by Susan Duncan
His words send me into a giddy spin of euphoria. Normal, I think, life can be normal again. Wind back the clock. A second chance. Thank you, God. I am dizzy with relief.
The surgeon snatches back control, steadies my euphoria. 'Of course there is no way of knowing what is ahead. All it takes is for one little cell to get through the lymph system to metastasise.
There are no guarantees. Getting through the first two years without a recurrence is a start but we don't give you the all-clear until you've been cancer-free for five years.'
'All-clear?'
'Well, there's never a complete all-clear. We never know what's ahead, do we?'
He stands, takes my hand. 'So go home and enjoy life.'
The words sound ominous. I am on a slippery dip, hurtling towards hope only moments before plunging into despair. I look for hidden meanings in every word, study faces like I'll be examined on them. I am frantic and erratic. Which I disguise with a public mask of good cheer. Toujours gai.
The lover visits once. Quickly, in the early morning, on his way to the airport, which gives him an excuse to rush or he'll miss the plane. An international flight. He'll be gone for two weeks. His face, usually a featureless mask, registers shock when he sees me reach for a glass of water with the arm that no longer segues into a breast. My movement is slow and painful. Crippled. It is the moment, I think, when he finally understands everything has changed. It is the moment I understand the affair is over. It takes a while longer to accept it.
Eight days after surgery, I beg to be allowed out. The surgeon wants me to stay another two days. We compromise on one more day.
A lovely friend we all call the Witch, my brother-in-law's beautiful, voluptuous partner, takes me home, driving through a Saturday morning world. It is pristine, sharp, vibrant. All my senses are raging, picking up smells, colour, shape and shade. The great big black hat of doom has lifted at least a little. There is time, who knows how long, to begin again. Another chance. Don't blow it. Not this time. Because it's my last chance.
Kay, a friend and colleague, insists on coming to stay for my first week at home after surgery. I fight her but she is short, tough, opinionated, a genuine earth mother who never had children of her own. She bustles in anyway, loaded with fresh fish and vegetables, all sorts of herbs, crusty bread. A feast after brown paper hospital fare. We settle into a cosy daily routine of late breakfasts and early dinners. Each afternoon, we both take a book to our bedrooms. Kay sleeps though, long and deep, lulled by the tranquillity of Lovett Bay, the cessation of city sounds. I read.
I have long finished the hoard of Donna Leon, who writes exquisite whodunits set in Venice, and moved on to food and travel. I want only to touch the surface of life. Steer well away from the big issues. But in truth, I do not read much until darkness overlays the outside world and all I can see when I stare out the window is a reflection of my thin white face. Do I just imagine that I look ephemeral?
Even then, for a while, I tune in to the sound of evening. The fishwife screeching of white cockatoos reduces to a satisfied cluck. Noisy miners, nondescript brown and grey, do not slow down before bed but race from tree to tree, rowdy as a classroom full of teenagers. There's a final glissando from a full-throated magpie and, if I am lucky, a flash of emerald green and brilliant red as the king parrots wing home. It is the kookaburras, though, who ring the bell for lights out when they have their last laugh for the day. A lazy, deep-bellied laugh lacking the high-pitched, raucous joy of daybreak.
I read until Kay calls dinner is ready and we sit down to a beautifully set table, candles lit, as though we are celebrating. After what feels like a lifetime of drinking wine with food, I reach for a glass of water. It's time to change old habits but it is hard to be sociable without the crutch. And the evenings are full with time, when they used to slip away as fast as the wine.
Most days the phone rings regularly. Concerned friends, great friends. Their support means so much. They schlepped briskly through the hospital, arms full of flowers, hearts full of compassion, with lots of advice. Carrot juice. Apple juice. Vitamins. Chinese herbalists. Acupuncture. On and on. If it was that easy, I think, why do so many people die?
On her last day, Kay makes tortilla the detailed, traditional Spanish way she learned when she lived in Spain. By the time her husband arrives to take her home, it is golden and fragrant with garlic, rich with potatoes and eggs. It is the most delicious dish I have ever eaten. I devour an omelet that could satisfy four people.
