Nathan’s mouth cancer got worse. It was the cigarettes of course and the futility and the lies he had to face within the system. When the mouth cancer first appeared like that oyster shaped and white coloured thing that it was, Nathan thought he had AIDS. Google said you’ve got AIDS! He should see the GP and Nathan in the meantime said to himself that it was nothing. It.
“It’s not cancer,” the GP had said originally without even a goodness gracious me.
A month later after spotting the reoccurrence of the cancer and some six months after seeing the Willy Overman, Nathan insisted that he see a specialist again like any normal person would. Sadly, the specialist he picked at the hospital where he was born and where this doctor was practising more than comfortably was Willy Overman.
Willy Overman is every specialist; out for himself, out for private medical cover, family and friends are welcome; plush office which was so fucking big you could house refugees, at least in Bill Overman’s head office anyway and that was in the city… Willy Overman. Specialist at large.
As for the first time he went to get the original cancer checked out, NDIS would take him to the specialist’s clinic at Glenelg and Nathan would be told by a biopsy made on the second appointment at that big office… The lure of the hospital that first time where he had been born at Glenelg a good place to drum up business for Willy Overman with its teddy bear pictures and homely come on et al… The main office where the operations took place was away from that hospital… and where the biopsy took place. He told Nathan that the cancer wasn’t to be operated upon. Well, that’s what they said. There was no point. Not because it couldn’t be operated on but because Nathan was poor and he smoked. They didn’t like the look of this Yellow Star child, only to the point where he wasn’t charged a gap on his follow up appointment at the mercy of Nathan’s obviously empty wallet. They looked at his cover on private health insurance and ignored him. Nathan must remain ignorant… of the system.
The biopsy cost $700 out of his pocket after Medicare. Not that Willy Overman would know or care or question that amount since all of the money went straight into the business and his and his partner in crime’s bank account.
There were no lymph nodes yet in Nathan’s arms and throat and the cancer was not yet a tumour of dangerous fist-like proportions, according to Willy. It was only a limp wrist cancer. Nathan liked Willy at first, but those cavernous offices with a lift meant too much money was spent on edifice and the gathering of riches and not enough on treatment, especially the poor. Possibly there were exceptions and Nathan could be one. That feeling hadn’t quite sunk in yet for an ignorant Nathan. That office that Willy Overman would soon hope would be his private hospital and probably already was.
Thus, when Nathan was told by Willy that the cancer was only two percent aggressive after the biopsy way back when, Nathan believed him because he was a specialist and specialists save lives and help people as it was a part of their hippocritical oath or something. And to quote How to Succeed in Business, Nathan had ‘a very tropical disease or something’… Nothing seemed amiss.
Judicious that the practitioner of oral cancer may be, Willy lied to Nathan, a white lie in Willy Overman’s own opinion. It was not a white lie in Nathan’s mind, as all the dirty poor Nathans with their worn-out arseholes were nothing but scum to be returned to the earth. To be harsh on Willy Overman.
Really, Nathan was slowly dying because he knew it, because he was Nathan. He knew when they didn’t operate to take the cancer out that he really did have cancer and that he must face the reality that two years of stress in the borstal and despite sixteen years of not smoking meant death. This would be the realisation of a new dawn… of cynicism and wonder. How could the child inside be so betrayed and so simple minded to think that the medical profession really didn’t care, or would let that child discover the truth for themselves. That they decided he should die ignorant. It added up somehow. The bucket list had been done like his cock for which he had been rejected for almost all his life. The Yellow Star child called Nathan could possibly be put in the concentration camp of what passed for the socialist medical care system…. Like when his family signed him up for mental illness way back in the beginning…. It was cheap too if you persisted this system, just like the life that flashed before their eyes when they realised the system cheated them if you didn’t cheat the system… And, yes, they would take care of him. The family of the system. Oh boy could they ever, thought Nathan.
Why did Nathan panic suddenly when the tumour of the oyster grew tendrils and his throat got sore along with the tongue itself? Why?
