Barbequed food gives you cancer, or God does. Cancer’s in the air, in your mobile phone, in the stuff you clean your oven with. If it’s not mutating those cells then it’s mutating those other ones. It’s patronising you from your box of cigarettes; it’s picking off your kids. It’s there or it isn’t. It’s got you or hasn’t.

It’s taken your loved ones or it’s about to.

So it’s a funny thing, cancer, in that it’s not at all. Everyone’s either got it, known it, or been really really pissed off by it. It’s like rain. It’s always affecting someone someplace. And cancer, well there’s some weird bias to it — it’s billed as the worst thing that can happen to a person but then again seems to happen to everyone anyway.

So why’s it still so surprising when it turns up? How come we’re still so gutted by it? And we are, and no mistake. We are devastated by it, ravaged by it. Even now it’s making me dead sad, and I’ve known about cancer since I was little. I know that sometimes it changes everything, brings mortality into sharp focus. Other times I know we’ll crack jokes or throw a different spin on it. Always we’ll write books about it; we’ll write brave memoirs of battling on, battling through. Remission, repeat, return. Terminal or not terminal — that’s the question. We’re totally obsessed with it. I’m totally obsessed with it. Morbidly. It’s called the big C, like that swear word, and it can get you there too.

You go without hearing ‘cancer’ in a day and you’ve not left your bed. Why? Because it’s the paradigm for about the only suffering we understand. We’re not being massacred or genocided, so our newspapers, they’ll bang on about cancer. We’re not being annihilated or oppressed or anything else, so cancer’s what we’re given to fret about.

Only people with cancer aren’t like that.

Cancer, it’s a horribly common way to go. It’s horrible because it ruins you and it’s common because when you get it, people just don’t care beyond your close family. Old, young, surprisingly middle-aged. Cancer, it claims and carries on, and sometimes it’s beaten and mostly it’s not. Is it luck or isn’t it? Is it just a risk we run for being advanced at everything else?

Some cranks, they blame cancer on you. Some cranks believe you get cancer because you’re not thinking positively enough. That’s what they say. They tell you you can beat cancer by thinking nice things. Thinking life’s not just living — it’s for enjoying. Strife doesn’t affect these people, because they’re too busy wishing cancer on people who don’t think like them.

These are the people that cancer gets, not the other way round. That’s one of my favourite jokes about cancer.

I’m a candidate for cancer. I’ve fairer skin than most, and the kind of moles you’ve got to keep at least an eye on. I drink, smoke, eat burnt toast on occasion. I’ve got an acid reflux condition I’ve never had diagnosed and my medic friends worry I’ll get the cancers in my eosophagus. But cancer doesn’t scare me, because some of the bravest people I know have cancer — and they’ve shown me that you don’t have cancer. You HAVE sex. You HAVE babies. You HAVE fun.

You don’t have cancer. You treat cancer. You irradiate cancer. You fight cancer. You beat it.

These people I know with cancer, they have made cancer a joke. It’s made them bald, made them cough blood, but they’re so fucking brilliant about cancer you can’t even explain it. One of them will die soon. The other will make it, but to them that’s cancer. Comes and goes. Wins some, loses some.

Anyway, he’s full of trivia and smokes a lot of pot, and since the two are mutually exclusive I get told a lot about the world and all the manly things he’s done and all the things I should do and lots of lurid things I probably won’t ever.

He’s the only man I’ve ever met who looks cool with a walking stick, a permatan and lung cancer.

Apparently he wants me to write his life for him but I tell him I’m too busy writing a semi-sequel to Colin, which is also polite code for ‘It makes me anxious’. Only he laughs at that and puts ketchup and mint sauce on his new potatoes.

But he’s got these magazines, my uncle; these detective magazines. He loves them. They’re all over the house.

I can’t tell him they’re creepy and I’m not even sure where he finds them because they’re significantly dated in appearance and look like they’ve been designed with fingerpaints.
The covers always feature these stock photos of 80s women experiencing some kind of TERROR and they’re splashed with the usual pullers about MURDER and TRUE CRIME and one, pointedly, saying, MY MUM’S BODY FELL OUT OF THE CUPBOARD.

I plonked down and had a flick through one earlier and it struck me that I’m no fan of crime writing. I mean I should be, but I’m not. My mum reads them — those anonymous-looking ones Tesco sell by the bucketload that make you jealous because you’ll never sell books by the bucketload from Tesco — and my gran does too, and then my uncle reads these things. And what they do in these detective magazines is they get a gruesome real-life crime and fictionalise the events so the murderers come across as quite polite and gamely till they’re hacking somebody, the victims totally useless, and the police these brazen heroes who’d sooner eat your face than talk to it. I don’t get it.

I don’t get crime fiction altogether.

