Second Life is an account of Luke’s experience of cancer, losing his brother John, and cycling round the world on a tandem. He is looking for a publisher who believes in the power of his story. If you enjoy what you read, let Luke know with a message on Instagram. If you have links in the publishing world, he would also love to hear from you. Thank you.

Chapter 1

“Did you know? Did it hurt?” People would later ask me.

I would shake my head. No, it doesn’t hurt. Or it hadn’t for me. I wished it had. Searing pain, enough to drop you to your knees in writhing pain, would have been better.

At 23 years old, my body felt invincible. I could drown it in alcohol, batter it playing rugby, function sleep-deprived after a week of all-nighters or wreck my legs running a marathon. Within a day, two at most, it had recovered. 

It could also transport me around the world and it had taken me to Russia. This was 2018, the same year that Russia would hold the football World Cup – not the global pariah it would later become. I’d graduated from Durham University the summer before, had a job offer at a fast-growing consultancy, and like many young people who had been lucky enough to grow up in middle-class privilege, my life seemed set.

I knew my parents loved me. I’d worked hard at school, with some cajoling. They’d stood by me as I’d lost my first year of uni to rowing and partying. My parents humoured my musical caprices – I cycled through the piano and cello before settling on the bassoon (though only after they’d bought me the cello) – so determined were they to find an instrument I wanted to play. Later, I would test their patience further when I decided to learn the bagpipes. The worst I could say about my brother was he was smarter than me and had thrown a famed houseparty – much better than I ever managed – before my parents knew any better. I’d come from a select group who lived with the vague but comforting certainty that hard work brought rewards. And with enough people around me to make sure I worked hard before I’d acquired the habit of hard work, I was on the path to a ‘good’ career. ‘Good’ here meaning respectable and well-paid.

Yet before I started work as a consultant, secure in the knowledge that my upwards career-path awaited me, I decided to spend a year teaching English in Russia. My real goal was to speak fluent Russian and being an English teacher was the easiest way I could find of spending a year in Russia.

Therefore this story starts in the Siberian city of Tyumen, a three hour flight to the east of Moscow, a city that blended dilapidated grey and stained apartment blocks built in the sixties that brought to my mind ghettos – not that I’d even seen any – with the flush of rapidly rising modern apartment blocks and new business centres, their ascent fuelled by Siberia’s primary resource: oil.

I was living in a peach-brick apartment block a thirty minute walk from the school, though I thought of it as a ten minute cycle. I had brought my bike from the UK and come rain, shine or snow, would ride over to the school. Frequently I would arrive mud-spattered and I took to bringing a spare pair of trousers that I would rapidly change into in the staff cloakroom.

Teaching started in the early afternoon and continued until 10pm at night. That left me with the mornings to myself: I would go running round Gagarin Park, named after the first man in space, join the local triathlon club for rides along the highway to the airport, and have Russian lessons. Although I lived alone, I was so busy I never lacked company. I was so busy it was easy to overlook – or ignore – that anything was wrong.

Though, nothing was wrong.

It was just that my left shoulder ached.

Simply ached.

At first I would only notice it running. After several kilometres, I might become aware of it and I would give my shoulder a shake off, letting my left arm hang loose for a few strides. Months passed like this as the snow between the silver birch trees in Gagarin park eventually thawed, became a mudbath for a couple of weeks and then, to my relief, dried.

As green catkins began to form on the silver birches I had made other adjustments. My shoulder had started to ache if I leant back in my chair whilst teaching, the seat back pressing against my shoulder blade. So I leaned forward. I sat with my chin rested on my clasped hands. It looked like I was always intensely interested in what my students had to say.

When the catkins had reached their full length, dangling faded-yellow from the branches and tasting the fresh air that hinted at future summer heat, I was in the best shape of my life. I had entered my first-ever ultramarathon: 50 kilometres through the Ural mountains near Ekaterinburg. Between English classes, Russian lessons and expanding my group of friends, I was doing longer and longer runs round Gagarin Park. It took me twenty minutes a loop and before the race I pushed a couple of runs out to over two hours. I would come back from these runs and glance at my torso in the mirror, still shining with sweat. I was lean, toned. I looked good. Yet seeing my front told only part of the story and no one else was around to fill in the gaps.

By the time the ultramarathon rolled round, I had turned 24. On the coach over – an eight hour journey – I spent most of the journey leant forward or swivelled in my seat so my right shoulder was pressed against the back, sparing my left side. If the other runners on the coach found my behaviour strange, none of them said anything. It was stranger anyway that they had an anglichanin – an Englishman – in their midst and Pavel, who was sitting next to me, peppered me with amused questions:

“Did you think Russia was full of bears?”

