Reading Madame Bovary (22 page)

On the Monday morning she rang her GP, Pamela, and found that Pamela was herself unwell and not in the surgery. She had hoped that Pamela could somehow find a way to expedite her test results and with this news she felt another implosion of powerlessness. But within an hour the music had drawn her again into its own benign dream. By the third day she found she was beginning to identify and respond to the different sensibilities of the performers. There were the two young Russians who were, according to the presenters, the popular favourites, but she preferred the Japanese woman who played with a rare irony, a kind of cool feminine candour (if only she had the musical literacy to describe this). And then there was the Chinese prodigy from Kuala Lumpur. Though only eighteen he had a magisterial quality. Unlike the romantic Russians with their tempestuous sentiment, he played with a kind of Apollonian detachment. He, especially, created a kind of sound balm for her body. She bathed in it.

Each day she swabbed her wounds and hoped for the best. One in particular kept opening up and seeping until it formed a crust, which would dislodge in the night and ooze again in the morning, but she did all that she needed to do, knowing that each day almost the entire air-time of Classic FM would be given over to the piano competition. She felt it as a gift, a gift of timing that her personal dilemma should coincide with this festival of lyrical power, and she taped over her oozing incisions, ate breakfast for the first time in days and sat out on the deck to listen to the Mozart concerti. It was in listening to Mozart that she began to hear even more acutely. One work seemed to suggest a bleak gaiety, another spoke of a hectic contentment, while the concerto that followed sounded like the most extravagant parody, a masterly joke. Passages were
183
vaguely familiar but she did not want to see a programme list. She did not want to
see
anything. She wanted to listen.

In the mornings and afternoons there were times when the responses of other listeners were broadcast: a farmer's wife on a remote property in the north, an accountant in Sydney's western suburbs, a piano teacher in Adelaide, a merchant seaman in Darwin; all conducting a proxy debate as to the merits of the performers but all united in their gratitude for the event. And this was not the least satisfying aspect of it; that here, prone on her back, or propped up on the deck, she was absorbed into a live community of listening. As she listened, so too did all these others. Mentally she argued with their responses, just as she hung on every word of the leading presenter, himself a piano virtuoso, a man she had never set eyes on but whose voice was inflected with such warmth, such judicious sympathy that she was already half in love with him. In his taste he seemed to lean ever so slightly towards the romantic, to the Russians, but this only made him seem a warmer and more appealing auditory presence. By now she was confirmed in her own favouritism and it was the young Chinese performer. With no trace of the romantic colouring so loved by the paying crowd and the presenters alike, he played like a young god, pulling it all together, the latent chaos of the notes, commanding it into order.

For a time she became so engrossed in the competition that she would no longer join Greg in front of the television at night or, if she did, she would sit with the headphones on, lost to the intensity, to the beauty of what she now thought of as ‘the comp'.

On the Wednesday morning she again rang the office of her GP and found her in. She told Pamela about the six-week wait for the results of the test on her ovary and, despite herself, said nothing more; no complaints, no whingeing. It was enough. ‘Leave it with me,' said Pamela.

Later that day, around five in the evening, Pamela rang back.

‘I've spoken to the pathology unit at the hospital. They did that test on the ovary three days ago and the results are clear.'

‘Why did the registrar tell me I would have to wait six weeks?'

‘I haven't the faintest idea.' It was clear from Pamela's tone that she was not impressed, but was not prepared to comment further, except to say, ‘If there had been something wrong, Neil McCormack would have come around and seen you himself.' But how was I to know that? she thought. No-one, at any level, had communicated anything. She put down the phone and went back to the Sydney Piano Competition where there was enough communication going on to sustain a universe.

When Greg came home he was both drained and relieved. ‘Thank God,' he kept saying, ‘Thank God.' And then, ‘Why didn't you ring me at the office and tell me straight away?'

