Chapter 7

Andrew would occasionally catch sight of the models when they visited the shop. Other than Monica the other three ignored him, he was beneath their notice. But Monica always said hello and would even wait in the shop if he was through in the darkroom. As far as Andrew could tell she got a kick out of making Andrew blush or get flustered. The thought that a 12 year old boy was partially developing the film seemed to have caught her imagination. What was odd about it was that she was 19 or 20, a real woman, and so there was no possible way for her interactions to be misconstrued. She had picked up on Tony’s habit of calling him kid, it was all very odd.

Andrew had joked about Monica getting him started on puberty early, but every time he met her it seemed more plausible. He wasn’t even a hormone soaked teenager yet but he was giddy to see Monica yet knowing that he would be blushing like a fool within seconds. And she was the only woman he spoke to that wasn’t a teacher or the mother of one of his friends. The girls in his neighbourhood were all his age or younger, there were no teenagers to focus on there. And his school was boys only with older women teachers. Monica was literally the only woman he spoke to between the ages of 12 and 40. But for all the teasing she came across as a nice person. There wasn’t an edge to her comments, she just got a laugh out of the situation, and Andrew always blushed on cue.

For all of that, it was only an hour of time spread out over four or five visits during the final term of 1^st year at school. The death of John had thrown Andrew and he no longer thought about challenging himself. If anything he was coasting more than ever through the year. He was conscientious at work and was still making very good money from developing the film. But his diligence at exercising had faded and he only ran every now and again, the slightest hint of bad weather stopped him from even trying. And school meandered along. In many ways he enjoyed school but he never really had to try. Andrew had no idea how lucky he was with academics coming to him naturally. All he saw, and all he thought other people saw, was his complete lack of ability at any sport requiring coordination. He heard the jeers and retreated further.

Family life had stabilised into a calm pattern but there was no closeness with his family. Rowan was getting brattier, mostly through their father’s indulgence. She seemed to take up more of the oxygen of the family and Andrew treated further into the background. Andrew now felt he understood his father, it had been instinctive from the night he overheard his parents shouting. So much of his behaviour fell into place and although things were better in that his father no longer picked or sniped at him, they were never going to be close. Too many things said, too many differences in how they looked at the world. Andrew accepted this, didn’t fruitlessly try for his father’s approval, and moved on with his life. Not even sad, just resigned.

His mother on the other hand was a mystery to him. The woman was ever more clearly a snob, worrying about what the neighbours would think or say, and with a pathological need to have the last word in every conversation. Yet this was the same woman who didn’t seem to care that her son was illegally employed and had been ever since his 12^th birthday. As his 13^th birthday approached, Andrew knew that this issue, if no other, would at least be solved. Andrew helped around the house, made sure not to annoy her or get her wound up about something and as a result was able to escape constant censure or scrutiny. Some days he felt like he was hiding in plain sight, right in front of her. That she loved him he was sure of. But she didn’t understand him, that was also pretty clear.

The latter six months of 1977 had been a time of growth for Andrew, he felt that he changed, took more control of his life. But since John’s death he had been floundering. Nothing bad was happening to him, he was making money and there was little for him to moan about. But yet. He was not getting any guidance, any parenting. There would be an occasional snippet from Tony. And even although Andrew had only written one letter to John and spoken to him for 30 minutes one week before he died, Andrew had known he was there. And maybe most importantly Andrew knew that John understood his family dynamic. He might not know the root of his father’s concerns but he could see the impact. And now that was gone. His 13^th birthday came and went without any of the changes or introspection of the prior year.

