by Helen Brown
The lower drawer was a Pharaoh’s tomb of priceless worldly goods. A plastic tiki pendant Sam bought for me at a fair months before he died; handmade Mother’s Day cards covered in wobbly writing and glitter. Among them was a more adult card from a couple of years earlier. It had a picture of two flamingos, one large bending protectively over a smaller one: ‘Dear Helen, Happy Mother’s Day. You raised me well. I love you. Love Lydia.’
I’d hoovered up the ‘I love you’ and stored it under my ribs.
Under the cards was an ancient tape recording of Mum singing for national radio in 1953. She’d chosen a maudlin song and the accompanist dragged along too slowly, but underneath the hisses and cracks of time her contralto voice was richer than burgundy.
I wished Mum was still here. She’d have sorted Lydia and told the surgeon she was imagining things. On the other hand, perhaps Mum had been watching over me all along, giving me a heads up at the wellness retreat just before things turned to custard.
If good comes from good, maybe cancer really is the angry disease some say it is. Years of pent-up rage could wreak havoc on the immune system. I had plenty to be mad about.
Pouring everything out on paper might help. Reaching for the top drawer, I grabbed a pen and scribbled a list of people I had ‘issues’ with: provincial editors who’d rejected my column; those who’d frozen me out of their lives, let me down or decided to become Buddhist nuns. Plus a list of resentments, some admittedly petty.
I am sick of :
• Changing toilet rolls.
• Being the only one who does any cleaning around here.
• And being a one-woman laundromat.
• Always choosing the spotty banana, so the others can have perfect fruit.
• Letting them hog the most comfortable chair.
• People saying, ‘What’s for dinner?’
• Then saying, ‘Spaghetti bolognaise again?’
• People checking best-before dates. Like I’m trying to poison them.
• When someone finally touches the vacuum cleaner having to praise them as if they’ve spun sink-hole hair into gold.
• People rolling their eyes when I ask for help with technology.
• Never-ending deadlines for columns, and now the book.
• Saying yes, I’d love to attend the tennis luncheon/Tupperware night when it’s a lie. I don’t even play tennis.
• The garden. It’s the only thing I don’t look after, so it’s the Gobi desert.
• Spending too many hours waiting for Philip to get home at night and then snarling when he does because dinner’s burnt.
• Trying and failing to be a good corporate wife.
• Forgetting what fun was.
• Feeling tired. For weeks and years, infinitely worn out.
I belonged to the generation of females who aimed to Have it All. Instead of learning from Mum’s mistakes, I’d tried to squeeze more in and made things worse. No wonder almost every middle-aged woman I knew pleaded exhaustion.
Not only had I shouldered the domestic roles Mum railed against, I’d striven for a ‘successful career’. During the solo mother years, I’d been too tired after a day at the newspaper to give the kids the attention they deserved. Parenthood and work were frantically woven together in a safety net that was continually collapsing under me.
My efforts to be a good corporate wife for Philip were laughable. At one memorable function, imagining I was entertaining a lawyer from Sydney with my wit, I was startled when he glared and said, ‘I haven’t been lectured at like this since I was at university.’ Then there was the Qantas Business Class debacle. Accompanying Philip on one of his trips, I followed him on a leg-stretching stroll through Economy. At the stop of the stairs on the way back to our seats I was apprehended by a hostess who snapped, ‘You do realise this IS the Business Class section, madam?’
And now to top it off, my daughter was dumping me for a Buddhist monk.
Still, it’s impossible to believe that cancer is really caused by anger. I’d known plenty of angry people who died of heart attacks, and easy-going types without a shred of rage in them who’d succumbed to the disease.
Not that I’d gone out of my way to get the lousy thing. At fifty-four I didn’t smoke or take HRT. I seldom drank more than a couple of glasses of wine (red for antioxidant qualities). Yoga and Pete the trainer were a regular part of my life and I was no stranger to organic produce.
But I had no control over genetics. Or the lingering impact of Sam’s death, divorce, remarriage and shifting countries. The menopausal hormone tornado wouldn’t have helped, either.
Environment, too. I remembered the evenings our parents took us to play on Paritutu Beach in New Plymouth back in the 1960s. Nobody had known back then that a nearby factory was pumping out Agent Orange for the war in Vietnam.
At least, they weren’t supposed to. A bright orange stream gushed from the cliffs into the sea, creating the perfect lure for kids raised on The Wizard of Oz. Our city wasn’t emerald. It was orange! I remember the alarm in Dad’s voice when he called us back. Too late. Mary and I had already run barefoot through the magic river. He told us to wash our feet in the sea.
Then there was the night we were sitting at the dining room table when someone noticed red clouds outside the window. We hurried outside to take a look. The entire sky glowed redder than a sunset. Awe-inspiring and freakish. Dad said it was because of the atomic testing going on in the Pacific. He thought maybe we should shelter inside.
For all the theories, there was only one I could rely on: getting cancer is bad luck. With breast cancer the plague of the female species it wasn’t a case of ‘Why me?’ but ‘Why not me?’
If it was too late and I was dying – well, everyone has to die of something.
I reached for a fresh sheet of paper.
Things I want to see/do before I die:
• Revisit Paris and the Loire Valley. See Monet’s garden at Giverny and the palace at Versailles.
• A Northern European cruise. Yes, we are that old!
• San Francisco, and the North American Fall.
• Visit Chicago for the art galleries and New York for Broadway and more galleries.
• Las Vegas. Why not? I’d always wanted to see Western Civilisation taken to its logical conclusion.
Clichés, admittedly. But things become clichés for good reason. On a third piece of paper I wrote
All I really want is:
(my pen hovered over the paper)
A friend.
I had fabulous friends, but their lives were overflowing with family and work commitments. I didn’t want to add to their worries. There were other friends, too. People I listened to with a view to helping them piece their lives together, not the other way round. I’d always shouldered the role of the strong Earth Mother for them. Perhaps I was afraid of my own vulnerability.
What I needed now was someone who understood suffering, but padded lightly over heartache. Who didn’t continually twist the subject around to their own problems. Who’d be there for me night and day without it being a chore. A friend who knew when to wrap arms around me, and when to quietly leave the room. Someone who could make me laugh.
I smiled when I read my list of friend requirements. Understanding on that level was almost beyond human. It sounded more like a cat.
Climbing down on my knees, I felt under the bed for a silver cardboard box full of wedding paraphernalia. Sliding it out from under the mattress base, I removed the lid and turned it upside down. Photos of glamorous brides and opulent venues fluttered to the floor. My pages of complaints and dreams fitted neatly inside in the silver box. I closed the lid.
Philip’s anxious face appeared around the bedroom door. Darling man. He placed a glass of water on the bedside table and helped me into bed.
‘Where do you think she’ll be now?’ I asked.
‘Lydia?’ he said, pulling the sheet up to my chin and kissing me gently. ‘Up in the air stil
l.’
I imagined her picking through her vegetarian dinner on a plastic tray while her plane inched across the Indian Ocean.
And dropped gratefully into a hole of unconsciousness.
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.
