Reading Madame Bovary (21 page)

At their second consultation, McCormack had repeated to her that it was ‘her choice'. The blood samples he had sent off for cancer analysis had been ‘inconclusive'. The growth might be benign. It might be that it could sit there for years with no ill effects. ‘It's your choice,' he said again. She went away and thought about this, but once the idea is planted in your head, the idea of Death, it becomes impossible to rid yourself of it. It begins to stalk you like a shadow that has no body of its own and is seeking to attach itself to yours. In the weeks before her admission to hospital she was unable to shake free of it, and at night her dreams were lurid. There was one where she was lost in a series of dark alleys and searching, with sick terror, for a child in old-fashioned swaddling clothes, a child who ran ahead of her and disappeared into the crowd. She woke in a sweat, and groaned aloud so that Greg rolled over and put his arm around her. Then there was the dream where she was trapped in a damp, dark room with walls of spongy tissue that breathed and bled.

The brisk nurse came over again. ‘Sorry, but we've had an emergency admission and we've had to put you back until two-thirty.'
Two-thirty.

Nothing to eat, and only water to drink. I can't stay here in this ghastly room, she said to herself, and got up suddenly and walked to the lifts, leaving her overnight bag behind on the vinyl chair.

For the next hour she walked around the industrial area that surrounded the hospital: warehouses, tyre depots, trucking companies. It was all grey and gritty. She went into a small shop that printed slogans onto T-shirts. Yes, they did one-offs, said the swarthy young man behind the counter. What did she have in mind? She thought of a souvenir shirt she might commission, some words of black humour, but her wits were dulled by fear and nothing came to mind.

‘I'll get back to you,' she said, and walked out.

Some time after she returned to the hospital a nurse appeared and guided her into a four-bed ward that was empty. The nurse handed her a worn surgical gown and ordered her to undress. She was hungry, her stomach was rumbling. She always did have a healthy appetite, even under duress. She folded her clothes neatly into her bag and sat with her legs crossed on the bed, waiting, a piece of meat ready for the abattoir. What a grim room it was, and the corridors so worn. The paint was scratched, the grey metal trolleys lined up in the corridor were old and creaked. She felt like a dumb cow corralled into a gate-room.

At last the orderly came and asked her to get up on the trolley. Bovine, she obeyed, thinking: why couldn't she walk into the theatre, why did she have to be pushed? It only heightened her feeling of being powerless. The wheels of the trolley grated and stalled and there was a harsh echoing sound coming from somewhere at the end of the corridor. When they arrived the orderly turned and walked off without a word. She could see through the door of the theatre, a swinging door propped open with some heavy object. Nearby, a male doctor in a theatre-gown was standing in an untidy alcove and he asked her for her name. At first she didn't hear him because she was looking past him, looking at the metallic surfaces within, shiny but worn, like an old kitchen in a former boys' reformatory she had once visited. In her heightened state of anxiety even the floors looked metallic and there was the abrasive sound of a radio blaring out into the theatre.

She did not want to go into the abattoir in a conscious state, not just because she was afraid but because if it was like the rest of the building it would be an ugly room. She did not want to see its scratched and discoloured walls.

‘Do I get a knockout injection?' she asked the young assistant.

‘Do you want one?' he said, in mild surprise, as if this were unusual. She found him offensively casual. Surely he should have asked her first? While she gaped in frozen incredulity, he turned to the small steel trolley in the alcove, turned back and without preamble stuck a short needle into a vein on the back of her left hand. One, two, three, four …

When she woke she was back in the same room and the other beds were still empty. She was cold and shaking uncontrollably. She felt encased in ice, as if she were now a carcass and hanging in the cool room. She was shaking so violently that the young Filipina nurse ran to her with a pale-blue cotton blanket.

‘Do you have any more?' she rasped.

Greg was there beside her bed, gazing down at her with a pained expression.

She was woozy, she couldn't think, she was still shaking, but she managed to lift the covers awkwardly and look down at her abdomen. There were four puncture holes smeared with brown disinfectant, one directly on the navel and three just above the pubic line. Whatever had transpired in the cutting room, no big incision had been made. She took this as a sign that the oncologist had not been called in and thought she might remark on this to Greg. Instead she laid her head down on the pillow and closed her eyes.

When she woke, Greg was still there. ‘What happened?' she asked.

‘I don't know.' He was angry. ‘I can't get any sense out of anyone. There's no bloody doctor you can talk to here. That frigid woman at the reception desk treats me like I'm a potential terrorist and says I'll have to wait for the registrar to come tomorrow on his rounds and he'll tell us then.'

‘I'm hungry.' She hadn't eaten for twenty-four hours. No-one had offered her food or drink. Greg went off to see the charge nurse, who returned an hour later with a cheese sandwich.

Overnight her blood pressure plummeted and the night nurse kept coming in to wind the pump around her arm and check it again. She seemed worried. ‘It shouldn't be this low,' she kept saying, irritably. ‘It shouldn't be this down.' As if it were somehow the patient's fault. She was brusque, like all of them. Only the young Filipina nurse who came on in the morning had anything resembling a bedside manner.

In the late morning the registrar turned up. He was short with a dark suntan and trim dark hair, handsome in a smarmy kind of way. Beside him was a young intern, a stolid girl with soft, pale features. The registrar stood at the end of her bed and looked at her chart.

‘What happened with my surgery?' she asked him.

He gave an inane smile. ‘You had your left ovary removed.'

‘What was the outcome?'

‘I can't say,' he said.

‘When will I have a test result?'

