The Last Act of Adam Campbell

by Andy Jones

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

'Astoundingly good. Brave, wickedly funny and profoundly affecting. Wow!' Miranda Dickinson

'Abig-hearted, funny, hugely emotional and uplifting novel - I loved it!' Rachael Lucas

What readers have said about The Last Act of Adam Campbell:

'One of the most beautiful books I've read this year'
5*

'Brave, wickedly funny and profoundly affecting.'
5*

'Andy Jones is the master of tugging at your heart strings'
5*

'Filled with love and fun and a story of friendship'
5*


A year can go quickly. Particularly when it's your last.

Adam had a good life: a job he enjoyed, a nice house, a loving partner and a bright six-year-old daughter. Then he cheated on his partner. Then she kicked him out of their home. And then he was given approximately twelve months to live.

Despite the devastating news, Adam is determined to turn his life around before it finally runs out. Help comes in the form of an ex-junky, a cantankerous train driver, a nun experiencing a crisis of faith, and a teenager intent on losing her virginity - all living on borrowed time, all desperate to feel alive before their time is up.

Release date: January 9, 2020

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Chapter 1

Adam has been dying for eight weeks now, but he isn’t getting any better at it. The fixation with time, the almost irresistible drag towards panic, the maudlin fascination with metaphor.

The fixation with time, for example, is not restricted to his too-few remaining months, but encompasses the smaller increments also; the start of a new day, the stealthy passing of an hour, the slow sweep of a minute, the inexorable tick of the kitchen clock – the hands moving forward, forward, forward, but the time counting backwards now, progressing steadily from some meagre number towards a final zero. Dr Sam suggested Adam stop wearing a watch. Adam did as the psychologist suggested, but you can’t escape time. Sitting now in his parked car, listening to the engine cool and creak, he looks at the dashboard clock and sees that he still has eight minutes and a handful of diminishing seconds before the session starts. He should have left the house eight minutes later, used that time to drink a cup of coffee, read an article in the paper, put the dishes away, listen to a track, or maybe two, by Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye or Johann Sebastian Bach – so many songs, so little . . . time.

The eight minutes are now seven, and Adam sits in his car, staring through the window at the carefully designed, sympathetically painted hospice, set out here on the border between the city and the surrounding suburbs. Set, if you like, on the border between one place and the next. The brochure makes much of the four acres of surrounding land; the trees, the lake, the view of distant hills – and they are, as advertised, spectacular. The leaves are fading from green now, moving through the spectrum of yellows, umbers and reds. Dying with – and here’s that compulsion to metaphor – a style and grace that Adam can only envy.

‘We’re all dying,’ a sympathetic friend might say, and more than a few have.

The cliché is well meant, but this pedantry is the privilege of the living, which, Adam supposes, is why he is here – in the land of the dying. In many ways, Adam is approaching his end the way a baby approaches life; clumsily, bewildered, frightened and with no small amount of tears. This crisis is, literally, existential.

And now, the familiar tightness across his chest and abdomen, the squeamish awareness of his wet heart beating faster behind his bones, a sensation of confinement and futility. Dr Sam taught Adam to focus on a single spot and slow his breath in order that his heart and mind follow.

He focuses on a single leaf, flattened against the windscreen, smooth edged and shaped like an eye or a teardrop. The colour scheme a mottled sunset of orange and brown, the veins sharp and stark like black lightning, a surviving patch of vivid green clinging tight to life. Adam concentrates his attention on the stubborn swathe of green, and breathes in to a count of one, two, three, four . . . and out to the same tempo. In . . . and out . . . and . . .

Half a year ago, Heather had insisted he leave the home they had shared for more than ten years. Three weeks ago – the enthusiastic tumour a newly named thing – he had pleaded with her to take him back in. A concession rather than reconciliation. Allowing Adam to spend his limited months under the same roof as his six-year-old daughter.

