Eating the Underworld Read online

  I retrieve my luggage and head to the taxi rank. This is where I get my first Washington surprise. The queue is being directed with military precision by a uniformed airport employee. And it is a long, long queue.

  ‘Is it usually this long?’ I ask the man in front of me.

  He shakes his head, no.

  ‘Perhaps World War Three has been declared and everyone’s heading in,’ I suggest jocularly. I am very sleep-deprived. I offer this as my only excuse.

  The man turns to me, a look of acute alarm on his face. I begin to wonder if I have inadvertently stumbled on something.

  An hour later, I am finally at the head of the queue. With a hydra-like capacity for regrowth, it still tails out behind me at exactly the same length as when I entered it.

  The cab commander is about to blow his whistle to signal the next taxi when he takes a good look at me. Then he decides that before he’ll let me into a taxi, I have to sing a few bars of ‘I Got You Babe’.

  The Cher factor has been a constant feature of this tour. I have been chased down freeways in Dallas, with a carload of young men screaming, ‘Cher! Cher!’; shaken awake in an aeroplane, from a huddled sleep in my little economy class blanket, by a man demanding to know if I was Cher. ‘Does Cher travel like this?’ I snarl at him. I was mobbed in a San Francisco department store when I made the mistake of inadvertently entering it five minutes after the real thing had just left—and now this.

  ‘I’m not Cher,’ I explain to the cab supremo, ‘I just want a taxi.’

  But he is adamant. No vocals. No cab.

  The crowd behind me is getting restless. I sense a nasty mood developing. Most unfairly, I see that it is me they are considering lynching, not the cab dictator. He is too important. They need him.

  I look at their surly faces. And then I unleash my secret weapon. I sing. Milliseconds later, I am in a cab speeding away—anything to shut off the sound. I sit back triumphantly. The mood is still with me as the cab deposits me at the posh Georgetown hotel.

  The entrance lobby looks like the dumping ground for used extras from Nosferatu. Poor things, I think to myself, unable to suppress a twinge of self-righteous superiority as I survey their pale, desperate faces. They obviously haven’t got credit-card-guaranteed-late-night-arrival rooms.

  As it turns out, they have. As do I. Whoop-de-doo, as the Americans say. Much good may it do you. The hotel has over-booked and is attempting to find alternate accommodation.

  A few hours later as I sit slumped in a dismal heap on my luggage, still awaiting reallocation, a porter takes pity on me. ‘I’ll find you a room,’ he says. Half an hour later, my hero leads me to a room tucked away on the ground floor. I thank him profusely.

  As I begin to unpack, I discover why the room is vacant. There are no curtains. The street-level windows don’t close properly. And there is a bunch of hoodlums outside who are taking their civic duties of welcoming visitors seriously and offering up a number of suggestions as to how they propose to entertain and educate me tonight.

  I have a quick conference with my neurons. If I reject this room, by the time I get another it will be morning and I will have had no sleep at all. On the other hand, I can turn off the lights, get into bed in my clothes and trust that I’ll wake and be able to speed off at the sounds of forced entry.

  As a demonstration of what sleep deprivation can do to normal thinking processes, I decide on the lights out and sleep-attire-ready-for-fleeing option. Luckily, the charmers outside have the combined IQ of an infant and are still in the peek-a-boo stage babies go through, where if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. Either that, or they figure I am functioning at a level somewhat above that of the average brussels sprout and have sensibly vacated the room when the lights go out.

  At breakfast the next morning, I order the most innocuous meal I can find—toast and cantaloupe. The cantaloupe has a strange, bitter taste. I figure the plan is to poison the resident guests, so as to make room for those arriving tonight. Perhaps there was a slip-up with the dosage yesterday morning?

  Outside in the street, I discover that there is a problem with being an author on the move in Washington—it is impossible to get a cab. When I finally make it to my appointment, the Maryland radio host is aghast, ‘They let you out in Washington without an escort?’ he shrieks. ‘They should be shot.’

