Games People Play (17 page)

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 relations 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 suddenly 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.’

‘Feel free to stay as long as you like, until you’re sure you’re fit to drive back again,’ he said, concern in those melting doggy eyes. ‘You may feel rather sore later.’

‘Thank you,’ I repeated. ‘I am fine.’

I repeated those words again, over and over, all the way home. All that day and the day after and the Friday morning when I was waiting for Mr Babish to call, and the Friday afternoon when he did call, right in the middle of the Radio Four play. I felt cross that he rang just when it got to the important bit, when I was about to find out why the moody Frenchman called Marcel was so obsessed by a woman’s necklace breaking in the Tate Gallery. Now I would never know, I thought as I picked up the phone.

Mr Babish announced himself by his real name, and it took me a moment to think who he was. I thought maybe he was someone calling to sell me some replacement windows. Then I remembered: Oh, Mr Babish. My lump.

When he told me that unfortunately it was cancerous, and I ought to begin treatment immediately, he would be able to schedule me in for a mastectomy in a couple of weeks’ time, all I thought was: Oh, and I so wondered why that woman’s necklace meant so much to Marcel. Then I went back to my silent chant because I couldn’t think of what else to do: I am fine. I will be fine. I am fine. It will be fine.

‘It will be fine, my darling,’ I say to Ted, later that night. We are lying in our big bed, me with my three fat pillows to prop me up, him with his two smaller ones. We have our little bedtime routine: he makes hot chocolate, and then we read together for a while. He reads the sports section of the day’s newspaper, and I read a novel. But tonight I cannot read, even though my reading glasses are on their chain round my neck and the book is open, on my knees. I don’t know what page I am on any more.

I tell Ted. The newspaper rustles and falls from his hands, and grey skin grows on the mugs of hot chocolate that neither of us were drinking today.

‘I will be fine. They catch it early, it’s fine. Don’t worry,’ I say, laying my hand over his. ‘In two weeks, he says, I will have the little op. Then some treatment. Then, we hope and pray, all will be OK again.’

He still doesn’t say anything, just rolls his creaky old body towards me and gives me a big long hug. For some reason I think of that advertisement on the television, for a mattress, with a big hippo in blue stripy pajamas on one side of the bed, and a teeny little yellow bird on the other. They were an odd couple, like us, but in bed together, happy.

‘You make me happy, Ted,’ I say, putting my reading glasses on top of my head like sunglasses, so he can’t break them. ‘I won’t leave you, so don’t you worry. You are stuck with me.’

I am not surprised he isn’t asking questions. Ted likes to let things sink in first. We turn off the light and lie in spoon shapes to go to sleep, his big body solid behind me. But later, in the dark stillness of the night, I wake up again to find his back to me, his shoulders shaking with silent crying.

‘Let’s not tell Ivan and Rachel just yet,’ I say, like we are carrying on the conversation from before. ‘Perhaps not even until after operation. I don’t want to worry them.’

Ted takes his handkerchief out of his pajama pocket and blows his nose, still turned away from me. ‘What about Susie? She wanted to come and stay when they get back from the skiing holiday. Do we tell her not to come?’ His voice is stuffy and dark.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I want things to be normal. I want to see her. Perhaps I will tell her, perhaps not. We will see. It’s good that she will be here, it will be nice for Rachel to have her close by. I don’t know how long she wants to stay. I suppose if she stay a long time, then we have to tell her.’