GUEST POST : IN THE LAND OF TORIA

While I was in hospital, my friend Victoria sent me photographs of her garden. There are gardens in my hospital, one in particular that I claim as my favourite, but while in a shared ward or private bay, there is no green to be found. Blue and cream aplenty but no living, moving green. So I thought I would share Victoria’s photos with you, with her permission, so you can see what cheered me...

Of course there are other ways to escape while in hospital. My new friend Mary, with the wandering mind, was not in Addenbrooke’s at all... she was in Selby in Yorkshire, and sometimes in the mining and weaving towns of her youth... sometimes she would give me directions to the cemetery nearby and sometimes she accepted that I was not real, I was a visiting spirit to whom mundane things of the mortal world would be of little interest. ‘How long have you been here, like this?’ Mary asked, her hand fluttering, indicating my other worldliness ... ‘Oh, I come and go,’ I answered. We spoke exactly the same language, Mary and I, both of us being of this world and not of this world. It’s all very mysterious, we both agreed.

When I was finally discharged I said goodbye to all my ward mates except Mary. I couldn’t bring myself to utter the finality. Mary had said I would return to her mind from time to time, and I told her I would never forget her. Mary Longbottom of Selby, Yorkshire. So why say goodbye?

(All photographs, except the last, by Victoria Kingsley-Pallant)

CO-VID: THE CONSIDERATE VIRUS?

Am I naive to call it that? Probably. But I would rather be naively hopeful during a global pandemic than be destroyed by fear of a thing I exist with daily, hourly. And that is extinction by infection. Talk about unromantic language. Some English consonants are not the prettiest sounding.

There are cars whizzing past, still. And the sound of conversation, laughter and once, a child crying next door. My mother is chopping vegetables for soup tonight. And my father is doing his floor exercises. On Friday, schools closed their gates around Britain, following suit behind most of Europe. The supermarkets are buckling under the strain but community morale and practical solutions are being invented by a world used to being superhuman, charged by motivation and productivity and consumption. Oh dear. More of those consonants.

Let’s steer towards the sea. And Venice’s clear waters.

On Monday, I had my six monthly dose of Rituximab, which depletes my B cells, and takes me on a briefly intense chemotherapy journey. Then it passes. But the meeting place of a new virus, further immunosuppressive drug therapy and continuing chronic illness is... interesting. This slow paced, enforced self-isolation life? This is my jam. This is where I dwell as a matter of course. This place is never quite comfortable in a world of motion and forward full speed ahead-ness, but it is home, for me. Am I better prepared than you for the quiet life? Perhaps. Well, except for the extinction by infection part.

The post and delivery men come and go. Retired NHS staff are returning with sleeves rolled up in solidarity. The birds were riotous earlier this week, but sounded a little subdued today. Humans, eh? they roll their eyes at each other. Just can’t tell what they’ll be up to next.

Are you coping alright? Is the quieter pace of life easy for you to adapt to? Or are you among the population who are busy doing at home work-outs, creating community cohesion networks, magazines, reading groups? I feel tired just thinking of the ways in which people are stopping, slowing down and finding ways to ‘do things’ in a time of government mandated no-doing. Perhaps this is because I have had a winter of respiratory infections already, and I have almost no energy to worry about a virus that seems to be making most people very considerate. But I gathered just enough to upload a vlog to my ancient channel, in case you want a little glimpse into my life! My skills are desperate, but there's always a chance I'll get better :)

CLIVE JAMES, ARS MORIENDI

‘Put that down.’ 

Clive always said that, if he thought I turned a phrase neatly. That’s good. Put that bit in. 

‘In’ to the ongoing double narrative of our lives that we were both writing separately even in our moments of togetherness on the Addenbrooke’s infusion ward. 

We met on one ward - D4 – hooked up to the same treatment of intravenous immunoglobulins, both under the care of the same wonderful immunology consultant, Dr Kumararatne - and then a few years later, on G2, the new incarnation. There is going to be a third iteration, but Clive will miss that one.

Death is so annoying. I feel a bit cheated as we all do when the continuity of our conversation with friends gets interrupted. But the nature of a writer is to personally provide the material for imaginary conversations to continue for all of time. Meet a person once and if they make an impression, you can re-meet them. Take down the book from the library of your mind and find the chapter titled ‘Clive’ or ‘Shaista’. In our case, that first meeting in April 2012 on D4 was not destined to be our last. Four years passed from our first meeting and one day a nurse told me that Clive had gone up to another Indian patient and hailed her across the tubes, ‘Shy Star! Lovely to see you again, kid.’ Except it wasn’t me. So I asked the nurse to book our next slots together if possible and on we went for the next three years, him booking in concordance with my dates if I hadn’t done so. We emailed throughout the years. 

