when he started giving books to me, “I didn’t realise I already had a copy of this,” he would say. “You can have it; it’s a double. “There is a very specific way of stacking books,” my father tells me, back in the ward. We are the next ones in the queue. “There is a way of making the most of the space. I actually have a book on the best way of stacking books. And it’s not just books up there, there are magazines as well. I used to get Analog but I finally cancelled the subscription when I got ten years behind on reading them.” If you were to go into the loft now you would struggle to move. There is a small but clearly defined maze of walkways through the precarious towers of tomes. I have my own little section, books I left behind, slowly being consumed by those around them, becoming part of the wider collection. That’s when the disease eventually becomes undeniable. You can either cut it out or live with it and wait for it to consume you. My father’s name is called and the two nurses ask me whether I’ve been before – as if it’s some kind of activity day – and I say I haven’t. My father is lying down on a slab and they start to screw a mask over his face. I pretend to listen to the nurses explain what they are doing, giving them encouraging sounds that I am paying attention. But I’m not. My father won’t get the opportunity to finish reading all of his books (he
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never read his first, Thunderball), but that was a truth he came to accept long before masks and radiotherapy. He has read 1,900 but owns 6,250, with 800 marked as ‘in progress’. This is his best estimate. But that day of reckoning is far in the future, because this time the radiotherapy works. So to my father, the final tally remains a mystery, and so the loft does to me. But one day, I will have to climb the ladder again and navigate those walkways and avoid putting my foot through the ceiling. When the host dies, so does the tumour, but the legacy is left behind, the genetic predisposition. Cancer runs in the family, and maybe so does the addiction.