Chapter 3

A waft of warm cedar filled the air as I whistled down a steep mountain road towards Beirut. John was just behind me on another borrowed bike. I felt a thrill as I caught sight of the Mediterranean far below as the two of us pedalled our way across Lebanon. It was 2015, three years before, and I’d decided to spend the summer here to improve my Arabic that I was studying at university. Never the most attentive to my studies, I’d invited John to join me on a mini-adventure and he had flown out for a week.

Now we were crossing the mountains, cycling from the town of Tebnin in the south of Lebanon to Byblos, a town some thirty miles north of Beirut. The previous week we’d joined a group of Lebanese cyclists touring southern Lebanon, which had taken us past UN troop carriers on the Lebanese-Israeli border, up valleys where Hezbollah hid weapons caches and the waving grass beside the road concealed landmines, and through honied villages filled with spiralling flowers and pomegranate trees. All the time the Lebanese army had followed us and we were often greeted at the top of climbs by the bizarre sight of a gun-wielding soldier handing out orange slices. This week-long celebration of Lebanese cycling and beauty would conclude the following day with a challenge to cycle from the sea in Byblos all the way to the highest point in Lebanon: the summit of Quornet As Sawda at 3,495 metres.

Whilst the remainder of our group were taking the day to rest in the army trucks driving to Byblos, John and I had decided to ride there. We thought that we could cycle to Byblos at least as fast as the trucks, making up any lost time in Beirut’s interminable traffic jams.

For the first time, we were free of the group and could go at the speed we wanted. We raced each other up the long climbs, surrounded by groves of Lebanon’s dwindling supply of cedar trees. In the early afternoon we crested the mountains and dropped back towards the coast. The roads plummeted directly down the mountainside – it seemed like the idea of switchback roads had never reached Lebanon – and I would whiz down, leaving John far behind. Periodically I would wait for him to catch up, twiddling my thumbs ostentatiously as he cautiously rolled down the hill.

One time, I waited much longer than usual. Frustrated, I eventually pedalled back up the road to see what he was doing. He surely wasn’t this slow at descending. Perhaps he had stopped for water or pomegranate juice. He could have told me, I thought. After a minute I saw John. He was standing next to his bike, regarding it with a look of disappointment. I saw scrapes on his arms and knees. “I came off,” John said, with a peevish look particular to him. “I’m fine,” he said matter-of-factly before I had a chance to ask as he swung his leg over the bike and we continued.

An hour later, we were pedalling along the coastal road in thick traffic that extended for thirty miles between Beirut and Byblos. We weaved our way around the cars, making a game of shimmying through gaps between wing mirrors and sprinting ahead of cars before sliding in front of them and through to the next gap. We were grinning at each other. It was our version of brotherly love: Luke and John against the Lebanese drivers.

The car in front of me, a big black American SUV, braked suddenly. I slammed on the brakes and to my surprise found myself sailing over the front of the handlebars. I landed with a flop right behind the car.

 “Are you ok?” John shouted, pedalling over. I scrambled to my feet and showed him my ripped palms with a grin. Luckily I hadn’t been going fast. “I’m fine!” John nodded and we carried on waltzing through the traffic. We ended up arriving in Byblos an hour before the army trucks and our companions, much to our mutual smugness.

This was what life was supposed to be like, I thought. You take some risks and occasionally they don’t pay off but the consequences were proportional to the risk. John had been taking the descent too fast and come off; I hadn’t been paying enough attention to the car in front of me and ended up on the tarmac. Neither of us had paid enough attention and we’d ended up with scrapes. It seemed fair enough. Life was like exams: the harder you revise the better you do. Unless you were John, because he didn’t revise for exams but still aced them. But he was just that sort of person.

By and large, the life I had grown up in felt fair, or fair enough. If I worked hard, I got a payoff. If I took a risk, sometimes something bad would happen. But it’d be kept within a PG-friendly limit, nothing that Mum with her cotton wool or a bit of extra studying wouldn’t solve. These were the incontrovertible laws of life I had always known to be true.

“It’s not the sort we can cure. We’re probably looking at months, two years maximum.”

