never met before the funeral and had been Adrian’s boss when he’d worked at British Telecom. All the names on his list have magically been brought to life. The list is finally and unbearably transformed into real people standing in a semi-circle with me now around the hole containing my dear brother’s ashes.

  In the end it’s the memory of Adrian’s list that makes me cry.

  LONDON

  Thursday 21st June 2007 (the longest day)

  The phone in my study rings mid-morning. It’s my brother, Adrian, with his new husky voice. I brace myself. It’s usually me who rings him.

  ‘Ali?’ he croaks. ‘The doctor’s just been on the ward and I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

  I squeeze my fingernails into my palm. The fraction of a second while I wait for Adrian to go on seems long, yet somehow short.

  ‘They think I’ve got lung cancer,’ he says.

  *

  The remainder of the phone call is a blur. After Adrian has rung off I summon enough courage to ring one of my London friends, Jeannette, who is already in the know about my brother’s health problems. I must cross the first hurdle of repeating the C word aloud.

  ‘Adrian said they think he’s got lung cancer,’ I explain, amazed at my self-control. Maybe this is not going to be as difficult as I’d imagined. Providing Jeannette is not too nice, or overly sympathetic. Too much kindness might break me.

  ‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do,’ she says. Perfect.

  I carry on the rest of my day as a different person. I’ve just gone through one of those life-changing moments that come along from time to time. Like the morning I opened the letter telling me my ‘A’ level results were high enough to get me into university, or when I came round from the anaesthetic and Peter told me the premature twins I’d just given birth to by caesarean section were healthy girls. Today, however, there is nothing comforting about this tilt to the axis of my life. Just the bleak reality that my brother, my only sibling, may be about to die.

  As it’s June I’m working on the Frome Festival Short Story Competition. I return to what I was doing – writing a critique for a poorly constructed story and trying to think of something positive to say – but my mind soon strays again to my brother and his life-changing news.

  Adrian was always someone who peaked too soon. At the age of eighteen he was tall, dark and handsome. He’d inherited my parents’ dark curly hair (where did my mousy straight crop come from?), was slim, and strode around in clothes others wouldn’t have had the bottle to wear. Green or maroon desert boots he’d dyed with Lady Esquire shoe dye, skin tight jeans with just the right amount of flare at the ankle, and a tight fitting chamois leather jacket he’d persuaded Mum to make for him. To me he was a celebrity in his own circle of friends. Intriguing, brilliant, special. Despite some of the things that have happened to him over the past couple of years, he remains one of the lights of my life. I have a space in my heart reserved for Adrian which could never be filled by anyone else.

  I pause from my work and lean my elbows on my desk. On the windowsill, amongst several family photographs, is a black and white snapshot of Adrian and me sitting on a low wall outside the flat we lived in in Mitcham when we were little. On the back of the photo, in my mother’s stylish longhand are the words ‘Mitcham Oct 54’. She hasn’t added our names, though she probably had to restrain herself. Even for Mum, who was always the zealous labelling type, the identities of her kids went without saying. In the photo I am two and Adrian is three. We’re both smiling, dressed identically in berets, scarves and double-breasted herringbone overcoats, with long socks and bare legs. I guess this was a last photo shoot before we left our rented Mitcham flat and moved to the new post-war leafy suburban estate in Coney Hall near West Wickham in Kent where my father had bought, for one hundred pounds, a semi-detached house which looked out onto fields.

  Dad was keen to escape the woman with the yellow teeth and grey beret who lived in the flat downstairs in Mitcham, and complained about the noise we made. Or did she have grey teeth and a yellow beret? Whichever, berets seemed to be bizarrely de rigueur in the South London of the mid-fifties.

  In the photo, Adrian and I sit side by side with chubby cherubic smiles directed at whoever was taking the shot, squinting into the autumn sunshine, our two little black beret-clad shadows reflected against the wall behind us.

