Chapter 1
A few weeks earlier.
I couldn't help but wonder if she gave good head as I sat opposite the middle-aged doctor inside her private office at the Royal Infirmary. She'd just told me I had some form of terminal brain cancer, but it hadn't registered properly because I wasn't paying attention to her words any longer. She was overweight, apple-figured, yet with a cute round face that could still turn heads when she walked past a building site… although couldn't anything in a skirt these days? I imagined she'd been one of the popular, pretty girls back in high school. Back in the days when she'd at least had her figure under some control.
I couldn't take my eyes away from a tiny bubble of spit on her lower lip. It aroused me as I watched it linger there all seductively, taunting me. I felt an irresistible urge to lean over and lick it gently from her face. But I controlled it and refocused. My mind snapped back to reality. Fear and sadness once again overwhelmed my thoughts. Something in the air felt wrong. Very, very wrong. I lowered my head and raised my hands at the same time. Halfway into the motion, the two met and I found myself buried face deep inside my cupped hands.
'I just, I just can't take this in.’
Even though I was Scottish and had lived in the country on and off since birth, the Scottish accent I'd acquired over the years never dominated my tongue like it did in most born-and-raised locals. The doc was proper south-of-the-border English, though.
'I'm so, so sorry, Liam.’
I tore my face away from my hands, gently shaking my head before smirking sarcastically.
'So how long, huh? How long have I got?'
The doctor sighed. 'Please, Liam. Don't do this.’
'Come on, eh? What's my sentence? Best guess. Give it to me.’
'Liam, I really couldn't say.’
'How about the last person you diagnosed. How long did they get, huh?'
The doc remained silent, curiously observing me with both sorrow and pity. She really wanted to give me a good, positive answer, I could tell. A wee bit of good news for the long road ahead. But, of course, that wouldn't be very honest of her now, would it? So all she could do was stare.
Briefly I wondered if she found me attractive. I imagined making my move on her. Would she welcome it? Would she let me stick my tongue deep inside her mouth and move it around, entangling it with her own, before letting me run my hands all over her soft, plump body in the process? Would she enjoy it? Would she make the move for my zipper and then...my wandering mind snapped back to reality and rage consumed me.
'Well, let's hear it then Doc, Jesus!' I exploded, unable to contain my mix of frustration and sexual desire. 'It's like waiting for the bloody X Factor results, for Christ sake.’
She shifted in her seat, shaken abruptly from her staring trance by my aggressive manner.
'With treatment, chemo, I don't know, Liam. Maybe a year, maybe less. That's my best guess.’
I refocused upon that tiny spit bubble. It calmed me. Soothed me immensely. It made me feel good. Fuck the chemo. All that shite just to cling to a few extra months of life. To hope for a year at best. My uncle had passed away a few years earlier with leukaemia. It made my stomach churn just thinking about all the crap he had to put up with when he could have been doing something else with his life. Something more memorable and productive with the remainder of his time. Screw that shite. I was out of there.
I nodded kindly at the doc. Thanked her for all the information she'd passed on and left. She stood abruptly, calling out about making an appointment with some other specialist next week. More tests. More horseshit clairvoyance. More wasted time and taxpayers’ money. I wasn't listening anymore.
I walked past the cancer ward's waiting room, which was filled with more sad cases and zombified victims waiting to be told about their afflictions and survival rates. I kept walking. She fell out of earshot. I followed one of the ridiculously coloured lines on the hospital floor leading to some other part of the building. I chose the yellow path and prayed it would lead me to the exit. I felt like the fucking Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz. 'Oh, we're off to see the Wizard....’ But there would be no magical wizard with a new brain or magic cure lying in wait for me at the end of this brick road.
I made my way outside. Grey skies towered and rumbled above, urinating upon me with their wet drizzle. A storm was coming. A big fucking storm. When I reached the car park, a cool breeze hit my face like a soft fan on a humid summer's day. It felt good to be outside. To be at one and at peace with nature's earthly fresh air. It felt good to be alive. They say that some people, some lucky few on this earth, really appreciate life and its real meaning only when they're given their own personal expiry date. But oh, how I've pondered the meaning of it all these past few weeks since having the possibility of a near terminal end thrown in my face. The things we do to live a so-called long, healthy, and normal life. The empty, meaningless, monotonous, and mundane tasks, hobbies, activities, careers, love, sex, friends, family, people—and all the other trivial shite—we fill our empty lives with. All of them doing their very best to fill some hollow void in our conscious minds and distract us from the day-to-day process of growing older and nudging another step, another minute, another hour, towards our inevitable doom. Our species, Mother Earth's own terminal cancer, has never been more spiritually or intellectually minded in all our existence than we are today. Yet still, are minds are so narrow and rammed full of such pretentious and superficial self-importance, convinced that our own individual lives have more worth and meaning than those of any of our neighbours while still harbouring some hope and belief that there will be a simple, perfect meaning and explanation to it all in our final conscious hour. Our minds have evolved so far beyond our basic animal caveman way of thinking, yet we still harbour the possibility that there will be some kind of redemption. Some sort of beautiful ray of light or magical white-bearded wizard welcoming us at the end. Oh, what images and illusions of grandeur our minds conjure up in our most desperate times of need. Let me tell you about the meaning of life. We are all acts of a random nature, and none of us should even be here in the first place.