Gareth’s words went round and round my head as I pushed my bike in front of me. I was walking very slowly back from the hospital, alone. What Gareth had told me couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t be true. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit with the rules of life that I knew.

I looked at the facts of my life: I was 24 years old. I could run 10km in under thirty two minutes. I did more exercise and probably had the best diet of any of my friends. In essence, I’d done everything right. I hadn’t even done anything stupid or foolhardy. I’d lived risk-free, at least healthwise. So how was it possible I was the one who had got cancer? And not just cancer, but incurable cancer.  

I’d always known I’d live until at least eighty. I’d seen it on school posters since primary school and that one in three of us would live to a hundred. That meant that eighty was guaranteed, right?  

No one ever told me that you could also die in your twenties.

Somehow it didn’t matter I was young, fit and – in all other respects – healthy. I was about to join the unlucky few who died young. And I could see it coming. It wasn’t going to be over in an unexpected, excruciating, instant. I would be host and witness to my own death as my tumours grew and grew until they popped my bones out of their joints and suffocated me from the inside.

I stopped walking as horror shot through me like cold ice and I gripped the seat of my bike tightly, my nails digging into the leather.

I stood there, next to a garden with a St George’s flag hanging from a pole and gnomes filling the garden. What was the point in taking another step?

Why did I want to get back to Mum and Dad’s house? What would I do there? What was the point going anywhere?

No matter where I went, I could not escape my cancer. I was carrying it around inside of me.

No actions mattered, because I would soon be dead.

What was the point in pleasure? What was the point in trying? If I was going to be dead in a few months everything seemed pointless. It would fill the briefest time before I was dead for eternity. Such minor details, such tiny amounts of time, didn’t seem worth striving for.

Eventually, I started moving again. Not because I wanted to get home but because motion felt better than standing there. I couldn’t stand next to a bunch of garden gnomes forever.

With a hollow afternoon to fill, it felt I arrived back home all too soon.

Graham opened the door. The corners of his eyes, usually crinkled on the brink of a twinkling smile, drooped. “Mum and Dad told me, I’m sorry Luke.”

I nodded. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Above all I wanted to escape. I wanted to escape from this destiny I had now been assigned.

I didn’t want to die!

I brushed past Mum and Dad and curled up into the sofa. Emma had gone out to see her mum, who had come over to Bristol.

I was alone, with cancer in my shoulder and cancer in my lungs.

I tried to escape. I picked up a book from the floor. It was Shantaram. I tried to lose myself in the extraordinary, swashbuckling life of prison escapee Kim who starts a new life in India. I wanted to live in those Bombay slums, fight off a pack of dogs and save people from cholera and fight with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan. I wanted to leave Bristol behind and live this other life in Bombay, speeding down the coastal highway on a roaring motorbike with the mysterious Carla behind me.

But the magic wasn’t powerful enough. Reality seeped in at the corners of the pages. Every page I wanted to rebuke the hero, Kim. You might have almost got shot, but you don’t have cancer. You might enter a spiral of heroin addiction, but you don’t have cancer. Eventually I threw the book down, unable to escape my fate. I curled up on the sofa and cried into the cushion.

I felt Mum’s hand on my shoulder, gently squeezing it.

“I don’t want to die Mum,” I said, my voice muffled by the cushion. Mum’s warm hand remained on my shoulder.

“I don’t want to die,” I said, looking up at her, my face stained by tears. I looked up at her in desperation, wishing her to tell me that it wasn’t true, the cancer I had wasn’t as bad as the doctor had said. But Mum couldn’t have said that and I wouldn’t have believed her if she had.

“Am I going to die Mum?” I said, pleading with her for hope.

“We never know exactly what will happen,” Mum said, the closest she could offer to hope without lying, “there are no guarantees in life.” Those words would come back to haunt her.

Mum sat with me for some minutes as I cried into the sofa. It was too awful. Too awful. Eventually she left. Dad came in soon after. With a buoyancy that from anyone else would have felt forced or crass he asked if I wanted to go for a run.

I stared at him, not quite having the energy to tell him to get lost. It was ridiculous, the idea of me going for a run. Surely he knew that. Didn’t he know my shoulder ached when I ran? Didn’t he know I had absolutely no energy today? Didn’t he know I’d just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer? It was obvious the only way to spend today was crying my eyes out on the sofa. I wasn’t fit for anything.

