Staying Alive

Six, six, six.

I’ve got a lump.

11.38 p.m.

I’m in bed, but I can’t sleep.

I feel dreadful. Hot and sweaty, bunged up, achy. It’s the flu. But that isn’t what’s keeping me awake. I’ve got a lump. My mind is racing, looking for explanations. Alternatives to the obvious and deeply unpleasant one. Until a moment ago none had offered itself. But the one that does now is so blindingly obvious that it practically switches on the light and yells Eureka!

Megan left weeks ago. Three weeks, two days and (quick glance at the alarm) just over nine hours ago since you ask. It was weeks—OK, precisely twelve weeks and two days—before that when we last did it. That makes fifteen weeks, four days and an indeterminate number of hours without sex. That’s over a quarter of a year without any kind of release. Nothing so much as a…Say the word, Murray…Nothing so much as a wank.

The lack of sex has surely caused the lump. I must be backed up, overstocked, whatevered—there’s almost certainly a correct medical term for it. It’s probably only a matter of days before my right testicle swells in a similar manner. If I don’t do something soon they’ll be as big as satsumas—or full-blown oranges. Well, I can do something right now. If only to rule out the possibility.

wednesday 5 november / 1.33 a.m.

It didn’t work.

Oh, it worked in as much as I managed to shuffle through some mental reruns and get the job done. But nearly two hours on the lump is still there. Just as big—though, actually, it’s pretty small. So I still can’t sleep. And now I’m in the corridor outside my bedroom. I’m standing on a chair checking the battery in my smoke alarm.

It’s flat.

four: fancy that. outposts of the nhs that examine nothing but balls

wednesday 5 november / 9.12 a.m.

Blimey, I didn’t know Tom and Nicole were back together.

Mildly surprised but, honestly, not that interested, I return Hello! to the pile on the table. It’s only now that I see the date on the cover—July 1998. It must be a cunning policy cooked up by a Department of Health think-tank. Put ancient magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms and watch as patients are transported back to a halcyon age when Tom and Nic were the golden couple and you only had to wait two years for a hip replacement.

I’ve never met Doctor Stump. He has been my GP for years, but I’ve been avoiding him. Doctors make me squeamish and having one called Stump is hardly likely to cure me of that. The only time I did visit, a locum was on. He was Polish. No disrespect to the guy—I’m sure he would have made an excellent practitioner in suburban Gdansk—but in South Woodford, where the East End blurs into Essex, he was no use whatsoever. Normally I take my ailments to the chemist, where I ply the pharmacist with my symptoms before leaving with an over-the-counter remedy. But I couldn’t see myself dropping my trousers in Superdrug, so here I am.

Up on the wall the green light blinks. I’m on. I walk into the shabby surgery and sit down. Stump caps his biro and looks at me from behind his desk. Then he coughs. It isn’t a polite throat-clearing ahem. It’s a prolonged, spewing-blood-into-a-hanky, Doc Holliday affair that doesn’t look as if it’s going to finish any time before lunch. ‘Can I get you some water?’ I ask. He glares at me angrily—like Who’s the doctor round here?—so I sit back and wait. As he tries to catch the spittle with a billowing cotton hankie, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I mean, the lump…It’s probably nothing. The thing is, it doesn’t hurt. I’ve squeezed as hard as I dare squeeze one of my own testicles (a word I’m growing increasingly comfortable with) and there’s no pain. If it were something bad, surely it would be painful. By bad, of course, I mean cancer. Pain is the first thing I think of with regard to that disease. Cancer hurts. Like hell, by all accounts. Yet I feel nothing. So what am I doing here? Wasting precious NHS time, most probably.

Then again, if it is something bad, what am I doing here? Why am I entrusting my health to a doctor called Stump? It’s like calling a new brand of sweetener Anthrax and expecting the public to sprinkle it onto their cornflakes. And look at him retching into his hankie as if he’s spent the last few decades ignoring his own profession’s very sensible advice on smoking. He can’t even manage his own cough and I expect him to help me?