“Why does everyone in England have a cup of tea at 4pm?”

“Why did you decide to come to Siberia?”

On the start line I glanced with trepidation at the other runners. Everyone seemed to have new shoes, skintight race vests with lots of pockets specially designed to carry bottles and energy bars and gels. I was in my battered pair of trainers with a borrowed Camelbak that I’d filled with a mix of juice and coffee. I figured sugar plus caffeine would be a good combination but it tasted vile. I’d also slipped in a couple of bars of chocolate.

A local drumming group had come to the start and were beating their drums ever faster.

“Is like African tribe,” Pavel said, pointing.

I nodded. I didn’t think you could say that anymore, but this was Russia, and, well, he was right, at least as far as stereotypes went.

The drums reached their fever pitch, a starting pistol cracked, and we were off.

To my surprise, after several kilometres of scrambling up slopes and scooting down slippery descents, I found myself at the front running alongside one other runner, Evgeniy, a physiotherapist from Moscow. For the next fifty kilometres we were inseparable as we charged up hills, vaulted fallen logs, waded through a bog and splashed across rivers. The first couple of hours were glorious, as my legs were yet to get tired and I drank in the beautiful woodlands we were running through. Having only run shorter 5K and 10K races before, which were painful after just a couple of minutes, this was a revelation. Before I even got halfway, I’d fallen in love with trail running.

Which was just as well, because the bliss wasn’t to last.

The chocolate that I’d packed turned to thick paste in my mouth and the juice-and-coffee mix I tried to wash it down with was repugnant. I blocked my nose as I gulped it down. Soon, I barely noticed, so intent I was on running with Evgeniy step for step. As my legs tired, the pain gradually built in my legs. With 20 kilometres still to run my legs were screaming at me with every stride I took, telling me to stop. But I couldn’t, not whilst Evgeniy was right next to me. Somehow, I shut off those signals and directing all my attention to matching Evgeniy step for step, my world contracting to that one aim. As we entered the final 10 kilometres, we took turns trying to break the other. When Evgeniy sprinted ahead, I would force my legs, already in agony, to move faster to catch up with him, and after a few moments when Evgeniy had eased off the pace, I would return the favour, running past Evgeniy. After an interminable, agonising, purgatory we suddenly saw the finish line ahead of us. 

Evgeniy shot forward and, helpless, I saw him bound ahead of me and lift the finish banner. I crossed seconds afterwards.

I wasn’t at all sad; in fact, I was thrilled. I’d never expected to make the podium, let alone almost win. Someone later told me Evgeniy had represented Russia over the half marathon and had a best time of sixty three minutes. Losing to an international athlete didn’t seem so bad. And I’d discovered a sport I seemed truly good at. Strangely, my aching shoulder had disappeared – I could lean back in my seat as we drove the eight hours back to Tyumen. And I was no longer the strange Englishman: I was the Tyumen running club’s new celebrity. Now everyone wanted to be my friend. It felt like another piece of my new life was slotting into place.

 The next day, my students thought I’d been in a car accident as I painfully shuffled across the classroom to my chair. That morning, my legs had been in such agony I had to slip down the six flights of stairs from my apartment on my bum. That was painful, but my shoulder was not. As such, I had no reason to pay it any more attention.

Besides, I’d been doing my physio exercises. During a brief break back in the UK two months before I’d seen a physiotherapist about my shoulder. She had told me it was a “winged scapula”, which meant that my muscles I used to pull my shoulder blades together weren’t working properly, so my shoulder blade was slipping round.  She’d given me some exercises to do with a red stretchy band and I sporadically did them. Whenever my shoulder ached more than usual, I would pursue these exercises with renewed vigour. Like any athlete knows, your body adapts to the load you put on it. The conclusion I had drawn was that my shoulder was aching because I still hadn’t done enough of the physio exercises.

I was so confident in my winged scapula that I missed other warning signs. When Jay, my rambunctious fellow teacher, boomed at me that my shoulder looked “a bit odd”, it was easy for me to brush him off. “It’s a winged scapula,” I said knowledgably, “I’ve got physio exercises I’m doing”. What did “a bit odd” mean anyway?

When the catkins in Gagarin park had fallen and my trainers mushed them into the soil it was too late.

The school where I worked had two branches. The first was where we taught in the evenings, mostly groups of adults. The second was in a large building that also housed a multilingual primary school, where I taught private lessons three times a week. I’d pushed the door open to the building, crushed catkins in the tread of my trainers.

I was fed up.

