by Self, Will
When I’ve absorbed another recipe for banana flapjacks perhaps the two hundredth of my life so far – I look up to see that Mr Khan is still there. Having failed with what he imagines to be a sympathetic approach, and rising to my rebuff, he adopts a more scientific one: ‘We – or rather I – wondered whether you might be able to help us, then?’
‘With what?’ I can’t believe this shlemiel.
‘We’re doing a study – a survey of patients . . . of terminal patients” – he’s squeezed it out at last, that terminal ‘terminal’, popped it like a cyanide capsule into the mouth of the conversation – ‘attitudes.’
‘Attitudes to what?’ Outside, on Grafton Way, I can hear the traffic whooping and growling. When I came into the hospital this time for the laughable operation (a lumpectomy-can you believe they really call it that? It’s like dubbing a heart transplant a ‘ticker swap’), it was such a relief to get out of the city, into a kind of refuge, but now I understand it’s no refuge at all. There ought to be a sanctuary inside the hospital where patients can hide from Khan and his ilk.
‘To, erm . . . to their quality of life.’ He’s got it out now and he’s obscurely pleased; there’s a thin smile seaming his stuffed, fat face.
‘Let me get this straight, you’re asking people who’re dying what their quality of life is?’
‘Ye-es, that’s it. I have a survey sheet . . . a questionnaire, if you’d like to see it?’
‘What do you expect to discover?’ My tone begins sharp but steady, but as I enunciate the hated words the pitch rises, the words fray and shred. ‘That the quality of a life gets better the nearer a cancer patient gets to death? Oh my fucking Christ I’m going to die. I can’t stand it I’m gonna die. Not me! Oh God-ohgod-ohgog-jeezus-ogod-og – “And here I go, choking into incoherent terror, the facade demolished by sledgehammer sobs. I moan and I pule and I groan and saliva loops from my slack jaws. It’s a most satisfying performance, I sense through the fog – for Mr Khan. After all, he’s a trained grief counsellor – and here’s plenty of grief. Sacks of it. But no – he can’t cope, he’s up and waddling off in the direction of the nurses’ station while I tear up the Woman’s Realm, lay waste to the paper Little England, and scream and cry.
I’ve always had a talent for hysteria, for plunging over the black edge of a mood, but this black edge is so much bigger. It’s a Niagara, sucking into itself the whole water of my life. I feel like a stroke victim must – half of my world is gone. Half of that plastic water jug; half of that box of Kleenex; half of that fucking already half-eaten Battenberg cake which my junky daughter brought me yesterday afternoon; half of that crumpled tissue; that Staedtler HB pencil; that dust mote. For the first time in my life I can feel, utterly and incontrovertibly, what it’s like not to be me. What it’s like to be me feeling not me. It’s so lonely. I’m so fucking lonely. Who would’ve thought that me, who’s led a life that has known so much bloody loneliness, now has to face the solitude of death? I’m sobbed by racks. Oh my self – why hast thou abandoned me?
Sister Smith, one of those West Indian women of landmass bulk, who could be any age between thirty and sixty, rips me into my plastic cocoon with her arms arching like leaping seals, then sits down heavily near my mutilated breast. She’s already got the unputdownable beaker, the easy-to-swallow capsule. ‘Here,’ she says – and I take the Valium. I’ve no problem with that; after all, I’ve taken a raft of the things thus far – why stop now? In the seventies, when I patrolled daily with depression’s black guard dog, I used to pass by suburban newsagents, and seeing those sweetie-dispensers outside (you know the ones – ten pence for some gum and a plastic charm) I’d imagine them full of five-, ten-, even twenty-milligram Valiums. Go in, and the old stick behind the counter – hair greased straight back, cigarette fuming in his face – might say, ‘Bad news today, Mrs Yaws, very bad news. Bomb in a pub in Guildford, many dead. Scenes of terrible carnage. Senseless slaughter. Unspeakably awful. Unimaginably evil. You’ll be wanting a Valium with your Guardian?’
‘There, love,’ says Sister Smith, ‘there you go.’
Gulp! I can feel her yellow-tinged, calloused palm through the brushed cotton of my nightie. A curious confusion of senses – and this alone serves to calm me, because it’s only with blacks that I imagine I can feel their colour. What could whiteness feel like? A stupid colourlessness of indifference, I daresay. But the blacks – whom I touch always unwillingly – they feel black, or yellow, or brown, or in the case of the old man I tried to comfort after he’d been knocked down by a car outside John Lewis’s on the Finchley Road – grey. He felt grey.
