He was a fuzzy, badly photocopied version of me, more or less the same age, width and height, except with more of a concerned “hospital” look, though maybe I had that at times. A phrase occurred to me: “sullen charm.” It took me a while to recognise its origin. Years ago I’d been so described by an interviewer, who might as well have added “sulky,” “opinionated” and “self-absorbed.”
I thought: The place of the dead is soon taken by identical others-as at some of the movie award ceremonies I’d had the misfortune to attend with Henry, where if you left your seat, bow-tied students would steal into your place so as not to reveal an absence to the cameras. Eliot had stolen from me all I didn’t want, and it felt like theft.
I was looking at Eliot and looking at her, wondering what there was between them. Maybe she had found what she wanted: a psychologist and, through him, twenty-four-hour care, like marrying a doctor.
I didn’t want to hang around. I declined tea, extracted a shot of vodka I’d left in the fridge a few days earlier, asked about the university department where he worked and shook his hand.
Leaving, I turned to see him wiping sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand. My shadow would always darken his life; I would be his ghost. Wouldn’t she always love me? My son’s face could only remind him of me. What, he could only wonder, was he getting into?
“What do you think?” Rafi asked, as he accompanied me to the front gate.
“He’s brave, but I don’t envy him,” I said. “Being in your own family is hard enough. Joining someone else’s is scary work.”
“Is he a different kind of psycho-thing to you?”
“He’s only a psychologist. One of those people who says it’s all biology, or all in the brain. I bet he talks about animals without realising you can find an animal to justify any intellectual position. What do you want? Snakes? Donkeys? Insects? Except that there is no animal capable of being grief-stricken, for years, like man.”
“They know nothing,” said Rafi supportively, adding for good measure, “Fuckers. Don’t worry about him, Dad. You should hear him talk. I’m snoring. He says all your stuff-it’s only specu-…Specu-”
“Speculation?”
“Yes. Speculation,” he said in a Jamaican accent. “An’ it’s all been dissed.”
“Yes?”
“Discredited. Years ago.”
I said, “Probably the only true psychologists these days are advertisers.”
“I have to tell you, Dad, we’re going on holiday together. To Malaysia.”
“You are?”
“Him, me, Mum and his two daughters. I’ve got two new older sisters-even if we’re not related and they’re teenagers!”
“He’s got money, has he?”
“You’ll be paying quite a bit towards it, Mum says. Does that hurt you?”
“It’s beginning to.”
“I’ll tell Mum I don’t want to go.”
“I’ll be here when you get back, exactly the same. I have Miriam and Henry and other friends.”
“Mum says, when we go away, will you feed the cat? I hate it when you’re sad,” he said, resting his head against my shoulder and nuzzling into me, as he did as a child. “But Eliot does have an Arsenal season ticket.”
“This fucking boyfriend too? Is that what she advertises for?”
“It’s very bad luck, Dad. T, those Gooners are everywhere.”
After I had told Ajita this, she said, “I’m glad you’ve spoken to me. We thought we liked each other, but were really only interested in other people. Do you want to carry on seeing me?”
I said yes, but like her, really wasn’t sure about it.
I had no idea how soon it would be necessary for us urgently to talk.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It was when Rafi, Josephine and Eliot went on holiday that I rang Karen. I emailed her occasionally, but it had been a while since I’d heard from her. It turned out she was alone too. Her daughters had gone to stay with their father and Ruby, along with the twins Ruby had just given birth to.
We were in Sheekey’s. She looked tired, and she was wearing a wrap on her head.
“You’re not drinking,” I said.
“Order whatever you want,” she said. “I’m paying and I don’t care.”
“Antibiotics?” I said.
“You know,” she said, “I was invited on a date. It must have been around the last time I saw you-”
“You were going to meet that guy.”
“Yes.”
“I went to meet him. Just before, getting ready, I was in the shower, luxuriating with my favourite French bath gel, Stendhal it’s called. As my hand moved across my breast, I felt something that didn’t move like the rest. I tried to find it again, but couldn’t.
“We had supper at the Wolsey. He’s talking, I’m talking. But all the time there’s this other text running through my head: Breasts change all the time. They’re more fluid than people think. They get bigger, smaller, rounder by the hour depending on men’s hands, babies, menstruation. But no one will ever touch me again.
“I have my checkups once a year. I worship my doctor. He’s South African, he likes women, our bodies, our breasts.
“At the end of the dinner, the date and I take separate cabs, he’s going somewhere else for drinks, he invites me but I’m too spaced to go. The last thing he wants to hear about is my lump. That’s going to make him hard and wanting me, right?
“The next day my hand seems to hit it, sort of smack into it.
“I froze. It was the end of me being what I still hadn’t become-desirable. Like Hepburn or Binoche. Just give me a chance, I’d think to myself, a moment, a week, a year, and I’ll get there. In fact, I’m more mature, smarter in every way. Less afraid of everything.”
“Why wouldn’t it be a cyst?”
“Exactly. Why not? Mammograms are full of them and they mean nothing. The mammogrammists send you off for further tests-sonograms, nonograms. Then more doctors mash you with cold plates or warm, humming probes and peer into scopes and monitors-and it’s nothing.
“Fool I might be, but I did the responsible thing and made an appointment with the doctor-hero. When he asked if I’d come for any reason, I said no, just a regular checkup. My man likes to see ‘his women’ every six months, but I managed to make it once a year. I didn’t want to determine his observations, give him an agenda. If he found something during the usual routine, well, okay. If not, what is there to talk about?
“He did the right breast, then the left. Slender, cool fingers. His touch is elegant, not arousing. You feel like a piano being stroked by a genius. Do they study it?
“Both hands on my left breast. Suddenly I couldn’t hear and I couldn’t breathe. But it was important to act natural. If he wanted to get me into the cancer thing, then he’d have to do his own damn work.
“His hands were off my chest, and he was pulling up the white disposable paper gown and saying, ‘Fine below and above, one of the lovelier uteruses, see you next time.’ I was free. I’d got through. ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘you didn’t find anything?’
“I shouldn’t have said that. He’s stopped washing his hands, and turning round to look at me again. He says, ‘Why don’t we just check again, to be sure? You think you’ve found something, don’t you? Which one, right or left?’
“When he says ‘left’ I blush and I feel my eyes widen to the size of the screen at the Sony Imax theatre. His hands are immediately on the left. He’s watching me, my eyes. ‘Am I getting close? Going to give me a hint?’
“I don’t say a thing. You went to medical school, you’re on your own, pal.
“He finds it. ‘Aah.’ His fingers, both hands, passing and passing again over the thing, moving it, isolating it, angling it.
“He’s not looking at me now. He’s not my breezy, older, attractive, cool, flirty doctor anymore. He’s a lookout for the cancer team, and he’s going to put me into the system, the system that finishes women. Once you’re in, you’re out. You’re not a woman who counts in the world.