Chapter 27

In the hospital I was advised to drink even more water, so much that I was in active discomfort while sitting in the waiting room. The place was busy. My mother bought me a bar of chocolate from the vending machine and I sat there tapping my pen against the front cover of Middlemarch, which I had to read for a class on the English novel. The cover depicted a sad-eyed lady from Victorian times doing something with flowers. I doubted Victorian women actually touched flowers as often as art from the period suggested they did.

While I was waiting, a man came in with two little girls, one of them in a pushchair. The older girl climbed onto the seat next to me and leaned over her father’s shoulder to say something, although he wasn’t listening. The girl wriggled around to get his attention, so her light-up sneakers pushed against my handbag and then my arm. When her father finally turned around he said: Rebecca, look what you’re doing! You’re kicking that woman’s arm! I tried to catch his eye and say: it’s fine, it’s no problem. But he didn’t look at me. To him, my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed. I thought about the way Nick handled his little dog whom he loved so much, and then I stopped thinking about it.

The registrar called me up and I went into a little room with an ultrasound machine and a medical couch covered in white filmy paper. The technician asked me to get onto the couch and she rolled some gel onto a plastic instrument while I lay there looking at the ceiling. The room was dim, evocatively dim, as if it contained a hidden pool of water somewhere. We chatted, I don’t remember about what. I had the sense that my voice was coming from somewhere else, like a small radio I kept in my mouth.

The technician pressed the plastic thing down hard into my lower abdomen then, and I stared upward and tried not to make any noise. My eyes were watering. I felt like at any moment she was going to show me a grainy image of a foetus and say something about a heartbeat, and I would nod wisely. The idea of making images of a uterus that had nothing in it struck me as sad, like photographing an abandoned house.

After it was over I thanked her. I went to the bathroom and washed my hands a number of times under the hot hospital taps. I may have scalded them a little, since my skin came up very pink and the tips of my fingers looked slightly swollen. Then I went back to wait for the consultant to call me. Rebecca and her family were gone.

The consultant was a man in his sixties. He squinted up at me as if I’d disappointed him in some way and then told me to sit down. He was looking at a folder with some writing in it. I sat on a hard plastic chair and looked at my fingernails. My hands were definitely scalded. He asked me some questions about the time I had been admitted to the hospital in August, what my symptoms were, and what the gynaecologist had said, and then asked more general questions about my menstrual cycle and sexual activity.

While he asked these questions he was flipping sort of non-committally through his folder. Eventually he looked up at me.

Well, your ultrasound is clear, he said. No fibroids, no cysts, nothing like that. So that’s the good news.

What’s the other news?

He smiled, but it was a weird smile, as if he was admiring me for being brave. I swallowed, and I knew that I had made a mistake.

The doctor told me that I had a problem with the lining of my uterus, which meant that cells from inside the uterus were growing elsewhere in my body. He said these cells were benign, meaning non-cancerous, but the condition itself was incurable and in some cases progressive. It had a long name which I had never heard before: endometriosis. He called it a ‘difficult’ and ‘unpredictable’

diagnosis, which could only be confirmed with exploratory keyhole surgery. But it fits with all your symptoms, he said. And as many

as one in ten women suffer from it. I sort of chewed on my scalded thumb and said things like, hm. He said there were some surgical interventions possible but they were only recommended in particularly severe cases. I wondered if that meant I wasn’t a severe case, or just that they didn’t know yet.

He told me that the primary problem for sufferers was ‘pain management’. He said that patients often experienced pain during ovulation, menstrual pain, and discomfort during sexual intercourse. I bit down into the side of my thumbnail and started to peel it away from my skin. The idea that sex could hurt me felt apocalyptically cruel. The doctor said ‘we’ wanted to prevent the pain from becoming debilitating or ‘reaching the level of disability’.

My jaw started to hurt and I wiped at my nose mechanically.

The secondary problem he said was ‘the issue of fertility’. I recall these words very clearly. I said, oh, really? Unfortunately, he said, the condition does leave many women infertile, that’s one of our biggest concerns. But then he talked about IVF treatments and how rapidly they were advancing. I nodded with my thumb in my mouth. Then I blinked several times quickly, as if I could blink the thought out of my mind, or blink the entire hospital away.

After that the consultation was over. I went back out to the waiting room and saw my mother reading my copy of Middlemarch. She was only about ten pages in. I went to stand beside her and she looked up at me with an expectant face.

Oh, she said. There you are. What did the doctor say?

Something seemed to close up over my body, like a hand held hard over my mouth or my eyes. I couldn’t begin to phrase the explanation of what the doctor had told me, because there were so many parts to it, and it would take so long, and involve so many individual words and sentences. The thought of saying so many words about it made me feel physically sick. Out loud I heard myself say: oh, he said the ultrasound was clear.