Because he still believed in people like Willy Overman as he treated people in Nathan’s poor suburb of Elizabeth where Willy practised also in yet another of his clinics. And a bit of death and suffering in the meantime too. Nathan felt sad and a little confident as he tackled the system once again on his doorstep and on a whistlestop doorstop. The dragons at the door would turn out to be foreskin zealots on their way to lunch at Willy Overman’s local clinic… or so it seemed.
The Pakistani GP Nathan had seen in the beginning was as hopeless as the specialist. His credentials questionable and his motive money. No money but a soothing – ‘it’s not cancer’… For too long the GP had lied about it not being cancer… and so he went to the specialist that time. They would continue to lie to the little Bobby Driscoll inside, or the little Bobby, the boy inside the man that was Nathan, who still believed in the system enough to warn others of its pitfalls. Just like in the movie The Window. Dead as a murder victim and lying in Potter’s Field.
NDIS took him to the cancer centre at a local private hospital cancer centre and he was immediately brushed off to the local public hospital.
“What do you think we do? Treat cancer here?,” rang in the cash register voice of the nurse at the cancer counter, as breast and later stages of other cancers took were preferred.
Nathan knew for the first time he went to Bill Overman for that biopsy that the cost of the operation, were it offered, could have possibly been worked out somehow. It might have cost him his tongue and his ability to speak, but it could have been done. So-to-fucking-speak never again of cancer! The cancer would have been dealt with finally. Sadly, it appeared discretion had been used in the case of Nathan and that was he was a dead man in the eyes of Willy Overman. Perhaps Willy Overman spared Nathan a long and tortuous death as a result under medical care… and now Nathan somehow had to learn not to spare himself the hangman’s noose when it came down to excruciating pain or at least his own innocent feelings. And they all scoffed on Red Planet and in real life. Such was the system.
Nathan imagined he went to see Willy Overman in the specialist centre at the private hospital, or did he? He saw a child there, a boy waiting in Willy Overman’s private specialist office waiting room ready to be seen by another specialist for a knee reconstruction … according to Red Planet anyway. He was just a 12-year-old boy with crutches or a bandage on his legs as he went to see one of Willy’s specialist friends with his mother for a cure long before the age of innocence would end in reality. It was the type of thing Willy Overman and his specialists would cure. Since to them, his mother’s bank account was so fucking cute. Nathan then imagined the boy seeing Willy even though Willy was a ears nose and throat specialist…
“Will I walk again Willy, will I?”
“You’ll walk again little Bobby,” said the specialist as the boy saw Nathan as a dead man walking from the practice, dressed like a nightmare in some nightmare scenario. Something about cancer.
“Will Lassie lick my arsehole Willy… Will he?”
“Of course, he will little Bobby.”
The boy had been flirting with Nathan about eating donuts melting on his cock at Maslin Beach as others boys do as well but that came later after he left the clinic. But is that dealing indecently? Is that being a Norval? What is a Norval anyway? … There were so many and it was so normal in the world to be a Norval that it didn’t matter to Nathan. It too was part of another system…and Nathan knew he wasn’t a Norval. And it seemed that Nathan for all those years had kept his mind clean and his soul as pure as his circumcised heart that he didn’t even know what a Norval was. And he did now and he was free of the bondage of being a Norval and being unbaptised, he was free of the guilt of the church. Those Norval practitioners of underage sex on Red Planet which was oh so too hideous to describe. If you get my meaning… wink wink nudge nudge say no more say no more… It was a question of steering a course through Red Planet without corrupting or selling your soul into becoming a Norval … But you get that when you’re Nathan. Or anyone else on Red Planet might get the concept of not being an acolyte of Norvalism. It was all a dream of course. Except for one thing… Cancer.
And that’s all a specialist can do is cure you. All the worries and all the pain and sorrow of real life could just disappear in the waiting room of the specialist. Just by seeing the specialist could do the same. But Nathan despite presenting himself that day and the fact Willy Overman was there in the specialist centre office, Nathan was not allowed at all to make an appointment, or any other, according to the receptionist, who was on her way to lunch and insisted she really wasn’t there at the time. In spirit anyway. Or am I underlining once again the flaws of a hypocrite?