  He calls a cab to get me back to DC. To my amazement, it comes. At my previous interview with a TV station in Washington, they called three cab companies simultaneously and it still took an hour and a half before one arrived.

  My second surprise is that the Maryland cab driver greets me as an old friend. Perhaps this is just Maryland hospitality, I think. But wait, he is spouting details of my life that a stranger couldn’t possibly know. My frantic search for explanations has discarded total amnesia on my part. Insanity is a possibility I put aside for later. Has he met someone I know in Australia? But no, questioning reveals that one to be a dud. I am down to considering the remote possibility of reincarnation as explanation, when all is revealed. He saw me being interviewed on the NBC Today show a couple of weeks ago and now considers himself to be my best friend.

  Although slightly unnerved by this, I have to admit it is comforting to have a taxi driver who actually appears helpful and eager to drive you where you want to go. I confide in him my problems with the DC taxi drivers. He is appalled. ‘They let you out in Washington without an author’s escort!’ he roars. ‘They should be shot!’

  This is becoming increasingly obvious to me. I continue my struggle to make it to my various Washington engagements. But finally, there is no escaping it: I need to get myself an escort or I can scrub the rest of my appointments.

  I ring my publishers. But it turns out that they are all at a restaurant enjoying some slap-up publisher-type celebration. No-one knows how to reach them. It is up to me. And that is why I find myself in the waiting room of a Washington radio station, my glazed stare fixed on a six-foot four, built like the proverbial brick shit-house, footballer.

  He is accompanied by a miniature, middle-aged woman, whom he keeps close to his side; rather like a child carrying a Tiny-Teddy to school. My fevered brain has focused on them immediately. Toy-boys are not yet fashionable, so I rule that out as a reason for the coupling. Is she his mother? His sister? His grandmother? Is she his … author’s escort?

  I am beside myself at the thought. I have already tried looking up escorts in the phone book. They are there, but not the type that I believe publishers are willing to pay for. Somewhere in this city I know they lurk, hidden in secret enclaves to which only publishers have the encrypted password. It is impossible for a civilian to break the code. I am never going to find one. And then suddenly, here I am …

  I fix the woman with a beady stare. She wriggles nervously. The footballer is called in. It’s his turn to be interviewed. I pounce.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I say. ‘Are you by chance an escort?’

  At this point, she is either going to slap me, report me or answer my question. I am prepared to take my chances.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and my heart goes into overdrive.

  ‘I need you!’ I say. ‘I’m an author alone in the city!’

  ‘They left you alone in Washington without an author’s escort?’ she squeals. ‘They should be shot!’

  Then she turns pensive. ‘I wish I could help you, but I’m booked for the day.’ She brightens. ‘You need Lottie Shivers.’

  And she writes down the number of one of Washington’s top author’s escorts.

  An hour later, my publisher finally gets through to me. I tell her the problem. She apologises profusely. ‘We should have organised it,’ she says. And then, ‘Damn. I don’t have my phone numbers with me.’

  ‘What are you looking for?’ I ask.

  ‘An author’s escort,’ she says. ‘We need to get you Lottie Shivers.’

  After a small pause to savour the moment, I explain that I already have her.

  The
doctor’s waiting room empties itself, patient by patient. The footballer continues to appear occasionally, like a different kind of cuckoo clock. Finally, there are no other patients left. It is my turn. At this point, I am startled to discover that the footballer is the doctor. I am not thrilled by this prospect. I like my gynaecologists to be either female, or avuncular, middle-aged men. Preferably overweight, so they’re in no position to sneer at spare tyres or cellulite.

  The footballer introduces himself as Greg Henderson, leaving me with the Miss Manners challenge of what to call him: Greg? Doctor? Dr. Henderson? and says, ‘Shall we wait for your husband?’

  With immaculate timing, Martin has disappeared into the Men’s a minute before my name is called.

  Greg, Doctor, Dr. Henderson and I wait at the desk. He is relaxed and easy. He doesn’t look like someone who was supposed to be in surgery hours ago. It is as if I am his first patient and he has the luxury of a whole unbooked morning stretching ahead of him.

