Hello, new friend. My name is tumour; the pleasure is all mine.

For you, any pleasure is now filtered through layers of crippling, ugly fear. Terror shoots a sting down your spine and lobs a lump like a grenade down your throat. Pinches your ducts till they bleed salty drops. Your legs crumple in dread and you fall to your face. The doctor in his arctic white shawl, like some terrible Jesus, taps you on the shoulder and mutters mantras of war. You should/will/can fight this thing, you can win, you cannot just quit; too many people need you to stay strong. He palms you a telephone number, the worst dealer ever, and ushers you out to make way for his 20 past.

Stop vomiting friend; we have so much talking to do.

I will stay here for a while I think, like a poisonous barnacle making home on the hull of your soul. Like a fat leech of life, thief of destiny, burglar of what you are and what you dream and what you shall become. You wanted to become someone, didn’t you friend? You wanted to marry the girl-next-door-with-breasts-like-towers and reap fruit from your loins, some mini-you to brand with the diamond encrusted iron of the upper class. You wanted someone to curl up to and take the bite from the mouth of a winter’s night. You wanted that ranch with those horses and that pond with those ducks and that car with windows that melt frost.

You wanted it all but here I am.

Here I am and your wealth forms no weapon against me. Your rupees are grain, dollars like sand, pounds as pointless as dust. You could soak your body in liquid gold and chew rubies for brunch and they still would not claw any time back from my iron grip. All those papers you bled sweat over in school, the tête-à-tête luncheons with teachers, essays you emptied your life into, all those damn letters after your name. Every single rung of every ladder you ever climbed, all those red-eye nights and red-eye flights, hounding deadlines you never caught. You wrote academic papers worthy of the finest audience in the land and to me it is kindling.

They crafted those lily white pills to fight me, just chew these and keep calm they say. Keep calm as your rotting frame is edged into the dark cave of uncertainty; keep calm as you stare at your walls and globs of futility dance down your cheeks. But those pills are a clinical fairground ride to nowhere, the carousel of vanity. They will inject you and test you and drain you and still nothing, nothing they do can penetrate my omnipotence. When your thoughts will not still and sleep slips from your clutches I will be here waiting.

Maybe now would be a good time to tell your friends of my invasion? You can tell them all about me and their eyes will become gooey, throats will become dry as cotton, words crack and patch together into a sombre soliloquy of how sorry they are and how they will pray to a God they don’t believe in and how much of a fuckin’ fighter you are.

Ha! A fighter, you? If only they knew of the nights we spend together. Me barking orders, my comrades firing flaming arrows deeper into your organs, sapping blood and soul from cells. You, pounding the pillow with fists of repentance, wailing promise of metastasis should the planet opt to save your sorry, beaten soul. The afterlife, previously pushed to a corner like some unruly ballistic child is bought centre stage and made to dances on the tables, hawking its various wares. Auntie Joan thinks you will go to heaven and meet Uncle Alan and you can share a tin of lager together. This pisses me off no end, to imagine all I am is the last bastion not between you and a life of holistic utopia — mansions lining the gold-paved streets — heaven in the clouds but in-fact between you and a chance to get tipsy and listen to that old goat talk about Hornby models.

Tomorrow you’ll write a bucket list and pray I don’t interrupt its playing out. Lunch dates with Mickey, frolics with dolphins, glugging champagne at opulent hotels, dancing with the boys. Family dinners where you all concentrate on the crispness of the duck and the roaring success of Mum’s Crème brûlée and forget about how much you normally find each other intolerable. Just like we lose the wardrobe of narcissism and abstract notions of mortality, everyone morphs into a damn pacifist when they are dying. One of my party tricks is negating this post-modern credo of the right to be right.

Speaking of rights, you know you now have the right to become a fundraising superhero, right? You shall jump from planes and hike up hills and run around towns and sail oceans — or at the very least lakes — and do it all for someone who is not you. Do it for the nation, do it for the people who have no voice or the world has forgotten about and do it for those African children whose photo you have blu-tacked to your fridge door. They want you to run round New York been cheered on by a swarm of frothy mouthed venture capitalists swigging venti soya lattes and jabbing the skies with giant foam hands bearing golden arched insignia.

Hey friend, don’t forget about me, I’m still here! Chewing on your spirit, I can taste your hope ebbing away; we haven’t got long. That shimmering sickle is lassoed closer with every piece of ground I gain. This is the happy ending, the crescendo of demise. You should make those calls, alert the black parade, erect the flag bearing your legacy and invite your priest round for tacos.

You will reach for hope but find no grip.

Soon the day will come and I will whisper in your ear, “Quit fighting friend, it’s over, my work here is done.”