The ache in my shoulder hadn’t disappeared. In fact, it had come back several days after the race, as the pain receded from my legs and I was able to walk normally again. Every few hundred metres, I’d shake off my shoulder. Still, even this was passed as normal behaviour for me. It was a couple of days ago something more concerning had happened.

I’d met my triathlete friends early in the morning for a group ride. We’d cycled along a quiet road in the forest, doing sprints. When I came back, I noticed a bump in my left armpit.

Strange.

Strange to have a swelling there. A bit odd.  

Today, as I walked down the corridor to my classroom, feeling quite sad as I felt this unexplained bump in my left armpit, I resolved to pop into the school nurse. I passed her door every day.

I knocked and entered. “Hello?”

The nurse looked up. She looked tough but matronly. I guessed she was in her late forties, her eyebrows perfect curves. The look of impatience that crossed her face told me she didn’t suffer fools – or cry-babies – lightly.

“Sit. What is it?”

“It’s err, my back,” I said, in Russian. “My shoulder actually. It’s painful but…”

I was struggling to find a word for “ache”.

“… but it’s not exactly painful,” I finished, limply.

The nurse raised her eyebrow again.

“It’s painful but it’s not painful?” She repeated. I could tell she thought I was wasting her time.

“Yes.”

“Davai, let me see. Turn around. Take your shirt off.”

I shrugged out of my shirt. I was almost embarrassed to have come. An ache hardly felt worth bothering with.

I yanked my shirt over my head and tossed it onto the chair. Then, I turned.

“Oh my god,” the nurse breathed.

My immediate feeling was relief. Oh good, at least I haven’t been wasting her time, there must be something there.

“Have you been in a car or bike accident?” She asked.

I looked over my shoulder at her, confused.

“No, I’ve been cycling, I was doing sprint practice this morning…”

“Did you break anything?”

“What? No!”

“Sit.” The nurse gestured at the chair with my crumpled shirt on it. She hurried from the room. I slipped the shirt over my head and sat on the chair, wondering what had just happened. What she had seen?

I felt at my left shoulder. It was hard, solid. Almost reassuring. It had been like that for as long as I could remember, the last few months at least. I could feel that my left shoulder blade had slipped round – there was a hard ridge that stuck out from my shoulder. But that was my winged scapula, wasn’t it?

My thoughts were interrupted as the nurse came back into the room, followed by the principal of the school, Tom, and his personal assistant. Tom was in his fifties, with a square jaw and craggy face. He was the spitting image of the Grandpa from the film Up! except his hair was jet black.

The nurse instructed me to take my top off again. I did, feeling about eight years old, not twenty four.

The trio peered at my back as I felt uncomfortably like a zoo animal.

Tom swore, muttered something to his assistant, and walked out.

I got the feeling that this was no ordinary ache. Something was very, very wrong.

An hour later, Tom’s assistant, Polina, and I were in the local hospital. A shiver ran through me as cold gel on the end of an ultrasound probe touched my left shoulder and the doctor moved it around, taking images. Polina sat beside me. She had taken me under her wing since I left the nurse’s room. In the hospital, I tried to explain to the doctor I had a “winged scapula”, my shoulder blade had slipped round, that was all. Polina had interjected, speaking so fast I couldn’t follow.

My shoulder blade had slipped round? I was beginning to hear just how ridiculous that line must have seemed. But what else could have happened?

The doctor looked up at me. She also spoke fast, in clipped sentences, each word like a shard of glass. The technical vocabulary swam round my head as I struggled to lift out the meaning. Polina translated for me.

“She’s saying that it’s not your shoulder blade there.”

I didn’t understand. That hard ridge sticking out from the side of my back, wasn’t my shoulder blade slipping round? That didn’t make any sense. That had to be my shoulder blade. It turned out my shoulder blade was in the normal place. So what was that hard ridge I was feeling?

After the hospital we went back to the school. Polina took me to Tom’s office but before we got there I ducked into the toilet. I needed time to think. I couldn’t take it all in. What did my shoulder look like?

I stripped off my shirt, stood my phone up against the mirror, set the timer and turned round. I looked at the photo.

My left shoulder was like someone had pumped up a balloon beneath my skin. It was smooth but swollen. If I looked at just my left side, it looked like I was a champion bodybuilder, with a bulging left lat that popped out of my back by a couple of inches. Only the point of the bottom of my shoulder blade which protruded from my back broke the waxy smoothness. It was like muscle, but without definition or being able to tense it.

Still inside the toilet I sent the photo to Mum and called her immediately afterwards. It wasn’t the first time I’d spoken to Mum about my aching shoulder. She’d said I should see a doctor. I pointed out she was a doctor. But because she hadn’t seem that concerned, I hadn’t been too concerned either.

