Helen Brown - After Cleo

It was as if we were back sharing the bedroom with daffodil wallpaper again. In the mornings I’d gaze across at her dark curls wrestling on her pillowcase and feel such crystalline devotion. We did everything together – playing dolls and listening to radio serials late at night until my eyelids drooped.

Then one day it ended. Mary acquired a new blue transistor radio and started listening to Top of the Pops . She bought a bikini and told Mum she wanted a room of her own. Mum explained to me that Mary, being five years older, was growing up and her interests were changing. Unable to understand why Mary wouldn’t want to play dolls and listen to Life with Dexter with me forever, I was exiled into a smaller bedroom with tree wallpaper next door to the toilet.

Mary offered to come and stay for a while after I came out of hospital. I accepted with gratitude.

Under the shower that evening, I examined the right breast that would soon disappear, hurled into one of those hospital furnaces and sent up into the sky to become part of a cloud, maybe. The thought was unexpectedly reassuring. I liked the idea of my body tissue drifting above the city on its way to joining the solar system.

Pert and springy no more, the breast had exhausted itself feeding four babies. And okay, possibly playing a minor role in attracting a mate or two. I ran my fingers across the nipple under which the enemy lurked. Apart from being bruised from the biopsy, it still felt the same. No lump. If anything, the malignant region felt slightly indented.

Losing a breast couldn’t be that bad, I thought. When I was a girl, Mum had told me how Amazon warrior women hacked (and sometimes burnt) their right breasts off so they could shoot arrows more efficiently. Good old Mum. She always enjoyed imparting information about the peculiarities of human behaviour. Under her tutelage I absorbed Enid Blyton along with images of African slaves packed like cheese crackers into slave ships.

Perched on Mum’s knee, I’d imagined Amazons pounding through the jungle, their single breasts flapping, before hurling themselves off rope swings and landing with a splash in the Amazon River. Finding out the Amazons weren’t in fact from the Amazon jungle but from somewhere around Turkey was one of the mild disappointments of adulthood. Anyway, if Amazons hacked their boobs off without modern anaesthetics, I couldn’t have much to worry about.

The front doorbell jangled. I hesitated to respond. Probably it was Katharine late home and feeling too lazy, as usual, to dig her key out from the bottom of her bag. I plunged into my dressing gown and stomped down the hall, my lecture ready to roll. Things were going to have to change around here. People were going to have to be more independent . . .

‘This is the last time . . .’ I said, swinging the door open.

A tall male figure hovered in the evening shadows. It was Ned, hands in pockets, looking more dishevelled and wild eyed than usual.

‘Sorry, I thought you were Katharine,’ I said, suddenly feeling uncomfortable in the dressing gown, though he didn’t seem to notice.

‘Have you heard from Lydia?’ he asked, distracted.

‘No,’ I replied, still resentful he’d kidnapped her and taken her to the airport. ‘She probably arrived at the monastery a few hours ago, I suppose. Have you?’

‘No,’ he said, examining his boots.

Clearly I wasn’t the only one hurt by her departure. Tying the dressing gown firmly around my waist I invited him inside and filled the kettle. We, the mutually rejected, could at least share a hot drink. I opened the fridge. He staggered and grasped the kitchen bench.

‘Are you okay?’

‘Not too good,’ he said. ‘I’ve stopped taking my medication.’

My grip tightened around the milk container. Lydia had always been vague about Ned’s condition. She disapproved of people being labelled. It was manageable providing he kept up with his pills. Otherwise, he lost touch with reality and heard voices again.

My only experience with people like him had been in a newsroom years earlier, interviewing a distraught mother whose son, after flushing his pills down the toilet, had jumped into the lion’s pit at the zoo.

A journalist’s training is handy in some ways, but it does make you catastrophise. The headline ‘Cancer Victim Stabbed to Death by Daughter’s Lover’ sprang to mind as I backed instinctively against the knife block on the kitchen bench. Dealing with Lydia’s spaced out – or, worse still, not spaced out and potentially voice-hearing – boyfriend, was the last thing I wanted just now.

I needn’t have worried. A dejected Ned hunched over his coffee mug at the table and, sounding for all the world like a pair of jilted wives, we shared stories of our disappointment in Lydia’s heartlessness in not having contacted either of us. Poor Lydia; for all we knew she hadn’t even got off the plane or made it to a place with mobile reception.

Apparently satisfied by the coffee, our conversation and the promise that whoever heard from her first would contact the other, Ned stumbled into the night. Rivals had become allies, temporarily at least.

That evening, every time the phone rang I leapt at it. There were calls from Rob and Mary, but nothing from Lydia.

In the days that followed, being a patient became a full-time job. In between going to various test appointments we had to make momentous decisions.

During this time, my surgeon announced she was going on holiday and I’d either have to wait a month for her return to have the operation (giving the cancer cells five more weeks to use my body as a fun park) or she could refer me to another surgeon. I chose the referral, though this meant adjusting to the more flamboyant style of her colleague.

The option of reconstructive surgery was another consideration. Even though the eight-year age gap between Philip and I felt less important these days, Philip was still a ‘younger man’. I wanted to reduce the shock of massive physical change – for both of us, frankly.

A silicone implant was the simplest choice. Alternatively, I could choose a more complicated process involving harvesting the roll of fat that sat companionably on my lap to make a new bosom. Flab into fab! I loved the sound of that.

A reconstructive surgeon showed us photos. She was proud of her work, which to the untrained eye resembled carnage from World War One. She could make nipples out of anything . . . toes, ears. She knew how to slice muscles off a back and bunch them up for a boob, except she preferred doing implant surgery.

I wanted to find a surgeon who preferred transforming stomach rolls into boobs. Across town we found our man. Greg had been to lots of international conferences and he specialised in flab to fab. His photos weren’t quite as brutal as the previous surgeon’s display – though maybe he was just a better photographer.

I was becoming an expert observer of surgeons’ hands. Greg’s were confidence-enhancing with their short fingers and freckles on the backs. A compact man, he was boyish and, for a surgeon, outgoing. With his pale complexion and reddish hair, he could’ve been a Highland piper in a previous life. I liked and trusted him almost immediately.

Mastectomy plus reconstruction – I was told – would involve three surgeons and several assistants, six to eight hours under the knife and a recovery period of three months (assuming the patient was a twenty-year-old Olympian with an incredibly high pain threshold, I thought later). Greg would leave a scar the shape of a smile stretching across my abdomen from one hip to the other, cut conveniently low so I could still wear a bikini. As if.

At the same time he planned to simultaneously perform a reduction on the left breast so the new pair would match. Scarring around the breasts would be artfully concealed.