It was around his birthday that the pains started. Andrew never thought to mention them to his parents, he saw his classmates starting to grow taller and there was chat around the classrooms that it was part of puberty, you literally got growing pains. Andrew just assumed that he was getting these pains himself. What also masked them was working for Archie again. The long days of carrying furniture and boxes to the van and then back into a new house, they resulted in Andrew being sore and tired every night. But probably for the first time since the death of John, Andrew pushed himself. He was barely any taller, still thin and scrawny and so was an easy target for the other two members of the crew. But nine months of withdrawing from hassle, withdrawing from conflict, at school meant that he just ignored it, tuned it out. He worked hard and kept himself to himself. Really, other than Grant who Andrew thought needed to see a doctor for some medication, most of the guys gave him shit for part of the first day and then just left to get on with the work. He didn’t have anything in common with any of the guys and so he worked hard, took his money from Archie at the end of the day, and lived his life on his own terms.

But it was a solitary and lonely life Andrew was constructing for himself. Other than his photography he led a passive and disconnected life. But then the pains in his back got worse and the small mole on his back grew alarmingly in size. The carefree summer pace was ripped apart, Andrew’s urgent visit to the family doctor was scary. The doctor took one look at the mole and had Andrew booked immediately for a biopsy. Within a week the diagnosis had come back, he had skin cancer.

The phrase ignorance is bliss definitely applied at this point. Whilst Andrew was initially freaked out he was constantly and repeatedly reassured that everything would be okay, that this had been caught early and that he would make a full recovery. He was scheduled for surgery followed by radiation therapy with the expectation that he would be cancer free within three months. So, during the late summer and autumn of 1978, rather than attend school, he was a patient at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh, colloquially known as the Sick Kids. The surgery was quick and successful in removing the source of the cancer, the mole on his back. However, the cancer had spread on his skin and the radiation treatment took longer than initially scheduled. It was at this point that Andrew’s concerns started to grow.

Very few children get cancer. This was both a fact and a very good thing. Paediatric oncology was not a specialty where doctors saw a high volume of cases. As a result however, this meant the treatment was specialised and concentrated. The Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh was one of only two centres in Scotland for paediatric oncology. Therefore, although cancer in children was rare, the treatment for it brought them all together. It was this exposure to other patients more than anything else that started to make Andrew think and worry about his personal outcome. Because not everyone got better.

Teenage boys do not consider death. Teenage boys think they are invincible. For them death is something that happens to pets and old people. Death happens to other people, not them.

What Andrew observed was that doctors were prone to generic statements and platitudes that he was unable to challenge. It also meant that as a patient he placed more emphasis on what he observed rather than what he heard from the doctors. And what he saw was death, lots of death, and looking back it was probably more than 30% of the patients, enough to give lie to all the assurances of a full recovery. And the thing was once he started worrying about dying he don’t think about much else. One of the other things was that whenever he tentatively tried to raise the issue, even in an oblique manner, nobody wanted to talk to him about it. Nobody. It was all relentless optimism, positive discussions and patronising pep talks. He wondered why there was not more honesty. Was it a defence mechanism to protect him? Or was it a defence mechanism that his parents were using to protect themselves? Either way, it made things worse not better. He was starting to obsess over his possible death.

Andrew didn’t really consider what his parents were thinking. His father was silent and his mother was clearly ostriching by only talking of when he would be released, despite the fact that his release date kept getting pushed back. And they never brought Rowan to the ward. So neither the doctors or his family were giving him answers.

Thirteen year old boys have a lot to deal with. Societal expectations of them started to change and their bodies are chemical warfare plants generating endless teenage hormones. They are growing, they are clumsy and they don’t know what sound their voice will make from one moment to the next. They also are delusional, immature and self-absorbed, and Andrew personified this to a tee. So rather than be stoic and calm, mature beyond his years, the reality was he was a whiny brat.

The most common whinge that he had was ‘why me?’ As the radiation treatment unexpectedly stretched on the whinges descended from anger to pity. On top of that Andrew finally started to be aware of his surroundings and understand that lots of the children were not getting better. This had two contradictory effects. Firstly, it freaked him out as he realised that his own survival was not assured; at this point his obsession with his own death went into overdrive. The converse impact was that he slowly started to grow up. Lying there feeling sorry for himself, whinging at the world about how unfair all this was, in moments of calmness and clearer thinking he realised that there were others in a much worse state than him. Their cancer had beaten them. This was not a sudden epiphany but rather a gradual dawning upon him just through observing his surroundings and fellow patients. What was most chastening was the relative lack of drama. Of course there were tears and raised voices but they were noticeable for the lack of frequency of them. Despite being one of the oldest patients on the ward Andrew was acting like one of the most immature. He had seen the nurses roll their eyes at some of his complaining.