The line at the Lyall McEwan the same day was small. It was the public hospital practice around the corner where Nathan was again nearly turned back at the reception window by the first lesbian dragon. Probably a Norval but who’s to judge?
“He thinks he’s circumcised,” she later joked with a colleague. And I’ll show him was her attitude. However, the younger women behind the counter who processed Nathan were more simpatico and let him go through the rigmarole of regular patients in the emergency room which seemed to be a place to sleep off psychosis and drug induced hangovers which the medical staff also seemed to think Nathan was suffering from. It was also a pick-up joint for some of the initiated… drugs or whatever.
Nathan sat in the then sparsely populated waiting room and watched as the hours passed and the crowd grew to the point of standing room only… from the Kenyan woman with an upset stomach caused by too much spicy food to none too bright children who had fallen or been dropped on their head. Not to mention the Vietnam veterans who talked to Nathan about their experiences as they waited for a fall to be treated. They got priority he hoped despite everything and watched an eighty-five-year-old forego getting a wheelchair to prove he was still the man who played AFL for North Adelaide Football Club once upon a time.
Nathan waited three hours before he went to the head nurse. It had appeared the doctors started processing patients an hour after Nathan had arrived if there were even doctors there at all, since they were all possibly on their rounds or knew the futility of those in the emergency waiting room. Yes, they were short staffed as the newspapers often claimed… isn’t that so?, thought Nathan. Where was George Clooney and Catherine Lahti and cute Patrick Dempsey? They were all enjoying themselves somewhere in the Greek Islands or Bali with each other as everyone else lay around dying. Thus Red Planet.
This second dragon at the door was the head nurse, who was spent and aged and had possibly seen it all. She didn’t really care. They reached the point where they didn’t care anymore and the hardened types were usually dealt to somewhere like palliative care. This one obviously had too many kills to count on two hands. Palliative care at the door of the emergency room. She read Nathan’s blood pressure and heart rate. Was she a volunteer? Are you the farmer?, as Withnail would say? She didn’t seem to be a nurse as she didn’t even put on the blood pressure monitor correctly. She too had paid lip service to Nathan.
“Will I be seen?”
“You might be One,” she pointed to him as if he were a poofter.
Once again it seemed the waiting room was a place to be deconstructed by staff members as rejects of society gathered there for something to do, their psyches fragmenting as they turned inward to cover their frustration… some playing Red Planet, Nathan guessed. Something which could be seen in their eyes. That inward pain. These people suffered in some way, even if it would be again as patients in a waiting room according to the hospital and waiting room palliative care. You could almost hear the dragons scoff again in the background.
If there was an angry person there it was Nathan, he thought to himself, as calm as ever. He took the blood pressure reading in his stride since it was slightly higher – for some reason… He also took the plastic hospital bracelet in his stride which the second dragon had put on his wrist. It was a sad state of affairs to have to ask a nurse to help you do that … rather than just sit there.
He still had hope of being seen. There maybe a hypocrite who would take pity. But these hypocrites heading the emergency room didn’t. Such was Nathan’s view of the medical system and hypocrisy. Soon to be erased like Nathan’s final illusions. To themselves they were wielding something powerful and, in their eyes – it was mercy of some sort… Perhaps Nathan would just go away. As Nathan watched the bruise on a six-year-old blond boy’s head fester, his mother soothed his Panadol affected head.
“We would have taken it out of you if you had stopped smoking,” was their slogan, then also their too late slogan, just to rub it in said an associate of Willy Overman earlier in the day, as Nathan was visited somewhere along the way on Red Planet by a doctor wandering around outside the hospital. And that’s as good as it gets, give up smoking or die in this new society which as it turns out is not society at all… Just a bunch of money hungry Nazis.
“We’re not society at all, but we’re good sounding boards aren’t we?,” summed up the hypocrisy. As medical professionals they no longer existed, if throughout all eternity they ever existed at all for those who ever cared about anything. To be broad, thought Nathan about not being too precious about his own life.
