Nadine Gordimer: Get A Life

You just rest. Adrian 's face round the door, stealthily, speaking only when he saw the son's eyes open. Lyndsay jostling from behind. That's what recuperation is. The parents had decided his state was recuperation. This was a better attitude than the doctors' informed conviction that tests would monitor whether removal of the gland and the blinding dazzle of invading radioactive iodine would defeat the opportunism of predatory cells to show a renewed attack elsewhere; congratulated themselves that the vocal cords had not been seriously damaged. The patient speaks in a normal voice, not like some sort of castrato, even the timbre is his own. When he thinks in this dim-dozing timeless half-consciousness lying in bed, of what must have been done to him while he was totally absent in an operating theatre, he watches a few maverick cells dartingly escaping the knife, later fleeing the radiant iodine to set up a new base in what he experiences is the territory of his body. It's a car-chase movie of the kind he'd switch from to another channel. The doctors have been pleased to note that the sense of humour he produces before them is a positive factor, the right spirit to endure whatever is ahead for him according to the oracle of the scan.

The parents have gone, she to So-and-So amp; Partners' chambers with a sheaf of documentation of her current case, he to his board meeting.

Lyndsay has arranged the 'quarantine' with the object of making him, Adrian, and her least embarrassed and aware of it. She has a special basket, souvenir of one of her trips years ago to a legal conference in a country where one bought such craft at the airport and didn't know to what use to put it, that was now the repository for his clothes and bed linen to be set aside for washing separately from the general bundle done by Primrose. One of those supermarket compartmented plastic trays held his cutlery kept apart with glasses and cups in a cupboard cleared of kitschy gifts, detritus of house guests, that it seemed wrong to throw away but never used. Plates: it would have been an unnecessary waste (sacrifice) to destroy, after the recuperation, as a necessary precaution, crockery with the beautiful hand-painted motifs from Italy she had ordered in some inexplicable fit of extravagance one year. (Who could have dreamed then, in that exquisite place, that a time would come for a different kind of hyperbole to describe expenses that were far exceeding medical aid schemes.) She had stocked a supply of barbecue paper plates of the kind stout enough to hold hot food. Adrian, through an industrialist friend with – no doubt – doubtful influence over the network people, had promptly installed a telephone and fax line in the assigned room, in fact right there, a stretched hand away, on a bedside table.

He could call Benni. At work. Or on her mobile if she's driving; is she wearing the no-hands model with the ear-aperture attachment he insisted on buying for her when the only thought for exposure to radiation likely to affect them was that said to exist in the old models clamped to the head. He cannot lift the hand, no device of the millennial gods of communication could reach across infinitude between how he lies and the module console-desks, Corbusier lookalike chairs, leather sofas for clients, professional flower arrangements, blown-up images of improbably beautiful or famous people and landscape paradises, from award-winning advertising campaigns; Berenice is admirably successful. A fax – to whom? His team, Thapelo and Derek, stick figures in the area where the intention to site a pebble-bed nuclear reactor plant has to be opposed. When he was in a wilderness her city place did not exist for him, as at her console in that city space his wilderness did not exist for her.

Neither does. Both equally unreachable. He's the receded. It's him. Far away.

Planes can land on automatic pilot. He's got up and gone to the bathroom reserved for him. Radiation is carried in urine and faeces. As he pees it just occurs to him, will he ever wake up with an erection again.

They have not left him really alone. There's the servant, now called housekeeper. Except that he's alone, apart, with anybody – everyone. His mind continues haphazard ridiculous wanderings; dogs are put in quarantine quarters, for months, when taken to other countries, a precaution against carrying rabies infection from Africa. Poor doggie. For him, the doctors have said, about sixteen days, including the first few in hospital isolation. Enough. Then he'd be fine, clear.

First they'd assured that the removal of the gland would be all that was necessary for a cure, he'd be fine, clear.

Then they'd had to admit that sometimes residual thyroid tissue remained after surgery. Could be intentional – to continue something of the normal function of the thyroid gland; sometimes inadvertent. Which was the case in his instance was not volunteered and what was the point of questioning anyway.

Neither his wife nor the parents were aware that of course he knew about the treatment for residual malignant tissue before the doctors told him and his wife. After the announcement by telephone of what had him by the throat, an early morning in the bedroom, he had gone that day to the university medical school and said he was doing research which required use of a medical library. There he had his own consultation with documentation on papillary carcinoma, the most serious form of thyroid cancer. More frequent in women and in both sexes more frequent in the young. So: thirty-five, a candidate. Read on. If there is suspicion that after thyroidectomy some tissue remains, then radioactive iodine ablation must follow. This radioactive iodine treatment is dangerous to others who come into contact with the individual who has received it.

Iodine, the innocent stuff dabbed on a child's scratched knee.

A few weeks' isolation. Fine, clear. Now sure the assurance, again, this time.

He would have to know, from within.

Primrose (it's not only whites who dub their offspring with pretentiously inappropriate names, a queen in ancient times, a flower in the imagined gardens from which the rich conquerors came) has left his breakfast prepared according to new household instructions. Tea and toast on an electric hot tray, fruit and yoghurt, honey, a cereal he doesn't know still existed, must have been something his mother remembered in connection with him as a child. A spoonful tastes like hay.

Primrose who knows him, of course, from ordinary occasions visiting the parents, does not appear. Through the windows open to let in the morning sun (what time is it, does a watch really know) there comes a low busy conversational twitter. He used to have budgerigars in a cage in this house as a kid, they would communicate confidentially like that – Lyndsay, his mother, who couldn't bear to have creatures caged, communicated the realisation of the birds' imprisonment to him. He must have given them away. But this low morning conversation was not that of caged birds but Primrose and some friends passing whatever the time was for them. He had not been told of the problem of Primrose as a member of the household. Realised it only as he ate the food prepared by her and heard her, unseen, in the cadence of African voices speaking their own language.

Adrian and Lyndsay had had to decide what to do, whether this woman, innocent of danger, innocent of any family responsibility towards the son, should be exposed at all. Lyndsay woke up in the night after a long discussion earlier and spoke aloud as if it were continuing. Adrian stirred and said the right thing she hadn't taken into account, as he so often did. (So much for her legal mind.) They must speak to Primrose: the decision to send her away must not be seen as a banishment from her place in their lives but come about with her full understanding and acceptance as their duty to her safety.