This is when he really turned inward. It was how he had dealt with the last year at school so it felt familiar, comfortable. He still had the same fears and was still constantly thinking about dying but his external demeanour changed from, if not positive, then at least neutral. It was not a full and instantaneous transformation but Andrew did leave the pity party and started to focus on other things.

Strangely he found refuge in his schoolwork. He was not attending school during his treatment and instead was receiving weekly packages of classwork from his various subject teachers together with homework assignments. He started to take this work more seriously than he had been at the start of his treatment, he found that it was a good distraction. He went back to the start of the term and focused on a single subject until he was caught up and fully understood all the topics. He carefully went over all the homework and rewrote some of it based on the teacher’s comments on the originally submitted work. By the end of November he was fully caught up with all his classes, at least as much as possible under the circumstances. In fact he had started to read ahead especially in Maths and the sciences and was finding the work easy now that he concentrated on it. Andrew felt he had used his time wisely and that when he got the all clear he would be able to perform well in the end of term exams ready to start back at school in the New Year. When you are living in the moment you do things that you are not necessarily aware of until you think about it later. Andrew lay in a hospital bed seeing other children dying, worrying about his own potential death and yet when he thought about school work he was looking forward to end of term testing and starting back at school. Could he explain that obvious and inherent contradiction? Just as he could not get anyone to talk to him about dying, maybe this was his mind’s own defence mechanism. He needed a positive anchor to hold onto in the face of all of worries, both founded and unfounded. For him this was school work.

On December 1^st 1978, a month later than originally envisioned, he completed his third course of radiation treatment and further biopsies were taken to confirm, hopefully, the success of the treatment. The wait was only two days but Andrew was stressed. When distracted, when his mind was busy he was calmer. When he had too much time on his hands then he was much needier.

He found out that the cancer had not responded to the radiation treatment early in the morning. He had slept fitfully the previous night and was tired both physically and emotionally. Despite all his worrying, his immediate reaction was to be blindsided. Even although he knew this diagnosis was a possibility, he had constantly thought about it, and yet when the doctor told him and his parents it felt like all the air left the room.

As Wiley Coyote hovers in mid-air, his legs flailing wildly after running off the edge of the cliff, he looks round with a resigned expression and then plummets to the valley floor below. Andrew felt like Wiley Coyote right before gravity reasserted itself. Flailing around with nothing but a long fall to a sticky end to look forward to.

He was to immediately start chemotherapy. Given the position of the cancer on his lower back the doctors were concerned about it spreading to his organs. Andrew was to be moved to an adult hospital for the chemo, the Royal Infirmary. Still in the centre of Edinburgh and coincidentally across the road from where he went to school.

On December 3^rd, 1978 Andrew was admitted as the youngest patient on the oncology ward. There was only one other patient under 30 on the ward, a young woman about to turn 16. Given that they were more than a decade younger than anyone else the nursing staff took it upon themselves to place them in adjacent beds. He presumed they were trying to make the situation as comfortable as possible for them both. This is how Andrew first met Faith Campbell. Meeting Faith and talking to her were completely different things however.

He was 13, starting to go through puberty, attended an all-boys school and shy to an absurd extent. He had few female acquaintances and no female friends. Faith was about to turn 16 in early January and although she was, like him, thin and bald, Andrew could tell that she was beautiful. Especially if she took after her older sister Leslie. Leslie was 18 and had graduated secondary school. She was very pretty with a curvy body and Andrew was hopelessly lost. He had no idea where to look (although he knew where his eyes were drawn to!) and conversation initially involved squeaks and blushes. It was through their perseverance that he ended up being able to talk to them. Andrew didn’t understand why it was different to dealing with Monica. Sure, he blushed and occasionally stammered with her but Leslie was different.

