After Cleo Read online

  The kitchen tap hissed as Lydia filled the kettle. She’d be ringing to cancel her flight soon. I sat on one of the green sofas while Katharine tumbled on the floor and leant against my knees, facing away from me. I stroked her hair as she stared down at the book she was no longer reading. Perhaps she was weeping. Fifteen must be one of the worst ages for a girl to lose her mum.

  I wondered if mothers and daughters rehearse for this moment on their first triumphant meeting on blood-spattered birthing tables. Every beginning has an end. It’s fitting for the mother to go first.

  Not just yet, though.

  All three of us seemed equally incapable of comprehending the implications. I loved my daughters with every cell in my body. But if some of those cells were irregular, killer cells, I might have bestowed a terrible curse on them. My efforts to help them become strong women would mean nothing if I’d passed on terrorist genes.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Katharine asked, her tone breathless and child-like, reminding me of the time I’d fallen over skating, and she’d hauled me up off the ice. She’d only been seven or eight years old then. The pain in my tailbone had been agonising but I’d assured her I was fine. Mummies were always fine.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied, play-acting again.

  ‘But there’s a problem with your cells,’ said Lydia, dropping tea bags in the pot.

  ‘Apparently,’ I replied in an absurdly upbeat voice. ‘That’s why it took so long. They took heaps of images and this daft woman used baby talk.’

  I didn’t feel bold enough to broach the subject of whether Lydia would stay home now. She’d understand the gravity of the situation and do the right thing. Or Philip would talk her into it.

  Tea was okay, but not enough. Reaching into the back of the cupboard behind the electric frying pan, my fingers curled around the consoling shape of the cognac bottle. It’d helped when I’d been in an unworldly state of shock after Sam’s death. After the initial sting in my throat, the liquor eased through me like an old friend.

  Philip arrived home early from work. The girls chopped vegetables for a stir fry. I told them about the four treats I was supposed to have and they laughed too loud.

  So this is what it’s like when you have irregular cells, I thought. People laugh at your jokes.

  ‘They catch things so early these days everything’s going to be fine,’ I said, scrubbing out the wok afterwards. Yet I was already taking a step back from the three of them. From my viewpoint above the fireplace, I envisaged father and daughters getting on without me. They were loving and good to each other. They’d stick together.

  How could I possibly leave them?

  Waking for the third time that night I counted my blessings – great husband, terrific kids, living in a city with exemplary healthcare.

  Starting awake the fourth time, I saw the faces of women friends who’d died circling above me. Lydia’s nanny, Anne Marie; a neighbour who’d had a young family; Mum’s friend Vicky; Aunt Edna and more . . . They’d all been felled by the disease that strikes one in eight women. The one that starts with abnormal breast cells.

  Sometimes it seemed I knew more angels than living people.

  My last thought before falling asleep was that Philip would be hopeless on his own. I’d have to hunt out a new wife for him.

  Abandoned

  Wilful daughters were born to defy strong-minded mothers

  Next morning I waited for Lydia to announce she’d cancelled her trip. After breakfast she sailed downstairs in a pale pink shawl and invited me out for coffee. She suggested Globe for a change, a cafe not far from our old house. I let her drive my car, partly because I couldn’t trust my reactions under the circumstances.

  Globe glistened with mirrors and polished wood. Staff had changed since we used to go there. Assuming she was going to tell me about her change of plans, I ordered two lattes (one soy) and prepared to act surprised.

  The best thing you can talk about when one of you has a potentially life-threatening illness is something else. I asked Lydia how Ned was going. Apart from chronic lateness and the occasional fanciful idea (taking part in medieval battles with rubber swords in city parks), he was keeping his symptoms under control, she said.

  Lydia had always downplayed Ned’s symptoms, but hearing voices inside his head sounded a bit serious. She’d been encouraging him to stop smoking, lose weight and smarten up his wardrobe. He wasn’t responding well. He still smoked and never wore the ‘new’ clothes she found for him in charity shops. I asked what’d happened to the scarf I’d knitted him. She said there’d been no sign of it. I smiled. Man makeovers almost never work.

  ‘Maybe he’ll wear something decent to take me to the airport tonight,’ she said offhandedly.

  The words were too shocking to absorb.

  ‘You’re still going?’ I asked, suddenly chilled.

  ‘I can’t change my plans now,’ she said, stirring her soy latte.

  I couldn’t believe Philip hadn’t spoken to her, insisted she stay home for a few weeks at least.

  ‘But I might be seriously ill,’ I said, sounding weak and pathetic.

  My daughter stared into her soy latte. If our situations were reversed . . . but she’d seen it countless times. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her.

  Did she think I was indestructible?

  ‘This trip is important to me,’ she said in her therapist voice. ‘I’ve been saving for it for ages. And . . .’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain . . . but . . . I’m thinking of becoming a Buddhist nun.’

  ‘A what?! ’ Cafe patrons glanced up anxiously from their newspapers.

  There had to be some kind of mistake. The poor child was confused. Youthful experimentation with spirituality was one thing. Turning her back on her education, her family and future to become Buddha’s bride was unthinkable.