No, whichever way I look at it, coming here was a poor idea. Best I leave now, let him get on with the three old ladies in the waiting room, all of whom looked as if they might die in their seats if they don’t get immediate medical attention. I stand up, but with the hand that isn’t preventing his lungs from spilling into his lap Stump waves me back into my chair. With an effort that turns his face purple he finally strangles the cough and says in a voice awash with phlegm, ‘What can I do for you, Mr…’ He searches for the name on my file. ‘…Collins?’

‘It’s Colin,’ I say. ‘Like Cliff Richard.’

‘What, it’s not your real name?’

‘No, I mean it’s Cliff Richard, not Richards. I’m Co lin. No S.’

‘What can I do for you, Mr Co lin?’

I’ve been giving my next line a fair amount of thought. Actually practising it in front of my bedroom mirror. Much like I used to mime to Smiths songs when I was fourteen. (And now I think about it, Doctor, it would appear that I have a growth on one of my testicles sounds like a Morrissey lyric, one he rejected as being too gloomy—that and the fact that finding a plausible rhyme for testicles would have been beyond even his considerable lyrical gifts.) But now I’m here—on the stage, in a manner of speaking—I can’t say it. So instead I mumble, ‘I’ve got the flu.’

‘Well, what do you expect me to do about it?’

I don’t answer.

‘I suggest you go home, take some paracetamol and sleep it off,’ he says.

I don’t move, though.

‘Is that it?’ he asks. ‘You’ve got the flu and you just came to tell me?’ He picks up his pen and writes something on my file—time waster probably.

‘No,’ I say quietly.

‘What then?’

I still can’t say it.

‘Speak up.’ He’s irritated now. ‘I’ve got a waiting room full out there.’

Yes, three old ladies and the Grim Reaper.

‘It’s my…I’ve got a…’

He nods by way of encouragement.

‘I’ve got cancer.’ There. Said it. It’s out now.

‘Really?’ he asks, genuinely curious because, well, there’s no note of it in my file. ‘Where? When was it diagnosed?’

‘It hasn’t been…Not exactly. But I’ve got a lump.’

‘Where precisely?’

I can’t say it.

‘Give me a clue.’

‘It’s…It’s on…My…’ No, still can’t say it.

‘Somewhere rather personal perhaps?’ Stump hazards.

I nod.

‘Why don’t you point?’

Good idea. I point.

‘You’d better drop your trousers.’

‘Do I have to?’ I ask.

‘Well, you could just describe it for me, I suppose,’ Stump says.

Excellent. Relaxed now, I say, ‘It’s on my left…er…you know, my left one, and it’s about—’

‘I was being facetious, Mr Collins—’

‘It’s Co lin.’

‘Whatever, if we’re going to make any progress at all today you really will have to take your trousers off.’

Damn.

9.24 a.m.

Still traumatised, I buckle my belt and zip up my flies. Stump noisily peels off his surgical gloves and sits down. He picks up my file. ‘Smoke, Mr Collins?’

‘No,’ I say fairly honestly. I’ll share in the very occasional joint, my one weedy concession to my inner Jimi Hendrix—I’m sure he’s in there somewhere—but I’ve never touched a cigarette.

‘Drink?’

‘Only socially…’

…And not much of that these days.

‘How’s your general health been?’

‘Fine, I suppose. Apart from the flu.’

‘Are you stressed?’

‘Well, I’ve got a lump,’ I say, not adding, You cradled it in your bloody hand. How do you think it makes me feel?

‘I meant generally,’ he explains.

I should be, shouldn’t I? Advertising is one of the more stressful businesses. At least, that’s what everyone in advertising would have you believe. Maybe it is if you have to make knife-edge decisions about the fate of multi-million-pound marketing budgets, but I don’t do that…I lurk around freezer displays with a digital camera.

It wasn’t always so. There was a time when I lived on an adrenal diet of tension. It lasted for about six months. I was an account supervisor in the fast lane, whizzing past blue and white signs pointing me in the direction of Rapid Promotion and Big Corner Office. It couldn’t last. After its initial rubberburning burst of speed, my career stalled. I’m languishing on the hard shoulder now, watching younger models scoot by in a blur of alloy wheels. I’m only thirty-one and they’re not that much younger, but life spans in adland are measured in months, not years. Strangely, while this state of affairs depresses me, it doesn’t stress me out.

