Games People Play

by Voss, Louise

  It was the first time I’d seen her animated. She was her old sarcastic self.

  ‘So you enjoyed it then,’ I said, leaning on the doorframe and watching her and Robin trying to pull off their boots. I delved into the box of shoes and passed Rachel’s Caterpillars over to her.

  ‘Thanks, Mum. Yeah, it was fantastic. I’d forgotten how much fun skiing is,’ she enthused, and I relaxed.

  The holiday had been the right thing to do after all.

  Robin smiled up at me as he tugged at his left boot. His red ski socks made him look somehow vulnerable. ‘Your daughter’s quite the athlete, isn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘We’d have been back much sooner, only she had to keep stopping to help me when I fell over.’

  I liked him a little better for saying that. I’d put him in the category of a man who’d hate to admit that a woman could beat him at any sport.

  ‘Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t ski,’ I said, smiling back at them both. ‘You’d both have been stopping every ten yards. We’d still be out there.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Rachel. ‘But you’d better get ready. You’re skiing tomorrow, and no excuses.’

  Right. Damn. The smile fell off my face, like an icicle falling off the eaves of a roof. I realized I’d discovered the problem with skiing holidays, for me, at least. You had to ski.

  Chapter 19

  Rachel

  The best thing about skiing is the freedom of it. I can go fast, but it doesn’t matter if I’m not the fastest. It’s not a competition. I owe it nothing except the exhilaration of the experience.

  I felt really miserable when the plane landed at Verona airport, even though I was looking forward to seeing Mum. It is lovely to see her, but however familiar her face still is to me, she’s a stranger too. I didn’t want to be sitting on a coach with her as she eyed up all the men; she’s lucky to have a man already, I thought, what does she need to look at other men for? For a moment I felt resentful: I wanted to be going on holiday with Mark, not my mum and a bunch of people I’ve never met, and am not sure that I ever want to meet…

  Mark and I talked about going away somewhere together. We were thinking of Northern Spain, or perhaps a mountainous Greek island. Somewhere rural and hot, without a tennis court; perhaps just ping pong or boules, or something else to quench Mark’s insatiable thirst for competition. I would have let him make love to me, all night if he wanted. Even if we didn’t make love, just to be in a bed cuddled up next to him till morning would have been so amazing. We hardly spent any whole nights together – Dad always quizzed me so relentlessly about where I was if I was out all night, and he saw Kerry every day on court, so I couldn’t use her as an alibi more than once or twice. Plus I think Mark found it difficult to be in bed with me without doing anything.

  It still makes me so bloody angry that I let Dad dictate the terms of my love life. I suppose because he runs everything else in my life, at the time it didn’t seem all that weird that he had a say in whom I went out with too …Never again, though. If I ever manage to get another boyfriend, I don’t care what Dad says, I’m doing it my way.

  Mum and I are sharing a room. How weird is that? The beds are low and hard, with synthetic orange blankets tucked in too tightly, and the room so dimly lit that it will be difficult to read after dark. It’s also stifling hot, until you swing open the window and then of course it’s arctic.

  ‘Have we ever shared a bedroom before?’ I ask her when we are settling in after that initial run down the mountain. I’m standing in my thermals, having taken off my boarding pants and jacket, and draped my wet ski gloves on the heavy old radiator. Mum is fussing around, unpacking a vast cosmetic case on to the dressing table. Honestly, sometimes I feel like she’s the teenager and I’m the mother: I only brought one eyeshadow and a lipstick and some Vaseline, and she’s got enough crap in that vanity case of hers to turn the Statue of Liberty into a drag queen. The case opens out into several stepped layers, and each layer seems to be overflowing with little pots and tubes and pencils.

  She laughs, in a tired sort of way. ‘Have we? Let me think…not since you were a baby. It’ll be fun! I bags this bed.’ She presses down on the mattress of the bed nearest her, and it yields soggily.

  ‘It was when we came back to England,’ she continues. ‘We stayed at Gordana’s for a couple of years while Ivan was on tour. She was great with you: taking you out for walks in the pram, and down to the tennis club to show you off to her friends. I don’t know what I’d have done without her.’