  ‘I gather it looks worrying,’ I say to him. I’m impressed by how calmly and clearly my voice comes out.

  He looks at me. ‘Not necessarily,’ he says.

  And I am thinking to myself, ‘What a good answer,’ knowing at the same time that neither he nor I really believes it, when Martin arrives and we walk into the office.

  The doctor (I am deciding on Greg) gestures apologetically at his set-up—the standard chair behind the desk—and says, ‘I know you probably don’t sit behind a desk when you see people …’

  His voice trails off, asking me to forgive him this medical officiousness, and I look up in shock. Somehow he knows I am a psychologist. He is acknowledging that I am a person with my own skills and accomplishments in the outside world; that I have a being and life outside this room, an existence which is not simply defined as ‘patient’. I feel a grateful amazement. He is giving me back to myself.

  I get up onto the examination couch, that odd place where the body transforms into object—suddenly stripped of its normal boundaries and the right to defend itself against intrusions from strangers.

  He palpates my abdomen, hands moving deftly and expertly. Not that it needs either deftness or expertness to feel this mass, apparently. It is big.

  ‘Here it is,’ he says.

  And then, unexpectedly, he takes my hand and places it on my abdomen, keeping his own hand, big and warm, over mine in a primally comforting gesture.

  ‘There,’ he says, ‘you can feel it too.’

  And there it is. Solid and substantial, like a continent that has appeared overnight.

  It is one of those moments that remains frozen in time for me. The three of us joined—he, I and the mass that I am carrying inside me. We are a trinity, come together and interwoven. One of us will be the agent of another’s death.

  I don’t feel disgust or loathing for the tumour. What I feel at this moment is more like amazement; an intense wondering about this new presence inside me and what it will mean for my life. I am struck, too, by the power of Greg’s simple gesture. He has introduced me to my tumour. And just as earlier, he recognised my wider self, he is now returning to me the body given up to the examination couch; the impersonal body we offer up to strangers while we pretend that we are not there. He has said, ‘Here, it is your body, with all that it contains. It is strange, frightening, but it is yours. It is your domain, but I will stay with you while you encounter it, take care of you while we both do what is needed. We are here together.’

  I should know all about this, of course. For the last eight years, I have consulted to the oncology department of a major teaching hospital. One of the things I do is teach final-year medical students how to talk to people with life-threatening illnesses. But nothing has prepared me for this: the real impact of the alliance formed on the edge, with the drop shearing away and the safety rope possibly obtainable. Or not.

  Dressed again, I sit with Martin while Greg tells us what the radiologist saw: a large mass on my right ovary, partly solid. I know enough to know what this means—it means that I probably have ovarian cancer. Greg clearly thinks so too, although he is being careful with his words. This is the point, I know, at which I am supposed to blank out. I always tell my patients to take a relative, friend or tape-recorder with them when they’re scheduled for a show-and-tell at the doctor’s office. It is well documented that the mere shock of hearing the word ‘cancer’ in close proximity to the words ‘you have’ knocks out the higher thinking processes. A lot of people don’t remember anything the doctor says after that.

  That’s not happening to me though. I feel as if I’m thinking very clearly, taking it all in. Am I in shock? It doesn’t feel like it. It feels more like a heightened alertness.

  ‘Could it be benign?’ Martin asks.

  Greg nods. ‘Anything is possible,’ he says.

  For a minute I hang on to that thought. Then I am pulled back to reality. What we are really sitting here and talking about is cancer.

  After years working with oncology patients, I have an understanding of what I am facing. Ovarian cancer is the deadliest female cancer, often known as the silent killer. It does in fact whisper, but the symptoms with which it whispers—expanding waistlines, indigestion, bloating, a feeling of fullness, back-ache, urinary problems, vaginal bleeding or discharge, pelvic pain or pressure, fatigue—can also apply to dozens of everyday and harmless conditions. The whispers are often ignored or misinterpreted, by women and physicians alike. The ultrasound and Ca125 blood test, which are the most useful diagnostic tools for it, are not ordered. The unrecognised disease progresses and is most usually detected only after it has well and truly spread to surrounding organs. In these late stages, the cure rate is dismally low.