***
Before anyone starts feeling sorry for me, let me just say that I am not a nice guy. I want to get that out there into the polluted airwaves from the beginning. I mean, I'm not an utterly insane, mind-fuck, George Bush/Tony Blair mass murderer of millions and a shit pit of festering evil. Nor am I anywhere near the peak of Mother Teresa's rich, heavenly, Mount Everest of eternal goodness. I'd like to think of myself on the just-below-sea-level-mark on that particular scale. If I'd been born a country, I'd like to have been Serbia. Stuffed with a few deeply rooted rugged charms and not a complete and total fuck-up loss to humanity by any means, just 'not a nice guy' when it came to people. Especially relations and feelings with people of the feminine kind. Although, recently I had been trying. I really had. I battled constantly with this conflict more and more as the days rolled by. Like, the more I aged, the worse of an arsehole I moulded myself into. In all fairness, it was just too damn easy to be an arsehole… but an arsehole who, deep down inside, wanted nothing better in life than to settle with his own demons. To be completely devoted and faithful to one woman and one woman only. A woman whom I loved wholeheartedly and who loved me, without all the other mind-trap relationship bullshit games getting in the way.
I thought a lot about living in a house that filled me with pride, in a suburb and city I wasn't ashamed to call home. A home I'd be able to speak fondly and openly of some day while chatting with like-minded strangers on a family holiday abroad. Yes, this was what I dreamed about sometimes in the darkest hours of the night. A good life and a good home, surrounded by gardens, flowers, and freshly cut green fields. Surrounded by friends, family, and children I adored with all my heart, who adored me in equal measures. But for some people, life doesn't quite pan out like that. And the longer you resist putting off this comfort and happiness and fantasy bullshit of a good life, the harder it becomes with each passing day to find it again. To accept it and finally come to peace with it before letting go of all your insecurities and grasping it with all your heart, passion, soul, and desire.
Lately, I'd been coming to terms with the fact that I would most certainly die alone someday. And way before I'd been diagnosed with this untreatable brain cancer inconvenience. Yes, dying alone. Like some sad, old, lonely, sex-crazed fool with no friends, wife, children, or family to call my own. All I seemed to care about was where my next shag was coming from. This insatiable lust, which had infected my body and soul ever since my very first sexual awakening in my teenage years. A guilty lust which felt far worse than any incurable physical decease. Some days I woke up in the morning and felt, deep within my bones, that I could be truly happy with just one special someone in my life. Someone to love, protect, and come home to at night, cuddling up on the couch and spending free time together. A reason to get up in the morning. A reason to live and fight onwards and upwards.
On some rare occasions, I even longed to find that perfect someone who could make me want to be a better man. But alas, I knew it was useless and just prolonging the inevitable. What if I finally found that perfect someone and spilt my seed deep inside her soul and everything felt good and perfect for that short, singular, orgasmic heartbeat, trapped inside that perfectly wrapped, bubbled moment of harmony for one priceless and meaningful second, only for me to realise there was no such thing as a perfect compatible soul mate and that dark, sinking loneliness would eventually consume me and my feelings for her, just like everyone else who'd come and gone before her. Ultimately it would all disappear, fading like dusk from dawn. Evaporating into thin air, faster than a steam of hot piss in a frozen winter field, like those feelings always did. Always. And I, once more, would begin to long for something different, someone new. The never-ending monotonous circle of my daily life. That addictive chase for a new day. A new dawn. The grass is always greener...
I knew at the heart of this mental affliction I was what some might call a 'Selfish Narcissistic Prick.’ Sex had always been a weakness and a downfall. I knew I needed sex a lot, and with as many partners who'd give themselves willingly to my cause as possible. It had always been quantity over quality over the years, that's for damn sure. And maybe that's the problem. Who knew? Certainly not me. I didn't really believe it mattered any longer whether someone was that perfect one for me. I really didn't. I knew I had this other horrible terminal lustful cancer embedded deep within my soul, and it was only spreading further and deeper through my veins with every new notch I claimed. This need, want, urge, curse… this longing. This goddamn disease which would absolutely be the end of me even before the real cancer had its wicked way. I needed to fuck. I wanted to fuck all the time and with as many different women as I possibly could. Christ, didn't all heterosexual red-blooded males want the same when you got down to the bare-knuckled nitty-gritty of it? I just didn't act upon it anymore as much as I'd like to, that's all. Maybe settling into a comfortable suburban lifestyle and approaching middle age had finally grasped a hold of my balls and slowly squeezed the final droplets of lust and zest for life right out of me.
But at the other end of that scale, I'd considered cutting off my own damn balls just to spite the suffering and finally live that so-called normal life. To end this cursed pleasurable and insatiable torment. But I was too weak… too goddamn weak to do it. Or then again, in hindsight, maybe I wasn’t weak after all! Maybe I was just a man.