  That’s right; I remember from before that Mum always refers solely to Gordana, as if poor old Pops doesn’t even exist. Strictly speaking, it’s Pops’s house, not Gordana’s – he’s the one who earned the money to buy it and maintain it. But Mum has always adored Gordana. In inverse proportion to the way she feels about Ivan.

  ‘I’m so looking forward to catching up with Gordana. I’ve got so much to tell her,’ she says, a bit too wistfully, in my opinion. I wonder what she has to tell Gordana that she can’t tell me. But I suppose Gordana’s like that. She’s just the best person to tell your problems to – everyone does it. Except perhaps Ivan, who, ironically, is the only one whose problems she really wants to hear. She’s the tennis club’s agony aunt, the Problem Guru. I feel a surge of love for her, and pride that in our fractured little family Gordana is the constant, the hub of a rather wonky wheel.

  ‘What’s this for?’ I ask curiously, picking up a little triangular wedge of sponge. ‘Do you seriously need all this junk?’

  ‘It’s all right for you, Rachel, you’re young and beautiful and you don’t need any help. But you wait till you get to my age, and then you’ll see how vital it all is,’ she says gloomily.

  ‘But Mum, you’re only forty-four, and you look great. I’ve got more wrinkles than you have!’ I go over to the mirror and screw up my face, fracturing the skin around my eyes into dozens of fissures. Sighing, I flop down on the bed instead.

  ‘You certainly don’t. Besides, any lack of wrinkles on my face is due to Botox, not nature.’ She instantly blushes and looks horrified, as if she’s momentarily forgotten to whom she is speaking.

  ‘Mum! You don’t inject that poison into your face, do you? I don’t believe it!’ I am far more horrified than she is. I’ve always known she was vain, but because I also know how critical Ivan was, somehow I’ve never blamed her for it before. But she’s with Billy now.

  ‘Does Billy know?’

  I can’t get my head around Mum getting Botox. She surely couldn’t do it for Billy’s benefit – Billy is such a space cadet, he wouldn’t notice if his fiancée grew a full beard.

  Mum turns away and begins to remove immaculately folded thermal vests from her suitcase, placing them in neat piles in the top of the three drawers underneath the television. When she speaks, it sounds as if her throat is constricted.

  ‘No. He doesn’t. I didn’t do it for him; I did it for me. It’s no different to spending a fortune on facials and useless creams – except it works.’

  ‘Can you even get Botox in Lawrence, Kansas?’ I am curious. Lawrence, from what I remember of the time I visited it, is terrific if you’re after a dreamcatcher, a tie-dye T-shirt, or any amount of paraphernalia featuring a stupid-looking blue bird, mascot of the Jayhawks football team (or basketball, or perhaps both); but I wouldn’t think it would be bursting with beauty salons offering high-tech non-cosmetic surgery.

  ‘Actually, I go to a little place in Kansas City,’ she says, still not looking at me. ‘Could we please drop it. I’m sorry I mentioned it.’

  ‘Of course,’ I say, clasping my hands behind my head and staring at the varnished wooden strips on the ceiling. I feel suddenly awkward. I don’t know my mother at all.

  Chapter 20

  Gordana

  I am not accustomed to misfortune, and I am never unwell. I have always been attributing my good health to six, not five, portions of vegetable and fruits every day; regular tennis; frequent rela
tions with my Ted – whether he likes it or not; a little echinacea when my nose tickles with the start of a cold; a lot of vitamin E for my skin. Although my face gets more papery all the time – I think I fight a losing battle there.

  I have dabbled with other options in my attempts to retain relative youth and beauty, but haven’t yet found anything which works as well for me. Elsie say that selenium is very good for decreased wrinkles and increased brain power, but I don’t like it; it gives me taste of scaffolding poles in my mouth. And too much vitamin C makes me need the lavatory too often.

  Anyway, I am healthy in mind and body, thank the Lord.