Nothing resolved; everything simply further fucked up.

He quit work and moved into the spare room, entertaining an idealised vision of Adam Campbell making the very best of this very bad situation. Stoic and pragmatic in the face of the inevitable, he would make Mabel’s packed lunch in the morning, walk her to school, then fill his day with books, films, music and long lunches with dear friends. This done, he would collect Mabel from school, content and refreshed from a day well spent. He would help his daughter with her homework, play, create, impart wisdom and indulge. And long after Adam had gone, Mabel would remember those hours and days as a special time characterised by laughter and ice-cream and unaccountably good weather. His last months would be his best.

He would live even as he was dying. He would die well.

And yet. Two weeks ago, he had found himself struggling with George Eliot in the living room. Struggling with the turgid prose, struggling to get comfortable, struggling to block out the rhythmic whir of the motor insinuating poison through a silicon tube inserted into a major vein of his left arm – the pump, roughly the size of an old Walkman, bulky against his hip in the hospital-supplied bum-bag. And above that hum and drone, the insistent kitchen clock ticking in the next room. He put on music, something low and acoustic. For a moment it worked, smothering the murmuring motor, adding context to the slow Victorian novel. But the relentless, ruthless tick, tick, tick of the kitchen clock pushed through the spaces between the notes until it was all that Adam could hear.

He set down the book, walked through to the kitchen, lifted the clock from the wall, and swung it hard against the corner of the kitchen table. He swung again, smashing the glass cover and tin face, buckling the black hands and sending the batteries skittering across the tiles. He slumped to the floor, shaking and crying for the first time since the oncologist – I’m sorry, Adam – had delivered her own shattering blow.

Perhaps – as he bashed the clock face against the table and the clock hands tinkled to the floor – perhaps Adam felt this destruction would be cathartic. That he would laugh, cringe, mutter something whimsical about having needed only to remove the batteries. But there was no such sigh and no purging laughter. Just the sensation of roiling waves inside his head and belly, of the walls closing in on him like coffin boards.

And all of this at eleven-fifteen on a Monday morning.

Eight weeks ago, when the doctor had laid it all out – Months, Adam. Perhaps a year – there had been less than a week left in August. The last of the true summer months. And Adam’s immediate thought – the bargaining stage, he supposes, albeit out of sequence, out of time – had been: Give me one more Christmas. And then, denial, anger: Fuck that; give me two. The anger had lent Adam strength. He felt, even as he sat there absorbing his diagnosis, that this defiance might sustain him.

It sustained him for seven weeks. Seven weeks during which he broke news, made arrangements, bargained with the mother of his child and returned to the home he had left six months previously under an altogether different shadow. But the defiance (as all medicines must) stopped working, and Adam reduced the kitchen clock to smithereens.

He cleaned up the mess, sanded the splinters from the corner of the table and in doing so found the legs somewhat loose. He fixed them next. Screwdriver in hand, Adam moved through the rooms, tightening hinges and handles and rails. He changed a dead light bulb in the bathroom, and bled the radiators ready for autumn – the morbid nomenclature of these tasks not escaping Adam’s attention.

He made a sandwich and ate most of it, consigned George Eliot to the recycling and watched a Monty Python DVD. He collected Mabel at ten past three and they played and drew and watched cartoons.

By the end of his seventh week of dying, every door in the house swung silently and true, every crack had been vanished and every bulb burned bright. The following Monday, with nothing else reparable besides his mind, Adam sat in Dr Sam’s office, focused on a single spot and slowed his heartbeat with his breath. They talked about mortality, fear, and the slow process of adjustment.

When Adam left work, his co-workers gave him a card and a bottle of thirty-year-old whiskey in a black and gold presentation box. These colleagues observe a code of flippancy – a compulsion to reduce significant events (weddings, births, divorce) to nothing more than banter. And Adam – some words expected of him – was tempted to joke that at least he had outlasted this single malt in its coffin-like box. But this, he sensed, this would be pushing the code beyond its limits.

