Girl, Balancing & Other Stories

by Helen Dunmore

  There are just the two of us, John. Why won’t you look at me? Why won’t you tell me what you see?

  ESTHER TO FANNY

  I AM AN orphan. I say these words aloud to myself and hear them move around the room and then disappear into the carpet. They sound like a lie, even though they are true. An orphan is small, scared and hopeful, battling bravely in an institution or bowling along a country road in a dog cart towards a new home where she won’t be wanted at first. Orphans have red hair, wide vocabularies and a carpet bag containing their earthly possessions. An orphan is a child with a destiny.

  I know the literature. ‘Orphans of the Storm: the journey to self-actualisation in literature for children’. We don’t yet teach a module with that title, but we may well do so one day. It has exactly the right ring to it. Our students like modules which demand opinions rather than extensive reading. My studies in English Literature have brought me here, to this room where words sink into the cord carpet, to this university staff flat in a concrete block full of students.

  They are arriving now. Parents are unloading cars, lugging TVs up echoey staircases, checking the wiring on the communal microwave, opening and then quickly closing the bathroom doors. Soon they’ll be gone and the kids will be on their own. Big, bonny temporary orphans with credit cards.

  My mother died during the summer. I practise the words and they too disappear. When last term ended I was a woman with a mother whom I visited each weekend. Some colleagues knew why, others didn’t. I had learned a new vocabulary. I would say, ‘Macmillan nurse,’ and on one or two faces there would shine complete understanding. On others, not a flicker.

  Esther to Fanny, this is Esther to Fanny, come in.

  I listen. I’m not daft enough to think there’s going to be any answer. My name is Esther. My mother’s name was not Fanny.

  Last term I read out to my students a letter from a woman with breast cancer. This letter was addressed to a woman called Esther. The writer’s name was Fanny, Fanny Burney, and in her letter she described a mastectomy performed on her without anaesthetic, in 1811.

  I came across Fanny Burney’s letter by chance, while I was searching yet another website for information about mastectomy. And there was Fanny Burney’s portrait. Her face was composed but she looked as if something had amused her very much a few minutes earlier. I began to read her letter to Esther.

  The eighteenth century is not my period, but it has always appealed to me. There is something about those small, fierce, brave people who dressed elaborately, smelled awful, gushed about feeling and worshipped Reason. Fanny Burney, for all she lived forty years into the nineteenth century, is one of them to the bone. I am glad it’s not my period. I wouldn’t want to add to it, deconstruct it, contextualise it, demystify it, or explain it in any way.

  I didn’t ask my students to analyse Fanny’s letter. It didn’t fit into the module at all, but I thought it was worth reading to them, all the same.

  I read it out to them, that’s all. They are too big and bouncing, healthy and beautiful. They frowned and shifted in their seats and flinched and probably felt glad that things like that only happen to really old people. Fanny Burney was fifty-nine! No wonder she got ill, what else could she expect? Besides, at fifty-nine, should you really care so much about your life any more? It is the deaths of children and young people that rate as tragedies, just as it is children who make real orphans. Fanny Burney’s mastectomy, performed without anaesthesia, gave her another twenty-nine years of life. I watched my students doing the calculation, and reckoning that it was hardly worth it. Who wants to suffer in order to be old for even more years?

  No, I am not doing them justice. They flinched, as I did. Unconsciously, some of the girls brought up their hands to cover their breasts, as I’d done. Fanny got through to them.

  ‘I don’t see why she agreed to have the operation. I mean, I’d rather die than go through that!’ one girl said after I had finished reading. ‘I mean, she wasn’t young, was she?’ she added, glancing at me.

  Esther to Fanny. No, you weren’t young. My mother wasn’t young, either. She was even older than you. She was seventy-three. If she didn’t receive the very best of modern medical treatment, she certainly had the nearly best. She had a mastectomy, radiotherapy, chemotherapy. Two years later she developed a secondary in her left lung. She had more radiotherapy, oxygen, a nebuliser, massage, physiotherapy to keep her lungs as clear as possible. They gave her baths in a Jacuzzi at the hospice. She liked the Jacuzzi, or at least I think she liked it. She was so polite that it was hard to tell.