  So I did not like to be sitting on that thin bed with my gown open like a flasher, even though the surgeon was a very beautiful man with brown skin and huge brown eyes and the gentlest hands. His name sounded like the word Rachel used for ‘biscuit’ when she was a toddler: babish. I decided to call him Mr Babish. It would not have been proper to look at his eyes while he touched me though, so I looked at a damp spot on the ceiling and hoped that my nipples were not getting hard from his touch. I was seeing him privately, of course, although it was a rather odd, crumbly local hospital where he held this breast surgery. I didn’t think it would matter, just for the check-up, although I would rather not see damp spots on the ceiling when he was a private doctor and Ted would get a huge bill to pass to the BUPA. But never mind.

  He asked me to put my hands behind my head like I was lying upright on a sun lounger, and it made me feel like some kind of old porn star. Ted is the only man who ever touched my breasts before. I don’t think that Ivan’s father ever did. He was only interested in getting to the main action area, and anyway in those days underwear was so awkward to negotiate.

  I wonder what he is doing now, that useless spotty Paul Tyler. He joined the Navy, even though he knew I was pregnant when he left. I used to dread him turning up one day, knocking on the door and saying, ‘Hello, son’ to my baby; but I don’t worry about that any more. Ivan always said he would punch him in the face if he ever met him, and I worry more about Ivan doing that and Paul Tyler telling the police and the police arresting Ivan. Then Elsie would have been right, and that would be most annoying.

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Mr Babish thoughtfully, rolling his fingers over the lump. It tickled. I felt a little embarrassed about my droopy old breasts, although he must see them all sizes and shapes. ‘It’s bigger than a pea or a bean, isn’t it? It’s more …oh, I don’t know, cylindrical. Like a column.’

  Doric or Ionic? I wondered, remembering the documentary Ted and I watched about classical architecture.

  ‘A sub-cutaneous column,’ he clarified, as if I’d spoken out loud. ‘Thank you, Mrs Anderson.’ Mr Babish drew out his hands. ‘You can do up your gown now. I’ll call the radiologist and we’ll just pop you next door for a scan, check it out a bit further.’

  Why do medical people always use the word ‘pop’?

  The nurse kept saying it too: ‘Pop your top off’; ‘Pop up on the bed for me;’ ‘Pop your things in here’. I still think that English is very strange language.

  ‘I’m sure it is nothing,’ I said. ‘I know I have lumpy breasts. A doctor told me that when my son was born.’

  I’d never forgotten that, actually. I did not wish to have lumpy breasts. It make me feel like the mattress on the spare bed.

  ‘You did the right thing, getting it checked out,’ said Mr Babish kindly.

  I could hear hail against the window, and when I looked outside, it was half snowing, half hailing; they were neither flakes nor stones, too heavy for one and too light for the other. They sort of floated down past the window like they were unsure of where they should be going. Oh well. At least it was probably too cold to play tennis, which was where I’d told Ted I was off to; my usual Wednesday session with the girls. I wondered if they were being hardy this morning, wrapping up against the weather, playing in layers of scarves and hats and jackets, or whether they’d abandoned the idea and gone to drink big hot chocolates in the coffee shop round the corner.

  I imagined them in there: Esther, Liz and Lorraine, grumbling and laughing and gossiping. Maybe wondering where I am.

  The same nurse came back and ushered me out to the waiting room, where some anxious-looking couples were sitting holding hands. So young, they were. I hoped they would all be OK. They looked so vulnerable. They all glanced up at me, and then quickly away. I wished Ted were with me. No. That’s not true. I didn’t wish that. I don’t want Ted to be worried. He worry so much about everything else. I picked up an old tatty copy of Good Housekeeping and flicked through it without stopping at any of the pages.

  ‘Shouldn’t be long, Mrs Anderson,’ said the nurse, who was a few years younger than me, probably, but with a lot more wrinkles and a very big double chin.

  Selenium would be good for her wrinkles, but she couldn’t do much about that chin. ‘We’ve just paged the radiologist – he ought to be here by now. Maybe he’s been held up by the weather.’

  There were no windows in this waiting room, but from what I’d seen out of the window in the examining room, the snowy hail – snail, I will call it – did not look as if it could hold anyone up.

  ‘Oop!’ the nurse said cheerfully. ‘Here he is now.’

  All eyes in the waiting room swivelled away from me and towards a small, stooped Indian man, who nodded briefly at the nurse and hurry-hurried past us and out through another door.