Nevertheless, he felt a duty to show bravado – ‘No time like the present, right?’ – and had begun unwrapping the foil from the neck there and then. His boss, just a few years older than Adam, had gently taken the bottle from him. ‘Save it,’ he said, patting Adam’s wrist. ‘Save it.’ And there were tears standing in the man’s eyes. Later, several drinks down in a crowded bar, the same man had said to Adam: ‘We’re all dying, when you think about it.’

‘He meant well,’ Adam told Dr Sam.

‘But . . .?’

‘Well, besides being a cliché, it’s bullshit, isn’t it? He’s not dying, not actually dying. Not like . . . not like me.’

‘ “We were born to die”,’ Sam had said, his delivery telling Adam the words weren’t his own. And in response to Adam’s silent enquiry: ‘Romeo and Juliet.’

Adam nodded. ‘I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well it’s a damn sight more snappy, I’ll give him that.’

A short laugh from Dr Sam; a tilt of the head inviting further comment.

‘It’s kind of bleak,’ Adam said. ‘Don’t you think? The idea that we’re doomed from the outset. From the day we’re born.’

‘When you put it like that: doomed. But what about destined? Does that change anything?’

‘ “We’re all dying”,’ Adam said. ‘It diminishes what I’m going through. Trivialises it.’

Dr Sam nodded at this.

‘It suggests me and Derek are in the same boat, dealing with the same bad hand . . .’

The same rotten pancreas.

‘But the other one . . .’

‘ “We were born to die”,’ repeated Sam.

‘It’s about inevitability. And it might be bleak, but at least it doesn’t trivialise anything. It’s . . . honest, I suppose. That’s the best I can do. Sorry.’

Sam had seemed pleased by this.

‘Did I pass?’ Adam asked.

‘Do you know why Shakespeare has endured for so long?’ Sam said, then, answering his own question: ‘He understood the human condition. Love, lust, fear, ambition. Death. He was particularly insightful on the subject of death, in my opinion.’

Adam, sensing there was more to Sam’s discourse than an English lesson, sensing that the man was steering them somewhere and was soon to arrive, simply nodded and waited.

‘Shakespeare understood our fear and fascination with mortality. He doesn’t pretend death isn’t tragic, but he shows us it can also be noble, beautiful, necessary. He shows us—’

‘That we’re born to die?’ Adam interjected, and perhaps there was a note of cynicism in his quick reply.

Sam had smiled. ‘That death is a part of life. The problem with this,’ he said, using his palms to indicate both himself and Adam, ‘is that – like your colleague – I’m not “in your boat”. But I know men and women who are. A small group of us meet once a week and . . .’ Sam laughed, a small apologetic sound. ‘We talk.’

‘About Shakespeare?’

‘Amongst other things.’

‘I’m not really . . . I studied geography.’

‘It’s not a literary thing,’ Sam said. ‘Nothing academic. I think you’d like them.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you at least think about it?’

Adam thought about it. He thought about it at home that night. He thought about it in the empty house the following day. And, really, what else was he going to do on a cold Thursday afternoon? After all, there are only so many clocks a man can smash.

‘Life is a process of adjustment,’ Dr Sam had said. ‘And death is no different.’

Adam shifts his attention now from the leaf to the dashboard clock and sees he is one minute late for group therapy with Dr Sam and half a dozen others who are unlikely to receive calendars this Christmas.

He climbs out of the car and heads towards the entrance.

Chapter 2

The hospice is divided into quadrants, arranged in a cross formation around the central hub of reception and open-plan coffee shop. The seating is soft, the framed prints colourful but subdued, even the flowers in their vases project an attitude of empathy and decorum.

