Staying Alive

Doctor Morrissey doesn’t have a bunch of gladioli sticking out of his trousers and a comedy quiff. In fact she has very short hair indeed. She’s young as well. Which is reassuring, actually—if I were on some critical, tumours-sprouting-out-of-his-ears list, surely I’d be seeing a battle-scarred senior consultant. With her Peter Pan haircut and pert features she’s quite elfin. No way would an elf pull the literal graveyard shift.

‘Take a seat,’ she says pleasantly with a hint of a West Country accent—not one of the Manchester Morrisseys, then. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.’ She must know why I’m here. Hasn’t she got some notes, a letter or something? Do I really have to explain? She seems to sense my discomfort and says, ‘I know you’ve found a lump…On one of your testicles. I just need to know how long you’ve been aware of it.’

‘A couple of weeks. Maybe three,’ I say.

‘That’s good. Our biggest headache is when men find something and then ignore it for months. Why don’t you let me take a look?’

I knew she was going to ask me that. In fact, I showered twice this morning because I knew someone was going to ask me precisely that question. So much for all the preparation because I feel extremely uncomfortable now. I hated it enough when sixty-something Stump had me drop my trousers and felt me up. Twenty-something, not unattractive Doctor Morrissey is an entirely different proposition and I imagine a lot of blokes would be thrilled at the thought of her small and fragile hands down there. Not me, though. I suppose I’m shy. Or uptight and repressed. Whatever, I’m someone who needs to be on very familiar terms with delicate feminine hands before I’m comfortable with them touching me below the waist. Again she senses my awkwardness and says, ‘I have done this before, you know. That’s why I keep my nails short. You can take your trousers off behind the curtain if you like.’

11.17 a.m.

I’m sitting on the edge of an examination couch, a needle in my arm, and under the circumstances I feel remarkably relaxed. Doctor Morrissey is taking blood. ‘We’ll do some tests for tumour markers,’ she explains matter-of-factly. ‘They indicate the possible presence of cancer cells.’ I flinch at the mention of the T-followed closely by the C-word. ‘Of course, you most likely don’t have cancer,’ she goes on, and I relax again because I believe it from her. ‘It’s much less common than you might imagine. It looks like you have some sort of growth down there though and we need to get to the bottom of it.’

She knows that I have some sort of growth because she sent me to a room along the corridor where a technician gave me an ultrasound scan. This, bizarrely, is what sparked my sense of calm. Ultrasounds—to me, anyway—are Good Things. My only experience of them was when Liz Napier, a senior account director at work, brought the print-out from hers into the office. A small, fuzzy black and white image that drew a gaggle of cooing onlookers. I peered at it too. I looked at the snap of the perfectly formed foetus that everyone agreed was sucking its thumb, though all I could see was something that resembled a photo of Greenland taken on a particularly cloudy day by a satellite equipped only with a disposable Kodak. But of course Liz didn’t give birth to Greenland. She had a perfectly formed, thumb-sucking baby girl called Carmen. That’s why ultrasound scans equal nice, warm and pleasant, even when they’re looking for cancer. So what if this has no basis in reason? It’s a sturdy-looking straw and just try and stop me clutching it.

Doctor Morrissey has helped to ease my stress as well. She has told me several times that I most likely don’t have testicular cancer and that even if I do, the cure rate is up in the very high nineties when it’s caught early enough. I’m choosing to go with her because she’s pleasant and competent and seems to know what she’s talking about. She takes the needle from my arm—very competently, I might add—and says, ‘OK, we’re done.’

I stand up, roll down my shirtsleeve and pull on my jacket. I bend down to pick up my briefcase and my Lotto tickets tumble out of my pocket and onto the floor. She picks them up and hands them back to me. ‘You’re the optimistic type, then,’ she says.

‘More like desperate, actually.’

‘Well, if it’s any consolation, the odds of there being something seriously wrong with you are almost as long.’

Almost? Only bloody almost?

Bloody Morrisseys. Why do they always have to drag things down?

eight: absolutely dandy (#ulink_d57779d4-5e7a-5e40-9cb7-562aaa74f3a0)

thursday 20 november / 9.21 p.m.

I pick up the tray of drinks from the bar and fight my way across the room to Brett, Vince and Kenny. Kenny is Production Geezer. The man without whom the glittering mirror ball we fondly call advertising would come crashing to the dance floor. He’s the man responsible for seeing to it that Brett and Vince’s lovingly crafted adverts make it into print. Always just in the nick of time. And usually, to his immense credit, the right way up.

As I sit down it only takes a moment to figure that the conversation hasn’t moved on from ten minutes ago. The question: How would you spend a Lotto win? It was sparked by my fumbling for a twenty to cover the round and pulling this week’s hopeless punt from my pocket.

‘You’re mad, Vin,’ Kenny pronounces. ‘Why would you risk blowing it when you’ve just won at fourteen million to one?’