The second dragon had looked at the large tumour or growth on Nathan’s tongue and Nathan’s hopes of seeing a doctor ended as, once he was processed, she told him he would be quickly ushered through to a prac nurse. Quickly, she said. Immediately. Instead, a brawny nurse from the mental health section emerged from the hospital into the waiting room and gave Nathan the once over before disappearing again never to be seen again… No prac nurse no pack drill otherwise ever arrived.
An hour later in the waiting room and Nathan went up to the second dragon again. The patients seemed to see the doctor once every half hour or something and it happened to not matter who had got there first even on the basis of emergency. Only a druggie who seemed to give the Oscar winning performance of the day in terms of being passed out in a wheelchair was ushered out of the waiting room quickly to rehab… to recover probably for the tenth consecutive time. I guess Nathan could have milked the system like that and just returned to borstal.
“We can see you later or you can go home?,” the second dragon motioned to the door. The power of suggestion being: forget it! You are down on the list and you have been forgotten.
Nathan decided to leave and left a half-eaten croissant which was his lunch and said to them all with a non-existent bow: “Thanks for seeing me… and thanks for the welcome.” Such are unforgettable memories in your life or the acceptance of death. Such was the feelings in the waiting room to tell them to all to get fucked. Which the crowd did on Red Planet afterwards anyway.
“Don’t worry, it’s only a wart,” was another of the nurses brush off lines in emergency.
The whole thing seemed ridiculous. I’d rather have AIDS thought Nathan. Not really, I guess. But at least people seemed to take pity on you like Princess Diana and you seemed to live longer from that than mouth cancer these days. Yes, he had seen the former boy queen who had been to prison sitting in the front bar of his favourite pub wearing a baseball cap kind of like a Pet Shop Boys cap and he had HIV or was on the verge of full-blown AIDS or alcoholism. He wouldn’t talk on Red Planet and seemed angry about his past and current state of affairs. Was this really Nathan’s future? To ponder death alone.
As for the affair of Nathan’s ‘wart’ or mouth cancer so to speak, there was no answer to be found at the Lyall. So next, Nathan went home and smoked foolishly and recklessly and waited for the next step on the way to the funeral he planned not to have. No memorial service either. Just a plaque at the Moon City Cemetery. Nathan Joad. Writer. They could spit on it, ejaculate on it, piss and fuck in front of it for all he cared. The boy queens could smudge their lipstick on it… that dusty forgotten and lonely old cemetery where nobody went …. Valentino would never have it so good.
Anyway, he woke the next day to a massive ejaculation viewed on remote viewing much the delight of a dwindling crowd of supporters. It seemed everyone hated Nathan on the frequency that was Red Planet on which he was marooned for all to read him. In reality, no one cared at all… Instead, they would escape reality and tell him on Red Planet that it’s a fucking disgrace that book they never read of his and also anything else he felt enthusiastic about was shit as well and as a result life like his own writing was pure shit… Nathan however knew their life was even shittier along with their consciences which had been laden with so much shit they didn’t know the difference. It was incredible and inedible, just like he now believed his book was, if only faeces were a delight on the end of their anal tongues…. Instead, Nathan preferred real literature and real life. And truth and trust. Things in life like nature and his own cock and not the effect of flushing his latest batch of Coco Pops down the toilet at three in the morning just to annoy everyone on his Red Planet frequency who couldn’t switch off… Maybe Nathan should be locked up for flushing if anyone understands what he meant. Red Planet and not red faced.
Nathan hoped to still use his cancerous tongue once the cancer was removed once upon a time. He hoped to still speak, still perform cunnilingus and still kiss like a teenager… But these were little more than hopes and dreams like life itself. The illusion was gone, and if it wasn’t it was going in terms of his view of the medical profession…
And yet he had already been written off… By the family, by friends, and now by the system yet again.
He had forgotten about Willy Overman for a while… Yes, the insensitivity Nathan had found among the medical profession and the nurses told Nathan something about his diagnosis and more. It was cancer and he would die from it eventually.