The quadrants are named – pleasingly, to Adam’s mind – after the seasons, and a smiling receptionist directs him to a meeting room at the far end of summer. Adam declines the offer of an escort and, using the supplied floor plan, makes his way north-west past private rooms, an art studio and a physiotherapy centre. In other seasons, the map lists a hairdresser, crèche and non-denominational chapel. There is an atmosphere of quiet bustle, camaraderie and optimism and it makes Adam want to run screaming to the car park, maybe kicking over a vase of empathetic orchids in passing.

He rounds a final corner, arriving at a closed door painted in a soothing green that merely intensifies his instinct to turn and run. He hears laughter from inside the room, and checks the embossed plaque – Summer: 4.b. – against the room number scribble on his floor plan. This is it. He reaches for the door handle, closes his hand around the cool metal . . .

A sound behind him, of someone shifting position or taking a step.

The girl might be as young as sixteen, but is unlikely to be much older than twenty.

‘Are you here for the . . .’ Adam hesitates to complete the question. Because to ask if she is here for the group, is to ask this girl – who doesn’t look old enough to buy a stiff drink – if she is dying.

‘It’s my first time,’ says the girl.

Adam fights an urge to close his eyes and sigh. Feels an impulse – which he resists – to hug this girl and tell her how sorry he is.

‘Me too,’ he says. ‘I’m Adam.’

The girl nods. ‘Laura.’

And again, laughter from inside.

A look passes between Adam and Laura. Adam shrugs: Shall we?

Laura removes her right hand from her pocket and shows Adam a dull and tarnished fifty-pence coin. She tosses the coin high, catches and covers it on the back of her left hand. She looks at Adam.

‘Tails.’

Laura looks at the coin, nods and returns it to her pocket. ‘Lead on, Adam.’

Chapter 3

The chatter stops as the two newcomers walk into the room. Laura, half hidden behind Adam, counts the faces tilted towards them – five excluding the doctor, all somewhere past fifty with the exception of a single guy who she puts in the vicinity of thirty. This man wears a baseball cap, and a gold stud in his left ear. Crude, possibly hand-drawn tattoos show on both wrists, vanishing up the sleeves of an ill-fitting checked shirt.

‘Tom,’ says the man, and Laura fades back into Adam’s shadow.

Dr Sam rises from his chair, arms extended and wide. Wild-haired and bicycle-clipped, he looks more like a busker than a clinical psychologist. ‘You came,’ he says. ‘Wonderful, great. Come in, take a seat.’

There are three free chairs in the circle and Adam takes one adjacent to an older woman who shakes his hand and whispers a name Laura doesn’t catch. There are two seats left: one next to Tom, the other beside a kindly-looking woman who could be the same age as Laura’s mother. Both hold invitations in their eyes. Tom smiles, as if daring Laura to sit beside him; the woman looks at her with something more urgent and Laura walks across the circle of chairs to sit beside her.

‘Erin,’ says the woman. She touches Laura’s wrist and her sympathetic smile makes Laura look away.

Sam claps his hands gently together. ‘As we have two newcomers, perhaps we’ll go around the circle and introduce ourselves. I’m Sam. Some of you – Adam, for example – know me from our individual sessions. Others – like Laura – have been referred from elsewhere. All of which I mention for nothing more than preamble. It doesn’t matter how you came to be here, what matters is that you are here now.’

Erin glances across the room to the last remaining empty chair, and Laura notices other members of the group doing likewise.

‘This is your group,’ Sam says to the room as a whole. ‘Take the sessions where you will, share what you want, and only what you want. I’m simply here to moderate, nudge and bring a box of books. Okay, enough from me.’ He gestures to the lady on his left. ‘This is Pat.’

Pat has smooth, plump skin with simple make-up and entirely pencilled-on eyebrows. She wears a pale grey headscarf printed with images of various breeds of dog.

‘Hi,’ she says, and she places her index finger against the poodle at her temple: ‘Little b— bugger just here. Gliob— blastoma. Although not so . . . not so little any more. So if I say anything daft, don’t hold it against me.’ She turns to Adam. ‘It feels strange to say welcome, under the c— circumstances. But, well, I hope you enjoy the g— g— group. I hope you enjoy it as much as I have.’

