Only Leonie to tell, now.
July 1977
This Month magazine
Leonie Barratt: Letters from a Feminist
Our monthly column from the front line of the Battle of the Sexes
Dear John,
I’ve had an abortion.
I didn’t tell you before I went because I had a feeling you would make it all about you. Or all about the squatting, breeding group of cells that you would doubtless call ‘the baby’, as though it already had a favourite spoon and a bike with stabilisers.
And I didn’t tell you because the baby might have been yours and it might not. And I didn’t need to put up with the conversation that would follow, as surely as Black Forest gateau follows steak Diane in a Berni Inn on a Friday night.
I know what we say – that it’s fine, it’s good, for us to be uncommitted and casual, it’s the 1970s, we don’t need the old rules. You often say, as you’re leaving, that, ‘You know this is nothing serious, right, darling?’ (And don’t think I haven’t noticed how rarely you bother to use my name, honey.) But I suspect that, when it came to it, you would not like the fact that I was playing that game, too.
John, you’re a lot like a lot of men I know, or know of. You’re all for liberation and being open so long as you’re the one who’s being casual. But you like to think that the women you’re casual with are just waiting for your call. And I don’t think it occurs to you that if you did want to be more than casual, and you wanted us to have stickers with our names across the top of your car windscreen, and meet each other’s families, I would run a mile. We’re trying to make a new world but, man, those old assumptions, about what women want: they cling on. They will not die.
Unwanted foetuses are another matter. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t have the time, or inclination, to argue with you about your rights and your desires. Throwing up your guts takes time, and so does going to your doctor and letting him think you’re too fragile for motherhood so he and his colleague will sign you off to get that squatter hoovered out of there.
My body. My abortion.
It wasn’t very nice, but it was better than a rusty coat-hanger and septicaemia, or a punctured uterus. It was better than gin and a hot bath or a well-meaning hairdresser that a sister told me about sluicing me out with bleach on her kitchen table, and hoping no one reports her to the police. It was better than having a kid, for that matter. But up until a decade ago, those would have been the only options I had.
I imagine, John, that you think I’m writing this letter because I want you to come round with flowers, and tell me I am brave, and I didn’t have to do this alone, and you’re here for me. I expect, if you did, you’d feel like a hero.
Well, you’re wrong. (I wish you’d learn, John. I’ve been trying to educate you for years now. I know we have many centuries of patriarchal bullshit to scrape away, but I’ll be honest. I’d hoped we might be making a dent in it at this point. Maybe if you start working on it from your end, we’ll make a new way faster.)
I’m writing this letter because I want you to know that I’m fine. I didn’t want to have a baby and now I’m not having one. I got rid of it in a clean, legal way and I feel no shame. No regret. No anything, except relief. And a bit of sadness for the sisters who just ten years ago couldn’t abort safely, and risked their lives to get out of an unwanted pregnancy, or the unwanted marriage that was likely if they didn’t have the money or the contacts to help them to get rid of what they didn’t want. I’m glad we’ve changed this. And yes, I know you’ll point out that it took more than the women to do this, so credit to David Steel for getting the act through Parliament in the first place. I’ve never said all men are bastards, have I? If you were, I wouldn’t be bothering to write you these letters, month in, month out. But it only had to be a man because we don’t have enough female MPs. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. Don’t think the sisterhood isn’t on it. But that’s a big conversation. We are going to have to save that whole topic for another letter.
We are getting some sort of equality for women, with safe abortions on the NHS, even if we do have to jump through a couple of hoops to get there. (The sisters are working on getting rid of the hoops. We are not satisfied with things as they are. Not yet. Imagine if you could only have a vasectomy if two doctors said that your mental health wasn’t strong enough to handle fathering a child.) What we need now is for everyone to stop being so sentimental about it all.
