Helen Brown - After Cleo

I hoped I could be as brave as Mum had been. When she was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer, she’d treated it lightly. ‘I’m floating out to my island,’ she said with a dreamy smile. ‘It’s so beautiful over there. I can almost see it now. I’m going to Bali Ha’i.’ What was it with women in our family and islands?

I wondered how much of it had been an act for our benefit. Probably more than we realised. As the cancer distended her abdomen and turned her skin the colour of candle wax, Mum spent her days comforting visitors and phone callers who couldn’t disguise their grief.

When she wasn’t in pain, she was a beacon of happiness, claiming these were some of the best days of her life. Alone in her room with me one afternoon, she raised a bony finger and said, ‘Learn from this. Watch me.’

The local vicar visited her town house to find out if she had any sins to offload. I ushered him into her bedroom and closed the door. Mum wasn’t an official churchgoer, but she’d sung in the choir. Singing was her form of worship, she’d always said. The vicar emerged a few minutes later looking flustered. He said he’d never met someone with such a spiritual approach to dying. Checkmate. Part actress, part guru, Mum bedazzled us all.

I’d perched on her bed and taken notes while she choreographed her funeral. She didn’t want things starting on a downer, so chose ‘Morning Has Broken’ for the opening number. After that she wanted her friends from choir to line up in front of the altar and sing ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’, which had become one of her favourite songs. The words attributed to St Francis of Assisi were a neat summation of mother love – ‘Grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love with all my soul.’

‘I’m so excited,’ she said about the funeral. ‘How many people do you think will show up?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, trying to think of a huge number. ‘A hundred and fifty?’

‘Is that all ?’ Mum looked devastated.

‘Well, no. Probably double that.’

Settling into her pillows, whose whiteness matched her chiselled face, Mum looked satisfied.

‘When they’re carrying my coffin out, someone will have to sing Bali Ha’i,’ she instructed.

Mum had been famous in town for her role as Bloody Mary in the 1963 Operatic Society production of South Pacific . I asked if she knew of a local whose voice was good enough to match hers. Her response was firm. A decent international recording would be required. Sarah Vaughan, perhaps.

‘It’ll be a great do,’ she sighed. ‘I wish I could be there.Though I suppose I will be in some way.’

I doubted I could ever be that strong for my children. Compared to her, I was a coward, an amateur.

Even though we’d had our conflicts, largely about sex and marriage, Mum and I had been close. When we fought it was only with mirrors. I still sometimes dialled her phone number just to feel a connection with her.

As journalist herself, Mum had pointed me at a typewriter from an early age. I’d rebelled of course, and ended up exactly where she’d wanted me. When we knew she was dying I’d experienced a guilty surge of freedom. At last I’d be free to smash to mould she’d squeezed me into. But it was too late. She’d carved me in her own image.

When Philip and I met at the clinic that afternoon the surgeon had good and bad news. It was cancer. The growth was unusually large at nearly seven centimetres across. The cells, however, appeared to be non-invasive. They wouldn’t know for certain until after the surgery but once my right breast was lopped off, and assuming the left one was clear (pending MRI results), I had every chance of a normal lifespan.

Normal. Lifespan. Hallelujah! I could have kissed her, but the desk was wedged safely between us. Surgeons aren’t touchy-feely types, which is strange considering how deeply they delve into people’s flesh during working hours. Walking through the city after the appointment, I savoured wintry sun on my face. Naked branches stretched across baby blue sky. A seagull on top of a statue rearranged his feathers and glared down on the crowds huddled in their coats against the cold.

I meandered through a sea of impassive faces engrossed in iPods and mobile phones. The world had gone Asperger’s. Bent over little boxes, white wires dangling from their ears, people were compulsively attached to realities that didn’t exist. Connected to the abstract but disconnected from their living, breathing lives, they were half robots. I wished they’d stop for a second to absorb the beauty around them, the ephemeral nature of being human. Our visit here is so short.

In the waiting room of the MRI place next morning, a questionnaire asked if I was claustrophobic. ‘Somewhat’ I scribbled between yes and no. Apparently some patients need general anaesthetic before they’ll consent to being slid inside the giant vagina that is an MRI machine. Birth in reverse.

The medicos were back to calling me ‘dear’. A radiographer stabbed my arm, dear, where dye was going to be pumped through during the procedure. I wanted a sign stuck on my forehead for the benefit of every nurse, doctor, scanner operator, bloodsucker and pusher of probes and trolleys: Dear dears. Please don’t call me ‘dear’.

A nurse warned me it would be noisy in the MRI machine and gave me headphones with the choice of jazz or classical. Usually I’d go for classical, but tastes of medical people are unpredictable – e.g. the arum lilies. Wagnerian opera or ‘The Funeral March’ could have a devastating effect. Jazz felt safer.

Two nurses packed me on a trolley like meat on a tray, buzzer in hand in case I freaked out in there. Lying on my front, a boob protruding through each of two holes, I glided into the machine’s womb with ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ tootling in my ears. ‘Tall and tanned, and young and lovely . . .’

I’d always hated that song, even more so now that I was feeling almost the exact opposite of an elongated Brazilian beauty – short and white, old and ugly. Thank God it was soon drowned out by head-smashingly loud buzzing.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Brown?’ a male voice asked through the headphones.

I was reassured by the youthful tentativeness in his voice, the sunshine in his Australian accent. And the fact he didn’t call me dear. ‘Yes,’ I shouted, though shouting probably wasn’t necessary.

The buzzing was replaced by rhythmic ringing. It was like being lodged inside a giant bell. I thought of Lydia in Sri Lanka and imagined myself meditating alongside her to the strikes of a monastery bell. Together in a mysterious land, and at peace. Except the bell could’ve done with silencers.

I drifted to another time, a day at the beach after sixth form exams, wagging school with Jan. Glittering black sand, a mandarin sun hovering over the horizon. Poised between childhood and maturity, it was a perfect moment – my first adult experience of bliss.

‘You did well,’ said the red-headed young man who belonged to the MRI machine voice.

‘How could I not?’

‘Some people move.’

To my relief the MRI gave the left breast the all clear.

Later that day I called my sister Mary in New Zealand. Her voice was calm and gentle over the phone. Having had a mastectomy eight years earlier, she understood what it was like.

‘You won’t be as lonely as you think,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a circle of women. It happened for me and it’ll happen for you, too. So many women have been through this thing, they know how to help. They’ll draw close and give you more strength and support than you can imagine.’

I hadn’t heard that tone in Mary’s voice since we were kids and she was the older sister, The Protector. Any distances adult life had forced between us evaporated. She’d lost her left breast. I was about to shed my right. Between the two of us we’d have a perfect pair.