‘No,’ I tell Stump, ‘I’m not stressed. Generally.’

‘Testicular cancer is the commonest form of the disease in young men, you know,’ he says, leaning back in his chair and ignoring me sinking in mine. ‘Having said that, it’s almost certainly not cancer. One big testicular clinic saw over two thousand lumps in a year. Less than a hundred of them were cancers. Incredible, eh? There are testicular clinics. Fancy that. Outposts of the NHS that examine nothing but balls.’ He’s rambling and I’m not feeling comforted.

‘If it isn’t cancer, what is it?’ I ask.

‘Could be any number of things,’ he replies vaguely.

I need some help here. ‘Like?’

Seems he needs help too because he leans over to a pile of books on the floor and examines the titles. After a moment he pulls one from the middle, a big, dusty softback that looks as if it hasn’t had its spine bent in years. ‘Wonderful book, this. Excellent pictures,’ he says, flicking through the pages. He stops, peers at the print for a moment, then reads, ‘“Testicular swellings commonly misdiagnosed as tumours”…Blah, blah…“Seminal granuloma, chronic epididymo-orchitis, haematocele” and so on and so forth…See? Any number of things.’

All of which are not only unpronounceable but also pull off the difficult feat of sounding more terrifying than cancer.

‘I’m going to refer you to Saint Matthew’s,’ he says.

‘The cancer bit of Saint Matthew’s?’ I whisper.

‘Heavens, no. They’d try to have me struck off for wasting their time. You’ll see a general surgeon. Maybe a urologist.’

What’s a urologist? He’s not going to tell me and I’m not about to ask.

‘You’ll get an appointment within the next couple of weeks—try and keep it. And cut out the cigarettes. Ridiculous habit.’ To emphasise the point he launches into a fresh fit of coughing.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I remind him.

‘Well, better not start,’ he says through the hacks.

I scrape my chair back—I think we’re done. ‘You really shouldn’t worry unduly,’ he says as I stand up. He manages to sound annoyed rather than soothing, as if what he’d really like to say is Pull yourself together, man.

I look at my watch: nine thirty-five. Sorry, doctor, but I should worry. Niall Haye is big on two things—store checks and punctuality—and I’m very late.

11.03 a.m.

Niall Haye is big on three things: store checks, punctuality and contact reports. When I arrived at my desk and checked my e-mail there were seven from Haye. Seven times he demanded to know the whereabouts of a contact report. Fair enough. It is a week overdue. I’m typing it now.

[e-mail]

to: [e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

[e-mail]

cc: [e-mail]

[e-mail]

re: Contact Report No. 37

Brand Group Meeting: 23 October Venue: Blower Mann/DBA Present for client: Gerhard Breitmar, Sally Gilhooley, Betina Tofting Present for agency: Niall Haye, Murray Colin

Despite having a potentially malignant growth on one of his testicles, plucky Murray Colin took the client through the results of his store checks. There were general oohs and aahs of appreciation and it was unanimously agreed that there is no one better at shooting in tricky supermarket lighting conditions.

Niall Haye presented draft 27 of the ChocoChillout script. There was much discussion about whether the voiceover should read ‘a sensuously silky taste adventure’ or ‘a silkily sensuous adventure in taste’. After failing to reach a consensus, the group agreed to put the matter to research so that a bunch of housewives in Solihull can make the decision.

(Action: NH)

Niall Haye presented the launch media plan. The chart (consisting of the usual Xs in boxes) was generally well received. Sally Gilhooley requested that the Xs in the central column be moved two columns to the left. Betina Tofting agreed, and further suggested that the X immediately below the X at the top right be moved to the box below. Gerhard Breitmar endorsed these proposals and added a request for the Xs in the extreme left-hand column to appear in red rather than blue. Murray Colin slept peacefully.

(Action: nobody—on the basis that in two days’ time no one would remember what anyone else had said and that, besides, all the Xs could be put in a very big hat, shaken vigorously about and tipped in a heap on the floor, where they would make the same amount of bloody sense.)

Before the meeting broke up Niall Haye invited Gerhard Breitmar to climb onto the table, lower his trousers, kneel on all fours and have his strapping Hunnish behind peppered with kisses by the account team.

