The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

that is the sum of
these and yet something beyond them, and with the assorted uneasiness of the
whole. Two’s company, which is bad enough in all conscience, but one’s a crowd.
    I was
putting the Volkswagen into gear when a dull pain of irregular but defined
shape switched itself on in my left lower back, a little below the waistline.
It stayed in being for perhaps twenty seconds, perfectly steady in intensity,
then at once vanished. It had been behaving in this sort of way for about a
week now. Was it sharper this morning than when I had first noticed it, did it
come on more frequently and stay for longer? I thought perhaps it was and did.
It was cancer of the kidney. It was not cancer of the kidney, but that disease
whereby the kidney ceases to function and has to be removed by surgery, and
then the other kidney carries on perfectly well until it too becomes useless
and has to be removed by surgery, and then there is total dependence on a
machine. It was not a disease of the kidney, but a mild inflammation set up by
too much drinking, easily knocked out by a few doses of Holland’s gin and a reduction
in doses of other liquors. It was not an inflammation, or only in the sense
that it was one of those meaningless aches and pains that clear up of their own
accord and unnoticeably when they are not thought about. Ah, but what was the
standard procedure for not thinking about this one, or any one?
    The
pain came back as I was turning south-west on to the A595, and stayed
for a little more than twenty seconds this time, unless that was my
imagination. I thought to myself how much more welcome a faculty the
imagination would be if we could tell when it was at work and when not. That
might make it more efficient, too. My own was certainly unequal to the task of
suggesting how I would deal with the situation if my kidney really were under
some lethal assault. I had fallen victim to some pretty serious afflictions in
my time, but so far they had tended to yield to treatment. The previous summer
I had managed to check and even reverse the onset of Huntington’s chorea—a
progressive disease of the nervous system ending in total helplessness, and
normally incurable—simply by cutting down my intake of Scotch. A year or so
earlier, a cancer of the large intestine had begun retreating to dormancy as
soon as I stopped eating the local greengages and plums, gave up drinking two
bottles of claret a day and curbed my fondness for raw onions, hot pickles and
curry. A new, more powerful reading-light had cleared up a severe brain tumour
inside a week. All my other lesions, growths, atrophies and rare viral infections
had gone the same way. So far.
    That
was the point. Other people’s hypochondria is always good for a laugh, or
rather, whenever one gets as far as beginning to think about it, just fairly
good for a grin. Each case of one’s own is hilarious, as soon as that case is
past. The trouble with the hypochondriac, considered as a figure of fun, is
that he will be wrong about his condition nine hundred and ninety-nine times,
and absolutely right the thousandth time, or the thousand-and-first, or the one
after that. As soon as I had reached this perception, the pain in my back
underlined it elegantly by returning for about half a minute.
    I had
joined the A507 and was coming into Baldock without noticing anything I had
seen on the way or done to keep me on the way. Now that I was about to deal
with about the last thing concerning my father that I would ever have to deal
with, it was thoughts of him that intervened between me and what I was doing. I
parked the Volkswagen in the broad main street of the town and remembered
playing cricket with him on the sands at Pevensey Bay in, good God, 1925 or
1926. Once I had been out first ball and he had praised me afterwards for my
sportsmanship in accepting this with a good grace. While I waited, then was
dealt with, at the registry, I thought about that daily round of his in the
village,