So they don’t know what it is? my mother said.

Let’s get in the car.

We went out to the car and I strapped my seat belt on. I’ll explain more when we get home, I thought. I’ll have more time to think about it when we’re home. She started the engine and I ran

my fingers through a knot in my hair, feeling it stretch and then give way, the little pieces of dark hair snapping off and falling away through my hand. My mother was asking questions again and I could feel my mouth formulating responses.

It’s just bad period pain, I said. He says it’ll get better now that I’m on the pill.

She said oh. Well. That’s a relief then, isn’t it? You must be feeling good about that. I wanted to be hard and frictionless. I produced some kind of facial expression by reflex and she indicated left out of the car park.

When we got back home I went up to my room to wait for the train while my mother stayed downstairs tidying up. I could hear her putting away pots and pans into kitchen drawers. I got into bed and looked at the internet for a while, where I found a number of health features on women’s websites about this incurable disease I had. Usually these took the form of interviews with people whose lives had been destroyed by suffering. There were a lot of stock photographs of white women looking out windows with concerned expressions, sometimes with a hand on their abdomen to indicate pain. I also found some online communities where people shared gruesome after-surgery images with questions like ‘how long should it take for hydronephrosis to improve once a stent is in place?’ I viewed this information as dispassionately as possible.

When I had read as much of this as I could, I closed my laptop and took the little bible out of my bag. I turned to the part of Mark where Jesus says: Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague. All sick people were good for in the Bible was to be healed by people who were well. But Jesus didn’t really know anything, and neither did I. Even if I had any faith, it wasn’t going to make me whole. There was no use thinking about it.

My phone started to ring then and I saw it was Nick calling. I picked up and we said hello. Then he said: hey, I should probably tell you something. I asked what, and there was a short but perceptible pause before he spoke again.

So, Melissa and I have started sleeping together again, he said.

I feel weird telling you about it on the phone, but then I also feel

weird keeping it from you. I don’t know.

At this I lifted the phone away from my face, slowly, and looked at it. It was just an object, it didn’t mean anything. I could hear Nick say: Frances? But I could only hear it faintly, and it was like any other sound. I put the phone down carefully onto my bedside table, though I didn’t hang up. Nick’s voice became a kind of buzzing noise, with no identifiable words in it. I sat on my bed breathing in and out very slowly, so slowly I almost wasn’t breathing at all.

Then I picked the phone up and said: hello?

Hey, Nick said. Are you there? I think the signal did something weird just now.

No, I’m here. I heard you.

Oh. Are you all right? You sound upset.

I closed my eyes. When I spoke I could hear my voice thinning out and hardening like ice.

About you and Melissa? I said. Be real, Nick.

But you did want me to tell you, didn’t you?

Sure.

I just don’t want things to change between us, he said.

Relax about it.

I could hear him breathe in apprehensively. He wanted to reassure me, I could tell, but I wasn’t going to let him. People were always wanting me to show some weakness so they could reassure me. It made them feel worthy, I knew all about that.

How are you otherwise? he said. That scan is happening tomorrow, right?

Only then I remembered that I had given him the wrong date.

He hadn’t forgotten, it was my mistake. He had probably set a reminder on his phone for the next day: ask Frances how the scan went.

Right, I said. I’ll let you know about it. The other phone is ringing so I’m going to go, but I’ll give you a call after the thing.

Yeah, do that. I hope it goes okay. You’re not worried about it, are you? I guess you don’t worry about things.

I held the back of my hand to my face silently. My body felt cold like an inanimate object.

No, that’s your job, I said. Talk soon, okay?

Okay. Keep in touch.

I hung up the phone. After that I put some cold water on my face and dried it, the same face I had always had, the one I would have until I died.

*

On the way to the station that evening my mother kept glancing at me, as if something about my behaviour was off-putting, and she wanted to reprimand me for it but couldn’t decide what it was.

Eventually she told me to take my feet off the dashboard, which I did.

You must be relieved, she said.

Yeah, delighted.

How are you managing for money?

Oh, I said. I’m okay.

She glanced in the rear-view mirror.

The doctor didn’t say anything else, did he? she said.

No, that was it.

I looked out the window at the station. I had the sense that something in my life had ended, my image of myself as a whole or normal person maybe. I realised my life would be full of mundane physical suffering, and that there was nothing special about it.

Suffering wouldn’t make me special, and pretending not to suffer wouldn’t make me special. Talking about it, or even writing about it, would not transform the suffering into something useful. Nothing would. I thanked my mother for the lift to the station and got out of the car.