Murray Colin

Account Supervisor

I click send…But only after I’ve completely rewritten it to make it as dull and harmless as every other contact report I’ve ever written. My hand goes into my trouser pocket and touches the lump. Thankfully, an incoming e-mail takes my mind off it.

[e-mail]

to: [e-mail]

cc:

re: love your contact reports…

…reading them always makes me thank my sweet lord jesus I wasn’t at the meeting. question: is a betina tofting a self-assembly dining table from ikea? another question: fancy buying me and vin bonfire beers tonight?

Taken at face value it reads like the e-mail of a friend. I know better. Brett Topowlski is a copywriter. Vince Douglas is his art director. Together they are a creative team. I, on the other hand, am a suit. Creative teams do not buddy up with suits. We’re like the Bloods and the Crips. This is because, while it’s a creative’s job to come up with ideas that are out there, it’s a suit’s function to water them down until they’re as bland as every other ad on the box. ChocoChillout is the perfect case in point. Draft one was well out there and barely on the legal side of the Obscene Publications Act. Draft twenty-seven is wallpaper—and not even patterned, not even as interesting as, say, a magnolia-painted woodchip. Suits 1, Creatives 0.

No, Brett, Vince and I could never be true friends. They only want me for my access to expense-account beer. However, it doesn’t stop me being drawn to them, and especially to Vince. He’s an entire Victorian freak show in a single body. He’s a bad car crash, one where the firemen are cutting the corpses from the twisted wreckage: you know you’re not supposed to look but you can’t tear your eyes away.

But it’s an experience I won’t be enjoying tonight.

I hit reply.

[e-mail]

to: [e-mail]

cc:

re: love your contact reports…

Can’t do beer tonight because

1 I’m broke.

2 Megan is coming round to pick up stuff.

3 There’s a distinct possibility I’ve got cancer.

Sorry.

Murray

I send it, but only after deleting item three.

A couple of minutes later:

[e-mail]

to: [e-mail]

cc:

re: love your contact reports…

what bloke wouldn’t pass up getting ratted with his mates so he could wait at home for the bitch that dumped him? you sad cunt.

Brett is right—I would sooner hang around at home for the bitch that dumped me.

five: you’ve been wanking, haven’t you?

wednesday 5 november / 7.05 p.m.

I stand in my living room and survey the rock-star chaos. The discarded Stolly bottles, the dusting of coke on the coffee table, the TV lying on its side—well, watching it the right way up is for squares, dude. And, stone me, is that a peroxide groupie wedged down the back of my sofa cushion? How long has she been there?

Actually, most of that was rubbish.

OK, all of it was.

A part of me—the deeply repressed, inner-Jimi-Hendrix bit—would love to be able to say that my flat is a temple to debauchery and that in the post-Megan fallout it resembles Hiroshima at tea-time on 6th August 1945.

I can’t, though, in all honesty.

Because I stand in my living room and see…Neatness, a pleasure dome of just-so spick and span-ness. No dust or greasy finger marks and certainly no used socks, half-empty takeaway cartons or exhausted vodka bottles. No drugs on the coffee table—just a few magazines, the spines of which are precisely parallel to the table’s edge. And while I’ve got some fairly cool CDs, they’re stacked in order. Not in some esoteric rock bloke arrangement, but alphabetically (Smith, Elliott preceding Smiths, The). This conforms to no rock ’n’ roll rulebook I’m aware of.

I could say that this outbreak of tidiness is because Wednesday is my cleaner’s day, but that too would be a lie. I haven’t got a cleaner. This obsessive order…

It’s…Me.

My inner Jimi Hendrix doesn’t stand a chance. If I were a pie chart, Cleaning Impulses would be a huge slice taking up well over seventy per cent, while Playing Guitar, Screwing Girls and Drowning in Own Vomit would be a negligible sliver. I’ve always been like this. I’m well-known for it and I barely have to clean any more—household grime sees me coming and emigrates. When we first lived together Megan found this side of me endearing and I was a talking point among her girlfriends. One evening she answered the phone to Serena or Carol or whomever to be told, ‘I wanted to speak to Murray, actually. Does he know how to remove encrusted limescale from the base of a tap?’ I spent a memorable thirty minutes extolling the unbeatable combination of Limelite (‘Not the liquid, mind. It’s got to be the Power Gel.’) and an old toothbrush while Megan looked on with an indulgent smile.