  *

  Post Mitcham we were brought up in the semi-detached suburbia our parents’ generation aspired to, but which was so scathingly depicted in the pop songs of ours. “Semi-detached suburban Mr James,” “Matthew and Son,” “Little Boxes”… I think both Adrian and I decided early on that our individual futures would lie as far away from the Mr Jameses, the Matthew and Sons, and their little boxes as possible.

  With only eighteen months between us, in those days we were sometimes mistaken for twins. Nowadays we are very different. Our lives are polarised. Adrian lives in London and I’m in rural Somerset. He lives alone in a two bedroom flat in Putney, has a degree in Pure and Applied Maths, and is a statistician. I studied English at university. I’m a writer, a teacher and a mother of four children. I’ve been married to Peter for twenty-six years. Adrian is single. When holidaying he tends to travel alone. I travel en famille. Our lives have ended up as opposite as South and North Pole. We are chalk and cheese, Town Mouse and Country Mouse. Every day I walk our dog in the woods opposite my house. Every day Adrian walks the pavements of Southfields to the pub. Twice.

  I persuaded him to accompany me on a dog walk when he was visiting one Christmas. His unease was tangible. He turned back before we were halfway down the track leading to Vallis Woods.

  Nevertheless, in other ways Adrian and I are similar. Sometimes if we’re in a room full of people he’s the only person who will understand a particular remark I make, or get a joke. Sometimes I’m the only person who will get a remark he has made, or a joke. In pub quizzes we share the same random trove of useless information. What was the first single by the Rolling Stones? Come On. Who wrote The Dice Man? Luke Rhinehart. Which actor starred in the Stephen Poliakoff TV drama Caught on A Train? Michael Kitchen. We both know all this stuff. And also, although I am only 55 and he is 56, Adrian is the only person left on the planet I’ve known since birth. He’s the only person who has known me since day one. Dad died thirteen years ago and Mum died in 2005. There’s only the two of us left. I find people who’ve known us all our lives to be deeply reassuring. Even if we have partners and children, our partners (in most cases) have only known us as adults, and our children see us as ancient has-beens who were brought up scratching pictures on cave walls.

  *

  I phone the hospital and, as Adrian’s next of kin, manage to arrange for a doctor to ring me back. In the world of the NHS, next of kin is an important status. Adrian has never married, has no children and, as far as I know, hasn’t ever lived with a woman. So that makes me his next of kin – which is turning out to be useful now as the key to getting anyone at St George’s Hospital, Tooting to talk to me about what is happening to him.

  In fact I know quite a bit of what has been happening. I’ve been phoning him on a regular basis for some weeks, ever since February when he told me he’d been suffering from breathlessness and pains in his back. On reflection, I’ve been worried about him for a couple of years. But my worry only turned into real concern a few weeks ago when I opened a text from him while I was out with Billy, our West Highland White terrier.

  Am in St Georges – Rodney Smith Ward. Ring me. A.

  I rang him immediately. Billy carried on sniffing the bracken
and snuffling amongst the reeds of the river bank whilst I endeavoured to find out why on earth my brother was in hospital.

  *

  Adrian answered straight away and explained what had happened. He’d been washing up the night before and had cut his hand on a broken wine glass. Was he perhaps drunk? Duh – the clue’s in the wine glass. The cut was deep into the skin that separates the thumb from the first finger and was bleeding profusely. The following morning he woke up to find the blood had seeped through the thickness of the towel he’d wrapped around his hand. His bed sheets were soaked. Rather than drive (these city folk seem to do anything rather than get behind the wheel of a car), he took two different buses to get to St George’s Hospital. When he alighted from the second bus, he collapsed on the pavement outside the main gates, but they still sent an ambulance to pick him up and take him into A & E.

  The cut hand led to the collapse, the collapse led to the hospital admission, and the hospital admission led to an analysis of the collapse. This instigated a series of tests, and now those tests are leading to something more sinister. A simple cut on the hand has brought my brother to a quite horrible place.

