The First Chapter
Click here to read chapter one of At Five in the Afternoon.
Michael on Cancer
Page 196: “The contract between life and me has been sundered, as much by the diagnosis of cancer, which introduces a fatal doubt, as by the invasive operation to remove my prostate, which has left me crazed with shock. I’m experiencing an emotional devastation out of all proportion to what’s been done to me, which echoes and reverberates off past injuries. I can no longer trust life to continue on, the way you can be sure that the summer sun will shine in Spain tomorrow, and that there’ll be more of the blue sky. I’ve had my prostate gland removed, the surgeon has taken it out and thrown it away, and that’s a position beyond rectification or recovery which has left me broken-hearted and incontinent. Every time I touch my penis, a dribble of urine drenches my fingers, and soaks my pad. If by some miracle an erection were to occur, the overflow of urine precludes any sexual activity, which also serves to protect me from embarrassment and disgust, but I feel bereft. I’ve become an untouchable, the lowest caste which deals with the slops…”
Michael on the Future...
Page 258: “When I was shocked at the way Fr. Flanagan in Newbridge [College] had used pure slabs of colour, he’d advised me then “Paint with broad strokes, and boldly, Michael” He’d led me through the doors into further rooms that I hadn’t known existed. Writing this book has been like that. Each step I take leads onto new positions, new perspectives, and further choices that ask me for the unfaltering courage to breach the defensive walls of silence, and to say it out clearly. My words are like a Trojan horse, which carries the truth through enemy lines to wait for its unknown and subversive conclusion. It will be an ending, determined by those who can hear. “But it’s the only direction to follow, isn’t it?”
Page 270: I have told it like it is, what I have seen and what I have heard. I have said it, and my saying is true. Because of the cancer, there’s no longer any space available to hide in; neither is there any time left over for being silent. I have told the truth to save my life”