A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

‘You hope it works.

‘It’s three and a half hours before they come and get you and say you should lie on the bed. Even though you’re not unconscious, they want you to act as if you are. The porter wheels you to a small room full of cupboards, like a kitchen, and a very young nurse takes away your dressing gown and puts it somewhere you don’t see and you wait a while longer. You’re just in the hospital gown. And this room is colder than the ward.

‘You can’t stop shaking.

‘Then you’re pushed from the kitchen room, through into the theatre — at least you get to see swing doors — and it’s not right. It looks half-abandoned — all white space and not much equipment and it’s freezing, the air’s freezing.

‘You help them to strap you into the special chair — legs in thick Velcro, held tight, held up and tight and parted. This means that the porter sees you. He can see you while you’re naked. He must probably do this all the time, but the naked women he sees are asleep and that makes it more OK for him, you can understand that. He is nervous and upset. You’re nervous and upset. And you’re cold.

‘From a door in the far corner, a man walks in — you’re not sure who he is — and he glances at you. He seems surprised that you can look at him back. Mostly, though, he’s strolling towards another door, a far door, and out. It seems you’ll be having your operation somewhere which is used as a short cut.

‘Your specialist, gynaecologist, is fussing with an extension cable — there is a problem with the power supply in some way — or the room’s hugeness means that the laser she will use isn’t near enough to a fucking plug. You decide not to let this disturb you. You’re thinking that can be a joke, too.

‘And she puts in the expander and winds it open and you’re not doing that well, already — the cold has stolen away how you move and you can’t keep control of yourself — these tremors happen. And the cream was good cream, working cream, not a failure, but you hurt and you remember other times that hurt and you can’t fucking believe you could have thought this would be reasonable and something you could fucking deal with. You’re a fucking moron, obviously. And the gynaecologist who said this would be a breeze is also a moron, because there’s this huge pain, but maybe that’s your own fault and you’re weird and you’re not going to tell her any of this, because she’s closing in with a a needle in her hand and you’re watching that syringe dip in — you don’t want to — a needle between your legs. I’m thinking to hell with that. And it hurts and it hurts again and all this is hurting — the biopsies, the looking around, messing you about, this crap that she’s doing — and she hasn’t even started with the laser.

‘The specialist talks to her student about you. She doesn’t talk to you. Even when you talk to her, she gives her answer to this really young guy beside her and then he passes it on to you. She can’t seem to deal with you being alive.

‘Then she starts the lasering.

‘It smells of burning. That’s you burning. And you know that because it feels like you burning.

‘More injections don’t especially help.

‘You shut your eyes and you go somewhere else for a while, way down where your breathing runs away to — you know how to do this, you go there to get warm — the only place that’s warm.

‘Then there’s this metal, rattly noise and you get yanked back into what’s happening, because your specialist has kicked over some kind of bowl that was on the floor and you can’t feel pleased that she’s this clumsy, or that bowls in operating theatres get left on the fucking floor.

‘The laser takes forty minutes, probably because you’re moving, you’re shaking because you’re so cold — the creak of the frame you’re strapped to, the way it’s rattling, is mostly what you can hear — even though you’re trying to be still and numb, really numb. You’re saying that over and over.

‘It’s fucking horrible.

‘And afterwards you get yourself on to the trolley because you don’t want the porter to touch you, even though he seems a nice person and wheels you very carefully back to your place by the wall and he looks at you with this still face, still brown eyes, he’s such a still guy, and then he looks at your chair and he sees your book on it and he goes and picks it up and gives it to you and he says, “Now you can read your book.” He talks to you as if you’re a person.

‘You tell him, “Thank you.”

‘And he goes away and you hurt like fuck, exactly like fuck.

‘But you did it, you got through, you made it. And you walked in with your little bag and you walk out the same way and nobody can see that you had no dignity, because now you do, because you’re sober and you can fight this shit and be OK, even though it was humiliating and it hurt and it brought down so many different kinds of crap on you that you’ll have nightmares for a week. You walked in and you walk out and you deal with it. If you have to, you can probably deal with other crap that’s worse.’

And Meg stops there. He’ll either understand that she knows about being scared, or he won’t. He’ll either understand that she doesn’t need any more trouble, or he won’t. She really does understand being scared — it’s not like he’s so fucking special.

She flattens her spine to the door and rolls the curve of her skull against it, back and forth, back and forth. When he doesn’t say anything, she stands up, slightly stiff, and she goes downstairs.

Leave him be.

Jon unfastens the bolt.

Huge clack and grind it makes — enormous warning signal that here I am, hopeless man, on my way.

And he opens the door which isn’t technically a hard thing to do.

Nothing else will ever be like that for her, not ever again. Promise. I’ll see to it.

His arms and legs work passably well.

If she’ll let me, I’ll make sure of that.

He knows where the living room is — it’s down the stairs.

She doesn’t need me to, but I will.

My girl.

‘Meg?’ His feet — big, ridiculous, guilty things — bring him downstairs.

The girl I didn’t help to make.

The other girl.

The girl I choose.

There’s no one in the living room.

You can hear crockery, soft motion. There’s a spillage of light from under a further door.

Kitchen.

And you follow her to where she’s gone, walk through the air that her body has already pushed aside, head along the corridor and down three little steps — they’re all the same these Victorian houses, you needn’t expect surprises, you just shouldn’t.

She’s there at the far end of the kitchen and her face is to the window, so you can’t see it.

And you can hear when your voice says, ‘I’m hungry.’

She tells you, low and even, ‘Yes, well, so am I hungry because some fucker stopped me having lunch and stopped me having dinner and I haven’t felt like …’ Meg with her back to you in the dimness and leaning on the counter by the sink. ‘It’s not good if I don’t eat. I get a bit crazy.’

The kitchen smells nice, like being in a home with established habits. ‘Meg …’

‘What? Don’t tell me you’re scared.’

‘No. I won’t. At least …’ He presses on into the room and is aware that Meg can watch his reflection approaching her. ‘I made the rules, you see, the rules for the letters and I was, you see, surprised when you … The idea was that I would never meet anyone and that … I was surprised.’

She brushes her hands through her hair and sighs and he doesn’t know if this is a sign of disgust, or tiredness, or something else, and he doesn’t feel able to ask, but then she tells him, ‘There aren’t any rules. We aren’t playing a game. I’m not a bloody game, Jon. I don’t have time to be a game.’ Meg turns, looks at him and her face is so gentle, soft, secret-looking — as if she is dreaming him. Jon would like her to be dreaming him — she would do that very well and undertake many improvements, he is sure. She asks him, ‘You want a game? I’ll tell you a game. We’ll play rock, scissors, paper, volcano . That’s what we’ll fucking play. That’s all anyone needs to play.’