  Five minutes later I was lying on a different paper-covered bed, next to an ultrasound machine. The nurse was standing next to me looking very sympathetic – I suppose that was the face that she put on just in case. I wished she’d go away.

  Mr Babish and the radiologist came back in again, and the door slammed loudly. I jumped, and was cross with myself for doing so.

  ‘Sorry,’ they both said. ‘It always does that.’

  The nurse squirted jelly on to my bosom, and the radiologist moved the scanner across it. A kaleidoscope of wavy grey tissue flickered across the monitor by the side of the bed. The nurse left the room and the door banged again. I jumped again, and the lines on the screen wiggled and dipped.

  The inside of my breast looked like the surface of the moon. I couldn’t see anything sinister or black, and waited for them to diagnose the column as a bad case of mattress-breast. Both men stared intently at the screen for a long time, as if they were concentrating on one of those 3-D pictures where another image is underneath the patterns. Eventually I realized what they were looking at: a series of small dark disc-shaped patches, denser than the rest of the fluid patterns.

  ‘I’m not happy about that,’ said Mr B ‘We’ll do a mammogram.’

  I sighed. Still, it was all paid for. Better safer than sorrier. I was still not nervous, even then. Not even when the nurse came back (door banging once more) and ushered me next door to the X-ray machine. ‘Good girl,’ she kept saying as she squished my breast between two sheets of glass then compressed it to about one inch thick. It was uncomfortable but not painful. My poor old bosoms are so floppy these days that she could probably have rolled them up and stuffed them into an empty toilet roll if she had so wished. I tried to take my mind off it by thinking about Rachel and Susie on their girly holiday. I hoped they were having some fun. Rachel needs some fun. But the nurse was still annoying me.

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘You are younger than me, surely. I don’t think I can really be called a girl anymore.’ Not by you, anyway, I thought.

  The nurse looked surprised. ‘I beg your pardon,’ she said. I nodded, trying to look dignified – which was hard, bearing in mind I was standing there with one breast in exact dimensions of British Rail sandwich.

  She left me alone again, taking the X-rays away for Mr Babish to examine. I dangled my legs over the side of the bed and thought perhaps I ought to say a small prayer. Although it might be too late for that now. So I said a prayer for Ted instead, that he would not become a widower and have all the women at the tennis club suddenl
y taking up golf and bringing him things in Pyrex dishes, even though we’d have a full-time housekeeper by then, not just that lazy Adele. I wondered if I should make sure she was not an attractive housekeeper, and then I thought: How selfish. I want Ted to be happy after I’m gone …Perhaps just not straight away after, though.

  Mr Babish returned and smiled at me, such a warm, lovely smile. I glanced at his finger to see if he wore a wedding ring. He did, and I was relieved. I didn’t want anybody except my Ted, but still …This man had just fondled my breasts, even if it was only in a professional capacity.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing showing up that’s obviously cancerous, but I’m still concerned about that ultrasound. We’ll just do a biopsy to give us a clearer idea.’

  Now I wished Ted was here.

  ‘How soon do I get the results of that?’ I asked in a small voice.

  ‘I will telephone you on Friday afternoon, hopefully,’ he replied. ‘Otherwise it will have to wait until Monday morning.’

  Monday morning! That was five days away. I couldn’t wait that long. I began to feel a little sick.

  The biopsy was not pleasant, not at all. It was the sort of needle I imagine zoo-keepers using on their rhinoceroses, and even though my breast had already been injected with some anaesthetic, I felt invaded. The big needle’s entry into my flesh hammered at me like a staple gun, and Mr Babish did it four times; the medical equivalent to pin the tail on the donkey, guiding it into the dark marbles of concern by watching on the ultrasound monitor.

  I didn’t even object when the big nurse held my hand and said, ‘Good g— er, I mean, well done.’

  ‘I haven’t done anything,’ I said, feeling a little sulky at these violations of my flesh.

  ‘All finished,’ said Mr Babish eventually, and the radiologist switched off the ultrasound. ‘Did anyone come with you, Mrs Anderson?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, wiping the jelly off my chest with a wad of paper towels and refastening my robe. ‘I drove myself. I will be fine.’