‘Dad!’
They ran to her and hugged her tight, more effusive than any greeting she’d ever had from them. She was delighted to receive it and felt shitty about it too.
A mum at the school, who never looked at her because they didn’t know each other, gave her a bright smile that transformed her face. ‘Hi, Mike.’
‘Hi,’ she said, feeling light-headed.
Back at home, she felt too weak to walk in his shoes. She longed to interrogate the children on matters she knew she shouldn’t, but to do so would be to betray them so with a sigh she took his shoes off and turned back into Mum. Her heart was heavy as the kids groaned when she entered the kitchen and declared it to be homework time.
The following day she wore his shoes again, this time to go into the city to shop. People expected her to be more physically helpful, to hold the doors, often failing to say thank you. She dropped by his office. As she approached his desk she felt her chest tightening and a headache coming on. She realized Mike hated his job, or felt immense pressure in his chest about it. She walked around the city for hours, feeling a need to avoid walking too closely behind women, drove to as many places as she could think of that they regularly went to, to see what the world was like for her husband. Her behaviour adjusted itself naturally, she felt her body kick into a different mode of societal compliance that she could never have imagined.
That night she arranged a babysitter for the kids and went out to a bar, wearing his trendy shoes. Taking a seat at the bar – something she never did by herself because she would never be left alone – she settled down to enjoy the peace and quiet. After a while, she felt a pair of eyes on her. She turned around and saw Bob Waterhouse watching her. Bob was the guy who dressed as his female alter ego one night a week; she remembered talking to his wife Melissa about it late one night when they’d had too much to drink. Melissa had arrived home to find him head to toe in women’s clothes, and they weren’t her clothes. He had an entire secret suitcase of women’s clothes in his size. She didn’t know what to do, but his love for her hadn’t changed, his desires changed nothing between them, apart from her understanding him more and him going out once a week, sometimes with her, sometimes with like-minded people for a night out dressed as his female persona.
The way Bob was looking at her, at Mike, she wondered if there was more to his character that his wife didn’t know. Perhaps he was coming on to Mike. She turned away and gulped her beer. Suddenly he was beside her, asking whether she’d mind if he joined her.
‘No, that’s okay, I’m just about to leave,’ she said.
Bob gave Mike a sneaky wink. ‘Wife at home?’
‘Eh yeah,’ she froze.
‘Sure,’ Bob snorted. ‘Hello in there,’ he said in a sing-song voice.
The woman frowned.
‘It’s me,’ Bob whispered, ‘Melissa.’
The woman who was wearing her husband’s shoes focused hard and finally saw who was in front of her. The person she’d taken to be Bob was in fact Melissa.
She looked down and saw that, although she was wearing her own clothes, Melissa had Bob’s Converse sneakers on.
‘I started doing this a few months back, after I found Bob wearing the dress,’ she said, grabbing the barman’s attention and ordering two more beers. ‘I thought, I want to get in on this action, see what the fuss is about. Bob loves women’s shoes. It’s his favourite part of it. So that’s what I tried first. As soon as I put on Bob’s shoes I realized that everybody thought I was him. He doesn’t know I do it – or maybe he does but he figures he’s had his secret all this time and now he’s letting me have mine. When did you figure it out?’ she asked.
‘Just this week,’ the woman whispered, wondering why she was whispering.
Melissa clapped her hands with glee. ‘Isn’t it great? Do you know the last time I went to a bar all by myself for a quiet drink?’
The woman shook her head.
‘Exactly. Never. Women don’t sit alone in bars. If they do, they’re alcoholics, or they’re looking for sex, or they’re lonely and need company, some idiot to sit down and talk to them about nothing out of politeness, when all I want is to be alone. When you’re a man, no one tries to keep you company, unless they want company. What has it been like for you?’ Melissa asked, grinning as she gulped her beer.
‘I learned that Mike hates his job, that he secretly smokes, it’s uncomfortable to be alone with women in certain environments, that women can be unfairly exclusive, that he feels such an enormous pressure to protect and defend the family that it hurts his chest. He feels safe with his mother, there’s a barrier with his dad, his male friends feel like an army of brothers and that a mom at the school, Polly Gorman, has a thing for him.’
‘Polly Gorman!’ Melissa threw her head back and laughed. ‘Mike would never look at her.’
‘No,’ the woman mused, sipping her beer. ‘Well, he flat out ignored her today.’
Melissa guffawed and they clinked their beers.
‘But I learned more,’ the woman said, more seriously now. ‘It’s a different world, isn’t it?’
Melissa nodded, solemn too. ‘When you wear those shoes, you’re walking in a man’s world.’
‘Not exactly,’ she disagreed. ‘When I wear these shoes I’m in Mike’s world. Mike’s life. I thought I would understand life as a man, but I just understand life for this man. I feel how he feels when he enters a room. I know how others make him feel. Our world is the same but it’s not. We share our lives together but we have our own. When I wear his shoes, things for me are suddenly tilted. I see the same things but from a different angle. Looks, tones, glances and reactions, that’s all that separates us from our experiences. In the same way that you can’t sum up what it’s like to be a woman, you can’t explain what it’s like to be a man.’
