My primary school teacher encouraged my poetry, as I’ve mentioned, and asked one day for me to read out another piece. I did, then promptly burst into tears. I wrote about how, when I was an infant, my family lived in Firle (a tiny village in south England) and that I used to go into the vegetable patch and pull out Mum’s carrots, plunk, plunk, and that maybe I had also pulled out my father’s heart. Marisa, the ‘it’ girl, a head taller and blonder than any other girls (a future Guess model), put her arm around me. She was kind, sweet and good company. The scene with Marisa was melodramatic but it reflected how my little nine-year-old self felt.
I guarded my heart and words with my father as a young woman, determined to never let him get to me again. But I failed. In the week I was very ill and hospitalised, my father waited on me hand and foot: cooking all my meals, doing all the laundry and letting me rest. The complex weave of my self-protective armour and the pain underneath dissolved. It wasn’t conscious, or worked through. It just went.
In Invisible Cities Marco Polo described the cities he had seen and imagined to the Chinese ruler Kublai Khan:
In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or grey or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency. When the strings become so numerous that you can no longer pass among them, the inhabitants leave: the houses are dismantled; only the strings and their supports remain …
They rebuild Ersilia elsewhere. They weave a similar pattern of strings which they would like to be more complex and at the same time more regular than the other. Then they abandon it and take themselves and their houses still farther away.
Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form.
I recalled this image when I tried to conjure the words to describe what kept me standing and hoping. In the moments when I basked in the simple happiness of caring for my family and remaining healthy, the external ambitions of becoming a writer or a professional in another arena dissolved, and I just wanted to live with my friends and family around me: geographically and emotionally. What I did for a crust and the house that I lived in were not important. The strings that grounded and connected me to others were. The dress made by a relative who gave it to me and then took the time to share a cup of tea: a pink string of familial love. My son holding on like a koala and squealing with joy after I’d picked him up: a red string of blood love. My partner making me laugh: a blue string of contentment and attraction. The thought that I could call people who understood me: yellow strings of joyfulness. The knowledge that I could get on a plane and someone on the other side of the planet would welcome me into their home with real love and affection: an orange string of kindness and shared moments.
When my world fell apart on diagnosis, the criss-cross of multi-coloured connections and friendships became the flexible scaffolding that held me upright.
Every female organ apart from my brain: what makes a woman?
Choosing a doctor is difficult because it is our first explicit confrontation of our illness. ‘How good is this man?’ is simply the reverse of ‘How bad am I?’ To be sick brings out all our prejudices and primitive feelings. Like fear or love, it makes us a little crazy. Yet the craziness of the patient is part of his condition.
Anatole Broyard, ‘The Patient Examines the Doctor’
Your son has a cold? asked a nurse.
Yes.
We’ll have to put you in a room as people are neutropenic here.
Damn, gynaecology–oncology! Because I was having optional surgery I didn’t think of the cancer side of things. A woman with no effective white blood cells could catch Celso’s cold and miss out on timely surgery. I tucked his echidna puppet into his arms and hurried us past the women’s magazines and health pamphlets to an open door that the head nurse gestured towards.
We bundled into a plain box that was the consulting room, and I sat down in entertain Celso mode. I blew up a surgical glove and let it fly around the room.
Sorry, do you mind if I change my son’s nappy? He’s pretty whiffy, I said to the tall man who’d appeared in front of me.
The gyn-oncology fellow cheerily replied, Of course, change his nappy. He’d just introduced himself.
I grabbed Celso’s backpack and put my giggling son down on the gynaecological examination table in the adjoining room. I giggled back because the leg paddles were against my knees when normally I’d be knees up. Celso found the strange moving table and lights fascinating.
After I treble-bagged the poo we were back discussing my impending hysterectomy.
Your ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus then cervix are taken out through your vagina.
Hmm … lovely. From what I’ve heard you have to blow my belly up. What’s the pain through the shoulders like?
It depends on how much is used and individual reaction to pain. You’ll be in hospital, so the pain will be managed.
Good. That was all I needed to know.
I found out later that the young surgeon with his Germanic clear skin, blue eyes and