Why hadn't she? Well, it had been late, and she knew he might already have left the office and be on the freeway. But also, she wanted to listen to her favourite competitor play his Mozart concerto, and he was the last that afternoon to perform.

On the night of the final programme, at the end of which the winner was to be announced, Greg was at a meeting and she had the house to herself. Once again she entered into the familiar trance, and found herself in thrall again to the playing of the Chinese finalist. When at the end of the evening he was proclaimed the surprise winner she was so excited she hauled herself out of her chair and paced around the living room in a state of elation. She knew nothing about piano technique and she had picked the winner! How was this possible? Energised by a kind of electric current coursing through her, she continued for some time to pace around the room, around and around, almost hypnotically. When, finally, she came to a halt, something in her head and chest had shifted and there was clarity in her thought. She had emerged from the week-long coma of her self-absorption. Tomorrow her mother would bring Annie home. She walked into her daughter's room and began to strip the cot.

The next afternoon, while Annie had her nap, she sat at the kitchen table and began to draft a letter of complaint to the hospital, but after the first few sentences she was inhibited by a sudden thought. The discharge sheet that they had neglected to give her, with instructions for surgical aftercare – this would most likely have been the responsibility of the young Filipina nurse, the only person in that awful place to show her any kindness. What if she lost her job? She screwed up the piece of paper. She would wait until she had her follow-up appointment with McCormack and complain then about the registrar. She would not mention the discharge sheet. She wondered if the registrar had operated on her under McCormack's supervision. They had to learn, didn't they, and how else but to practise on public patients?

Today, four weeks on, she has an appointment to see Neil McCormack in his little consulting room in the public wing of the hospital. This is well away from the waiting room where she sat, frozen, on the day of her surgery; the corridors here are even more narrow, crowded and stuffy. But now she is less absorbed in herself and thinks that it can't be pleasant for him to work in this environment, or any of those doctors who haven't yet abandoned the public system. Still, she has things to say; grievances to air. He is running late, and when at last she is called in, he looks tired. In her head she cuts back on her list of complaints but is determined to tell him about the registrar. She will wait until he asks her if she has any questions and then she will say, politely, ‘Well, I have a few suggestions.' (She will try and phrase this as constructively as possible.)

‘Registrars vary a lot,' he says. ‘I can't comment on this one, it's not my place.' Then he adds, ‘He was a first-year registrar,' and this, she knows, is a kind of coded apology.

‘But what about the test results?'

‘In a public hospital there is no way we can access a histology report at an early stage.'

She opens her mouth. She is about to say, ‘But my GP got her hands on it a week later,' but changes her mind.

‘If it had looked serious I would have come around and seen you myself,' he says.

‘Nobody told me that.'

He holds his hands open and gives an ever-so-slight shrug, a gesture that says, ‘That's the way it is.'

‘Who operated on me?'

‘I did.' He says it bluntly. And she is relieved.

She thanks him. She has had immense anxiety but not all that much pain. She is a piece of meat but she has been successfully processed. Somehow he got her onto his public list. She is in his debt. The system had in the end looked out for her, had checked up on her, had been vigilant. Unfeeling but efficient. The feeling part had come from another source; from the airwaves, from the piano comp. When all her other senses were dulled by anxiety, her ears had kept her sane.

She drives home from the hospital in a better frame of mind than she has been in for a long time. She has taken the morning off work and will eat an early lunch out on the balcony of her small apartment, which looks across to a line of full-grown lilly pilly trees and an ornamental pool where two water dragons are basking in the sun. She loves the way their heads rear up, the way they arch their backs, the long curve of their necks with the serrated ridges and the gloating, sardonic expression of their mouth and eyes.