His mind went back to the follow-up appointment he had made with the specialist months earlier that the NDIS had failed to remind him and take him there and he had forgotten also. It was only a two percent cancer remember and not the growth he had shown the uneducated and sword of justice wielding ‘nurse’ at the Lyall. The ‘wart’ was just another part of the chaos which was Nathan’s inner world meeting the outside world. The maelstrom wasn’t insanity, it was real life. And if real life laughed and scorned Nathan it was because they all thought he was out of sync…
Is it a dream that he saw Willy Overman?
The time had come to see Willy Overman with that tendril and the veins plugged into the growth. So, could Willy perhaps lie again like his GP had about the fact it had possibly not grown at all? You could argue the fact it wasn’t there, that Nathan was seeing things! There was no cancer there I tell you, Nathan flourished like Peter Allen in a Panasonic ad. NO cancer at all. The insane thought that the oyster on his tongue was nothing… just a fucking optical illusion.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be right as rain in a few days,” to quote Monty Python about the fact that according to him it hadn’t grown and they would wait until it was too late and the lymph nodes in his arms and throat would be raised irreversibly. The hospital would love to charge to fix that on Medicare if the private practitioner had discretion or with the inclination to cure somehow and perhaps Nathan wouldn’t care either about paying a not too horrendous gap. He would want to live, wouldn’t he? Desperate for an extra month, week or even a day with radiation on top of that. If…
That was the broken dream about Willy Overman and the nightmare of it having already been contagious in the profession to the point where it was a plague he never knew existed. As for cancer as a contagious contagion? That’s another story any devil could dream of to end the world. Nathan’s only dream was to end himself.
Despite the previous day, Nathan still thought his tongue could be saved and the tumour removed and so he went back again to the private hospital around the corner where Willy Overman practised… It was on the way there that he spotted a flower growing beside the footpath… It was a beautiful purple and yellow and it was some sort of daisy he would pluck to take home from the dry and unkempt footpath. Instead, he kept walking and again asked to make an appointment.
Dr Willy Overman is on again today said a different receptionist who served him even though it was clear she didn’t want to serve Nathan.
“Can I please see him I have a mouth cancer which has grown?,” said Nathan who had also grown over the last twenty four hours.
“Well, he’s busy and you can’t make an appointment here anyway, you have to make it at…
“Yes, I know, his bloody cavernous office which he operates from,” thought Nathan.
He had been turned away again. Nathan couldn’t understand it. Was it his appearance? Or his manners? Surely, he had said please and had mentioned the word cancer…. What did he have to pull out of his mouth to show them, his tongue painted in black spots or something? He had cancer!
But no, sorry, computer says no…
He left and saw himself in the future, which did happen, as he dialled that big office with its fantastic rooms like something out of a Lord of the Rings novel or something equally as grand…
“Sorry, there’s no one here to take your call at the moment…” before the call got redirected into a labyrinth that even the cancel button on his phone couldn’t escape from. Then Nathan would call the receptionist at the private hospital specialist centre again of Bill Overman’s…
“Sorry we’re not taking calls at the moment,” was the answer. And they never did. Forewarned and foretold on Red Planet.
Therefore, you have it. Mouth cancer. Dead in two years. Specialists that lie for money, nurses who don’t care, receptionists who couldn’t give a fuck… especially if you’re old and poor like Nathan.
Nathan gave up on life that day for some reason with the sneaking suspicion it was all true anyway. And they all scoffed. And scoffed again as he heard them say again and again – It’s your funeral! If only he had given up smoking…
He plucked the flower selfishly on the way home to his unit and walked briskly back through the sunshine. On the way, he bumped into the claret-haired Karen at the complex where he lived and he almost offered her the flower for some reason….
“That Karen was a bit of a looker,” thought Nathan once upon a time despite the fact she was over seventy.
But he just kept walking… kept going, going and going until he was gone. This flower had lived a futile life. And it sat in Nathan’s unit like Nathan and died … quickly, over a couple of days.
Cult Film Alley 