  My mother had everything. GP appointments, clinic appointments, a second opinion, referral for rehab, referral to pain clinic, a place in a trial, a re-referral, another X-ray, a series of blood tests, a change of consultant, a lavender massage, a Macmillan nurse, a commode, a bell by her bed and a tube up her nose, a bed in the hospice. She was so lucky to get it, that bed in the hospice.

  Esther to Fanny. You had none of that. Each doctor in your story had a name. They trembled, or grew pale, or stood aside hanging their head at the thought of the pain they were about to give you. They colluded with you in sending your husband out for the day. They knew, as you did, that he would not be able to endure witnessing your operation. They told you the truth: ‘Je ne veux pas vous tromper. Vous souffrirez, vous souffrirez beaucoup!’

  Yes, they were clear about it. They were men of the eighteenth century, even though the century had turned. They told you that you would suffer a great deal. They told you that you must cry out and scream. They stammered, and could not go on, because their sensibility was as powerful as their sense of reason. When the moment came for the operation to begin, you wanted to run out of the room. But Reason took command in your fierce, bright eighteenth-century mind, and you climbed on to the bedstead where your breast was to be amputated. There were seven men around your bed. I wonder how they smelled, and how often they washed? They were the greatest doctors of their age, but probably they didn’t even wash their hands before they cut off your breast. They put a cambric handkerchief over your face, and through it you saw the glint of polished steel.

  But they also cured you. They cut off your living breast and scraped you down to the bone to search out the last cancerous atoms. You screamed all the time, except when you fainted. You recovered, even though everyone concerned in your operation was left pale as ashes, in their black clothes. You saw the blood on them as you were carried back to your bed. You were about to live for another twenty-nine years.

  It’s a strange story to our ears, Fanny. How exquisitely you act out the hard logic of the eighteenth century, and keep your eyes open under the cambric handkerchief. It is only semi-transparent anyway, so you see most of what goes on as the men prepare to operate upon you. They could have found a thick black piece of cloth and tied it around your eyes as a blindfold, but they didn’t. I have the feeling that they respected you too much.

  And the emotion around that bed! Imagine if one of the doctors treating my mother had turned ashen, and wept. If he had told her the truth. ‘Vous souffrirez, vous souffrirez beaucoup!’

  Nobody said it. But you suffered, Mum. You suffered a great deal. There was a smell in the hospice which we never mentioned, although I know you smelled it as well as I did. It was the smell of death, literally: it was the smell of the cancer in the old man who shared your two-bed room. He was curtained, out of sight, but we could smell him. I had never known that such a thing could be. Sometimes I would gag, and turn it into a cough.

  ‘It’s not very nice, is it?’ you whispered once, sadly, pitifully. But in a very soft whisper, so no one else would hear.

  Esther to Fanny. I am glad that you screamed throughout the twenty minutes of your operation, except when you fainted. To restrain yourself might have seriously bad consequences, your doctors told you beforehand. What miracles of sense and feeling those men must have been! Knowing that you would scream, you must scream, and anticipating it by actually charging
you to scream and informing you that to do otherwise might be dangerous for your health. Knowing that you would have enough to contend with, under that semi-transparent cambric handkerchief, without any false shame.

  My mother hated to make a fuss. She was very grateful to all the doctors and nurses. If they didn’t do their jobs well, she had an answer for it. They were understaffed, run off their feet. ‘That nurse over there, Esther, she’s got an eight-month-old baby, she’s been up half the night with him cutting his molars. I don’t know how she does it.’

  I wanted to shake that nurse until her teeth rattled. She was late with the drugs round. My mother was waiting, waiting. There was sweat on her yellow face but she wouldn’t let me ring the bell.