‘I have to say, Mr Khan’s not the best clinical psychologist we have here at the hospital, y’know.’
‘I-I know. Believe me – I know. Ogodogodogod . . .’ I would certainly like to hug Sister Smith. She’s built to hug me, she’s big enough to hug me. My mother was too petite to give me a proper hug once I was seven – not that she would’ve wanted to, for fear of rucking up her perfect bodice. And as for my father – I never called him Daddy; I never called him nything – he’d lift me up under my arms and swing me, but only as if intent on letting go.
He really is well-meaning . . . but no one can find the right words exactly . . .’
No, or even fucking vaguely, or so it seems. Yes, I should like to be hugged by Sister Smith and feel her great reef of bosom support my shattered, decaying one . . . Full fathom five thy excised lump lies . . . I should like her yellow palms on my sallow shoulders. I should like to smell the coconut oil on her skin, the PH-balanced conditioner in her crinkly hair, but this would not be a good idea.
I’m sitting on the veranda of the old house in Huntingdon, Long Island, which we had, briefly, when I was a child. I’m sitting on the lap of a woman as solid as Sister Smith and as black and sweet-smelling. The sun is hot then cool on my neck as Betty plaits my long, blonde hair. Even then it was the best thing about me. Can she be doing anything as obvious as humming a hymn? Yes, she is. She’s a religious woman although when she did house-cleaning it would be the blues. ‘Titanic Man’ for the bathroom, ‘St Louis’ for the kitchen. She’s doing my hair in a French plait, up and over and through. Hairy pastry. And while she plaits I’m kissing her. The softest and lightest of kisses on her neck and on her collarbone where it rises from her house dress. I’m being scrupulous with these kisses, they’re really air kisses, perturbations of the atmosphere immediately above Betty, because I know – or I think I know – that this irritates her. But I want to kiss Betty because I love her. No, not love her – she’s my world. Like all loving adult carers of small children, she has defined the world itself for me. My world is Betty – not the earth. Things can be assimilated in as much as they conform-or diverge – from this Bettyness.
Yes, I’m kissing Betty and I’m smelling Betty and I’m even subtly rubbing a bit of Betty’s old house dress in between my thumb and finger – because she’s my security blanket too when I’m torn from her and deposited hard on the boards. ‘You bad girl! You bad, bad girl! You never ever do this again. Never. Do you understand me? Do you!’ One slap cross my tiny face, then back, then a third. My mother slapped me the way British actors playing Gestapo officers were later to slap their interrogation victims – but she wasn’t pretending. Her diamond ring drew my blood and became this little girl’s worst enemy. It was so out of proportion – the colossal violence from this petite, blonde woman – that Betty herself was stunned, left half-risen from the old rocker, her face a racist caricature of minstrel shock.
I never kissed Betty again. She stayed with us until I was fifteen – but I never touched her again. We would talk and I would confide and she would sympathise – but we both knew we could never touch each other ever again; that for me black flesh was an anathema. An evil substance. I cannot touch black people – unless I have to. How unfair that they may have to touch me. I do so hope I’m unconscious before it happens. And I find myself saying to Sister Smith, ‘Will I know it w
hen I die?
‘Hush now,’ Sister Smith puts a hand up and dabs at my dregs of hair – black women, blonde hair, my whole life has been wrapped in this skein – but draws back when she senses me stiffen. ‘Y’know, you’re not bein’ good to yourself, girl – Lily. Dr Steel, he means well, but he’s – how can I put it now – he takes a rather technical view of these things. He doesn’t explain so well – did he say what you should be expecting?’
‘He said that this time they couldn’t get all the tumour, that it had hypo– hypo – ‘
‘Hypostasised, yes, well, that jus’ means it’s spread, you see.’ ‘Anyway – that we could go on with chemo, with the ray gun, with a dancing shaman if I liked, but that he thought . . . he thought . . .’
‘That there was no point now. That it would be better to accept it an’ die with a little dignity – he said that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s nothin’ if not dependable like that, but he’s not a believer, y’know, he doesn’t have no saviour so he can’t comfort himself – poor man.’