After a time however, the indulgence petered out and I became an irritant. There she was busy making the world a better place, while all I seemed to fret about was who was going to keep it dusted. Over time a nagging tension developed between the forces of Pledge and There’s-more-important-things-to-worryabout.

When she left so did her mess. Order returned. No more work files heaped about the living room like badly planned council high-rises, no more damp knickers draped on the central heating and no more scented candles dripping irksome dollops of wax on hard-to-clean surfaces. I should have been happy, shouldn’t I?

Well…No. I was devastated. After a dust and disorder-free week I couldn’t stand the vacuum (I refer to the emptiness as opposed to my excellent Dyson upright) a moment longer and headed for Wax Lyrical where I bought a fresh stock of smelly candles. Then, inexplicably, I found myself in the Knickerbox next door, six-pack of cotton bikini briefs (assorted colours) in hand. No, it was perfectly explicable. I was going to take them home, rinse and wring them out and leave them dangling from the radiators—a Comfort-fresh reminder of what used to be. As I was about to pay I realised what a pathetic gesture it was. Megan was gone and I’d have to get used to it. The knickers stayed in the shop and, though I was already lumbered with the candles, they’ve remained wrapped up in a kitchen cupboard.

And now I stand in my living room and survey the germ-free perfection that is a tribute to my hermetically sealed single-hood…And when Megan turns up in half an hour, a reminder of the tedious dust buster she left behind.

I know what has to be done.

Deep breath—You can do this, Murray.

I start by taking the back of my hand to the magazines, flipping them to a wanton seventy-three degrees to the edge of the coffee table.

7.45 p.m.

She should be here by now.

As I wait I look at the mess that I’ve painstakingly created and it’s taking every ounce of willpower to resist tidying up.

I need a distraction. My hand goes in search of one, snaking into my trouser pocket and feeling for the—

I have got to stop this. Stop worrying unduly. Pull myself together.

I go to the bedroom, fetch the cardboard box containing Megan’s belongings, and put it on the coffee table. One more thing. I root around the kitchen until I find the scented candles. I unwrap one and light it. I immediately blow it out. It’s lavender. She hates lavender.

7.53 p.m.

‘What’s that horrible smell?’ she says as I let her in.

Though I dumped the candle in the bin, the bouquet has lingered.

My ex has an implausibly sensitive nose. The one and only time that I lit up a joint while home alone she busted me, picking up the scent as she walked out of South Woodford tube. ‘I’m a solicitor,’ she declared. ‘I work with the police, the CP-bloody-S. Do you have any idea how much you could be compromising me?’ It was like going out with the drug squad’s star sniffer dog—the one that can smell the heroin in the baggage hold as the plane takes off in Islamabad. I couldn’t get away with a thing. One night she climbed into bed about an hour after me and as I stirred she said, ‘You’ve been wanking, haven’t you?’

‘Have not,’ I mumbled sleepily while simultaneously shifting my hip onto the small sticky patch on the sheet.

‘Don’t lie, Murray,’ she snapped. ‘I can smell it.’

I follow her as she walks through the hall and into the living room for the first time in three weeks, three days and nearly six hours. She must have been in court today because she’s wearing a sober-ish grey suit, white blouse, glossy opaque tights and shoes that tread the fine line between sensible and sexy. I feel something stir. In my gut and down there. You cannot imagine how gratifying this is. I’ve got a lump, yet I’m getting aroused. Any sign of a normal sexual impulse (even if it’s lusting after my depressingly unavailable ex) is surely also a sign that I don’t have cancer. I mean, cancer and sex drive, they’re mutually exclusive, aren’t they? But I have to stifle it because this is neither the time nor the place. No, it is the place—at least two of my happiest memories consist of spontaneously doing it with Megan in this very living room (having first spontaneously draped a towel over the sofa to avoid troublesome stains)—but it is clearly not the time.

‘You can tell I’ve moved out,’ she says jauntily. ‘It looks really…tidy.’