Nigel Cox's write life

Nigel Cox with his wife Susanna at their Seatoun home. After his cancer diagnosis Cox resolved that he was going to publish whatever he wrote. Marty Melville / Getty Images

"Being told I had cancer had an effect on me. The doctor said, ' ... your cancer ... ' Those two words were in a sentence he said. Until then it had always been ' ... your lump ... ' and then this sentence went past me with those words in it ... The immediate effect was that my palms got sweaty ... I felt a film of really liquid sweat appear on the skin of my palms."

When Wellington novelist Nigel Cox wrote that passage in Skylark Lounge, he was reliving the cancer scare he'd survived in 1996 when a secondary tumour was removed from his collarbone.

But as hard as cancer specialists at Wellington Hospital looked, they could not find the primary cancer. So as far as Cox knew, his "heroic red cells" - as he described them in the book - had won the battle. As it has turned out, they had not won the war.

Last October, Cox, 55, was diagnosed with system melanoma, for which there is no cure. The cancer has advanced at speed, but his oncologists don't know when Cox's path towards death will end.

He is keeping the pain at bay with morphine, and tires quickly. His eyes twinkle with characteristic wit and warmth, then he lifts his sleeves to reveal painfully wasted arms.

"It's all going here," he says, patting his distended stomach. "This is where the cancer is."

It is mid-afternoon in the sunporch of the rented house on Seatoun beach Cox shares with his wife Susanna Andrew, and their three children: Kate, 11; Andrew-Jack, 8; and Frank, 4.

Despite his low energy levels and discomfort, he still writes every day, and is on the final draft of his sixth novel, The Cowboy Dog.

"Today," he says, "I feel pretty steady and I suppose that's where I try to keep myself. There are days when there's a bit of crying. Nobody wants to die young.

"On the other hand, we've got three kids aged 11 and 8 and 4. They know what's happening, in their own way. We've explained it to them but putting that burden on them, that's a very big burden. So I do keep a normal-ish life going here, that's important to me and it's important to them."

Cox looks raw but he continues. "Secondly, it's important to keep positive. Nobody knows ... the oncologists say to me, we don't know how long I'm going to live. It's not like some cancers which have a steady rate of progress, and so it's important to keep busy.

"Here I am - it's ironic. All my life I wanted to get into a situation where I had enough time to write fulltime and I've got that now by the most cursed of means."

Cox says he couldn't cope emotionally without his wife. "Susanna is an angel and she helps me and we are sort of doing this together. I couldn't ask more of her, she has been so wonderful. We try to stay very strong together - there are times when it breaks down a bit. It's when I think about the kids I get really upset. That is hard to think about."

Since his illness has become known, Cox has had a "huge number" of visitors, each with "their own ideas of why they've come".

"I've had a couple of religious people come to save me but that's not for me. I don't make a big thing and say oh no, I'm not religious. They've come to offer you their best. Then there are people who feel perhaps that they haven't spent enough time with you.

"And then there are people who purely and simply want to do anything they can to help you and support you. This is the thing that's made the greatest impact on me - whether they're delivering books for me to read, or lamb shanks cooked for our dinner, or taking a turn at looking after the kids. I can't say how much I've been moved by that, kindness is the greatest thing."

Cox declares that the cancer scare in 1996-97 was a galvanising event. "It sharpened everything - my taste buds, my sense of life as an adventure.

"The oncology therapist said to me, 'So you know - is there anything you want to do with your life? Get on and do it - don't wait.' There was something rather shocking about that, a mortal message but a good message. I'd been mucking about with the writing. I had been writing but not things I was finally committed to publishing and so I made my resolve that I was going to publish whatever I wrote.

"A lot of fast learning came out of that scare and I hope I applied that well."

Those who have followed Cox's writing, especially the last three novels, will know that he did apply that very well, with imagination and originality. Cox's writing has been on a growing arc of excellence, and Responsibility - about a New Zealander living in Berlin who works in a museum - is a sublimely clever noir thriller, its merit recognised in its inclusion in the fiction shortlist category of this year's Montana NZ Book Awards. The winners will be announced on Monday night.

