Facebook

"The children are around so I can’t call you”

We are on Facebook, and it’s not what you think.

“Are you ok? What’s up?”

He has been silent for so long – one quick message about ugly health problems – this must be what they say in German – and then nothing for months. Then one morning he is there and he messages me.

It’s cancer. He tells me which kind. I’ve never heard of it, and in the wait between messages I google it. A twenty per cent chance of surviving five years if it’s advanced – and it says most of them are - it’s the kind you don’t normally find very easily. He is only just fifty – three weeks older than me. I don’t ask anything else. I wait for him to tell me in the way he chooses. It’s his news. Instead I shiver, thinking how awful it must be for him to have to say this time after time.

Maybe it’s not advanced. I scroll through the treatments – if early, they leave it, if advanced it’s six courses of chemotherapy. I say “oh Uli” and I wait

“ I had a lot of treatments. Chemo. Five times. But I still have my hair”

I want to ask so many questions, but I don’t, because I don’t know what to say. Running through my mind is the two of us, in his old car, laughing as he deliberately drives into the Rollers and Bentleys parked along the Croisette in Cannes for the film festival. I am egging him on – shouting “encore une fois!”. We are twenty-two and we are waging a war against rich people

You can get better from most things these days.

I remember flying down the French motorway on the back of his bike, one beautiful evening, to the Roman amphitheatre in Aix en Provence to watch a David Bowie gig, and I’d pinched his leather trousers to wear, only they were too big, and every time I got off the bike they fell down and he would smile at me and shake his head.

“When it was found, it was very strange because I wasn’t feeling unwell, but it was in my lungs and my bloodstream – other organs too”

It must have happened just after we met again, after fifteen years, last summer. Why did I hide away from everyone for so long? I don’t want him to feel I am prying. I think if it were me I would want to do things my way, but I have to say something.

“Congratulations about the hair”

It sounds so lame

“Yes. So the good news – the scan shows it is getting smaller. I have one more chemo and then we will know”

So they must have been wrong – fucking google. I am relieved

“So you’re nearly better?”

There’s quite a long wait for the answer

“I will have some more time before it comes back”

If his English were better he would have been able to say this in the same way that google just has; gently, stressing the positive when the outlook is as bleak as it can get – where they talk about quality of life, rather than length.

His youngest daughter is six

I remember the first time we drove up to the cottage in the mountains, skidding round the hairpin bends, trying hard not to look over the side, and when we got there, he leapt out of the car while it was still moving - and climbed on top of a rock and recited the soliloquy from Hamlet in a heavy German accent, and afterwards we gave him a huge round of applause and whistles

“After the next chemotherapy – can I visit?”

All those years, all those invitations I turned down, and after last summer I had meant it to all be so different

“Yes of course”

I go back in my head again, and we’re drinking pastis on a hot summer’s evening, when we suddenly decide to hitch to London from Nice – on the spur of the moment – to see how long it would take. Half an hour later we’re on the motorway doing the old trick where I stick my thumb out and he stands well back, so they only see me. It took us two nights, but we never stopped laughing

When he started running, timing himself, measuring his pulse rate, with typical attention to detail, I stayed in the villa and mocked him when he came back, rolling joints and waving them in the air as I told him healthy was overrated.

I light another cigarette

“I have to go – I must make breakfast for the children – Doro is working”

“Of course. Uli, I am so sorry”

It sounds so small – such a paltry thing to say

“Take care”

“I’ll see you soon ok?”

And he’s gone.