‘You wait for an hour and you take the tube of anaesthetic cream — topical, that’s funny — they’ve given you and go with it to the bathroom — you worry about the cleanliness of the bathroom — and you fill the urine sample bottle you’ve been given and you wash your hands and then you put the warm little tub on the edge of the sink — which seems unhygienic of you — and you apply the cream where you’re guessing it should go and you hope that it works.
‘You wait for another hour, which is an hour longer than you were told you would have to be here.
‘You shudder with the cold, you try and hide yourself in away from it and you stop reading your book. You go and apply more cream.
‘You wait for another hour and other people have left for their procedures and have returned, flat-out, and they’ve got dreaming faces. The anaesthetic has made them happy. You go and apply more cream and you can’t feel anywhere down there now — it’s all dead. This is what you wanted, but it crosses your mind that maybe it will always be numb and you think this is funny and you want to tell the man you’re in love with about it so that he can think it’s funny, but you can’t tell him because you can’t use your phone and because he doesn’t know you’re in hospital and because it’s all ugly and you don’t want him to think you’re ugly and because being numb was what you wanted a lot before, it was what you needed, and it’s a joke and the wrong kind of joke that you’ve got a whole tube of numbness now — when you don’t really need it as much. Or maybe you do, though.
‘You hope it works.
‘It’s three and a half hours before they come and get you and say you should lie on the bed. Even though you’re not unconscious, they want you to act as if you are. The porter wheels you to a small room full of cupboards, like a kitchen, and a very young nurse takes away your dressing gown and puts it somewhere you don’t see and you wait a while longer. You’re just in the hospital gown. And this room is colder than the ward.
‘You can’t stop shaking.
‘Then you’re pushed from the kitchen room, through into the theatre — at least you get to see swing doors — and it’s not right. It looks half-abandoned — all white space and not much equipment and it’s freezing, the air’s freezing.
‘You help them to strap you into the special chair — legs in thick Velcro, held tight, held up and tight and parted. This means that the porter sees you. He can see you while you’re naked. He must probably do this all the time, but the naked women he sees are asleep and that makes it more OK for him, you can understand that. He is nervous and upset. You’re nervous and upset. And you’re cold.
‘From a door in the far corner, a man walks in — you’re not sure who he is — and he glances at you. He seems surprised that you can look at him back. Mostly, though, he’s strolling towards another door, a far door, and out. It seems you’ll be having your operation somewhere which is used as a short cut.
‘Your specialist, gynaecologist, is fussing with an extension cable — there is a problem with the power supply in some way — or the room’s hugeness means that the laser she will use isn’t near enough to a fucking plug. You decide not to let this disturb you. You’re thinking that can be a joke, too.
‘And she puts in the expander and winds it open and you’re not doing that well, already — the cold has stolen away how you move and you can’t keep control of yourself — these tremors happen. And the cream was good cream, working cream, not a failure, but you hurt and you remember other times that hurt and you can’t fucking believe you could have thought this would be reasonable and something you could fucking deal with. You’re a fucking moron, obviously. And the gynaecologist who said this would be a breeze is also a moron, because there’s this huge pain, but maybe that’s your own fault and you’re weird and you’re not going to tell her any of this, because she’s closing in with a a needle in her hand and you’re watching that syringe dip in — you don’t want to — a needle between your legs. I’m thinking to hell with that. And it hurts and it hurts again and all this is hurting — the biopsies, the looking around, messing you about, this crap that she’s doing — and she hasn’t even started with the laser.
‘The specialist talks to her student about you. She doesn’t talk to you. Even when you talk to her, she gives her answer to this really young guy beside her and then he passes it on to you. She can’t seem to deal with you being alive.
‘Then she starts the lasering.
‘It smells of burning. That’s you burning. And you know that because it feels like you burning.
‘More injections don’t especially help.
‘You shut your eyes and you go somewhere else for a while, way down where your breathing runs away to — you know how to do this, you go there to get warm — the only place that’s warm.
‘Then there’s this metal, rattly noise and you get yanked back into what’s happening, because your specialist has kicked over some kind of bowl that was on the floor and you can’t feel pleased that she’s this clumsy, or that bowls in operating theatres get left on the fucking floor.
‘The laser takes forty minutes, probably because you’re moving, you’re shaking because you’re so cold — the creak of the frame you’re strapped to, the way it’s rattling, is mostly what you can hear — even though you’re trying to be still and numb, really numb. You’re saying that over and over.
‘It’s fucking horrible.
‘And afterwards you get yourself on to the trolley because you don’t want the porter to touch you, even though he seems a nice person and wheels you very carefully back to your place by the wall and he looks at you with this still face, still brown eyes, he’s such a still guy, and then he looks at your chair and he sees your book on it and he goes and picks it up and gives it to you and he says, “Now you can read your book.” He talks to you as if you’re a person.
‘You tell him, “Thank you.”
‘And he goes away and you hurt like fuck, exactly like fuck.
‘But you did it, you got through, you made it. And you walked in with your little bag and you walk out the same way and nobody can see that you had no dignity, because now you do, because you’re sober and you can fight this shit and be OK, even though it was humiliating and it hurt and it brought down so many different kinds of crap on you that you’ll have nightmares for a week. You walked in and you walk out and you deal with it. If you have to, you can probably deal with other crap that’s worse.’
And Meg stops there. He’ll either understand that she knows about being scared, or he won’t. He’ll either understand that she doesn’t need any more trouble, or he won’t. She really does understand being scared — it’s not like he’s so fucking special.
She flattens her spine to the door and rolls the curve of her skull against it, back and forth, back and forth. When he doesn’t say anything, she stands up, slightly stiff, and she goes downstairs.
Leave him be.
Jon unfastens the bolt.
Huge clack and grind it makes — enormous warning signal that here I am, hopeless man, on my way.
And he opens the door which isn’t technically a hard thing to do.
Nothing else will ever be like that for her, not ever again. Promise. I’ll see to it.
His arms and legs work passably well.
If she’ll let me, I’ll make sure of that.
He knows where the living room is — it’s down the stairs.
She doesn’t need me to, but I will.