‘We all need money but there are degrees of desperation’, is a quote attributed to English writer, the late Anthony Burgess, well known for his satire A Clockwork Orange, but less well-known for the fact that he had a nomination for the Booker Award 1980 for the novel Earthly Powers.

Burgess passed away in 1993, but his utterance above is being acted out today by a devout young Anglo-Indian man, who I shall refer to as Q.S.S. (short for que sera sera, or whatever will be, will be.)

One morning, roughly a month ago, the telephone in his unit rang. It caught him home alone. His wife of 22 years was attending, with a group of girlfriends, a local cat show. They were all keen to catch sight of a rare civet-albino and an equally rare hairless (and vowel-less) Sphynx.

It was fortunate in this regard that Q.S.S. was alone, for it was Dr J.J. on the other end. Five minutes the call lasted. At the end of it, all Q.S.S. could remember were the words, “Five months”.

Despite the fact that every one of us knows that life is merely an interlude bookended by birth and the hereafter, when the final act is given an accurate finiteness, nearly all of us discover how unprepared we are for this eventuality.

He looked vacantly at the calendar counting off the months ... He then, in a germinating act of desperation, looked back over the years, consulting the mental calendar, reliving the past, rushing back headlong down labyrinthine lanes recovering lost memories.

After an hour of panic-scooting, the mind gradually settled, found its normal, measured tread once more, allowing the halls of logic and the conference rooms of rationality to reopen and initiate a discussion about ‘the foreseeable future’, which, like a document stamped with a bright red seal (URGENT), set out a tentative strategy based on the recent telephone call.

“All may not be lost”.

Now there’s a phrase that got obliterated in the initial panic. He called the hospital and talked about costs. Where’s the money going to come from? he wondered, after the call. You need an armload of money as ammunition to fight and conquer an army of invading cells. This was patently obvious. How to secure the ‘weaponry’? That was the conundrum.

And so, a day later, Q.S.S. found himself knocking on the door of good friends A&C. Quietly, the news was broken. As quietly W&C confessed (W breaking down openly) that they’d love to have been of help but ... Two other close friends (S&S) hugged him tight and offered to sell their beat-up Ford which is all they really had left after paying their son’s lawyer fees, a gesture that caused Q.S.S. pain and shame. In this way, over 48 hours, familiar doors opened but shut politely. At night, when his wife was peacefully asleep, Q.S.S., desperate and distraught now, did something he, despite his devout tendencies, hadn’t done in years. He went down on his knees, at roughly the same time an email was pinging its way into his Inbox.

“Contact Moses,” it said, and this could easily have been a command from above. Bleary eyed from a lack of sleep, a mug of steaming Nescafe in his hand, Q.S.S. read and re-read the terse communication. “Now that’s something I just cannot do, will not do,” he said, finally. After breakfast, the phone rang. “Get my email?” asked C, “I spoke to Moses, you should call him.”

“I can’t and you know why!” replied Q.S.S.

A silence ensued.

“Is this the time for pride, mate?” asked C.

“It’s not that,” said Q.S.S.

“What else can it be, eh? You pray for help from above. Show me a way, you say to God. Then a way opens up and you say, but no thanks God, I’ll take another route? Doesn’t that make prayer redundant? And how about the wife? She knows you’re putting a principle above life? Her life?”

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.