  ‘For God’s sake, Mum, it’s what they’re here for. They’re supposed to be taking care of you. That means bringing your tablets when you need them.’

  But my mother turned her head aside wearily. ‘It doesn’t do to get across them. You don’t know, Esther.’

  Esther to Fanny. You were utterly in those doctors’ power, just as Mum was. You saw the flash of steel through your cambric handkerchief. You felt and heard that blade scraping your breastbone. You were a heroine and the doctors treated you as one.

  We have moved on. We have chemo and radio and prostheses, and scans to show the travels of those ‘peccant attoms’ of cancer which your doctors feared so much that they scraped you down to the bone. What can I say? I can’t reread your account without flinching. You couldn’t reread it at all.

  Mum is dead and I’m an orphan. Two things that don’t sound as if they can possibly be true. Mum didn’t want to cause any trouble, and she didn’t cause any trouble. The doctors barely noticed her really.

  My students are pounding up and down the stairs with their posters, IKEA lamps, armfuls of CDs and clothes. They are flushed, healthy, on the whole averse to study but only too pleased to be back at uni with all their friends. Some of them will choose my module on Elizabeth Bishop. These days it is perfectly possible to get to the end of a degree in English Literature without venturing into the eighteenth century at all.

  Esther to Fanny. At the end of your long letter you apologised to your sister. ‘God bless my dearest Esther – I fear this is all written – confusedly, but I cannot read it – & I can write it no more …’

  I put my hand out to touch that semi-transparent cambric handkerchief which time has laid across you. Your letter cuts like polished steel, although I am not, dear Fanny, your Esther at all.

  WHERE I KEEP MY FAITH

  WHEN WE WERE children and our badness jumped out of our hidden hearts and showed itself in bold words, Grandpa would raise himself from his chair. His shadow would fill the doorway as he went into the yard to cut a switch. When he had found the right one he would call us outside. Five strokes on our calves, no more. Each one was a sharp, hot, single pain. I would stare down to see if my badness was flickering away across the dust like a snake. Maybe if I looked hard enough I would see the moment when the shadow of it left my body and slipped to the earth.

  My grandpa never hurt us hard. My mind was always quick and alive, not swallowed up in pain the way I know that a mind can be beaten until darkness overcomes it. But Grandpa made me think about badness: where it came from and how it could be seen in a person’s eyes or in his voice or in his smile. It might be hidden but it would never be hidden enough, not from my grandpa or from the eye of God.

  One night Grandma showed me something that looked like a star. She got me to fix my eyes on it and then she told me that it wasn’t a star, but a satellite made of metal and plastic.

  ‘Who put it there?’

  ‘The Americans put it there.’

  ‘Why?’

  My grandma shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ she said.

  I wondered if one day a satellite might take out God’s eye. If so, He would be able to see nothing. I thought about God seeing nothing and waiting blindly to be told what had happened in the world. The angels would be His messengers, and perhaps some days they would be tired or bored and they would fail to tell Him of every little piece of badness wriggling across the dust of the earth.

  I was grown up before I knew that it was the other way around. Something had taken out the eye that would show us God, and only faith would help us in our blindness. The word of God was so clear that it dazzled me.

  I was grown up some more when all this changed again. Blindness and hiddenness were in me and all around me. The words I had stood up for in church were far away. The sound of my voice praising the Lord was silent.

  Where is a person’s faith? Where does she keep it? I have been thinking about this question for so long. However much it wearies me, it will not go away. The more I think, the less I can answer. Even the word itself begins to have a strange sound in my mind. Faith. You might tell me that it is obviously kept in the soul, and then we can talk about what the soul is made of, and whether we can see it, and where it goes after death. Or perhaps it is in the heart. The heart is closer and more familiar. We are used to it knocking against the ribs when we are afraid, or melting tenderly at the curve of a baby’s head. Perhaps faith is in there too, sometimes knocking and sometimes melting.