‘Oh, you can go home today and then ring up in a month or six weeks and get the result.'

She was speechless.
A month or six weeks!
He couldn't be serious.

Did she or did she not have a cancerous ovary? She opened her mouth to protest but already he was walking out the door, his assistant trailing behind him. He had not introduced himself, he had not addressed her by name, he had not extended even the most common courtesy. Why had he bothered to visit? So he could tick off the ward sheet? Oh, and to check if she was still breathing?

Meat, she told herself again. Piece of meat.

Her mother rang. ‘Annie is fine,' she said. ‘She's not fretting, don't worry about her.'

After she put down the phone she hoisted herself onto the edge of the bed and reached gingerly for her dressing-gown. Then she walked painfully down the corridor to the central reception station. The woman looked up from her screen, looked at her as if she were a nuisance. ‘Yes?'

‘I've just seen the registrar and he says I can't get a result for six weeks. This isn't acceptable. It must be possible to get a test result before then.'

‘These services are in great demand,' said the woman coldly. ‘There are long waiting times.'

‘Who can I talk to about this?'

‘You can ask the registrar.'

‘I've just seen the registrar and he said six weeks.' They were going around in an endless, deadening circle.

When she got home she was sore. Overnight her four wounds opened up. They had not been stitched but smeared with some kind of gel that was meant to hold them together. It didn't. She wondered if they would get infected. How should she dress them? She hadn't a clue. She rang a friend who had once been a nurse. ‘They should have given you a discharge sheet,' said the friend, ‘with instructions on how to care for them.' They hadn't. One more thing to add to the bitter letter of complaint that she was drafting in her head.

‘Ring your GP,' said her friend.

‘I can't. It's the weekend.'

Around ten that morning her younger sister came in. ‘What's the result?' Jody asked.

‘I don't know.'

‘You don't know?'
She almost yelped. She was incredulous.

‘Don't they tell you?'

She no longer wanted to talk about it. ‘Put the radio on,' she said. Somehow the bedside radio had become unplugged and it hurt to reach across. Jody knelt on the floor to find the power point and the cheerful banter of talk radio broke abruptly into the room. But after Jody had gone she realised that she didn't feel like listening to that. Normally, yes, but she was not her normal self. She was her anxious, angry, humiliated and powerless self; her piece-of-meat self and I-have-had-to-think-about-Death self, and whatever she wanted to listen to, it wasn't this. For a while she lay there in irritable passivity, and then, wearied by her own thoughts, she leaned over to the radio and a stabbing pain shot through her guts. She tried to ignore it. Greg had driven off to the shops so she persisted with the dial, fiddling blindly with the small tuning wheel. There was some race-caller with the usual nasal twang, then a programme about new car design, an interview with a politician and, finally, music. Not music she was accustomed to but classical piano music, a tumultuous wave of it, rippling across her bed, rippling across her body like a sonic tide, so powerful that she subsided again into her pillows and surrendered to it, allowing the tidal surge of notes to flow through her veins. It seemed to go on and on for a long time, and yet for no time at all, until after a while she became aware of how her body had gone loose and she was breathing more easily, more deeply.

‘What's this?' asked Greg when he came in with some tea in a mug.

‘I don't know,' she said, ‘but leave it on, I like it.'

‘It sounds romantic.'

It's not, she thought, it's more complicated than that, but she didn't want to talk about it now, didn't want to analyse anything, just wanted to let the sound wash over her. After a time it created a field, and she was in the field, and in the field nothing else mattered.

Later in the afternoon she learned that she was listening to the Sydney Piano Competition. The competition was held every two years and contested by thirty-six young virtuosos who auditioned from around the world. She had missed the first day but there were several days to come, and all of it broadcast live, every note. All she had to do was to keep the radio permanently tuned to Classic FM and lie there in her bed, or sit out on the deck with headphones, in a trance. It was a force, a whirlwind of notes that filled the abyss. She had come home to a pit of uncertainty: was she ill or was she not? Was she a woman who'd had a benign cyst removed – perhaps unnecessary surgery – or was she about to face up to the worst? And what if the right ovary did not work – had never worked, for all she knew – and she would now be unable to have another child? How could she brush and comb her responses? What was this absurd state of unknowing, this vacuum of meaning? It was an affront to the plans she had made for herself, an affront to her rational mind, and into this vacuum, to which she was unaccustomed and for which she was unprepared, stole the beauty of the piano music. Better still, it was a competition, a human drama. Players would lose, players would make mistakes, players would be hurt.

After the first day she found that she began to develop an ear. The austerity of her bedroom, its bare walls, seemed to hone the sensitivity of her hearing. There was nothing to look at – she still didn't feel like reading – but there was this miraculous sound. At night she was restless, like a fragile barque on a sinister pantomime stage set, tossed on a sea of rope. She woke, and gasped, so that Greg rolled over, half-awake, and mumbled, ‘Pain?'

‘It's okay,' she said, because it wasn't, at least not physical pain.

But in daylight the music was there to soothe her. When she woke she found that, before long, she was waiting impatiently for the broadcast of the recitals to begin. First there were the introductory remarks from the presenters and then a sequence of special category performances: sonatas and preludes today, Mozart concerti tomorrow. The entrants had already been refined into a long shortlist: Russian, Japanese, Chinese, American, Australian, Korean, French and Italian. They were young, they were forceful, they were single-minded. They practised seven hours a day. They were obsessed and their obsession fed her. She was hooked up to them, as if on a musical drip. They were her daily nourishment, her milk and honey.