Helen Brown - After Cleo

‘What’s your feeling?’ I asked, deploying journalistic training (i.e. ask questions that don’t have yes/no answers).

‘Do you really want to know?’ she asked – meaning, do you really want to sell Bibles in Baghdad/put your head in a pot of boiling porridge?

No! Stop right there, thanks. I’ll just hop outside and pretend it’s yesterday when I was in here having a routine mammogram. But it was too late.

‘I think it’s malignant.’ Her sentence smashed across the room like a crate of empty bottles. There was silence while I examined the splinters.

‘But I haven’t got time to be sick,’ I told her. ‘I’m writing a book.’

Surely she’d take my busyness with the book into account and tell my malignant cells to go on hold.

‘What’s the book about?’ she asked politely.

‘Healing,’ I replied. I didn’t have the energy to go into detail. She smiled wryly. There was far too much knowledge in her eyes.

I glanced down at her hands. They were small, almost dainty, with efficient-looking fingers.

‘Brave’ and ‘positive’ are words associated with people in this situation. I could summon up neither. Cancer patients, especially if they’re film stars or rock singers, are often described as wanting to ‘fight this thing’. There wasn’t an ounce of aggression in me. I felt like a creature in a wildlife programme caught between the jaws of a powerful predator, its teeth sinking into my neck. I simply wanted to implode quietly in the corner.

‘The growth is large,’ she continued gently. ‘It’s spread across the breast.’

‘Mastectomy?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

Hang on. Couldn’t we strike a deal here? Couldn’t she make do with a lumpectomy like the ones I’d read about in magazines?

She said a lumpectomy was impossible considering the size of the growth. Performing a lumpectomy would mean taking the whole breast anyway. I glanced across at the man I’d met twenty years earlier; the man who’d been mad enough to marry me. He silently examined his fingernails. I needed to know the dimensions of the catastrophe.

‘And the other breast?’

‘Possibly it will have to go, too. We won’t be sure until the biopsy and MRI results are through.’

‘Do you think I’m going to . . . ?’

‘You’ve had enough information to absorb for one day,’ she chirped. ‘Let’s hope I’m wrong and the growth’s harmless.’

Her words disintegrated into gibberish. She wrote a prescription for sleeping pills. The days would be easier to get through, she said, if I’d had a decent night’s sleep.

The clinic nurse handed me a psychologist’s business card. A shrink? Hell no , I thought, but slipped the card in my handbag anyway. I was going to need all the help I could get.

In the biopsy room a man who could’ve been mistaken for a model train enthusiast attacked my breast with a miniature ditch-digger that had a staple gun attached. The local anaesthetic had little effect. His gun discharged four painful shots before he was satisfied he had a sample of the offending tissue.

Outside the clinic, beside the car, I wept into Philip’s neck. Trees in a nearby park waved their arms in sympathy. I’d encountered death before – my son, both parents and various friends. But I wasn’t ready to clasp its bony claw. Not just yet.

I wanted to be around for Rob’s wedding in January. Katharine still needed a mother. And Philip would be hopeless without someone to trim his ear hair.

The concept of dying – of shaking free of my body – was okay, providing it was relatively painless. What I couldn’t face was the prospect of leaving my husband and kids.

That evening, forks scraped through risotto while I recounted the day’s events. The girls nodded solemnly, uncertain how to arrange their smooth young faces. I’d sometimes wondered what they’d look like once life had etched a few wrinkles in their features. Perhaps now I’d never find out.

After loading the dishwasher, Lydia went upstairs. Any minute now she’d tell us she’d changed her mind about Sri Lanka. There’d be smiles, tears and forgiveness.

An iron weight formed in my chest as I heard the thump of her suitcase on the stairs. She appeared clothed entirely in white, pure and unapproachable, the way monastery students are required to dress.

A knock on the front door revealed Ned, his eyes blazing. I couldn’t tell if he was hurt, excited or confused. All of it, possibly. Filling the doorway with his presence, he seemed taller and broader than usual, almost physically threatening, as if he was challenging us to try and thwart his role as abductor.

One after the other, we kissed Lydia goodbye. My lips had no feeling as they brushed her cheek. This wasn’t happening. She wouldn’t, couldn’t abandon me . . .

A rush of brisk night air. The door clicked shut. She was gone.

Roaring with tears, I ran to the bedroom, slammed the door and flung myself on the bed.

Lydia loved orphans. Her devotion to people in wheelchairs was beyond comprehension. She’d drop everything to attend a fundraiser for refugees. Eggs from caged hens were repulsive to her. She loved the environment so much she preferred riding my old bike to driving and wanted me to start a compost heap. Possibly she loved Ned, Buddha and her monk as well. Lydia’s heart was so huge the whole world basked in the shimmer of her loving compassion.

How come she found it so hard to be kind to me?

Rage

Life’s too short to eat spotty bananas

Once my chest stopped heaving, I turned the pillow over. It was wet. I had no energy to change the pillowcase.

Philip opened the door a crack. I told him to go away. There was nothing he could do. Besides, someone needed to be with Katharine.

I popped a sleeping pill out of its plastic bubble, swallowed it and waited for the chemicals to kick in. The bedside light gleamed harshly on books I’d started reading in my pre-cancer life. The American War of Independence wasn’t so riveting any more. Our wedding photo beamed across the room. Philip had more hair then. I had less fat.

Next to the photo sat a small cat statue Philip had brought back from Egypt, and a miniature plate Mum had loved. On the plate was a painting of a wild beach in mauves and blues. The scene resembled New Zealand, but the plate was made in Denmark.

According to magazine editors bereft of ideas, a woman’s personality is revealed by the contents of her handbag. They should try investigating the lower drawer of her bedside cabinet.

My top drawer held the usual run of spare earplugs, crosswords, sore throat lozenges, pens, scraps of paper, a magnifying mirror to pluck rogue moustache hairs, a tube of hand cream I was never going to finish, lavender oil to sprinkle over our pillows.

The lower drawer was a Pharaoh’s tomb of priceless worldly goods. A plastic tiki pendant Sam bought for me at a fair months before he died; handmade Mother’s Day cards covered in wobbly writing and glitter. Among them was a more adult card from a couple of years earlier. It had a picture of two flamingos, one large bending protectively over a smaller one: ‘Dear Helen, Happy Mother’s Day. You raised me well. I love you. Love Lydia.’

I’d hoovered up the ‘I love you’ and stored it under my ribs.

Under the cards was an ancient tape recording of Mum singing for national radio in 1953. She’d chosen a maudlin song and the accompanist dragged along too slowly, but underneath the hisses and cracks of time her contralto voice was richer than burgundy.

I wished Mum was still here. She’d have sorted Lydia and told the surgeon she was imagining things. On the other hand, perhaps Mum had been watching over me all along, giving me a heads up at the wellness retreat just before things turned to custard.