  I had no problems with Buddhist nuns in theory. If any of my friends announced their daughter was about to be ordained, I’d probably make admiring noises. As ‘quite a spiritual person’, I’d always encouraged people to embrace the non-physical. But I wasn’t prepared for my daughter to take it so seriously. Did that make me a hypocrite?

  I’d once seen a Western girl with a shaven head dressed in maroon robes striding down a street near the university. There was no way Lydia could roam around looking like that.

  ‘It’s that monk, isn’t it?’ I mumbled.

  Lydia’s face closed in. She stared back at me defiantly, her eyes brimming with tears.

  ‘Do you think it’ll be easy for me?’ she said, standing up and preparing to flee. ‘Shutting myself away from everyone I love and kowtowing to nine-year-old monks just because they’re boys?’

  She came from a long line of feminists. It wasn’t in our genes to prostrate ourselves in front of anyone.

  Rebellion. That’s what this was about. Wilful young women defy their mothers in order to discover who they are. Not so long ago she’d been writing a sex column for a student magazine. I wasn’t sure what was more shocking. My daughter the sex columnist or my daughter the Buddhist nun.

  If she wanted to rebel, why couldn’t she just get a tattoo?

  ‘What about your scholarship?’ I asked, trying to control the tempest whirling inside.

  Lydia nudged her chair under the table and glanced sideways.

  ‘Do you have any idea how many kids would give their eye teeth for a scholarship like that?’ I said, standing to match her height.

  ‘It’s not working for me,’ she murmured, hurrying toward the doors. ‘I’ve had enough of Economics and Pol Sci.’

  I reminded her of Shakespeare’s words, ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ Convents had been dumping grounds for women for centuries. If a man wanted to get rid of his wife, or an unmarriageable daughter, he packed her off to a life of prayer and chastity. The number of convent ruins in Europe, and the size of them, is appalling proof of that. While I didn’t know much about Asian nuns, I’d heard they had
miserable lives, sweeping, cooking and performing menial tasks for superior male monks.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, following her.

  ‘Home to pack,’ she said, flushed with emotion. ‘I’ll walk. Thanks for the coffee,’ she added, before disappearing into a stream of shoppers.

  I stood at the counter in disbelief. What century was she living in? Dropping a tip in the jar, I recalled how I’d dragged her as a little girl along to some of the antics my New Age friends had got up to in the 90s. Crystal healers and aura readers had seemed harmless at the time, but maybe they’d tipped her into some wacky spiritual zone.

  While our daughter walked home to prepare for monastic life in a war zone, I drove into town to enter a different battlefield.

  If you want a steady support person, Philip’s your man. He sat beside me in the hospital waiting room later that afternoon, studying a yachting magazine while I worked through a book of crosswords. He appeared not to be emotionally burdened in any way. Maybe this forbearance came from his army training, or from his years at boarding school.

  The waiting room had a loathsome smell of fear. A raucous machine spat coffee from a pipe. Undrinkable sludge. Whoever chose the floral arrangement had a sick sense of humour. They’d placed a vase of arum lilies – didn’t they know lilies symbolised death? – in a prominent position beside the tropical fish tank.

  I pointed out the driftwood sculpture to Philip. ‘Better left on the beach,’ he muttered. It was his way of saying he hated everything about the place too. I loved him for that.

  A cheerful woman called my name and Philip followed me into the surgeon’s office. Lined with pale wood, it was a pleasant room with brochures about handling emotions and various other inconveniences. A regulation box of tissues sat on the desk. A nurse in the corner typed into her computer. I wondered if she was there to provide emotional backup for the patient – or a witness in case patients turned litigious.

  ‘How did this happen?’ the surgeon asked me in a tone that was alarmingly tender as we peered at images of the swirling planetary system inside my right breast. The nature of her question was unnerving. She sounded like a mother soothing a child who’d fallen off a tricycle. I’d eavesdropped on enough doctors to know they have a good idea what’s wrong long before they tell you anything.

  ‘What’s your feeling?’ I asked, deploying journalistic training (i.e. ask questions that don’t have yes/no answers).

  ‘Do you really want to know?’ she asked – meaning, do you really want to sell Bibles in Baghdad/put your head in a pot of boiling porridge?

  No! Stop right there, thanks. I’ll just hop outside and pretend it’s yesterday when I was in here having a routine mammogram. But it was too late.

  ‘I think it’s malignant.’ Her sentence smashed across the room like a crate of empty bottles. There was silence while I examined the splinters.

  ‘But I haven’t got time to be sick,’ I told her. ‘I’m writing a book.’

  Surely she’d take my busyness with the book into account and tell my malignant cells to go on hold.

  ‘What’s the book about?’ she asked politely.

  ‘Healing,’ I replied. I didn’t have the energy to go into detail. She smiled wryly. There was far too much knowledge in her eyes.

  I glanced down at her hands. They were small, almost dainty, with efficient-looking fingers.