Kay laughs happily. Her husband is wide-eyed. Kay feels the tortilla vindicates her visit. Her husband leaves a dish of lentils he has prepared, Chilean style.To build my strength, he tells me. And I want to cry.
It feels abso-bloody-lutely sensational to be out of the airless cocoon of the hospital, where illness and darkness are the norm. Away from the fetid stench of leaking bodies, a stench no amount of disinfectant can disguise. I wear a little woollen prosthesis that I slip into the empty cup of my bra for the first three months after surgery. It's a pink satin covered lump and I hate it. I have already asked the surgeon if I might have the second breast removed.
He thinks I am frightened of a recurrence. But it is the thought of a fake body part that is repulsive. He tells me to wait a while. Think about it. But I am determined. I want no part of the little silicone blob that I am fitted for five months later, when the long, livid scar has healed. It comes in a pastel blue box, overprinted with sentimental twaddle about life, wonderful life. It is soft and pink and looks like a jellyfish. Every night I remove it from the pocket in my new, specialised bra and tuck it back into the box. So it will retain its perfect, perky shape.
When I lie down during the day, it shoots up defiantly while my other breast swells softly over the side of my rib cage. I give it a name.Tom Tit. Sometimes, I forget to wear it. Forget I need it. Because I have stopped looking in mirrors and do not notice the single lump where there used to be two.
Once you've had cancer it creeps around your mind like a whispery guilty conscience. Before every visit to the surgeon for a check-up, a niggling dread builds like a tropical thunderstorm. What is this lump? Why this ache? Minor physical discomforts, once so easily shrugged off, are filled with threat. Is it back? Am I already hurtling down the highway to death? I have rejected chemo but the pressure is on. I'm given case histories. One lived. One died. But statistics can be spun to mean what you want, can't they?
Memories of my brother lying in hospital, a drip drizzling a poisonous chemical cocktail through collapsing veins, surge into my mind every time I am pushed by one friend or another to have this drastic treatment. I spoke to John every day during treatments when I lived in Sydney and he in Melbourne. I listened to his voice weaken to nearly nothing. Once, he could barely speak.
'What's happened?' I asked.
'Had a bit of a bad night. Ripped the tubes out of my chest in my sleep.'
Nurses found him wandering the corridors, bleeding and hallucinating, trying to find his way home. The treatment, I suspect, had become harder to bear than the disease. But after they calmed him and put him back to bed he allowed the nurse to hook him to the drip once more because he was brave and his will to live was massive.
My case, though, is so different from his. Is the choice between chemo or no chemo really life and death? The surgeon has told me I am a borderline case. No lymph nodes contaminated means no chemo. Miniscule contamination? Up to me to make the decision. He also says he thinks a five year course of tamoxifen, two little pills a day to suppress my body's estrogen, will suffice.
'Hell,' I say, when he tells me about the pills,'never thought I'd be so happy to be booked for the next five years!'
But a work colleague, high powered and persuasive, will not drop the case for chemo: 'Just go and talk to the oncologist.' She has done the research, like a good journalist, and she insists I write down a name and phone number. After two fraught days of weighing the odds, I make an appointment.
In the oncologi
st's waiting room wonderful paintings hang on the walls, fresh flowers grace coffee tables and lifestyle magazines – the succour of modern living – are piled high. I read directions on how to plant a magnolia grandiflora for future generations, learn the best thread count for bed linen, check out the newest trends in lighting. Anything to escape looking at the rows of filing cabinets behind the receptionist's counter. So many cabinets, so many files. Is there an epidemic? How many living, how many close to death, or dead?
I have not dressed up for this appointment. All I want is a healthy body. A healthy body turns rags into raiment.
When a door opens, a round-faced woman with dark brown hair and a cheery smile calls my name. She stands to one side and indicates a seat alongside her desk.