  But I don’t think so. I’ve had a long time to consider it, and many alternatives have presented themselves to me.

  Firstly, the hair. Unlike the heart and perhaps unlike the soul, hair continues to grow long after we are dead. It is not a pleasant thing to imagine hairs pushing through the skin, wriggling out into the white shroud. Even if a woman has always coloured her hair, she won’t be able to fool anyone after her death: the hair that grows will be grey. Grey and tired-looking and without lustre. Sometimes I imagine all the hair that is growing all over the planet, from the recent dead.

  Hair is not a safe place to keep your faith. It can be cut off against your will. It can be torn from your scalp. But on the other hand, hair can be plaited so tightly that the pattern endures for weeks. Perhaps faith would be happy there, planted deep in a maze.

  It is a long, long time since anyone plaited my hair, although I can remember sitting between my grandma’s knees while she combed and separated and twisted. She had strong fingers but she never hurt me.

  ‘What’s the hurry? We have all the time in the world,’ she used to say.

  My grandma liked to stroke the curve of my cheek with her finger. She told me that I was like her garden after rain had fallen on it, because I was young. ‘Look at my face. This is how a garden becomes when rain refuses to fall.’ She laughed and all the gullies in her face crinkled, exactly like the channels that ran down to the dry river.

  You might think it would be possible to keep faith in my grandma’s lines. Surely it would be safe there. An old woman’s lines will only grow deeper and provide a safer shelter. But even apart from the fact that my grandma is dead, I don’t think it would be possible. We shed our skin every seven years. The faith would flake away invisibly into what we call dust.

  I am supposed to sign a letter, renouncing my faith. I have spent a long time thinking about what this means. If you renounce something, then it goes away from you and you no longer possess it. But where does it go? The letter has been written on a computer. If I renounce my faith, will it go into the fibres of the paper, or will it hop back to where the letter was conceived and lodge itself in the computer’s memory? Where exactly will it go?

  What is supposed to happen is this. They bring me out of my cell into a room where I have been brought many times before. It is a small, dirty room with a desk and a chair with a man sitting in it. He is dressed in his army uniform. The uniform is clean and stiff. It looks as if its pleats and folds would have the strength to cut. His boots are also clean. His boots and his face glisten like land where rain has fallen. My feet are bare. The skin is grey and the veins are knotted. I have no mirror but I know that my hair does not shine. I have an infection in one eye which refuses to clear. I am not clean and so my body smells. I see his nose wrink
le. I am forcing him to do things he doesn’t want to have to do. All that is necessary is for me to sign his piece of paper and then sensible things can begin to happen.

  Each time it happens I look down at my feet. On my right foot, the big toenail has gone. Obviously I did not keep my faith in that toenail. I almost smile, but without changing the expression on my face.

  It is stupid, all of this. It is so stupid. They make that clear to us. There are four of us keeping our faith not in our souls or our hearts or our hair or our toenails or our grandmothers’ wrinkles. Sometimes we are kept separate and told that all the others have signed the piece of paper and gone away. They have been given food and a shower and shoes and clean underwear and even a small roll of notes so they can buy a bus ticket home.

  When the men say this, we just wait. We don’t look believing and we don’t look disbelieving. Even though I know it isn’t true, my stomach hurts because of the thought that it might be only me left. I fear that the others have been killed. I see them so rarely and we never have time for more than a few words. It’s better if we aren’t together, in case we give something to one another. Our badness maybe, or else our faith, which we ought to give to the white sheet of paper.

  I think of a thousand falling at my side, and ten thousand at my right hand.

  I am not the material of which martyrs are made. I have always known this. The others say that they are the same. It’s just that we took a step, and then another step, and these steps brought us here. But in fact it’s not possible to count the steps. And you can’t take them back again, because in order to do that you would have to unmake everything. I would have to become a woman with ten toenails and ripe, moist skin and hair the colour of earth after heavy rain has fallen on it.