  ‘Brave’ and ‘positive’ are words associated with people in this situation. I could summon up neither. Cancer patients, especially if they’re film stars or rock singers, are often described as wanting to ‘fight this thing’. There wasn’t an ounce of aggression in me. I felt like a creature in a wildlife programme caught between the jaws of a powerful predator, its teeth sinking into my neck. I simply wanted to implode quietly in the corner.

  ‘The growth is large,’ she continued gently. ‘It’s spread across the breast.’

  ‘Mastectomy?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she answered.

  Hang on. Couldn’t we strike a deal here? Couldn’t she make do with a lumpectomy like the ones I’d read about in magazines?

  She said a lumpectomy was impossible considering the size of the growth. Performing a lumpectomy would mean taking the whole breast anyway. I glanced across at the man I’d met twenty years earlier; the man who’d been mad enough to marry me. He silently examined his fingernails. I needed to know the dimensions of the catastrophe.

  ‘And the other breast?’

  ‘Possibly it will have to go, too. We won’t be sure until the biopsy and MRI results are through.’

  ‘Do you think I’m going to . . . ?’

  ‘You’ve had enough information to absorb for one day,’ she chirped. ‘Let’s hope I’m wrong and the growth’s harmless.’

  Her words disintegrated into gibberish. She wrote a prescription for sleeping pills. The days would be easier to get through, she said, if I’d had a decent night’s sleep.

  The clinic nurse handed me a psychologist’s business card. A shrink? Hell no, I thought, but slipped the card in my handbag anyway. I was going to need all the help I could get.

  In the biopsy room a man who could’ve been mistaken for a model train enthusiast attacked my breast with a miniature ditch-digger that had a staple gun attached. The local anaesthetic had little effect. His gun discharged four painful shots before he was satisfied he had a sample of the offending tissue.

  Outside the clinic, beside the car, I wept into Philip’s neck. Trees in a nearby park waved their arms in sympathy. I’d encountered death before – my son, both parents and various friends. But I wasn’t ready to clasp its bony claw. Not just yet.

  I wanted to be around for Rob’s wedding in January. Katharine still needed a mother. And Philip would be hopeless without someone to trim his ear hair.

  The concept of dying – of shaking free of my body – was okay, providing it was relatively painless. What I couldn’t face was the prospect of leaving my husband and kids.

  That evening, forks scraped through risotto while I recounted the day’s events. The girls nodded solemnly, uncertain how to arrange their smooth young faces. I’d sometimes wondered what they’d look like once life had etched a few wrinkles in their features. Perhaps now I’d never find out.

  After loading the dishwasher, Lydia went upstairs. Any minute now she’d tell us she’d changed her mind about Sri Lanka. There’d be smiles, tears and forgiveness.

  An iron weight formed in my chest as I heard the thump of her suitcase on the stairs. She appeared clothed entirely in white, pure and unapproachable, the way monastery students are required to dress.

  A knock on the front door revealed Ned, his eyes blazing. I couldn’t tell if he was hurt, excited or confused. All of it, possibly. Filling the doorway with his presence, he seemed taller and broader than usual, almost physically threatening, as if he was challenging us to try and thwart his role as abductor.

  One after the other, we kissed Lydia goodbye. My lips had no feeling as they brushed her cheek. This wasn’t happening. She wouldn’t, couldn’t abandon me . . .

  A rush of brisk night air. The door clicked shut. She was gone.

  Roaring with tears, I ran to the bedroom, slammed the door and flung myself on the bed.

  Lydia loved orphans. Her devotion to people in wheelchairs was beyond comprehension. She’d drop everything to attend a fundraiser for refugees. Eggs from caged hens were repulsive to her. She loved the environment so much she preferred riding my old bike to driving and wanted me to start a compost heap. Possibly she loved Ned, Buddha and her monk as well. Lydia’s heart was so huge the whole world basked in the shimmer of her loving compassion.

  How come she found it so hard to be kind to me?

  Rage

  Life’s too short to eat spotty bananas

  Once my chest stopped heaving, I turned the pillow over. It was wet. I had no energy to change the pillowcase.

  Philip opened the door a crack. I told him to go away. There was n
othing he could do. Besides, someone needed to be with Katharine.

  I popped a sleeping pill out of its plastic bubble, swallowed it and waited for the chemicals to kick in. The bedside light gleamed harshly on books I’d started reading in my pre-cancer life. The American War of Independence wasn’t so riveting any more. Our wedding photo beamed across the room. Philip had more hair then. I had less fat.

  Next to the photo sat a small cat statue Philip had brought back from Egypt, and a miniature plate Mum had loved. On the plate was a painting of a wild beach in mauves and blues. The scene resembled New Zealand, but the plate was made in Denmark.

  According to magazine editors bereft of ideas, a woman’s personality is revealed by the contents of her handbag. They should try investigating the lower drawer of her bedside cabinet.

  My top drawer held the usual run of spare earplugs, crosswords, sore throat lozenges, pens, scraps of paper, a magnifying mirror to pluck rogue moustache hairs, a tube of hand cream I was never going to finish, lavender oil to sprinkle over our pillows.

  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.