Of course . . . anything, darling girl . . . just please get well.
When the exams were finally over, she was in no state to celebrate with her friends.
‘I just want to be separated from my tonsils,’ she croaked.
Which she duly was – and sitting up in a hospital bed on a post-operative high.
‘It was nothing, Mum. I feel great!’ she said.
The first night she was home, Philip and I were woken by the sound of Jonah galloping up and down the hall, yowling loudly. We opened the door. His eyes, a pair of black orbs in the shadows, glowed up at us. He led us upstairs, springing up them two at a time. Katharine was in bed, crying with pain. The hospital drugs had worn off. She was in agony.
‘Thanks boy,’ I said, stroking Jonah’s silky back.
Our feline sat neatly on Katharine’s pillow while Philip phoned the hospital and arranged to collect stronger medicine. Devil cat no more, Jonah was Katharine’s guardian angel.
A couple of hours later, after Philip had returned with the hospital painkillers, we opened Katharine’s bedroom door a crack. Through a beam of light from the bathroom we could see her comfortably asleep with Jonah curled up beside her.
Jonah raised his head as if to say, ‘It’s okay. I’ve got everything under control. You two can go back to bed now.’
‘Still want to send him to a farm?’ I asked Philip as we stumbled downstairs, drunk with tiredness.
Philip shook his head and put his arm around me. There was no need to answer. Jonah was our daughter’s greatest round-the-clock comforter. For all the ups and downs we’d been through, from carpet destruction to cat Prozac, from grandchild envy to incontinence, he was part of our family.
Next morning, another text message came through from Lydia saying it was still raining in Sri Lanka. For all I knew, she might’ve taken her vows and become a fully-fledged nun by now. That was exactly the sort of sanity-challenging information she’d choose to withhold from me in favour of weather reports. I replied quoting a cover story from Newsweek saying meditation helps the brain grow. No answer. Perhaps she was meditating.
As Katharine grew stronger, the calendar flicked over into January, and her astonishing exam results came through. Her marks were so high she could go straight into Medicine if she wanted. I was relieved when she opted for a Science degree instead. A few years of broader studies would give her time to kick back and consider her options.
Meanwhile, Sri Lanka had crept like a cat into my mind. The teardrop island kept turning up everywhere – in my dreams; on the news. (Terrible flooding this time, misplacing a million people. Lydia’s weather reports hadn’t been exaggerated.) When Philip and I went out for a night at the opera, it was to The Pearl Fishers, a doomed romance set in, of all places, Sri Lanka. I opened a biography of Virginia Woolf’s husband, Leonard, to learn that before their marriage he was a British official in Sri Lanka, overseeing public executions and indulging in local women.
If Lydia had become a nun, I mused, there wasn’t much I could do about it except offer my support. If, on the other hand, she was still thinking about it, well, that was up to her. The least I could do was visit the monastery and take an interest.
Though I had previously had no real desire to go to the teardrop island, it mattered a great deal to Lydia. And if it was important to her . . .
* * *
As I lay on the bed with Jonah one afternoon, he rolled playfully on his back in a shaft of sunlight. I grasped his front paws gently between my thumb and fingers and stared down into his serious blue eyes.
‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked, lowering my forehead to touch his.
Gazing up at me without a blink, he beamed a single word: Go.
‘But what about my health?’ I asked, rubbing his nose.
My energy levels were still pathetic. On outings, the family sprinted ahead while I trailed in their wake, pretending to admire the scenery. I was slower. My lungs seemed to have shrunk. I still huffed and puffed.
Viruses invited themselves into my system more often and took longer to go away. I no longer sailed around mindlessly inside my body. I’d started experiencing numbness down both arms, which an MRI revealed was due to compression in my upper spine, but (the doctor added cheerfully) no tumour.
The enormous smile scar across my abdomen wasn’t without issues either. If I sat up suddenly, or twisted in an unusual way, I’d seize up with paralysing pain. I Googled the symptoms to find others who’d had the same surgery got it too. ‘Charlie horse cramps’ they were called. It was indeed like being kicked in the stomach. According to the Googlers, the cramps got worse with time.
Countless What Ifs whirled around my mind. My creaking, panting, cramping, infection-prone body was hardly up to Sri Lanka. What if I couldn’t make it up the monastery steps? Or if I caught a horrible bug and died in the jungle?
One morning while I was chomping through my muesli, Jonah winked at me and sent some more words: Does a brush with death mean you’re going to stop living?
He’s right, I thought. I could stay home drinking green tea, avoiding stress and being obsessed with the fact I wasn’t going to live forever, or I could follow my daughter’s example and live.
Seizing the phone, I punched in the nonsensical sequence of numbers needed to reach the monastery. The line crackled, then buzzed, and for once the call went through. A melodic female voice answered. Probably a nun. Tropical birds whooped and chortled in the background as she went off to find Lydia.
‘Is it still raining?’ I asked our daughter. ‘Has the monastery been swept away by the floods?’
Lydia assured me she was fine. Even though it was raining a lot where she was, the actual flooding was further south. She always made it seem the trouble was somewhere else.
‘I’m thinking of coming over in February,’ I said.
‘To stay at the monastery?’ Lydia asked, sounding pleased and nervous at the same time.
Drawing a breath, I pictured the 200 steps. And the hole in the ground that would most probably be my toilet. Plus the nonexistent towels, fluffy or otherwise. (Guests were instructed to bring their own linen.) Then there was the information Katharine, in an uncharacteristic fit of kid-sister brattiness, had recently confided – Lydia had discovered a leech ‘on her vagina’. (I’d managed to raise two daughters who didn’t know the difference between a vagina and a vulva.)
‘Yes.’
Three nights at the monastery would be enough, I told her. After that I’d move to a four-star hotel, where she’d be welcome to join me. To my surprise, she was enthusiastic about staying in a luxury hotel.
One of the things I dreaded most about going to Sri Lanka was having the inoculations (my pathetic needle phobia again). I even toyed with the idea of not having any. Then Heather next door told me about a friend of hers who’d just returned from Sri Lanka with typhoid and malaria. Frankly, the prospect of falling ill in Sri Lanka didn’t worry me as much as being a nuisance.
Steeling myself I went to the doctor’s. She seemed perplexed when I told her where I was going.
Her list of recommended vaccinations was sobering. Adult diphtheria and tetanus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, polio, rabies, typhoid, swine flu, varicella (for those who haven’t previously had chicken pox) and possibly malaria tablets. ‘Typhoid’, ‘cholera’, ‘malaria’ – romantic sounding names engraved on headstones throughout the Empire.
Seeing my expression, the doctor said I could maybe get away without some of them. Fixing her gaze tactfully on her prescription pad, she asked if the trip might involve an exchange of bodily fluids. I was flattered, but in a monastery? At my age? I was more likely to have a heart attack on the 200 steps.