‘Thank you, Pat. I’m Adam, and I’m . . .’ Glad to be here? Pleased to meet you? But he isn’t glad, he isn’t pleased, and he feels it’s important – here more than anywhere, perhaps – to be honest. ‘I’m new to this. But . . . Dr Sam spoke highly of you all. So, here I am.’

A man wearing a football shirt laughs. ‘Can’t trust them doctors. No offence, Sam.’

Sam smiles, the corners of his eyes folding easily into well-worn grooves. ‘None taken. And thank you Adam.’

Sam nods at the upright gentleman to Adam’s left.

‘I’m Raymond,’ says the man in a pleasant Scottish brogue. Square of shoulder, clean-shaven and wearing an impeccably ironed shirt, he has the bearing of a retired army captain. ‘Prostate,’ he says with a curt nod. And he nods again to indicate that will be all.

The next lady along touches Raymond lightly on the shoulder. ‘Thank you, Raymond. That was lovely.’ And there is not one jot of irony.

‘I’m Erin,’ she says. ‘It was in my ovary.’

Erin touches the teal ribbon on her cardigan, a membership badge to a club no woman would want to belong to.

‘They took it out, but it . . .’ Erin puts her hand to her belly and rubs it in a widening circle that takes in her sides and chest and neck. ‘So . . .’ Erin shrugs, ‘there you go.’ She wipes a tear from her cheek and reaches into her bag, withdrawing a large Tupperware tub. ‘Nearly forgot.’

The inside of the container is dotted with condensation, and the tub hisses as Erin lifts the lid. The smell, when it reaches Adam’s nostrils, is both sweet and acrid – it brings to mind over-ripe fruit, vegetable peelings, compost.

‘Spinach, goji berries, ginger and turmeric,’ Erin says. ‘I call them chemuffins. Like chemo, but in a muffin.’

Adam laughs politely. ‘Sounds . . . good.’

He catches the eye of the man in the football shirt. The man shakes his head, subtly but emphatically, and the message is clear: No, Adam. They’re not.

Erin holds the tub towards Adam. ‘Please.’

He suffers waves of nausea, but the sickness is at low tide now and Adam’s specialist has impressed upon him the importance of taking in sufficient calories. He selects the smallest muffin available. Erin offers the box to Laura, but Laura has read the room – the pinched lips and flared nostrils – and declines politely.

‘Just eaten. But thank you anyway.’

‘Anyone else?’

The assembled bodies mutter excuses and make apologetic gestures of firm refusal.

‘I’ll leave them here,’ Erin says, placing the tub on the floor, ‘in case anyone changes their mind.’

Adam bites into his muffin and knows instantly that no one will. ‘Lovely,’ he says around clenched teeth, and Pat touches him gently on the knee. She taps it once, twice, as if to say: Good boy.

This business done, Erin turns to Laura, and as she does, Adam slips the revolting lump of calories into his jacket pocket.

Laura puts a thumbnail between her teeth, removes it, adjusts the scarf bundled around her neck, clamps her hands between her knees. ‘I’m Laura,’ she says. ‘Stage four skin cancer. Well, melanoma, but same difference, I suppose. I’ve got three mets in the brain.’ Erin makes a small noise of anguish. ‘But . . . they’ve got me on immunotherapy; sort of the new thing, so . . .’ She wavers her palm up and down. ‘So I guess we’ll see.’

She turns to the man in the football shirt. His hair is shaved close to his skull, but on closer inspection – the islands and continents of dark stubble in a sea of pink skin – she sees this is done out of necessity rather than choice or affiliation.

‘Thank you, darling,’ says the man.

‘Laura,’ says Laura.