‘Egg-fucking-zactly, you tubby twonk,’ Vince says. ‘If I’ve just won at fourteen mill, I’m gonna fancy my chances at twos, ain’t I?’

Vince’s Lottery Dream: ‘ Hit the casino and put the fucking lot on red.’ Which, naturally, struck me as deeply insane, though I didn’t say so. Partly because, as is often the way with Vince, his logic has a perverted appeal. But, no, I mustn’t get sucked into this way of thinking. It’s profoundly insane.

‘You’re mad,’ Kenny repeats. ‘You’ve got your millions. Why piss it away?’

‘I wouldn’t be pissing it away,’ Vince says. ‘You’re forgetting the secret.’

I must have missed this when I was buying the round.

‘You gonna tell us what this secret is, then?’ Kenny asks.

‘The secret is I couldn’t fucking lose.’

‘Yeah, but what is it?’

‘If I told you it wouldn’t be a secret, would it?’ Vince says.

‘More like there ain’t no secret,’ Kenny mutters, draining his glass. ‘Here, stick another one in there, Murray.’

Hey, wow, you noticed I’m here.

Brett says, ‘Give him a break, Kenny…’

What, you’re buying this round?

‘…He hasn’t said how he’d spend his win yet. Tell us, Murray. Then you can get the beers in.’

‘Er…I don’t really know,’ I say, because…Well, I really don’t know. I don’t have a dream, unless you count getting Megan back (not sure a lottery win would do it) or being promoted to Account Director (Detergent Brands). Endless lists on the backs of envelopes have more or less proved that I’m devoid of credible ambition.

‘There must be something,’ Brett prods. ‘Just make it up.’

He’s right, there must be something. Even Vince, who usually never projects beyond the next ten minutes, has an ambition.

I’m not talking about putting it all on red, which as far as I could tell, came out of nowhere. I’m referring to the Official Vince Douglas Dream. Vince is like every creative. None of them wants to be doing ads forever. Nearly every copywriter I know is working on his Novel (though they’re so conditioned to thinking in thirty-second chunks that they rarely make it past page two). Similarly, every art director wants to Direct—prefer-ably Cate Blanchett and Halle Berry in a twenty-first century Thelma and Louise, but, frankly, they’d take Police Academy 12 if it came down to it.

Vince is the exception. He longs to break out of ads, but he has no wish to become the next Ridley Scott. His dream involves cunning, bravado and a miniature submarine. Ironically, it was inspired by a film—an action flick about a sunken nuclear sub. The crew spent a couple of hours running out of oxygen while outside Kurt Russell or Chuck Norris or whoever attempted rescue in a little yellow submersible. I can’t give you much more detail than that because I didn’t see it. I’d sooner have typhus-dipped slivers of bamboo shoved under my fingernails than sit through one minute of a film about my personal idea of hell. Vince saw it seven times though, munching his popcorn and thinking, What if you put the docking mechanism on the top of the rescue sub instead of the bottom and went up instead of down? In short, this is the plan: buy sub, sail up and down Med on lookout for millionaires’ yachts, dive beneath them, dock, make hole, climb in, clear the loaded sods out of boat and home, cruise off into deep blue yonder.

Sounds slightly more insane than putting it all on red, but…

I cannot stress enough how deadly serious he is about this. He has spoken to submarine makers and even drawn up a business plan—which he only just stopped short of taking to the small-business advisor at NatWest. He even nags Brett to begin every one of their TV scripts with Open on miniature submarine in the hope that he’ll get to shoot it and do some real live research. Bizarrely, their Cats Undersea script for Pura Kitty Litter came within a whisker’s breadth of making it onto the telly. As far as I can tell—though I have to say I’m no expert in the field—his plan is more or less flawless. Every time someone proposes a but, Vince has an immediate and convincing answer.

There is one problem, actually. Everyone that Vince has ever shared a beer with knows about it. If Trevor McDonald ever announces, ‘And now let’s go to our reporter in Monaco for more on that daring underwater robbery…’ a couple of thousand people will scratch their heads and try to remember the name of the drunk who was sounding off in the pub about magnetised docking tubes.

‘I’m sorry, Brett. I pass,’ I say finally. ‘Don’t know how I’d spend it.’

‘What’re you asking him for?’ Vince sneers. ‘You know what he’d do. Buy a Volvo, a cottage in the Cotswolds and invest the rest in the fucking Nationwide.’

Well, I’d have said the Woolwich, but it doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

‘Leave him be. There must be something you wanna do, Murray,’ Brett says.

‘I’ve always fancied the idea of pony trekking in the Andes,’ I say nervously.

‘That is fucking cool,’ Vince splutters—to my amazement because to the best of my recollection I have never had an idea that I would consider cool, let alone Vince.

‘Is it?’ I ask, wincing as I wait for the rug to be whipped from beneath me.

“Course it is. Buy your conk candy at source. Cut out the middleman—’

That isn’t what I had in mind, as it happens.