Melissa pondered this. ‘I think I could sum up what it’s like to be a woman pretty well.’
‘Only this woman,’ the woman said, pointing at Melissa’s chest.
‘I guess,’ Melissa agreed.
‘I can’t put his life into words. It’s nothing that anybody has said or done. It’s a feeling.’
‘One for the road?’ the barman asked suddenly.
‘Why not?’ Melissa replied.
‘What wifey doesn’t know, won’t kill her,’ the woman added, and they both laughed.
The two women standing at the bar beside them awaiting their order glared at them in disgust.
‘Chauvinist pigs,’ one muttered.
When Mike returned from his golfing holiday, the woman hugged him tighter than ever.
‘What’s this?’ he murmured, dropping his bag and returning her hug, breathing her in.
‘I love you,’ she whispered. ‘Thank you for everything you do; for all the things I see you doing, but even more for the things I don’t.’
She felt his body relax and he wrapped himself tighter around hers.
She lies flat on her back, arms tight by her side as she moves deeper into the coffin-like space of the MRI machine. The headphones hugging her ears are intended to relax her, to make her forget the walls pressing in around her, the ceiling so close to her nose. If she ever wondered what being buried alive would be like, this is it.
She never knew she suffered from claustrophobia but as she becomes completely encased in the narrow tube her heart pounds and she feels the urge to shout, ‘Stop!’
She wants to get up and run but knows that she can’t. This is her last chance to find out what is wrong with her: every other test has proved fruitless and yet she’s getting worse. At first she was tired, forgetful, muddled, flustered – but despite a blood test at her GP’s office, nothing was detected. No iron deficiency, no thyroid problems, just the stresses of a busy life like all the young parents who felt equally as exhausted as she.
But then it moved on. Her speech became affected, and lately her movement. There is something happening in her brain, it’s no longer sending the right signals
to the rest of her body. And so now she is inside this MRI tube, hoping that there is nothing wrong with her but that something will be detected, something small, something insignificant, something easily fixed, but something so as to prove her behaviour is out of her control.
When they first saw Dr Khatri, his concern was the cerebellum. He told her its function is to coordinate muscle movements, maintain posture and balance. Removal of the cerebellum doesn’t stop a person from being able to do anything in particular but it makes actions hesitant and clumsy. Which sounded just about right. She had been continuously knocking over her drink, and other people’s, at the dinner table. It was funny at first but then became annoying over time and a real bone of contention with her husband. She knew she was being clumsy and he was patient at first, but then even when conscious of it, she couldn’t stop, no matter how hard she concentrated.
Her spatial awareness was failing her too. She would attempt to place a plate on the kitchen counter but would miss, sending it smashing to the ground. This happened numerous times: once she even heaped a filled dinner plate into her husband’s lap. She closed the dishwasher door on an open tray of plates, smashing them.
She’d found a chicken wrapped in clingfilm under the sink, and the roll of clingfilm in the fridge. She placed a kettle full of boiling water in the fridge and the carton of milk by the toaster. She drove to the shopping centre, parked, shopped, then got a taxi home, forgetting she had driven. She mixed up her children’s school lunches. She brushed her teeth with cold-sore cream.
She was constantly having minor car accidents – she side-swiped walls, hit both wing mirrors, reversed into bumpers and lamp posts more times than she could count. Most of the time she didn’t even notice; it was at the end of the evening when her husband would inspect the car for new damage that her mistakes were revealed. There are only so many times another driver can be blamed.
Her skin took on a similar appearance to the car. A cut on her hand where a kitchen knife slipped, burns where she’d caught herself on the oven or a hob, a bump where she’d slammed her hip against the corner of a table, a stubbed toe, bruised elbows from hitting doorframes, shins on the car door. When her speech became affected, her ability to tell a story or simply construct a sentence, or remember the word she wanted to say, the doctor changed his mind. Now it was the frontal lobe the doctor focused on, which was responsible for personality, behaviour, emotions, judgement, problem-solving, speech and concentration. But while she could put that down to sleep deprivation, because she was exhausted, unable to sleep due to the sheer anxiety about what was happening to her, she couldn’t deny a growing obsession with the state of her brain.
It felt to her like her brain was slowly shutting down. And she couldn’t afford to let that happen. Not with four children who were depending on her to keep going. They were her life, their four lives were hers. She alone was responsible for managing four schedules, getting them where they needed to be at all times. Feeding them, clothing them, loving them, chauffeuring them. It was all-consuming, exhausting but rewarding. She hadn’t returned to work after her first child ten years ago. She’d been a financial analyst and, while the intention had always been to return, she’d extended her maternity leave over and over, then more babies came and she faced the fact she was never going back. She was content at home with her beautiful babies. She felt at peace, though it was more challenging and exhausting than any day in the office.
It had been difficult losing her income, when before she could spend whatever she wanted, without permission, without discussion. Now she scraped by on a carefully managed budget. Motherhood was not, as some might believe, a simpler life. She found it more challenging, constantly juggling responsibilities for four growing personalities and the obstacles that life presents to each person and how the family reacts to that.