Saviour. That’s done it. Sister Smith is undoubtedly one of the rocks the Church is built upon. Although in her case it’s probably a small revivalist chapel. I can see the tiny building in my mind’s eye, actually shaking as Sister Smith and her sisters slam out the gospels. I notice now what I should’ve before that wedged in the brown ravine of her cleavage is a gold cross. Her saviour must be tiny, it occurs to me – probably because my sardonic voice is the one that will be silenced last-if this is big enough to nail him up on. ‘Thank you, Sister – but I’m not religious.’ It’s probably the most sisterly thing I’ve said in years – which is how long since I’ve had cause to thank my own.
‘That’s all right, Mrs Bloom, there’s a special place with Our Lord for the Israelites, y’know – ‘
‘I’m not Jewish, Sister.’
‘I’m sorry – I’d thought . . . the name . . .’ She wanted to say the nose – they all do.
‘I was married to Mr Bloom, for a time.’ The deception comes easily enough – since she made the initial mistake. ‘No, I’m not religious – I don’t believe in an afterlife, I don’t believe in Big Cosy Daddy, waiting to swing me up into the sky. When I die – I’ll rot. That’s all, Sister – that’s all.’
For a second I’m proud of this bravado, then she says, ‘Y’know, Mrs Bloom, not all of the exoteric symbolism of Christianity should be taken literally. I can understand you’ll not be wanting to see the minister, but Mr Khan – ‘
‘Fuck Mr Khan.’
‘Mrs Bloom – ‘
‘Fuck him, fuck him, I don’t wanna see him – don’ wanna see anybody – ‘And here I go again; the little stopper of pride has popped out of my gullet and a great foaming splurge of self-pity froths out in a spasmodic series of gulps, seagull cries, tears and then globs of white bile which have the ministering fundamentalist reaching for a cardboard kidney dish. Why shape them like kidneys – why not like a heart, or a lung, or a severed breast?
She leaves me after threatening me with the cold Steel, and I relapse into the memento mori nightmare which is dying. Half of everything gone – the flesh peeled back and the skull of things finally, irrevocably, exposed to view. I’m so shocked. You wouldn’t credit it that I’ve been feeling the lump for two years now, that I’m so familiar with it I’ve even given it a baby name. Minxie, I call her – because she’s going to annihilate me – the little minx. Yup, two years of the pet name, and then Steel’s sharp pal cut Minxie out. But when the stitches were removed from under my breast and I had the courage to examine it, I found Minxie still there and bigger than ever. I think.
Before I knew I had cancer I was seriously frightened that I would die of it. Die like my own mean little mother, win-nowed out by it until I was a wheezing grey cadaver, literally a mummy. Everyone I talked to, everything I read, everywhere I turned, I heard that smoking causes it – but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t fucking stop. I couldn’t stop when my lungs felt like they were full of napalm – that’s what they felt like. They were napalming the Viet Cong – and I was napalming my lungs with Camels, with Winstons, with Marlboros, even with when I was truly desperate – British cigarettes, with English fags. They were dropping Agent Orange on the forests – and I felt like I was coughing the shit up.
Dr Bridge, one of my second husband’s perennial squeezes. A dry thing. It must’ve been dusty when they did it together Yaws himself being such a dry stick. A dry shit. Any old shit on a kerbstone – that was David Yaws. Pass him by every city block. If only I had. Anyway this Bridge – Virginia Bridge, no less – she’d park up her ridiculously well-kept Morris Traveller, a silly little half-timbered car to go with her silly little half-timbered house, and come up to the bedroom where I lay drowning in my own phlegm. Then she’d sound me with her smooth, Atrixo-creamed hands, while speaking to me with her dry English accent, and say, ‘Lily, really, I mean to say, you can’t expect me to go on treating you for chronic bronchitis if you aren’t prepared to give up smoking. I mean, it’s not as if you don’t know the facts . . .’
I couldn’t listen to her. I was feverish, I was in pain – and she still wanted to chafe with my husband. Did she come to the house in order to speculate as well as employ her speculum? About what Yaws and I didn’t do together? Imagining Yaws’s and my daughters as possible versions of kids she might’ve had with him? I can believe that. She had a crippled husband. Paralysed from the waist down. Lucky for Virginia it wasn’t from the waist up. Anyway, I lay there and watched as black-and-white documentary clips of the era showing baboons with masks lashed on to their muzzles, forcing them to smoke, spooled behind my eyes. Give it up. I couldn’t – I’d rather die. Cigarettes were the best friends I’d ever had. More reliable than liquor, comforting – but not fattening. I’d sooner die.