  After lunch, while I’m working in my study, Doctor Felicity Harding, registrar at St George’s, rings.

  ‘Mrs Clink, we suspect lung cancer and cancer of the kidney.’ Her voice is gentle, unassuming. Calm. ‘But nothing at this stage is conclusive. Nothing is proven. We will have a more accurate diagnosis soon.’

  I shiver and reach for my cardigan on the back of my chair, draping it over one shoulder.

  ‘What will happen to my brother?’

  ‘There are a number of options depending on the type of cancer, if indeed this prognosis should prove correct. Chemotherapy is a possibility, as is radiotherapy. However, for a more aggressive small-cell growth, treatment is not always offered, and if the cancer has spread then…’

  I make notes as she speaks, jotting down key words on the back of the short story I’ve been critiquing: nothing proven, chemo? radiother, small-cell, spread… I feel my heart banging inside my chest.

  ‘Thanks for phoning. For letting me know.’ My reply is scant, my voice thin.

  *

  After this has sunk in I ring Adrian.

  ‘They said they should have the results of a biopsy they’ve done on my lung tomorrow. Do you think you could come up to London tomorrow, Ali?’

  ‘Tomorrow? Let me think what I’m doing. Yes I’m sure I can. I might have to rearrange a few things. The girls will be at school. Margaret can have the dog. The men can get a takeaway. Yes. I’ll find out the train times.’

  ‘Thanks, Ali. I really appreciate that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  *

  My brother has done this before – three years ago when he was waiting for a heart bypass. Then he’d rung me and said the same thing.

  ‘I’d like you to come up.’ He said this as if it was me, and me alone, he wanted, although later I realised I was only one of a list of women he called on in moments of anguish.

  I heeded the call and rushed up to the big city and found him in one of the green-walled wards in the older part of St George’s, fully dressed, sitting on a bed with a DIY will laid out on the blanket.

  ‘I need a witness,’ he said, indicating the document. ‘I need someone to sign this will for me.’

  In the hospital ward of pre-op heart patients, Adrian was bright and chatty. More so than normal, in fact – waving jauntily at his fellow patients as they shuffled along in dressing gowns, with pale faces and uncombed hair.

  He called over to a diminutive male nurse who looked to be from somewhere in the Far East, Malaysia perhaps – a part of the world Adrian visited during his travelling days – and explained he wanted him to witness the signing of his will. The nurse seemed more than willing to help.

  ‘Wit – ness? Do you un – der – stand?’ Adrian flapped the will in the air. ‘I – would – like – you – to – sign – this!’ he said. The nurse smiled and produced one of the many pens in his uniform pocket.

  ‘Ah! Sign! Yes, yes! I sign!’

  My brother has a knack of asking people to do things for him, which somehow seems to make people want to do things for him. How does that work? The nurse was so keen to help he was almost jumping up and down on the spot. ‘I sign. But you no die,’ he added.

  All three of us laughed, relief bouncing round the hospital bed. No, Adrian wasn’t going to die. Hundreds of people, thousands, had heart bypasses. And they didn’t die. The nurse put his signature to Adrian’s will. An illegible scribble next to the word ‘Witness’. Just in case.

  Friday 22nd June 2007

  St George’s, Tooting is the hospital I’m travelling to today. Of course, Adrian didn’t die when he had the heart bypass and now I’m on my way to see him once more, but this time to ascertain from the doctors whether their suspicions from the scans and X-rays are borne out by the biopsy they did yesterday on his lung.

  As yet no definite conclusions have been drawn, but in my heart I feel the news I’m heading towards on the 8.05am First Great Western Westbury to Paddington will be the worst I’ve ever heard. My brother might not be around for much longer.

