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.