My Boyfriend Cures Cancer

Laila Woozeer reflects on life, death, love, and the heroic 'morbid sorcery' of cancer research.

Laila Woozeer. Photo: Sian Shoots

Well, he doesn’t say it like that, he lists off some stuff about proteins and experiments and research labs being large groups of people – but grill him and eventually he’ll admit it.

“Well, that’s the aim,” he says, begrudgingly, sat on the bus.

“Or trying to,” he responds another time, holding the one clean fork.

“Yes, hopefully,” now slumped on the sofa, absent-mindedly watching me watch myself in the mirror as I consider the best way to style a dress.

Sometimes he needs reminding, like when he is sat across the table staring morosely at a mug of huckleberry tea. What am I doing? he asks. You’re curing cancer, I state, and without looking up he says Oh yeah.

One time he put his phone down and said, “Am I?” And I said, well what are you doing then which means you aren’t here with me, listening to my poems and playing Overcooked 2?

“Oh, right. Well, I’m making lots of leukaemia on plates.”

On an early date, before he was officially my boyfriend, we went to this extremely expensive reservation-only place with an oversubscribed waitlist and an incomprehensible booking system, and over several hours we shared a fourteen-course creative fusion ‘tasting menu’. I have rarely known such thrills. I’m an artist (the penniless is implied). Why were we going there? We could have gone for a pint. “It looks nice,” he said, “I’ll take you.” And then he just booked it and sorted it like it was the easiest thing in the world, and a slightly acerbic waiter brought two dozen small dishes of unrecognisable food like “glazed baby tofu in radicchio reduction” and “chargrilled fettuccine on mollycoddled florets” and none of it fit on the table so he kept rearranging the increasingly tiny plates and we accidentally got a bottle of still water instead of tap so that was another five quid and it was all worth it because every single item was delicious.

When my boyfriend talks about the leukaemia on plates, I think of that table, and the small ceramic discs bearing their finely arranged parts. Picture my boyfriend on his frequent all-nighters. See him chef-shaped; searching the freezer for the right vial of marrow to complete his macabre recipes. Place the purified spleen cells in the centrifuge at 500 RCF for thirty minutes. Maybe it is more arcane. Imagine him in the dead of night, alone with his rodents, silently conjuring complex spells as his dutiful familiars watch on. Harvest the unborn babe of a mouse who has not seen the sun; and upon its cell of stem, bear the calamitous disease…