I had an abortion, John. I’m glad. If you have some feelings to feel, then don’t let me stop you. I’m all for men having feelings, admitting them and expressing them and not being ashamed of them. But if you have feelings about the abortion that I chose to have, I’d like you to go and have them a long way away from me. I’ve got better things to do than dry your tears, and I have none for you to dry. I can’t be distraught in the way you want me to be. I’m relieved. That’s all.
Until next time,
Leonie
26 February 2018
‘IT’S NOT GOOD NEWS, MS MOON.’
‘Of course it isn’t,’ Veronica says.
It’s a week since the tests, and Vee is back in Mr Wilding’s office. The top of his desk is clear, save for a laptop which sits a little to his right, a vase of scentless, out-of-season roses and a box of tissues to his left. The tissues are within Vee’s easy reach. Of course they are.
She tried, briefly, in the waiting room, to talk herself into being a silly old woman worrying unnecessarily about a migraine or two. After all, she’s seventy years old. Parts of her ache that never used to. The small of her back, her hips, her knees all complain when she asks them for the slightest out-of-the-ordinary effort.
But as soon as her name was called, and she rose to walk through to the consultant’s office, she stopped all of her attempts at pretence as simply as other patients put down magazines when it was their turn to be seen. She’s been lucky to have a decade; the surgery last time was successful in a running-repair sort of a way, but it was always just a matter of time until the tumour in her brain started to grow again. The only thing that would stop it, really, would be death from another direction: heart attack, cancer somewhere else, wrong-place-wrong-time putting her in the path of terrorist action or car crash. Those fates have not come her way. It looks as though she has this one.
Mr Wilding swings his laptop towards her, ‘Here’s an image of your latest scan. You’ll see the scarring from the previous operation, here.’
Vee nods. The thick white line is the barrier between being able to remember the best part of two years, and a scattering of other memories. It blocks the taste of sweetness, the confidence to drive a car.
‘And, as was always a possibility, you’ll notice this cluster of marks here—’
‘Where are they?’
The consultant’s finger moves across the screen. It’s blunt-ended and far too normal-seeming for the delicate use he puts it to, coaxing out the interloping growths that have rooted themselves into brains. ‘Here,’ he says.
‘I meant’ – Vee shakes her head as though that will arrange her words into something clearer, closer to her thoughts – ‘I mean, which parts of the brain? What do those bits do?’
‘Ah.’ Mr Wilding sits back in his chair. ‘Well, as you know, the brain is complicated, and we don’t fully understand, for example, where and how memory is made and stored, how—’
‘Yes,’ Vee says, ‘I do know.’ She’s never had any tolerance for mansplaining, even before one of her younger sisters invented a word for it.
If Mr Wilding is annoyed by her interruption he doesn’t show it. ‘You’ll know, then, that we can’t say anything with certainty. The tumour will have roots in many other parts of the brain. Are you vomiting?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Seizures? Slurring?’
‘Not yet. Really just the headaches. And . . .’
‘Yes?’ He looks straight at her, waiting. And it doesn’t feel as though there
’s anything significant enough to offer up to that clinical gaze. She’s exhausted, out of proportion to whatever she’s been doing. And impatient. She looks at Erica’s face and sometimes she thinks she sees Leonie’s, trying to tell her something. ‘Anything you can tell me will help, Ms Moon.’
‘Nothing major. It’s – tiny things. I’m tired. I ache.’ Vee has a sudden memory: Leonard Cohen. She hadn’t heard of him, when she was asked to photograph him in 1974. She bought a record, afterwards, and every one since. There was a lyric about aching in the places where you used to play. ‘I just remembered a song I haven’t listened to in twenty years. I keep finding my keys in strange places. I’m not hungry, and nothing tastes of anything.’
‘It must be very disorienting.’
Yes. It is. And she doesn’t want to die disoriented. She wants to die sure of the world she is leaving, of her place in it. She wants the last things that she sees to be real enough to photograph. She wants to keep whatever it is that she has that means she can compute the subject, the light, the film, the background and the story, and produce an image that feels true to the people who look at it, afterwards. And suddenly, she’s crying, ‘I don’t cry. I don’t usually cry.’
