After Cleo

Amazons

A circle of women – many who have just one breast

I woke in better spirits. Morning light filtered through the blind. Philip lay beside me. We rose early and headed across the road for coffee and still-warm bread.

Whatever today’s outcome, things would be fine. I knew that from a programme I’d seen about Stephen Hawking’s view of the universe. The fact we’re all made from stars was profoundly comforting. Our bodies are literally composed from the stuff of heavenly explosions. We never die. We revert to star dust. Dust to dust.

I hoped I could be as brave as Mum had been. When she was diagnosed with terminal bowel cancer, she’d treated it lightly. ‘I’m floating out to my island,’ she said with a dreamy smile. ‘It’s so beautiful over there. I can almost see it now. I’m going to Bali Ha’i.’ What was it with women in our family and islands?

I wondered how much of it had been an act for our benefit. Probably more than we realised. As the cancer distended her abdomen and turned her skin the colour of candle wax, Mum spent her days comforting visitors and phone callers who couldn’t disguise their grief.

When she wasn’t in pain, she was a beacon of happiness, claiming these were some of the best days of her life. Alone in her room with me one afternoon, she raised a bony finger and said, ‘Learn from this. Watch me.’

The local vicar visited her town house to find out if she had any sins to offload. I ushered him into her bedroom and closed the door. Mum wasn’t an official churchgoer, but she’d sung in the choir. Singing was her form of worship, she’d always said. The vicar emerged a few minutes later looking flustered. He said he’d never met someone with such a spiritual approach to dying. Checkmate. Part actress, part guru, Mum bedazzled us all.

I’d perched on her bed and taken notes while she choreographed her funeral. She didn’t want things starting on a downer, so chose ‘Morning Has Broken’ for the opening number. After that she wanted her friends from choir to line up in front of the altar and sing ‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’, which had become one of her favourite songs. The words attributed to St Francis of Assisi were a neat summation of mother love – ‘Grant that I may never seek so much to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love with all my soul.’

‘I’m so excited,’ she said about the funeral. ‘How many people do you think will show up?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, trying to think of a huge number. ‘A hundred and fifty?’

‘Is that all ?’ Mum looked devastated.

‘Well, no. Probably double that.’

Settling into her pillows, whose whiteness matched her chiselled face, Mum looked satisfied.

‘When they’re carrying my coffin out, someone will have to sing Bali Ha’i,’ she instructed.

Mum had been famous in town for her role as Bloody Mary in the 1963 Operatic Society production of South Pacific. I asked if she knew of a local whose voice was good enough to match hers. Her response was firm. A decent international recording would be required. Sarah Vaughan, perhaps.

‘It’ll be a great do,’ she sighed. ‘I wish I could be there.Though I suppose I will be in some way.’

I doubted I could ever be that strong for my children. Compared to her, I was a coward, an amateur.

Even though we’d had our conflicts, largely about sex and marriage, Mum and I had been close. When we fought it was only with mirrors. I still sometimes dialled her phone number just to feel a connection with her.

As journalist herself, Mum had pointed me at a typewriter from an early age. I’d rebelled of course, and ended up exactly where she’d wanted me. When we knew she was dying I’d experienced a guilty surge of freedom. At last I’d be free to smash to mould she’d squeezed me into. But it was too late. She’d carved me in her own image.

When Philip and I met at the clinic that afternoon the surgeon had good and bad news. It was cancer. The growth was unusually large at nearly seven centimetres across. The cells, however, appeared to be non-invasive. They wouldn’t know for certain until after the surgery but once my right breast was lopped off, and assuming the left one was clear (pending MRI results), I had every chance of a normal lifespan.

Normal. Lifespan. Hallelujah! I could have kissed her, but the desk was wedged safely between us. Surgeons aren’t touchy-feely types, which is strange considering how deeply they delve into people’s flesh during working hours. Walking through the city after the appointment, I savoured wintry sun on my face. Naked branches stretched across baby blue sky. A seagull on top of a statue rearranged his feathers and glared down on the crowds huddled in their coats against the cold.

I meandered through a sea of impassive faces engrossed in iPods and mobile phones. The world had gone Asperger’s. Bent over little boxes, white wires dangling from their ears, people were compulsively attached to realities that didn’t exist. Connected to the abstract but disconnected from their living, breathing lives, they were half robots. I wished they’d stop for a second to absorb the beauty around them, the ephemeral nature of being human. Our visit here is so short.