It was a strange friendship because Clive saw himself as mentor to a new young female writer. But the not very new or very young writer had no such notion. I was often and often extremely direct with Clive when he made remarks that didn’t sit well with my own sense of self and my feminism. Dude, seriously. You can’t say that! Or at least, you can’t say that and then expect me to take your praise of my work seriously. Clive once said I had a type of arrogance not dissimilar to his. Eek. Make of that what you will. But presumably he never imagined a pipsqueak would squeak back. Or roar back, baring her teeth. Mostly it amused him, and probably made him want to persist with that thread but for the fact that he genuinely cared and eventually ceased to undermine a real friendship. One during which he swiped my favourite snuggly hat. One during which he introduced me to Tom Stoppard. One during which he offered to send an essay of mine about Les Murray to Les Murray. But I never got around to it, because life with illness is an interrupted life. Hold a thread here, concentrate on keeping it unbroken, and another one, just over there, breaks. Les died six months ago.

Clive’s eyes would light up when he saw me. And this was because if I walked on to the ward, I was still alive. If I was alive, there was conversation to be had and a moment to be shared. Preferably a merry one but I never held back on sharing my sorrow, depression or painful reality. I lifted up my eyelid once to show Clive the various shunts and blebs that my glaucoma surgeon has sown in over the long years to save some sight. And Clive wove the moment into one of his poems. 

A year before we met for the second time, Clive had been in correspondence with and then lost a fellow cancer patient. She was, believe it or not (but if you have read that article you will know this to be true), also Indian and, also a blogger. Shikha Chhabra wrote under the pseudonym Oblomov; her blog was titled Oblomov’s Sofa, and Clive mentioned her in the Guardian. It was a respectful nod he offered her, one that meant for a brief sweet while, Shikha was the acclaimed writer she was always meant to be. She died at 24, so losing me to an early arrival of Death was not implausible. And I have brushed that cloak - or did the cloak brush me? Either way, it has not been my time yet to cause that particular clutch to the heart and breath that hearing of Clive’s death caused me. I am writing because he would expect me to. Because he’d think it a wasted opportunity and because I know he always checked my blog, ostensibly to see what I was up to, but also to see if I was writing about him. He was rather disappointed that I hadn’t brought the ‘yoof’ in as he once had hoped I might. 

I have IVIg tomorrow. It’s a Thursday. And Clive won’t be there as he hasn’t been for the past several months. In his last email he made light of a recent operation, and I chose, ridiculously, to pretend he just might merry his way back to the ward. Even though I knew he wouldn’t. But he had already outlasted that type of ‘knowing’ for ten years. 

Death is so annoying. I am so tired of it. I ought to respect it and fear it, but really... I can’t. Not this death anyway. It was preceded by so much humour that the cloak looks a little less terrifying now. A cheery pathway is being cleared for us by the kid from Kogarah. 

And presumably, heaven and hell aside, I will hear him hail me again someday, his eyes lighting up and my cheeks and lips curving up. Unless of course he mistakes that other Indian girl for me... 

RED KOI, BLACK SKIRT

A radiologist rushes by
in a black wool skirt
splashed across with koi;
red fins, white bellies,
swimming in the creases
as she moves.

The skirt is from a tiny shop
in France; she says this sadly,
knowing she cannot satisfy
my craving for koi
beneath my own fingers,
in friendly wool.

I pass Fiona Sampson’s ‘Orpheus Variation’,
and travel up the long tube
to the topmost floor,
which tucks me away
from apheresis, and other humans,

and I swim
into the closed wards of the infected,
the diseased, worming in to join
the dark night of our souls.

But when the blood moon draws closer,
and blue Monday arrives, I arise
and begin to shed the creature that holds sway;
small sheddings are small victories, these days.
©Shaista Tayabali, 2019
participating in Dverse Poets Pub

(I thought about tacking on a different ending because the hospital did let me out, but only to reveal the next morning that they had found the bacterial culprit, so I haven’t swum to freedom yet. I have a cannula in me and nurses arrive daily to my house to administer antibiotics through a drip they set up. Something is being shed, I have to believe, or else the dark nights will claim me again...)

CROSSING THE CLOCKS TOWARDS HAPPINESS

Happy National Poetry Day! I recited two poems at the Addenbrooke's hospital chapel, which Mum recorded (albeit slightly shakily). It was fun to see the main entrance to the hospital festooned with lines of poetry, written in chalk on the cement and strung up into bunting flags. It was not much fun to witness the terror and repulsion of some people when they were offered poems. 'Would you like a free pome?' I asked nicely, naively. 'NO!' was the short sharp response. 'Yikes!' I may have said. 'Any reason?' 'I just hate it!' 'Er...right,' I stammered, 'since when?' 'Since they rammed it down my throat at school.' 'Fair enough,' I produced, cravenly, and skulked back to my friend Kaddy Benyon, who had warned me. She'd been at it for far longer than I. Never mind. The reading itself was lovely.

It's strange the way life circles. The first time I visited this chapel, I was in a wheelchair. That was eight years ago. And today, an extraordinary thing - after the reading was over, a woman in the audience said she recognised me from eight years ago, from my time being incarcerated on the Infectious Diseases ward for months. She said she was glad to see me walking.

Also, my surgeon came - which was very supportive of him - and immaculately timed to perfection, catching the poet before me, me, and the one after me, who happened to be the last poet of the day. Must be a surgeon's skill.