Dad, however, was unperturbed.

“What?” said Dad, raising an eyebrow in mock surprise, “why not?”

“You know why,” I glowered at him.

“Do you think you’ll feel better or worse after you run?”

I didn’t answer the question for several moments.

“Maybe later,” I muttered.

Dad nodded. “When do you want to go?”

“When I’ve finished my cup of tea,” I said.

“You don’t have one,” Dad pointed out.

“Once you’ve brought me a cup of tea and I’ve drunk it,” I responded, as grumpily as I could, though a trace of a grin came to my face that I couldn’t prevent.

Dad raised his eyebrows in mock exasperation and a grin and left the room.

Minutes later he came back with a large cup of tea. Fifteen short minutes later I’d finished the tea. Dad came back and glanced at the empty mug. He raised his eyebrows again. Defeated, I slunk upstairs to put my running kit on. Dad was already in his running kit. In fact, he hadn’t changed. He simply lived in an old pair of black running leggings with holes around the knees and a changing caste of race tops.

The truth was I wanted to go for a run. Deep, deep, down I knew I wanted to. I knew I’d feel better afterwards though I wouldn’t have had the motivation to get out by myself.

But it wasn’t pretty. As we started out tears ran down my cheeks and my left arm hung awkwardly off my body. Several times I had to stop and bend over, letting my arm hang down loose to relieve the aching. Eventually, we reached the edge of the Downs and looked out over the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The river Avon was far below, a thin brown snake that wound its way into the centre of the city. The sun shone brightly down on us. It seemed surreal: everything seemed normal, except I knew it was not. We stood there in silence for some time.

 “I don’t want to die Dad,” I said looking at him, pleading with him. I wanted him to tell me it would be ok. Dad put an arm round my shoulders and pulled me close.

“Luke, this is the worst thing I can imagine,” he said, as we stared out at the people crossing the Bridge. “But even as your Dad, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t change whether you’ve got cancer and nor can you.”

“I wish I’d gone to the doctor earlier. I was so stupid.” I said desperately. 

Dad squeezed my shoulder. “We can’t change the past either, we can only be where we are right now.”

I wanted comfort, not bleak words. I didn’t want to be where I was right now.

“But you can choose how you live your life from this point Luke. You can’t choose if you’ve got cancer or not, but you can choose how you live with cancer.”

“But I’m going to die Dad!”

“Maybe. But what are you going to do in the time you have alive? How do you want to spend this time? If you’ve got three months, six months, a year, well, what do you want to do in it?”

“I want to live! Longer than a year!”

“I want you to live longer than a year too. Of course I do. But what are you going to do with the time you do have? What’s important for you to do now?”

“I want to do everything I can to live,” I said stubbornly.

“And what does that look like?” Dad asked.

I thought about what Dad was saying.

“It means I want to do everything I can to survive. What can I do to be one of the people who defies the odds?  I need to think about exercise. And diet.”

I didn’t want to be like everyone else. Everyone else, in my situation, died. I was going to have to be different. I was going to take this in my own way.

 “What does living the rest of this day as well as possible look like?” Dad asked me.

“I don’t know. Having an Indian together? Tandoori chicken and a peshwari naan? Maybe going for a cycle too? I need to tell John. And tomorrow, I dunno, we could do something special, like go to the theatre?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Dad, squeezing my shoulder.

I felt a little braver in that moment.

But another wave of despondency hit me. I was still scared of dying. “But Dad, even if we have a good day tomorrow… I don’t want it to end. I don’t want to die,” I insisted.

Dad hugged me once more.

“We don’t get to control that bit. Let’s just focus on today and tomorrow. Take each day as it comes and let’s make our focus to make each day the best it can be.”

We stood there for several more minutes, watching cars slowly cross the bridge below us. Everyone else’s lives continued as normal. People even seemed to be enjoying the sunny day.

I’d do what I could, I thought. I’d do what I could to make each day the best it could be. And I’d do what I could to keep my body strong and give myself the best possible chance of dealing with what lay ahead.