‘Course, course you are. Thank you, Laura. I’m Vernon,’ he says, addressing this to Laura and then to Adam. ‘Cancer of the bowel, spread all over the shop. I’ve had the lot – surgery, radio, chemo, trials, you name it, but . . . well, here we all are. The end of the line club.’

There is a beat of silence as the room waits for a response; for some objection, perhaps, to this brutal candour. None comes.

‘No use in dressing it up,’ says Vernon. ‘Get enough of that at home.’ And there are several low murmurs of agreement. ‘So, yeah, that’s me.’

‘It certainly is,’ says the young man with the baseball cap and tattoos. And I’m Tom.’ His voice, now that he’s used it to form more than a single syllable, is cracked and thin.

He has a long curving scar from the hinge of his jaw to the hollow between his collarbones; neat and almost certainly surgical. Laura’s hand goes to the concealing silk scarf piled around her own neck.

She has lost count of how many scarves she owns, but it seems her mother can’t leave the house without bringing a new scarf back with her. ‘To keep you warm,’ her mother says, regardless of the month. Or ‘It matches your eyes.’ Or your coat, or your shoes, or that pair of socks your aunty bought you. But what her mother is saying, of course, is ‘This will hide the scar where the surgeon removed your lymph nodes.’

Wrapping me in cotton wool. Or silk, or cashmere or merino wool, just so long as we keep that scar hidden.

The young man with the tattoos points to his own scar. ‘Tonsil cancer,’ he says. ‘Which is a right liberty considering I had ’em out when I was nine.’

Laura leans forward. ‘You’re joking.’

Tom shakes his head. ‘Tiiiny bit left,’ he says, ‘and a tiny bit is all it takes, apparently.’ He has the voice of an old smoker, but there is a lisping aspect too that slides over the words waste and ice-cream. ‘Spread, too, so they took a bit of my tongue for good measure. Still, my mum always said I talked too much.’ Tom takes a sip from a bottle of water and winces.

He rests his hand on the empty chair to his left. ‘No Nadeem today?’

Sam smiles a smile that perhaps they had all been anticipating. ‘Nadeem had a bad few days. Some complications.’

‘Is he . . .?’

‘He’s in hospital. I had an email from his wife last night. Sending Nad’s apologies for missing group.’

Some affectionate laughter.

‘He’s okay, though?’ asks Pat.

‘He’s not good.’

‘When will he be back?’ Erin asks. ‘I expect he’ll be back next week?’

Adam watches this slow teasing out of the obvious fact concerning this man he has never met, and – to judge from Sam’s expression – never will.

‘His wife has asked me to pass on Nadeem’s email address, for those that don’t have it already.’

Vernon clasps his hands behind his head. ‘Shit. Sorry, I . . .’ He shakes his head. ‘Shit.’

Sam leans forwards, faces Vernon with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped lightly together. His posture invites the man to continue.

‘It’s just . . .’ Vernon shakes his head. ‘Empty chairs,’ he says, his voice slowing, quietening and trailing off. ‘Empty chairs waiting to happen.’

Adam watches the slowly settling reactions. Watches the doctor shift his attention to Laura. Sam mouths Okay? And Laura nods, although Adam – well versed in bravado – sees the slowness, the heaviness, in this simple movement.

It occurs to him that perhaps this – the steady ebb of members – is part of the point. The way a therapist might present an arachnophobe with a large spider in a glass jar. Exposing and then inuring the patient to the thing he fears.

Silence falls about the room, and the members of the group reach into bags, pockets and folders, each producing a thin sheaf of paper, some crisp, others creased and dog-eared as if from repeated handling.

Sam rises from his chair and hands a set of stapled-together pages to Laura and another to Adam.

Adam scans the evenly spaced text, his eyes drifting over pages of quotes, each attributed to William Shakespeare and referencing the play or sonnet from which it originates. His eye is drawn to the word ‘minutes’, and he reads:

 

‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that wh. . .