‘You aren’t usually in this position. Any disruption to your sight?’
‘What?’ She heard. Of course she did. She just didn’t want to. The tears gather, grow, spill.
‘Your sight. Anything unusual?’
No, no, no, no, no. ‘Only when a headache is coming on. I get pinpricks. And the light hurts.’
Mr Wilding nods, waits.
Vee feels a patch of damp on her front; tears have fallen on to her collarbone, slid under her shirt, and the silk is sticking to her skin. ‘That’s normal, though. For headaches. Migraines.’ If she states it, as a fact, she might make it true.
She is rewarded with a nod. ‘It is. But you should be aware of the possibility that your sight will be affected.’
‘Affected or lost?’
‘Well—’
‘Mr Wilding, please’ – she hates that her voice sounds pleading – ‘I really do not have time for this. Just tell me.’
She’s rewarded with a nod. ‘As time goes on, loss of vision becomes more likely. In some patients it can be an earlier symptom of tumour growth.’ He looks back to the scan, then at Vee, who is aware that she is sitting very straight, now, as though keeping her head balanced will improve things. ‘This cluster, here, is closer to the occipital lobe than we’d like.’
‘I’m not losing my sight.’ Vee had thought there was nothing worse than losing her memories – being unable to recall any details about her father’s death, about Leonie’s, looking back through her photographs desperate for clues to her life and her happiness. But it could be that something worse is waiting for her.
Mr Wilding leans back in his chair, watches her, and waits.
She won’t be pitied. And she won’t be blind, either. It’s just not possible. She refuses.
She blows her nose, then inhales; forces her shoulders down from where they are hunching. ‘What happens now?’
‘Here’s what I suggest you do. Put things in order. Take plenty of rest. Don’t put yourself under undue stress—’
‘Why not?’
‘I’m sorry?’ Mr Wilding is clearly not used to being interrupted. And at whatever he costs a minute, Vee is not surprised. But she does not have time for this. She needs to go out and look at everything, fill what remains of her mind with the colours of the world.
‘What will happen if I don’t rest? If I am under stress?’
‘Well . . .’ Oh, Vee loathes it when people steeple their fingers, prides herself on never having taken that photograph, even though there is a certain class of (usually male) expert who considers it the only way to be portrayed. ‘Well, the disease could be speeded up.’
‘So if I enjoy myself, I might die sooner?’
‘Well . . .’ Mr Wilding says again.
Vee nods, because that’s her answer. ‘What now?’
‘We can give you painkillers, and we’ll ask you to let us know of any changes. We can’t really predict how the disease will progress from here, I’m afraid. We know the possibilities—’
‘And the end,’ Vee says.
He nods. ‘Sadly, yes. We know the end. That’s mandatory for all of us.’
‘Mandatory. Bloody men,’ Vee says, and laughs, and Mr Wilding joins in, though Vee isn’t sure that either of them think what she said is funny.
8 March 2018
International Women’s Day
Five million Spanish women mark International Women’s Day by taking part in the country’s first ‘feminist strike’, demonstrating against sexual discrimination, domestic violence and the wage gap.
Seven weeks until exhibition opening
The light of a March dawn is hardly strident, but still Vee winces as it starts to leak in around the edges of the blinds in her living room. It has been a long night. She went to bed at eleven, but the headache had come before she could sleep. The medication did nothing for her. At three she got up and groped her way downstairs, bore the bright light of the fridge-freezer for long enough to take out an ice pack and pour herself a glass of spiced rum. Her painkillers are not compatible with alcohol but they weren’t touching the pain, so Vee was damn well going to do all she could to get some relief.
She lay on the sofa. Perhaps she dozed. Now morning is coming and the night has exhausted her: the headache has neither attacked nor vanished, but is skulking in her jaw, across her forehead, round the back of her skull. This is new. It’s never hung around like this before. If Vee was one for prayer, she would pray to have the old headaches back. Even if she found religion, she thinks, she would like to believe she would still be a pragmatist. She wouldn’t ask for a miracle. Just a lessening of the pain; a return to familiar landscape, where she will know where and how the light falls. And her sight. She would beg and wail for her sight. She would have got down on her knees to Mr Wilding last week, if she though he had the power to save it.