She wriggles around in her chair until she's comfortable and then pulls a file towards her, opening it to a letter from the surgeon. She gives the impression she's reading it for the first time, and perhaps she is.
'What would you do?' I ask her.
She sighs and leans back in her chair, swivelling in quarter turns. She taps her bottom lip with a ballpoint pen then puts the pen down. Leans forward so her elbows are on the desk and her body is almost fully turned to me.
'I would have the treatment,' she says.
'Why? I'm told I'm a borderline case.'
'Because you have two types of cancer cells. One a greater risk than the other.'
I do not ask any more questions. I agree to the treatment and make an appointment for a couple of days after my forty-ninth birthday. I'm expecting to have lunch with the lover. He's never forgotten a birthday.
That night I call Sophia, seeking courage. No, seeking more than courage. I want her approval, I want her to tell me I am taking the best course. I want to believe that she has some magic power so that if she says good girl it will mean all will be well. Because I feel like I am spinning in a whirlpool of rage and confusion. There are no straightforward answers – or clean answers, as I come to call them. Will chemo guarantee I beat cancer? No, there are no guarantees. Is tamoxifen enough? There is no way of knowing. Can I be sure a little cluster of cells isn't already mutating somewhere else in my body? No.
At some point I begin to understand that my grip on life will always be tenuous. As it is in reality. Except that's not how we're taught to regard it. Life is blithely taken for granted by most of us – until it is threatened.
'My sense of security is gone,' I tell Sophia on the phone.
'Well, that's not a bad way to live,' she says.
'Next you're going to tell me it's another bloody gift!'
She laughs her big, fat, gorgeous belly laugh.
'Ah, darlin'. That's exactly what it is. Only fools think they're promised more than the moment they're in. And the only absolute cure for life is death.'
13
THE LOVER DUMPS ME formally at my birthday lunch. A lunch he does not confirm until the last minute.
When it seems like he will not call, I go to the juice shop at the organic grocery and order the drink with fresh garlic in the carrot and celery. It reeks all around me, all over me. But it makes me feel healthy.Then the phone rings and it's the lover and I regret the juice immediately. Lover before health, I ask myself? Surely not. That would be insanity.
'Are we having lunch or not?' he asks.
Why don't I just terminate the call, press a tiny button and zoom him into space forever? 'Yeah. Sure. Where?'
My phone drops out. Low battery. A chance to drive on, begin again as I promised myself I would. But I call back. 'Quick. Where?'
We make a time and place and the phone goes dead again.
I wear my uniform of jeans, loose shirt, Pia's discarded windcheater with its rusting steel buttons. I want to be interesting and sexual, revel in my last white napkin lunch before beginning chemo. But I feel I have passed my use-by date. I cannot even conjure up a smile. Toujours gai is gone forever. Soon I will be bald, without eyebrows and eyelashes, stamped as a person who now belongs to a different club.
The restaurant is beautiful, white tablecloths, perfectly tweaked table napkins, glittering glass. Lots of pale wood and slim waiters in black. The prettier the waiters, I think, the higher the price. We have dined here before. Often. The first time, I wore a mid-calf length flowing dress, my hair was freshly washed and styled, my shoes polished. I felt a million bucks as I walked down the staircase into the room. The lover introduced me to the owner, who ordered a bottle of wine and sat with us for a while, talking food, Italy, music. Life was always an event with the lover.
But it is winter now. Sunny and cold with clouds building over the silhouette of the CBD and we have a table on the deck. There are plastic blinds and gas heaters but it is still cold out here, and the view through the plastic is gluey. I keep my rusty jacket on to stay warm – or perhaps to hide a pink satin breast that often moves too high or low, giving the game away.
I read a menu that once tantalised but I have no appetite.The thought of swallowing makes me feel ill. I order fish because I think it is healthy but I have never enjoyed fish. I've always been a lamb or steak girl by choice.