Like the teeth, though – I had a fateful relationship with the unlucky Luckys. More than this, as I looked at Virginia’s equine teeth (how could she keep such tent pegs clean?), it occurred to me that it didn’t have to be my life on the line, someone else’s might do as well. Like Virginia’s. I closed my eyes tighter still– ‘ it’s an addiction like any other, Lily, it will take a few days ‘ – and willed Virginia Bridge to die: O Great White Spirit, if I give up smoking will you take this woman in my stead? Yup, it did. She died only a couple of years later, and let me tell you I was sorely tempted to take it up again. Only kidding. By then I had the anxiety even worse. Every year throughout the sixties, more and more evidence kept coming out about smoking. I felt as if all my life I’d been driving towards an intersection, while Death was speeding down the main road, the two of us on a collision course. Really I felt no better when I’d given up. I had about a motorway’s worth of tar to cough up, then I realised that I’d smoked so much that it was more than likely too late already. It was after-the–bloody-hemlock time. I began to refer to any discussion of cancer as being ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’.
A cigarette would be good now, though. Good here in an antiseptic ward. Blue smoke goes well with white linen. We may all live soapy, light-musical lives, but every woman has the right to die as Bette Davis.
A self-fulfilling prophecy. Nice, ringing phrase that – and I’ve always been something of a phrase-maker. I was a designer by training, not that I ever designed much of consequence except for the cap of a pen which has since been sucked by a billion mouths. It was a unique cap – they were generic mouths. That’s the way I look at it. Still, designing is a self-fulfilling prophecy – if it’s done right. But the thing about this particular self-fulfilling prophecy – death by cancer – was that the very articulation of the prophecy was bound to induce cancerous anxiety. Every time I said it, I knew it would come true. The self-fulfilling prophecy was itself a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even so, I was surprised to be diagnosed – funny, yeah? Real amusing.
I’d also said to the girls, who grew up with my dark m
oods, ‘At least we can be miserable in good surroundings.’ (Miserable because their father had left us; miserable because he hadn’t paid the utility bills so we had no heat or light or telephone; miserable because I couldn’t stop crying; miserable because I couldn’t find my keys.) At least we can be miserable in good surroundings – ha! What a fool I was – I got it the wrong way round; I should’ve said good in miserable surroundings – that would’ve been the right way to carry on. Maybe if I’d concentrated on doing that I wouldn’t find myself so fucking lacking in stoicism now, so scared of this pain, so sick of this nausea.
They give me drugs for the nausea – but they make me feel sick. Perhaps they’ll give me still more. Yeah – they’ll do that. They’ll load me up with pills until I’ll find myself cramming some into my mouth while I’m actually hurling others out. Ha-ha. Here comes Dr Steel, tripping over the swirly lino, in between the mobile biers. He wears a white coat which although lovingly cleaned and pressed (by Mrs Steel?) has been imperfectly dry-folded, so that the thick cotton forms a series of rigid, square panels. It makes him look like he’s wearing a peculiar tabard. St George, sneaking into the ward to do battle with the tumour dragon . . . ‘Hello, Doctor.’
‘Ms Bloom, your daughters are here to see you.’
‘Oh goody.’
‘Both of them.’ I wonder which one it is he so disapproves of – either would be worthy of it. ‘But before they come through I wanted to have a word with you about the future.’
‘You mean the lack of one – for me.’
‘Look, I know I didn’t express myself terribly well this morning, I’m afraid that side of things isn’t my forte . . .’ No, I can guess that too. I think Steel is one of those doctors who doctors because he loves the disease, not the patient. Yeah, he loves the disease. He likes to look at microscope slides that show slivers cut from interesting cancers. He likes the surprisingly vivid colours and the complex whorls of tissue. Indeed, in his more reflective moments he’s subject to philosophising on the nature of cancer. He expatiates on the fact that cancer was unknown in the ancient world, that it seems to have arisen at the same time as human reason itself emerged from the darkness. After a couple of glasses of a good single malt, he’s probably been known to hazard that the peculiar morphology of certain cancers may be a function of their being, in reality, tiny cellular models of the Copernican universe itself! ‘. . . it’s never easy to tell somebody that there’s nothing much we can do.’