She could cope with being a photographer who didn’t take pictures, but not with being a photographer (even a long-retired one) who could not see.
Still, her time is nearly done. So long as her sight holds fast for as long as her breath does, she will manage.
Vee thinks of Erica, so much life ahead of her, and feels almost glad her own time is nearly done.
Of course, that could be the tumour affecting her brain, making her think that dying is something worth having. She keeps waiting to care more about it. After the clinic she walked, then sat in Regent’s Park until the light faded, feeling old and cheated and bereft. Since then she’s felt very little. ‘I am dying,’ she says to herself in the bathroom mirror, and she watches her reflection for clues to how she’s feeling. It doesn’t help.
She could ring the clinic, about the pain. Calling an ambulance would be melodramatic. She isn’t an emergency, she’s a painful inevitability. And until she has a seizure, there’s really nothing else to be done.
Vee watches the light at the edges of her window, tries to see it thickening and growing. But its creeping is too clever, like the creeping of the growth in her brain, too easily dismissed as nothing until it was undeniably and irrevocably something. Something unstoppable. While she waits, she tries to remember what it is about today. She is doing something today. Something for Leonie. Except it can’t be, because Leonie’s dead. Is it too much to hope for headaches then death, without the blindness or the jumbling of past and present? Vee has got used to living without what she lost after the surgery a decade ago. The older she gets, the less relevant those memories feel, though at the time she had mourned for every lost one of them, and their lack had made her feel unstable, uncertain, shaky on her feet.
*
The knock comes at nine-thirty.
‘Morning,’ Erica says, with a broad, lipsticked smile and a coiled up energy that makes Vee almost glad she has
lived alone for all of these years. Other people are just so tiring, closeup. Even if you aren’t ill. They always want something: conversation, help, company, praise. Compromise. ‘All set?’
‘For what?’
The smile pauses. ‘The march?’
Oh, Christ on a bike. This is what today was about. Vee sits down on the sofa, the small warm space that she made in the night. ‘I’m not well.’
‘A headache, again?’
‘Yes, a headache.’
And there’s a new sort of pain, too. Missing Leonie has become visceral, again, with Erica so close by.
‘I’ve got painkillers in the car.’ Erica sighs, as though trying not quite as hard as she should to hide her annoyance; letting the edges of it glisten. (Was it always this much of an effort, with people? It’s so trying, to interpret, to interact.) Then she adds, ‘I had to arrange childcare.’
Vee considers letting this go, but then she imagines what Leonie would say: ‘Why does that make it worse? Couldn’t you just be angry on your own behalf? You’re a person. You’re entitled to feel—’ Oh, if only the words would come, more easily than they do. ‘Pissed.’ No, that’s not quite right. ‘. . . off. Pissed off.’
Erica acts as though she hasn’t heard, ‘I don’t want to go on my own. I want to see what you see. Your perspective?’
‘That is not my problem.’ Vee is becoming fond of the emerald coat: the colour is good against Erica’s skin, just warm enough, just bold enough. Looking at Erica’s straight shining hair, the whiteness of her teeth, the gloss of her shoes (patent pewter brogues today, not heels), she feels coated in sweat and the grime of the night’s pain, illness clogging her pores. She could have a shower when there’s someone within earshot. That presence would make the rest of it – the undressing-dressing, the rinsing of shampoo from her hair, the first hot sting of water on her skin – bearable. It would be worth it to feel at least a little bit renewed.
‘I’m going to have a shower, and then I’ll see how I feel. I’ve been sorting through some boxes and I found photographs that you might like.’ She pauses, amends, ‘Might like to see. They’re on the table.’
The Woman in the Photograph Page 13