Responsibility was written when Cox and the family were living in Berlin while he worked at the Jewish Museum, as was Tarzan Presley.

"I got a lot of work done there," recalls Cox. "I got up at 5am and did my writing. The thing is, writing is sort of home to me and so I was home at 5am, wherever home was. I think it proved an antidote to that job which was very stressful and very demanding.

"It was very good to have something that was mine - controllable and my business, done towards my goals. A big project like an international museum is co-operative and there are always compromises. So it's good to be able to write uncompromisingly."

While Cox and fellow New Zealander Ken Gorbey were able to break down some of the more extreme forms of German formality at the Jewish Museum Berlin, he says "the straw that broke the camel's back" after he completed his five-year contract was the offer of a permanent job.

Cox laughs. "Suddenly we saw ourselves as becoming Germans, being German. That was a bridge too far and we very quickly decided to come home. I was thrilled to get back to New Zealand. It was serendipitous too in that I didn't know about the cancer then. Imagine if we'd found out over there, it would have been really difficult."

Although Cox writes about things that can't happen - Jack Grout abducted by aliens in Skylark Lounge, Tarzan growing up in the Wairarapa bush before being transplanted to America where he becomes Elvis in Tarzan Presley - he is always convincing.

"The word you use there - convincing - is very important to me. I'm not the kind of writer who does a lot of research - I do some, obviously - but the ability to go there, to take the reader to that place and to make them feel this is really happening, even though common sense tells them it couldn't be, that's something I really value. It's a gift I hope I have made good use of.

"To convince the reader, you have to convince yourself. I am not interested in queasy satire. Tarzan Presley, for example, could have been very cheesy but I didn't want that."

Responsibility contains, in its climactic scenes in the Berlin Underground, a truly memorable repulsive creature called Eddie, whose head is covered in a tattoo, except for one ear, "a white question mark in the torrent of ink".

Cox looks pleased that Eddie is, so to speak, indelible. "Eddie was a person who looks how he is described in the book who I saw for two minutes in the Berlin airport. He made an extraordinary visual impression on me and I couldn't forget him.

"I spent a lot of time wondering what it would be like to be tattooed like that and present yourself in public."

He grins. "He saw I was looking at him and he scowled in a kind of nasty way but actually, he didn't have the character to pull off the scowl. There was something weak about him, so I got a really big kick out of writing about him."

Right now, Cox is doing the final read-though of The Cowboy Dog.

"Then I want to write something for my kids, then I have another novel in my mind and I will set about doing that.

"I am very short of energy but I can do about an hour and a half every day and as long as things are going well that's what I do."

Cox is tired now, shifting about uncomfortably, and it's time to leave.

Outside, Susanna says her husband is dealing with his illness the way he has dealt with most problems in his adult life: head-on.

"If we didn't have the money to do something, he'd say we don't have the money so we can't do it," she says.

"That is what he is doing now. He is a very practical, sensible man ... he could have done that job at Te Papa [as the museum's "director experience", which he had to leave when he became too sick] standing on his ear.

"He was so good at it and everyone liked him, and he could have got on with his writing. It is such a shame."

NIGEL COX

Born 1951, Pahiatua; grew up in Masterton and the Hutt Valley.

Career:

Worked at Unity Books Wellington and Auckland for a decade; senior writer exhibitions team, Te Papa; led the project team 2000-2005 (with New Zealander Ken Gorbey) which created the Jewish Museum Berlin, where he became head of exhibitions and education.

Returned to NZ in March 2005; director experience Te Papa, Oct 2005-May 2006.

Writing career:

Waiting For Einstein, 1984.
Dirty Work, 1987, reissued 2006; shortlisted NZ Book Award, Wattie Book of the Year; winner Bucklands Memorial Literary Prize.
Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow, Menton, France 1991.
Skylark Lounge, 2000.
Tarzan Presley, 2004; runner-up fiction category, 2005 Montana NZ Book Awards; barred from reprints or sale outside New Zealand by the Edgar Allen Burroughs Estate in "Tarzania" in the United States.
Responsibility, 2005, shortlisted for the Montana NZ Book Awards, to be announced Monday night.
The Cowboy Dog, in final draft stages.