Trick of the tail

October 20th: the final day of treatment. To mark the occasion and to catch one more installment of the radio-lab waiting room theatre-show, I accompany Major on the last of his pilgrimages to the healing waves. Autumn sunshine obligingly paints the delights of the journey gold, and roadworks have begun in several places along the way causing queues where until today there have been none, the cycles of repair neatly taking over one from another.

Major is now 2 1/2 stone under his normal weight and supermodel thin. It suits him in a pale and interesting sort of way; if only he'd wear nice shirts he might pass for an ectomorphic Oxbridge prof. He is bony and fragile to hold, making me understand how wonderfully healthy thick flesh feels on a body. I consider making a chicken stock to supplement his milky courier-delivered "fortisip" but worry that the fat globules will bung up his PEG. My specially created, mega-fattening avocado and milk mush is rejected purely on the grounds of its unappealing colour (70's chemical green; totally un-F&B, despite the natural ingredients). This, I feel, as I watch it sink into the rose bed, is the behaviour of a 3 year old since the PEG bypasses any sensation of taste and it would have done him GOOD. Oh well, must respect the patient's wishes, and, to be honest, I didn't really fancy it either.

The weekend passes with nothing much but the compiling of a huge shopping list, mostly goodies for Delia's mincemeat and Christmas cake, but also odd little essentials; socks, watch batteries, floor mop... There is going to be a big shopping expedition featuring Major's favourite food, MIXED PEEL, which usually at this time of year he'd be sneaking into the kitchen to eat straight from the pot with sticky fingers. We will experience a return to normality now that treatment has finished, a celebratory afternoon out in Hastings.

Major drives and makes a return trip on foot from the car park to ESK (fab discount emporium) to get change for the machine while I browse shelves full of all the cut price crap anyone could wish for in a lifetime. In Trinity Wholefoods he holds the baskets like a dutiful butler and I pile them high with yummies above and beyond Delia's requirements, the rapacious wife of Jack Spratt. But after Woolies, in the third jewellers on the watch battery quest, he has to sit down. His wax jacket stays stiff and large around him as he disappears into it on the chair, half little old man, half tortoise. He is a pale shade of yellow. He lets me drive home.

The next day he visits the GP, the first appointment since April, when he was told for the third time, "No, I'm sure you haven't got cancer". The vein in his arm where the PIC-chemo line went is showing as a dark streak through his skin, and he feels so weak and cold, more spittle than ever.... The GP says this is all to be expected after such treatment. I ask whether he apologized for the mis-diagnosis, "No, but he smiled a lot and was very gentle."

It's only now, at the end of treatment, that we are told things will get worse for a couple of weeks before they improve, or perhaps it's that we are only taking the information on board as Major is feeling so unexpectedly grim. I imagine that the radio waves, having accumulated in his neck over the last 7 weeks, are dancing out a wild and exhausting frenzy of squiggles to white noise, untamed and free now from the machine that created and administered them. (Have I just described sperm?! These are the negative of sperm, going in for the kill rather than creation, yet the result also being life.)

I leave for a weekend of work on Friday, assuaging desertion-guilt with the hope that Major will be more comfortable in complete silence. He says that he's listening to his body and his body says "sleep". On Sunday evening I return to find that there has been an amelioration; talking seems slightly easier and he is not so listless. He's halved the time the hospital said it would take to turn the corner out of the grim stage, and I'm impressed by his strength. He is reappearing.

Mask man

Back in July Major has a day of appointments at Maidstone Hospital. We meet Dr Rowell for the first time, the head and neck radiotherapy specialist. He has a tic after Herbert Lom's Chief Inspector Dreyfus, and beautiful, elegant hands. He will oversee Major's treatment, and gives us lots of time. We learn that the treatment will be "curative" though there is some concern about how deeply the cancer has extended into the neck from the back of the jaw. The fact that one of Major's lymph glands is hard as a rock and full of straw coloured liquid seems not to be cause for alarm; apparently squamous cell carcinoma does not tend to spread to other parts of the body.

Major is pretty much his normal self, energy twitching out all over the place, thirsty... He's lost weight already as eating has become increasingly painful but is relieved to be in the system after 10 months of repeated cancer-denial from his dentist, doctor and wife. The pain-killing drugs suit him fine, and he's wearing his PEG well after the initial infection and discomfort it caused. I, however, feel tired and periodic, and have no protective crust against the world on this day, especially the strange world of the Oncology Wing.

We sit in the waiting area of the radiotherapy labs. Four appointments secretaries work in a bay near us and I listen to them making dozens of phone calls, all to people with cancer, and wonder at the scale of this illness. I am overcome with all sorts of emotions, soppy gratitude for the NHS being one of them, and have to ask Major for a tissue.

A smelly looking man of about Major's age with a long beard and Catweazel hair is pushed to the desk in a wheelchair. He wears pyjamas and a threadbare dressing gown; huge, yellow toenails poke like talons through holes in his slippers. His body expresses captivity and separateness, as if he doesn't understand the language being spoken around him. The staff don't address him directly but talk about his needs over his head. Without warning he pukes up, his face showing disgust and wretchedness and disbelief that he is centre-stage in this scenario. I can't help thinking of acting - the expression is so pure and intense through just his eyes, and the set, casting, costumes, action all so perfect that the scene can't possibly be of real life.

