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By Root 1423 0

’s, mind you. A sofa would be great, a coffee bar—something like that. Or even just Saturday kids who know how to alphabetize. But I’m a loyal customer, even if I occasionally buy a beach read for £3.97 at Tesco—I always feel guilty when I do. I bought my Enid Blytons there, for you girls. Then the Penguin Classics, for O levels, and the Letts guides. Got my Teach Yourself language tapes there (money well spent—hear me order lunch in ten different languages and marvel), and the Highway Code, of course, during what I now refer to as the Terror Years, when you lot were learning to drive. Crikey, Hannah—yours are still to come…I may be tearing my hair out before it falls out, ha ha! So they know me, and I know them. They knew when I got an Aga, for God’s sake, and had to go in and get a Mary Berry cookbook, because all I could manage to serve up was charcoal sausages. They’d never seen me in the self-help section. And there I was, suddenly intently studying the shelves, and buying these books. In hardback, at great expense. Taking Control of Cancer, The Living with Cancer Cookbook, Challenge Cancer and Win!, The Independent Consumer’s Guide to the Non-Toxic Treatment and Prevention of Cancer. And I’m just scratching the surface. There are mountains of them. I don’t think I really expected that I would read them, or indeed, that if I did, they would help. It’s a bit like when you join the gym. You convince yourself that just writing the first check and having your tour of the weights room is somehow going to make you fitter. Well, it doesn’t. And this won’t cure me, or at least if I am to be cured, it won’t be by this. Anyhow, I wish I hadn’t. Because they made the face. The oh-my-God-you’ve-got-cancer-you-poor-cow face. Hate that face already. And I’m not even bald yet.

Hannah’s obsessed with what I will look like without eyebrows and eyelashes. I’m kind of glad, for the first time in my life, to have a relatively sparse and spindly set of both. It would surely be much harder to part with thick, strong, lustrous ones. Someone said your hair can grow back differently—but I liked my hair. I’d like it back just the way it was. I wonder what kind of skull I have. There’s such a thing as a good one and a bad one, when it comes to being bald. I don’t know. I’ve had long hair all my life. Long good hair. Bugger. Look—there I go with the expletives. Told you. Why does this bit—the hair bit—matter so much?

Anyway, I digress. So I bought the books, but I don’t expect I’ll read them. Haven’t I got a teetering pile of unread must-reads by my bed already? I’m the only person in the world who still hasn’t finished Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Okay—maybe the only person in the world who admits it. I reckon my mental attitude is doing okay at this point. I’ve got the full lexicon of war-mongering words, and I’m not afraid to use them. Fight. Battle. Overcome. Determination. Courage. Win. I want to do all of those things. I’m ready to do all those things. I want to live. Simple as that. We all do, don’t we? It’s instinctive. Besides, it’s 2006. They cure cancer these days. They catch it early, they treat it “aggressively” (that expression makes me think all the oncologists will charge around the ward looking like Mel Gibson in Braveheart, but I don’t suppose that’s what they mean. I’d settle for oncologists who look like Mel Gibson, though. Good-looking obstetricians I can live without, but oncologists aren’t excavating around downstairs, as my mother would put it): they cure cancer. Success rates are higher than ever. The disease has bad PR, that’s for sure. It makes people make the face. But they cure it. And they will cure me.

If I wrote a book (ha, ha), I know what picture I would put on the front cover. I have this fridge magnet—you bought it for me, Lisa, a long time ago. I can’t remember exactly what it says and I can’t be bothered to go downstairs and see, but it’s this black-and-white photo of some Edwardian-type women sitting at a table, and it says something about the ladies on the Titanic who waved away the dessert cart. Makes