  Martin is asking Greg about his operating experience and his training. I am startled. Not because these are bad questions—on the contrary, they’re very good—but because it has simply not occurred to me to ask them, to ratify his expertise. I realise then, that I have already given my trust to this stranger, who no longer feels like a stranger. And that it happened without my even being consciously aware of it in that moment on the examination couch.

  Greg, it turns out, is a gyn-oncologist, a gynaecologist who has undergone further specialised training in gynaecological cancers. He is the type of doctor you want to see if there’s even a hint that it may be cancer. He tells us about the operation: a hysterectomy, with the possibility of various other organs thrown in, depending on what’s found. A week in hospital and at least six weeks off work, recuperating. Perhaps chemotherapy afterwards. He can schedule the surgery for next Thursday.

  We nod and he gives us information about the hospital, pre-op admission and a piece of paper that ensures my entry into the system. I’m digesting these facts, still waiting to feel numb. But I remain clear-minded, alert.

  On the way out, I remember what it is like to squeeze emergency patients into an over-full day, and thank him for fitting me in. He shakes his head and says, ‘It’s the least I could do.’ And I am struck once again by how dependent we become on the kindness of strangers.

  The kindness of strangers … It is a phrase penned by a playwright an ocean and several decades away, in the Deep South of America, spoken by a character in circumstances utterly different from my own. And yet there it is, emerging from some deep chest of memory, locking in with the click of comfort that comes from finding the exact words to capture the wordless world of inner experience. And I am aware once again of the deep mystery of stories and the pull of that strange, universal language at their heart.

  DETECTING

  Rachel told stories. This was a short way of saying that she had graduated with a PhD in folklore from a respected university. She had wrestled with the solar mythologists, the functionalists, the Finns, the ethnographers, the Freudians, the Cambell-ites and the anti-Cambell-ites and somehow, miraculously, she had still come out telling stories. She lectured part-time at her old university, where she tried to do the impossible—to give her
students enough academic stiffening to pass their exams, while allowing them to open to the magic in the stories. She sometimes felt like an old-fashioned corsetiere—outfitting her clients in heavy whale-bone corsets and rigid, intricately hooked brassieres, and telling them to go out and enjoy themselves.

  Rachel’s other job was in a library. A member of the local council had been visited by an angel one night (this was Rachel’s version anyway), and had woken convinced that what the local library needed was a storyteller. So several times a week, Rachel sat in the sleepy Tasmanian library and told stories.

  She had expected her audience to consist of children—and that was so, initially. But the adults who brought the children stayed for the stories. And then began to come by themselves. And to bring more and more of themselves. They brought their friends, their families; but they also brought their own stories. After the official storytelling time, Rachel would inevitably find herself approached, carefully, eagerly, shyly, apprehensively by one of her listeners. Here is my story, they would say, in so many words. And then, with the delicacy of a Tarot reader unwinding the precious silk swathing her cards, they would begin to speak, unwrapping their story, offering it to Rachel, wanting her to take it, shape it, find its beginnings and endings and tell it back to them.

  At these times, Rachel thought of herself as a detective. A detective of the heart. People came to her with clues. The stories were scattered, uneven. It was her job to hear them, track the signs and bring the pieces together. An internal orienteering course—the cryptic instructions, the signals, the sense of direction. Rachel had read a story once about a boy who had been born weightless in free flight. When he came back to Earth, he discovered that he had an extraordinary gift—no matter where he was, even if he was far underground in the dark, spun around a hundred times, when he stopped he would always point in the same direction. He did not think about it or calculate it. He simply did it. Others had perfect pitch. He had absolute direction. Rachel thought that many of the people who came to her had absolute direction although it was a skewed direction. It did not matter where they were in life, as soon as they stopped moving they would inevitably find that they were facing the same direction they had faced all their lives.