Mum answered immediately.

“Luke, you need to come back to the UK,” she said.

“Come back to the UK? Are you sure? What’s changed?”

Mum didn’t answer.

I sloped into Tom’s office, apologising for keeping him waiting.

“How long have you known about your shoulder?” Tom asked, fixing me with a stern gaze.

“Err, I don’t know. A few months?” I offered. I felt there was a right and wrong answer but I didn’t know whether that meant a long or short time. I didn’t want Tom to think I’d come out to teach at his school only to use the medical insurance to treat my health problems. But he also needed to know the truth – it had been aching for months.

“I just, err, spoke with my Mum,” I said, feeling like a sheepish schoolboy that I was invoking my Mum because I couldn’t stick up for myself. “She says I need to go back to the UK immediately.”

Tom’s face was motionless, meaning he looked grumpy. “Put her on the phone.”

I handed over my phone to Tom and he gestured, not unkindly, that he wanted to have this discussion in private. I didn’t want to hear what my Mum would say and was happy to leave the room. Outside Polina gave me a hug and then we sat waiting, side by side. Somehow in the space of an afternoon I’d gone from employee to… something akin to child, and for Polina… son. Polina glanced at me with worry in her eyes. The worry a mother would have for a sick child or a child in pain; not the glance you give a work colleague. I sat there, awash with emotions. I felt out of place: I should be teaching my classes, not sitting outside the head of school’s office. I realised with a guilty start that I’d already missed my first three classes. No one had even mentioned them. A wave of confusion rolled over me: none of it made any sense – how could a winged scapula not be a winged scapula? How could that hard protrusion from left shoulder not be shoulder blade, bone? I felt it. It was hard and solid and smooth. That was bone, wasn’t it? I checked on my right shoulder blade – that was hard too, but angular and with an edge. There was no edge on the left side. Where was the edge of my shoulder blade?

At this point it didn’t occur to me to be angry or scared or anything else. I simply felt confused and lost.

Tom called me back in. “You’re going to be on the next flight back to London,” he said. He said it flatly but the corners of his eyes crinkled with concern.

“When’s that?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” said Tom.

“Tomorrow? But I’m teaching tomorrow, and for the rest of the week. Doesn’t it make more sense if…”

“Tomorrow,” Tom cut in, firmly. I opened my mouth, but pre-empting my question Tom continued “your classes this evening have been taken care of, Jay will cover for you.”

When had this all happened? What had Mum said to Tom? I had ceased to be a teacher in the space of an afternoon.

“Go back to the UK and get yourself sorted out,” Tom continued a little more kindly, showing me the door. With a hard but well-meant squeeze on my shoulder, Tom disappeared from my life.

The next twenty four hours passed in a blur. I didn’t have time to think, let alone worry. My first priority after leaving Tom was to find a cardboard bike box so I could fly my bike back to the UK. Luckily the first bike shop I arrived at had recently had a delivery of new bikes. I walked back to my flat with a box the size of a mattress resting on my handlebars and saddle, one hand holding the box upright, the other on the handlebars.

It didn’t take long to pack my belongings. I’d flown out with a single suitcase and hadn’t stayed in Tyumen long enough to acquire any new things. The only additions were my textbook from my Russian classes and the map of Tyumen I’d sellotaped to the fridge. On it I’d written on places I wanted to visit –coffee shops and craft breweries and cocktail bars – and the theatre and philharmonia, where the triathlon club met for their rides and a falafel joint. Looking at it, seeing how many of the places were still unvisited, reminded me that I was abandoning this city before I could call it my home and that my driving ambition behind coming here – to speak fluent Russian – was unfulfilled.

After packing my things, I went over to the school. All my colleagues had heard I was going back to the UK. I tried to explain why.

“I’ve got an aching shoulder,” I said, hearing the words sound limp and unconvincing. “The nurse was concerned and my Mum – who is a doctor – thought I needed to come back to the UK.”

“Why don’t you go to a hospital here?” Jay asked.

I wasn’t able to explain that, whatever it was, it was going to need more than a hospital visit here. I didn’t know what it was, but I had a very firm feeling I wouldn’t be coming back to Tyumen. My colleagues were sympathetic but they didn’t – couldn’t – understand. I didn’t blame them, but I felt the distance growing between us.

Jay pulled me into a tight hug and then waved me goodbye, “see back here soon bro!” he called out enthusiastically.

“I hope so Jay, I hope so.”

If you enjoyed Chapter 1, you can download Chapter 2 here.