She settles into a deck-chair with half an avocado and a spoon and looks across to the jutting branch of a spreading plane tree. There, only two metres away, is the biggest, fattest kookaburra she has ever seen. So close. So wily and composed. He is the steeliest of birds; a wolf with wings. Definitely not a whinger. She flicks her empty avocado skin at him. He turns his head sharply and looks at it with contempt, jerking his beak as if to say, ‘Bring on the meat.' She laughs. ‘You'd make a good surgeon,' she says out loud, and thinks of her lopped ovary, but it's alright, she still has one good one. And she takes out her iPod and adjusts the headphones. She has gone back to her habit of listening to talk radio from podcasts and a man's voice is droning across the airwaves, warning of the coming drought. She does not want to hear this. Instead she switches to the final night of the Sydney Piano Comp. Here it is, then, the first bars of Prokofiev's ‘No.
3
in C Major'. The bright winter sun beams down onto her head.

The Existence of Other Men

‘… despite the horrors of history, the existence of other men always promises the possibility of purpose …'

—
JOHN BERGER

How long have we got? Me? I can stay for around an hour, I'll just have to answer the pager, that's all. I'll have a whiskey, what about you? And some sandwiches, they do a decent club sandwich here and I haven't eaten all day.

Now, why is it that you're here? Public relations? A series of profiles for your website? I'd better be on my best behaviour then. Where do you want to start?

Is there a special mystique about brain surgery? You bet your life there is. I don't know about a young journalist of your generation but when we were growing up ‘brain surgeon' was code for super-smart. Is that what attracted me to it? No, not at all. By the time you've done your general training you've had the stars ground out of your eyes. As a matter of fact, my first interest was in cardiac surgery. In those days that was the glamour field, especially transplants. But soon you learn that the heart is just a pump, albeit a pretty smart one. The brain is a much more interesting organ, for obvious reasons. I've never understood all the glamour about transplants. It doesn't come from insiders, from the surgeons. To people not actually involved it looks glamorous to take something out of somebody, even if they're dead, and put it in somebody else, but in fact it's one of the less complex procedures that top-level surgeons do.

A simple analogy would be fixing car engines. If you've got a major problem, the easiest thing to do would be to take the car down and ask the mechanic to put a whole new engine in. That only involves bolting in one or two things whereas, say, if you take the head off and repair the valves, well, they'll say, thank you, we'll keep it for a week or two. It's the same thing: if you want to cut a heart out and throw it away and then put a new one in, you've just got four big holes to sew the thing back to, it slots into four places and that's all you have to do.

I shouldn't say this, I'll get into trouble.
(Laughs)
You'd better cut that bit out of the tape. But look, it's the same with the brain, except we don't have as clear a picture of it yet because it's more complex than the cardio pump. But if we think of the brain as a television set, a complicated piece of technology that's transmitting stuff from elsewhere, inputs from the environment and so on, then we're just the TV technicians.

As a young resident I did some work in cardiac surgery but it didn't grab me. I had a friend in training with me at the same hospital and he went on to become a cardiologist. ‘Why do you want to do neurosurgery?' he'd say. ‘You're working with zombies. Too many of them don't wake up.' There's a better rate of recovery in heart cases and people with heart disease tend to be cheerful. Did you know that? And my friend liked the fact that within days the men would be experiencing better blood flow and they would joke with him about the return of their early morning erections. He loved that. But I decided that cardiology wasn't, well, to put it bluntly, the heart isn't interesting enough, not enough of a puzzle. Mind you I may have been influenced by one of the neurosurgeons I worked under. He was famously eccentric, a bit mad, and he seemed to be able to do exactly what he liked. He had an aura about him. I think I was drawn to that.

Do you have to be obsessive? It helps. Even more than in other specialties you need to have an obsession with detail. One of my colleagues is a dedicated fly fisherman and he took me trout fishing with him once. He hadn't long taken it up and his casting wasn't what it might have been and on the first day his line got badly tangled. So he just sat there on the bank of the river and oh so patiently and carefully untangled it. Took him forever. One of the other guys in the party couldn't get over it. Why doesn't he just cut the bloody thing and rig up a new line? he said. He didn't get it.