So now, as she closes her eyes and breathes deeply in the MRI scanner, she longs for the doctors to tell her that they can find nothing to be wrong with her, but at the same time she needs them to discover something. Catch-22. She needs it to be something fixable. Tears spring from her eyes and roll down to her ears, tickling her neck. There isn’t the space to lift her hand to wipe them away. She momentarily opens her eyes and sees the cold white surface of the ceiling too close above her. She feels the panic rise and fights it, breathing, closing her eyes and listening to the classical music that drifts through the headphones. It’s a familiar piece, but like so many other things, she can’t remember what it’s called.
She gets lost in her thoughts for a while, thinking about the kids, hoping they are okay and that Paul’s mother has managed the school and Montessori pick-ups in time. Jamie has soccer and Ella has swimming. Lucy will need her bag of toys to play with while she’s waiting for them both and Adam should be doing his homework while Ella swims …
She hears Dr Khatri’s voice come through the headphones. She moved while they were taking the scan, they have to repeat it. She fights the frustration while the machine whirs loudly again and she ensures she doesn’t move a muscle on her face.
Then finally they’re finished. Back to high ceilings and air. The relief floods through her and then the fear prickles. What have they discovered?
They wait.
Paul looks exhausted, worried. She would have struggled to keep going as best she could, but he forced her to come here. Things had been bad between them for a while, and it’s obvious her behaviour aggravates him. But, now that they’re at the hospital, doing an MRI after a battery of other tests, she knows that he’s sorry for losing his temper with her all those times.
‘It’s okay,’ she says gently. ‘I was frustrating myself. I was exhausted by myself. I am exhausted.’
He looks at her with pity, and she doesn’t like it. It scares her. Things have gotten too serious. She wants to roll back the clocks to being an accident-prone silly wife, silly friend, silly sister, silly clumsy Mummy.
Dr Khatri enters looking quizzical. His eyes rest on her for a moment and she doubts he’s seeing her as a person; it is a look similar to the one given by an engineer popping the hood to analyse the engine of a car.
‘Is everything okay?’ Paul jumps up from his chair.
‘It’s peculiar. We’ve never seen anything like it before.’
Paul swallows, sweat on his brow. He looks like a child. ‘Please, explain.’
‘I can’t really … I’ll have to show you both.’
Still wearing the hospital gown, she follows the men into a consultation room.
There are various X-rays on the screens, lit up on the wall. She looks at them but doesn’t even attempt to analyse them. She wouldn’t know what a normal brain looks like, or a tumour for that matter. Would she know one if she saw one? Should she know it’s in there, if it’s in there? But Paul obviously knows these things because he places his hands on his hips and stares at the scans, open-mouthed.
‘Is that …?’
‘It appears so,’ Dr Khatri shrugs, then rubs his face, confused.
‘But how can …?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
‘Honey,’ Paul turns around, looks at her.
Her body is trembling. There is something wrong with her brain. She thinks of Jamie, Ella, Lucy and Adam, her babies who need her, who literally cannot survive without her. She can’t deal with the thought of them being without her. All she can think of to ask is, ‘How long do I have?’ but she can’t even bring herself to say this out loud.
‘Do you see?’ Paul prods her.
‘No, I’m not a brain surgeon,’ she says, confused.
‘Neither am I but I can see …’ The old familiar frustration seeps into his tone.
That same irritated tone he’s used for the past year, perhaps longer. There’s an uncomfortable silence in the room. A couple of other doctors have slipped in to study the results. She feels embarrassed, slapped in the face, scolded by her husband in such company but she slowly lifts her eyes and scans the X-rays.
> ‘With all due respect,’ Dr Khatri says, defending her, ‘her brain can’t be functioning in a normal—’
‘Oh!’ she says suddenly, seeing what they see.
She walks closer to the images of her brain and examines them. She doesn’t know how she didn’t see it earlier, it’s so obvious.
There is a clearly defined skeletal feather highlighted on the X-ray, looping around her brain.
She turns to face Dr Khatri. ‘There’s a feather on my brain, a bird in my head?’ She screws her face up in absolute disgust, feeling dizzy, feeling like she wants to slap her head, hit it so hard that it falls out one of her ears. Which is exactly what she does. Paul and Dr Khatri rush to her side to stop her.
‘There is no bird in your head,’ Dr Khatri says, trying to calm her.
‘But how else would it get there?’ she asks, her head throbbing after whacking herself so hard. ‘Feathers don’t just appear out of nowhere. They grow on birds. And chickens. And … what else has feathers?’ She shudders again, wanting to shake her head so hard it will fall out. She steps closer to the X-ray. ‘Is there a chicken in there, can you see it?’
The experts in their long white coats all move closer to the X-ray.
‘Isn’t the feather the evidence?’ she asks.
Dr Khatri considers this. ‘I don’t know … but I can tell you what I do know. One side, as you can see – the left side – is mostly covered in this … feather … which affects your speech and language, mathematical calculation and fact retrieval, which explains your behaviour and the problems you’ve been experiencing.’
‘How do we get it out of my head?’
‘We can’t operate, unfortunately. The position this feather is in is just too intricate, too dangerous.’
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