  People who’ve known us since the West Wickham days often refer to us as ‘close’. But aren’t all siblings? I’ve only ever had the one, so I can’t imagine any different relationship. As children, we were inseparable. Being brought up in the fifties, our mother didn’t send us to nursery – pre schooling was much less the norm then – so I missed Adrian when he went to school. I was desperate to start school myself and soon after my fifth birthday I joined Class Twelve at Wickham Common County Primary. By this time Adrian had gone up to Class Ten. What happened to Class Eleven I’m not sure. I guess it was the stream for the less able, those poor little ones who’d already been picked out as being destined to fail the Eleven Plus and spend their teenage years in secondary modern schools. Adrian would certainly not have been in that group of pupils.

  Before I started school myself, I’d watched Adrian learn to write with my mother’s help in an exercise book at home, and had been for an interview with the headmaster who asked me to write my name on a piece of paper and to add two and two together. But when I was taken to Class Twelve, otherwise known as The Babies’ Class, and left by my mother to fend for myself, I felt as if my life had ended. My yearning to be at school hadn’t been properly thought through. I cried when my mother said she ‘had to go now’ (Adrian had managed the separation from home to school without a tear) and tightened my little fists around the hem of her dress. At four o’clock when she collected me I couldn’t believe I’d have to go through the whole traumatic experience again the next day.

  As the days passed gradually I settled into the routine, and discovered the excitement of the slide, the sand pit and – my absolute favourite – the ‘sweet shop’ where small stones wrapped in old sweet wrappers were kept in a jar for sale, ready to be eagerly bought with cardboard coins. Clearly there were no health and safety issues in Wickham Common circa 1957.

  The sun shone most days (or so it seemed) but Adrian was a hard act to follow. It was clear he excelled in everything. Sums, writing, sports, history, geography – all these things came easily to him, and he was popular amongst his peers.

  I remember being proud of him from an early age. I felt blessed to be one of the few kids in my class who had an older sibling in the school, but at the first playtime when we met, as arranged, by the water fountain, Adrian introduced me to one of his friends.

  ‘Ali, this is Smegglesworth,’ he said indicating an older, more sophisticated looking boy – at least nine years old and definitely not from our road.

  ‘Hello, Smegglesworth!’ I whispered coyly.

  ‘You can’t call me that. Only Adrian can call me Smegglesworth,’ Smegglesworth said, pushing past me to drink from the fountain. ‘And you’re not allowed to drink from this fountain either. You have to use the babies’ fountain.’

&n
bsp; I slunk off to the smaller fountain on the other side of the playground, still unsure what I was supposed to call him. Since then I’ve never been good at being introduced to new people. However, I soon made my own friends, although I was always aware of Adrian in the class above at playtimes, lunchtimes or when he was sent to our class with a message from his teacher. Adrian was always chosen for message carrying, even though he wasn’t the tidiest member of his class.

  ‘Doesn’t your brother ever have his shirt tucked in properly?’ Mr Woollard (Class Three) once asked me as Adrian left the room with the answer to a message. Mr Woollard was a curly-haired gentleman whose brogue shoes curled up at the toes.

  ‘Hardly ever,’ I answered, immediately realising what a pathetic retort this was. Adrian would have come up with something far wittier.

  One of the fads at our school was bead swapping. To take part in bead swapping you needed a tin, some beads and the correct way of running your fingers through them. Mum gave me an old tin (which originally contained blackcurrant throat pastilles) and a few beads from old necklaces. During playtime we sat with our tins and, with the correct finger movement, examined other girls’ beads until we came to a mutually acceptable swap. After the first day at school with my tin, Adrian asked if he could also have a tin for beads. Mum, being a fair and kind parent, said she’d find him one, though I felt intrinsically uncomfortable on his behalf. Boys didn’t have beads. It was only the girls who bead-swapped. Even at such a young age I could see Adrian occasionally got things wrong. His enthusiasm sometimes blinded him to the mores of the social status quo. Anxiously I watched him produce his bead tin the following morning at break time. A couple of the quieter boys joined him to look at his beads but there was some playful laughter amongst some of the more confident boys, with Smegglesworth at their helm. That night he gave his tin back to Mum.