I also have stark memories of watching Miss Marple with my gran. She seemed much larger then, though I don’t mean fat like pigs. Stark because I didn’t want to watch it; I wanted to play with my Lego. She said, ‘you’re always thinking about the next thing, and never enjoy the thing you’re doing.’ And I haven’t ever forgotten that – mainly on account of nothing’s changed.

She had all the books so essentially she was cheating but we watched this programme and some posh twerp got drowned in a bobbing apple bowl. Riveting.

All the way through I was convinced I knew who the killer was and all the way through she’d sort of smile wanly at me and say, ‘wait and see’. Course, it was the maid, that filthy street urchin, and why didn’t I see it as a socio-political allegory. She must’ve had two scenes. Two fucking scenes in an hour’s drama, and I was supposed to work that out. So I told her, I went, ‘That was unfair, there was no chance,’ and my gran, she shook her head and said, sagely, ‘No, Matthew – that was Agatha Christie.’

The point is maybe I’ll write a crime novel one day. That’ll show them. I’ll make sure everybody knows who the murderer is from page one and the twist will be there’s no twist.

What it is really is that my Dad’s been building a kitcar for over twenty years — and now he’s had to sell it on account of he can’t afford to finish it off and it’s been plonked under sheets for a couple of years.

Twenty years, We’re talking my age; leastways my brother’s age and certainly for longer than my sister’s been breathing. The car, it’s a Cobra replica – an AC Cobra – in British racing green.

It’s quite a lovely thing – a V8 engine strapped into a fibreglass body – and usually I’m not so fussed by cars.

But to understand my dad I guess I’ve had to because a) it’s been his life, and b) this was his longest project; the thing you’d tell friends about at school. ‘My dad’s building a rocket-car’, maybe, or things very much like that. Because it really is. Because if you strap a V8 to a fibreglass body you might as well be throwing a ramjet onto a bicycle. It’s as sleek as it’s silly. Dad used to race rocket cars too, see.

Used to throw Minis into tiny spaces or through tinier gaps and get trophies; used to drive fast cars up slow hills and win trophies for that too.

So why am I bothered? Sure I know it’s only a car. But probably it’s slightly because I have so many memories of it growing up — of playing hide and seek, lying under it, and getting fibreglass dust in my knees — and then it’s mainly because Dad’s eyes might’ve grown a little wet when the trailer pulled into the road.

Now he’s just pretending like it was just putting some bottles in the bottlebank, or taking some vinyl to a carboot. I think he keeps sighing and being philosophical about it, which makes it worse. My guts tighten a bit when I think about how much he’s put into it and for how long he’s talked about doing track-days and hill races in it.

Or maybe they tighten because most of my memories – and we’re talking even right back before my parents seperated — paint him as being his happiest when showing me the bits and bobs of this car.

Basically it’s that we’ve had our independence for a while and then everything’s gone slightly wrong so we’ve lost our self-dignity, money, food and the good grace not to just hurl ourselves off of something tall instead. Good. Right.

My brother, well he’s a bit smaller than me but he’s broader by two. He’s quite nice usually in so far as we get on for about ten minutes before he’s trying to stab me or before I’m bursting with frustration, but that’s what siblings are supposed to do, right, and always it’s much of a muchness.

Me and him, we’ve fought about an awful lot. He chews his food funny. I can’t watch him eat. He calls me a ‘bitch’. I call him a ‘thug’. He throws crates of beer at me. I sulk and slam doors. He resents my education. I resent his confidence. He thinks I’m lazy. I think he’s ignorant. He steals my t-shirts. I steal his soul. That’s a lie.

Anyway, he’s a DJ is what he is. He’s not a paid one, though possibly he should be. Leastways he’s good at it. At the moment he’s setting his turntables up in the room adjacent to mine – through a wall so thin you could maybe smell his trumps of an evening. It’s like he’s already testing my resolve not to dash my head on my windowsill. He keeps testing his speakers by dribbling insanely wobbly basslines through them, and it’s making me agitated on account of how I’m already trying to listen to something in weird time-signatures. All of it’s making my head wonk off. Furthermore I don’t really enjoy it.

Apparently he can’t decide what his name should be. I keep suggesting things like:

DJ Gronk.
DJ Googlewhack.
DJ Rinsespin.
DJ Pizza.
DJ Herod.
DJ Tripod.
DJ Formaldehyde.
DJ Hangover.
DJ Semaphore.

And so on. In fact I’ve realised you can DJ most nouns and verbs, but I’m often finding that they’re all bollocks anyhow, and nobody’s actually been brave enough to refer to themselves as DJ Noun. Which means I’m now called DJ Noun even though I’m not actually a DJ and even though I wouldn’t know how to jockey a disc if there was, say, a transformer who was a vinyl record that changed into a horse and asked me if I’d like to play on it.

Always you’ll get to the conclusion that DJ names are synonyms for relentlessly snorting cocaine, or about humans moving in strange and rapid ways.