A man in a pristine white tunic claps his hands on Major's shoulders and says, "Don't worry mate, you're in with me next". Graham! His warmth makes me feel emotional and my eyes need another tissue. Its lunch time and he's impatiently waiting for staff to come back to work, keen for us not to be waiting. He's heard that Major is a musician and tells us that the band he plays double bass with got to No 3 in the Indie Charts. We make impressed noises but are too sad (not tears sort of sad) and middle-aged to know what an Indie Chart is. To fill the time and put us at ease, he shows us the lab where he makes the masks for radiotherapy.

It's spotless; a cross between the office of a fastidious computer engineer and a sculptor's atelier. Motorbike leathers hang from the coatstand, carefully pegged to a hanger, and chilies are growing on the windowsills. There are plaster body parts on shelves; a perfect breast, a big man's forearm, and the transparent plastic head of a child. I reach out and touch it. "She's doing fine now", Graham says, a bit too quickly. I reckon the odds on this being true are 50/50.

He gives us insider tips; Major's huge list of appointments is an excellent sign, it means the treatment is expected to work; if there were only a few sessions of radiotherapy the treatment would be palliative. Also good is that Major will have a full head and shoulders mask; head only means they're just trying to make you comfortable on your way out.

He dumps a handful of Roses chocolates on the table before me and explains that he uses the chocolate gifts brought to him by patients as bargaining currency with the pharmacy girls; he gives them sweets and they give him Aqueous cream which, in turn, he gives to the patients to ease the burning the radiotherapy will inevitably cause to their skin. Major is given two tubes and makes a mental note to bring in a big tin of Quality Streets next time. We are also given a book of poems written by cancer staff and patients at the hospital, Graham proudly turning to the one he and his assistant wrote. This completely does me in and I excuse myself to the loos. Its the sort of feeling a weepy movie produces; nothing dramatic, just liquid from the eyes that won't stop.

Major lies on a plinth with his shirt off, his face marked with green lines of light to make sure his position is right for the fitting, his eyes closed. From a tray of hot water Graham takes a flat piece of head and shoulders-shaped plastic, like a marksman's practice target, and puts it onto Major's face. It is quickly smoothed and shaped over his features, pinched round the nose and pushed into eyesockets, sculpted round the neck and clavicles. I take Major's hand and tell him to give his weight to the table, and breathe - I can see from his ribs that he is close to panic -and I watch as the holes in the plastic stretch to mould round him. It's a real sci-fi trip seeing it take his form in seconds.

He now has his very own thermoplastic immobilisation unit. Graham says that when treatment is over he can take it home and keep it.

I think these masks are fantastic! Such faces and stories, each one labelled in hand-written red ink with the patient's name and a "finish" date. Mrs Abbott's also says "dentures out". There's a stack of them piled under a counter in the lab and I'm thinking theatre, dance, school drama projects, art installations, hanging baskets.... Graham says, in a perplexed and somewhat disappointed way, that people don't usually want to keep them after treatment, and they have to be thrown away. Its perfectly possible to put them in hot water and melt them flat, ready to be moulded to the next victim's head, but in this country that's not done for fear of cross-infection. He smuggles out three big ones and three small ones hidden in large paper sacks for me, delighted by my enthusiasm for his work. He wants photos of whatever their future incarnations turn out to be.

Poäng

There are just two weeks of treatment to go. Everyday, Monday to Friday, Major makes the pilgrimage to the radiotherapy department at Maidstone Hospital. The route is beautiful; country lanes weave in and out of gorgeous Kent villages and all along the way 16thC Wealden houses, 17thC cottages and 18thC rectories punctuate undulations of strawberry fields and orchards. Yes, its really lovely enough to inspire yukky prose like that. Major has made the journey alone for most of the time and gets cross whenever I offer to drive him.

Other than that his days are spent snoozing and syringing. The sun is out and the tide is right to go for a walk on the beach this afternoon but, though he suggested the idea this morning, there is no way he has the energy to go. He's wrapped in a blanket asleep in the sicky Poäng chair. (An Ikea thing that came to us by accident. It really doesn't GO here but, annoyingly, it's the most comfortable piece of furniture we have so its allowed to stay until Major is better.)

I've got used to keeping my trap shut about food. I prepare my own meals without any consultation about their content or when they shall be eaten. The experience of opening the fridge to find only my bits in there is odd; its a bit lonely but at the same time the total control is great... I decide to take advantage of it and be GOOD while Major is feeding rather than eating: a good-wifely, sympathetic effort. (I confess to hoping for dramatic results as a by-product of good-wifeliness any day or I shall despondently fall off the fridge-control/sympathy rails into the ever-open arms of One Stop chocolate-comfort.) Today I wore a pair of his tatty jeans to chop and bring in logs for the fire; they fit me (very comfortably which could be by-production already working...) but are now two sizes too big for him.

He still shows me enormous care; cups of tea are brought which I haven't asked for but for which he magically knows I am thirsty; with a loving kiss to my brow he turns out the light in the spare room at 4.15am when he sees that I have passed out without doing so; he does MY washing up if I don't get there first, stops off and buys me vegetables at the farm shop on his way home from hospital, makes sure there is fuel for me in the car.... But... in conversation his contribution is uncharacteristically scratchy; I receive impatient, irritable replies to the most innocuous of questions and he's become completely allergic to my "where did I put my keys/purse/shoes/music?" leaving-the-house routine.

I've waited a long time to see how he'd be on the wagon and (since one can of PEG-drunk Guinness a day hardly counts) now I'm rather keen for him to come off it.