Leslie had a kind heart and seemed to understand what he was going through. Maybe it was the last five years of dealing with stammering blushing boys but she knew how to draw him out. Day by day both she and Faith put him at his ease and he managed to hold a reasonable conversation with them both. The first week was laughably terrible, constant blushes and inarticulate mumbles. Andrew sometimes wished they would just leave him alone. Although ten minutes later he would be gloriously happy that he had made one of them smile.

The one area that Andrew could talk to Faith about without too much struggle was cancer. Like him she had grown weary of never having an honest conversation especially about the possibility of dying. She was being treated for leukaemia, had finished a round of chemo which had not been successful and had just received a bone marrow transplant from Leslie. They were in the waiting period to see if it had worked.

One day out of the blue Faith asked.

“Andrew, are you afraid of dying?”

His first instinct was to either deny or avoid the question but Faith was having none of it. She looked at him.

“Answer me honestly please. I can’t talk to anyone else about this. I have had chemo and now have had a bone marrow transplant. You are on chemo after radiation didn’t work. Are you afraid of dying?”

She implored again. He looked at her for a few moments as his mind raced. Here was a young woman, afraid that she might not have a future and nobody to talk to about it. She probably had dealt with the same well-meaning but annoying denials and brush-offs as he had, so he took a deep breath and started.

“It is a constant fear now Faith. During the autumn, I would think about it but it was not all consuming. But as my radiation treatment was extended it became worse. Also, the cancer ward at the Sick Kids was a daily reminder that not everyone got better. Sometimes I could distract myself with schoolwork. It became a refuge for me, where my mind was kept busy. Schoolwork was my future in a way; this is my present.”

Andrew swept his arm around to encompass their current surroundings.

“Now that I am here it is all I think about.”

He went on to explain how his mind flitted about on the subject. He did not have one dread but rather a series of them. The lack of honesty, at least to his face, from his parents and the doctors was discussed. He told Faith that he had overheard one of the doctors, who had a voice you could cut concrete with, explain that the main concern was the spread of cancer to his other organs. What was unsaid but he had realised was that would be terminal. He talked about trying to stay strong, having a positive mental attitude, maintaining a stoic demeanour etc., and how he would be annoyed at himself for worrying about death and overthinking it. He told Faith about his general worry about chemo and cancer and how he would cope with the pain. Was this pain a precursor to the pain if he was dying? Overall it was a stumbling ramble about the last four months of dealing with cancer and the worry over survival. And then there was the deepest of the tortured dreams he had.

“I have terrible thoughts and dreams about not surviving and that in some way it is meant to be. Like it is Fate or something. We did Greek mythology in class two or three years ago and I read about the Fates. Maybe this is my life and it is fated that it will be short and cut off soon. That is the fear that underpins all the others. That it is fated and there is nothing that I can do. My death is already written and there is nothing anyone can do.”

H paused and looked at Faith again. She had been silent as he had rambled on for the last few minutes.

“I was hit by a car when I was 7 or 8, it was the only other time I was admitted to the Sick Kids. I was lucky, I got a cut on my knee and a few scrapes but otherwise I was fine. I have thought about that day over the last few months as I have sat in hospitals. It could have killed me. Was it not my time? Is now my time?”

Again, he paused for a few moments and regrouped his thoughts.

“Yes Faith, I am afraid of dying, but at the same time I know that being afraid of it is not going to stop it. Maybe I am fated to die and weeks and months of worry will change nothing? As you can see my thoughts are all over the place on this. Fear, fatalism, positive attitude, fear again. Depends on the time of day and how I am feeling I suppose.”

He finally stopped and shyly smiled over at her. She laughed a gentle laugh and returned his smile.

“I was only looking for a yes or no answer, Andrew.”