While I waited I phoned my father without checking what time it was in England. When he answered I burst into tears. I don’t want to die like Mum, I sobbed. My life is only half-baked. There’s so much I want to do.
My father’s faint Nottingham accent calmed me. I know, he said gently. I know, darling. But listen. Your mother’s fate doesn’t have to be yours.
I barely let him finish. But what if it is?
My father couldn’t answer that question.
Celso stirred in his bedroom, pulling me out of myself. My nine-month-old boy had strawberry-blonde curls and a cherubic face, the high colouring only Caravaggio knew how to paint. I was still recovering from his traumatic birth, which we’d both only narrowly survived. His tiny body struggled, but he maintained a sunny sweetness. Would I live to see him grow? How would Celso, who so relied upon me to literally survive every day at this point in his short life, cope without the unconditional love of his mother? A similar question arose when my mother was dying. How would I cope without her unconditional mother love?
Celso’s movements rustled the sheets around him. I went to him and plucked him from his cot, careful to avoid tugging on the tube that went up his nose. His skin still radiated the narcotic new-baby smell of fresh, warm straw. It’s a powerful drug, designed to keep mothers bonded to their babies. I breathed him in and wondered if my mother might have made different decisions if I’d been an infant when she was diagnosed.
I placed Celso on his domed play mat and returned to the stove to stir the Bolognese. The window above the kitchen sink shone a rectangle of sharp light onto my hands.
B hadn’t arrived home yet, but he was close. I saw myself as the large target on the screen with B about to connect.
When were you diagnosed? asked the paediatric surgeon.
Last Friday, I said.
Celso was on B’s lap with the blood pressure cuff’s black cord in his hand. He was tugging at it. I was taking off my faux-Burberry trench coat and feeling businesslike. We’re here to talk about my son’s undescended-testicle operation, not my cancer.
My lumpectomy’s tomorrow, I continued.
His head reeled back. What’s your treatment going to be?
I told him my plans. We got onto the subject of chemotherapy baldness; he relayed the story of a colleague’s wife who had alopecia and how people often mistook her for a cancer patient, so she wore a real-hair wig at home when guests arrived.
I think she looks great bald, he kindly added. So the operation’s called orchidopexy. I’m basically moving the testis into the scrotum and sewing it in place. He looked at Celso: If all goes as planned I won’t see you again until you’re 16, buddy, and we have a man-to-man conversation about how to check your testicles.
B and I turned and smiled at one another. At this point in the reaving hell of it all, our son turning 16 was moon-landing material.
Before my diagnosis, I’d had a dream I would not forget. I was in a long room with iron-framed windows high up and neat rows of single beds, like a military hospital in the world wars. I looked at one bed, empty and firmly tucked in, a white sheet folded over a grey blanket. A line of writing looped along the seam: Hospital Ward. I looked around. In the other beds sick people lay and watched me. One of them asked me what I was doing.
I have breast cancer, I said, still staring at the sheet.
Lumpectomy: is this right?
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
Susan Sontag, ‘Illness as Metaphor’
Are you sitting down, honey? It was Mum’s friend, Kath.
I am now, I said, half-laughing. I was 21 and living in a shared house in Brighton, Melbourne. I’d scored a cheap room in a once-handsome rundown brick bungalow with shag carpet and the largest bedrooms I’d ever seen. There were three of us in the house. We spent weekends rock climbing or catching up with friends in cafés on Brunswick Street.
Now I sat in the hallway of the house, with the Bakelite landline pressed to my right ear.
My mother came on the line. I don’t want to tell you this. I’m sorry, darling, but I’ve got breast cancer.
Why? I asked, I mean how?
Patiently, my mother told me everything that had happened. It began, she said, when she noticed puckering under her left breast when she lifted it. I didn’t want to scare you, so I went ahead and had the needle biopsy and mammogram to make sure I knew what was happening.
I remember the words formed images of hypodermic needles stabbing at my mother’s chest. And her funeral.
How are you, Mum?
She’d started crying by this point. These last few years have been so bloody horrible I’m not surprised I’ve got cancer now, she said.
Mum had left her position as a lecturer in social ecology and the history and philosophy of science to live in the Northern Rivers and write up her PhD. The faculty she worked in had become too fraught with tension as her ex-partner’s presence was a daily reminder of a bad break-up. Mum’s PhD was on the development and innovation of genetically modified organisms in Australian society – how to devise public policy processes that avoided destructive conflicts and stalemates in decision-making. The move wasn’t necessarily meant as permanent.
Several years after my mother’s death I had contact with one of her last students, who said he