I let the waiter fill my glass with wine and feel a sudden thrill at being careless of my physical well-being. I drink it recklessly and the cacophony in my head mutes instantly. Within a few minutes, I am quite drunk. It feels wonderful. Like days of old. Steady. Steady. But the second glass is gulped and it is enough to make me throw caution to the wind.
The lover reaches beside his chair and puts a shopping bag in front of me.
'Happy birthday.'
When I open it I find two books, one about the destruction of love, another about dogs.
'Trying to tell me something?' I ask. Another gulp, another empty glass. Because I know he is.
A conversation, years earlier, about the right way to end an affair: 'Never a phone call,' he told me. 'You go to lunch. At least.' And yet I cannot believe this is the official moment. It is my birthday, for God's sake. I have just lost a breast. I am about to begin chemo. How hard is it to give me one frivolous day to sustain me through the next few months?
He shifts in his chair, trying to make himself taller by straightening his back. The expression on his face is almost neutral but not quite. There is a hint of power. He drums the fingers of one hand – short fat fingers, I see with sudden clarity, when once I only noticed the buffed, clean shine of a recent manicure. He looks like an actor about to break into the defining soliloquy of the play.
'All my relationships eventually come to an end,' he says.
And I cannot remember anything else. I turn to reach for the wine and knock over the ice bucket. Ice slithers across the floor. Other diners stare. Waiters rush over to fix the mess, defuse whatever they sense is going on.
But I do not make a scene. I have never made scenes. I do not cry. I try for a line that is light (my mother again!) but come up with one that I am ashamed of to this day: 'I gave it everything I had. I guess it wasn't enough.' Jesus, where were the violins?
I see his jaw jut a little more. Power. Control. And I fall off the shaky edge of what I thought was love into hate and anger. Such a fine line. Passion of a different kind.
'We'll always be friends,' I say, but I'm lying. Because I'd rather see him dead.
When the waiter comes by with a fresh glass and bottle, I ask for the dessert menu. This time the lover is shocked and cannot fake neutrality. Was I supposed to get up and leave? Break down? What did all the other women before me do?
I slowly swallow every last mouthful of dessert. He can bloody well wait. But I am seriously drunk with an irresistible desire to get even drunker, to obliterate the event until I reach a stage where I cannot even remember where I am, who I am with. My wine goes down in gulps and I demand my glass be refilled.
The lover gets more and more aloof but never impatient. Even the stubby, drumming fingers are still. The performance of the damned has him riveted.
I look at him after what seems like onl
y minutes and notice city lights with rain halos. Outside it is now dark and wet. I am deliciously, almost paralytically drunk, the stench of wine mingling unhappily with the raw garlic of my juice. At some point I hazily remember my mother, here for my birthday party, is waiting for me in a nearby restaurant where she is lunching with friends.
I stagger to my feet, thanking him for lunch, politely, like someone I don't know well, and leave. Just before I reach the door onto the street, I turn and ask him to call the restaurant where my mother waits. 'Tell them to get my mother to stand outside, that I'll be there in a moment.'
He nods. He is anxious to be away now. I suspect he has another date. Drinks with the new mistress. Poor cow. I hope she is stronger than me, that she gives him a run. But I doubt it.
I stagger the two blocks to my mother and then make her drive us to Church Point. Which is a pig of a thing to do. At home, she rarely drives further than her local shopping centre, which is three minutes away, and if she meets an oncoming car, it's a heavy traffic day. We're in Sydney city peak hour, Friday night traffic. It's a zoo.
She accelerates/brakes all the way home through rain and wind, never letting the speedo jump beyond forty kilometres while I fill the car with great big bellowing howls. She thinks I am going to tell her I have not long to live and she is silent.
Church Point appears around the final bend, familiar, friendly, like a safe haven. All the car spaces are taken, as usual, so I tell her to park illegally. By now, I have slid the afternoon into another part of my mind, to be taken out and dealt with later. I think I am being strong, but I am still just monumentally drunk.
A year later, I ask a shrink how I can go through a truly terrible situation and, not long after, behave as though nothing has happened.