In the waiting room of the MRI place next morning, a questionnaire asked if I was claustrophobic. ‘Somewhat’ I scribbled between yes and no. Apparently some patients need general anaesthetic before they’ll consent to being slid inside the giant vagina that is an MRI machine. Birth in reverse.

The medicos were back to calling me ‘dear’. A radiographer stabbed my arm, dear, where dye was going to be pumped through during the procedure. I wanted a sign stuck on my forehead for the benefit of every nurse, doctor, scanner operator, bloodsucker and pusher of probes and trolleys: Dear dears. Please don’t call me ‘dear’.

A nurse warned me it would be noisy in the MRI machine and gave me headphones with the choice of jazz or classical. Usually I’d go for classical, but tastes of medical people are unpredictable – e.g. the arum lilies. Wagnerian opera or ‘The Funeral March’ could have a devastating effect. Jazz felt safer.

Two nurses packed me on a trolley like meat on a tray, buzzer in hand in case I freaked out in there. Lying on my front, a boob protruding through each of two holes, I glided into the machine’s womb with ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ tootling in my ears. ‘Tall and tanned, and young and lovely . . .’

I’d always hated that song, even more so now that I was feeling almost the exact opposite of an elongated Brazilian beauty – short and white, old and ugly. Thank God it was soon drowned out by head-smashingly loud buzzing.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Brown?’ a male voice asked through the headphones.

I was reassured by the youthful tentativeness in his voice, the sunshine in his Australian accent. And the fact he didn’t call me dear. ‘Yes,’ I shouted, though shouting probably wasn’t necessary.

The buzzing was replaced by rhythmic ringing. It was like being lodged inside a giant bell. I thought of Lydia in Sri Lanka and imagined myself meditating alongside her to the strikes of a monastery bell. Together in a mysterious land, and at peace. Except the bell could’ve done with silencers.

I drifted to another time, a day at the beach after sixth form exams, wagging school with Jan. Glittering black sand, a mandarin sun hovering over the horizon. Poised between childhood and maturity, it was a perfect moment – my first adult experience of bliss.

‘You did well,’ said the red-headed young man who belonged to the MRI machine voice.

‘How could I not?’

‘Some people move.’

To my relief the MRI gave the left breast the all clear.

Later that day I called my sister Mary in New Zealand. Her voice was calm and gentle over the phone. Having had a mastectomy eight years earlier, she understood what it was like.

‘You won’t be as lonely as you think,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a circle of women. It happened for me and it’ll happen for you, too. So many women have been through this thing, they know how to help. They’ll draw close and give you more strength and support than you can imagine.’

I hadn’t heard that tone in Mary’s voice since we were kids and she was the older sister, The Protector. Any distances adult life had forced between us evaporated. She’d lost her left breast. I was about to shed my right. Between the two of us we’d have a perfect pair.

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.

My optimism wavered. What Greg was proposing wasn’t a renovation so much as a full body refit. Putting myself through all that would be the equivalent of simultaneously bungee jumping, climbing Everest and playing in the World Cup Rugby final.

‘We live in a breast-obsessed society,’ said Greg.

Rubbish, I thought. Driving home, I stopped at some traffic lights and saw a sculpture I’d never noticed before. It was constructed entirely of concrete breasts.

A DVD about breast reconstruction lay on the kitchen table. I wasn’t keen to examine its contents. Apparently the reconstructive surgery would take longer to recover from than the mastectomy itself. Still, even though I’m no Pamela Anderson I didn’t fancy running around like an Amazon for the rest of my days.

Watching the DVD with Philip, I emitted involuntary yelps. How could those women talk so brightly about the massive scarring on their bodies?

Maybe I’d give reconstruction the swerve. But then I remembered a friend describing how shattered she’d felt waking up after her mastectomy to see a vast empty space where her breast had been. Reconstruction might be a physical hurdle, but it could spare some psychological trauma.

Getting three surgeons to show up in the same operating theatre at the same time was like arranging for Lady Gaga, Angelina Jolie and Queen Elizabeth II to attend the same charity event. The medics shuffled their diaries around and found a date to suit them all in three weeks’ time. It felt like forever.