Eating the Underworld Read online

  I make the tape and then, on playing it through, realise that the volume is too low. I’ll have to redo it. This really irritates me. It’s bad enough that I have to make my own tape; that I have to make it twice is really throwing infuriating fuel on the flame.

  I fix the volume levels and get back into non-irritated therapist mode to make the tape again. When I play it back this time, the volume is fine, but there is the most curious sound threaded through the tape. It’s a low sound, like a heartbeat; but each beat is regularly spaced, like a metronome. The rhythm is slow-ish and then, halfway through the tape, adjusts to a quicker speed. Despite the sound being low and subtle, it is definitely there and definitely distracting. Now I am really irate. I say several nasty things to the tape machine and get Martin to whip it into shape.

  Martin plays the tape through. ‘Could it be that you’ve somehow recorded your heartbeat?’ he says, puzzled.

  I point out that it’s not possible, and also that the rhythm is too even.

  Two hours later, he has picked the tape machine apart and still not been able to duplicate the sound. ‘The fault’s not in the machine,’ he shrugs, baffled, ‘somehow, you produced it.’

  I’m baffled too. There was no trace of the sound in the room as I was making the tape. And unless my body has produced some peculiar new pulse that it is transmitting straight to air, I haven’t a clue as to the origin of the sound. But I am very, very irritated now. I have to make the tape for the third time! I decide to do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow. Instead, I get down to cancelling my patients for the next few weeks.

  Within a couple of hours I’ve managed to contact most of them. When I explain that I need to cancel appointments because of some unexpected surgery, I notice that my non-oncology patients assume it’s something simple like a gallbladder or appendix. My oncology patients are the ones who immediately say, ‘Is it dangerous? Is it cancer?’

  I wake in the morning and realise that I left an important suggestion out of yesterday’s tape. If the distracting sound hadn’t made me scrap the second tape, I would have taken it to hospital without thinking about it. Trying for third time lucky, I make the new tape, complete with new suggestion and minus the mysterious sound.

  The mysterious sound is about to get more mysterious. A few days from now, I will wake in my hospital room. It is midnight. I was operated on at 4.00 pm and have spent most of the time since then asleep. The room is very quiet. As I adjust to the dark silence, I recognise a familiar sound. It is the soft, regular beat I last heard on my ditched tape. I have just worked out that it’s coming from the intravenous drip when the door swings open and a torch, followed by a nurse, enters.

  ‘Just checking the drip,’ she says, padding over. ‘Ah, it’s running too slow.’ She makes a few adjustments and the soft, beating rhythm speeds up. Just as it had on my tape.

  The sound takes its place as one of those odd events that elude explanation. They arrive sometimes, like seeming wrinkles in time or space, and remind us that perhaps we do not know all there is to know. To this day, I have no idea what caused it.

  In the months before all this happened, I’d been struggling with a major case of writer’s block. My new poetry book is only two-thirds finished and I’ve been stuck. Finally I decide to turn instead to my new novel. The opening scene is set in an operating theatre. As I write, I realise I know nothing about operating theatres. Damn, I think, I’ll have to find some way of seeing one. I am clearly offering myself up to be the embodiment of that cautionary phrase, ‘Be careful of what you wish for …’ Ten days later, as I’m wheeled in for my surgery, I will be looking around me, frantically trying to memorise everything I see.

  But in the meantime, the poetry has come back with a rush. It happened the instant I realised I was in for something serious, life-threatening. I have found the cure for writer’s block! Words and images are flowing through, as if a door had suddenly been opened in my mind. It feels wonderful to have them with me again. I am gripped by the totally irrational certainty that as long as I write, I will live. The poems pour out, telling me what is happening to me, guiding me through the journey.

  The Waiting Room

  Arthur Stace was an Australian eccentric who spent forty years writing the word ‘Eternity’ across the streets of Sydney

  In the back room behind it

  the doctors flit backwards

  and forwards like fishes

  doing the secret thing.

  There is the woman who is sobbing

  in the corner and the woman on the wall

  staring up to the pale, pure ceiling.

  There are flat princesses

  on the table

  in their Woman’s Days

  and women are dying here

  and where are you, Arthur Stace

  rising at midnight,

  grey as the pale slate pavements

  of Sydney, writing ‘Eternity’ …

  ‘Eternity’ …?

  And I think that if we all

  reached out, wingtip

  to wingtip from where we sit,

  including the receptionist

  typing in the corner

  we could stretch out our arms

  and slowly lift, rise up,

  rise up …, lighter than flowers

  over the rusty roofs

  and hover

  strange great blooms

  and look, see—

  the houses are breathing

  in and breathing out,

  bright as candles

  wishing towards each other.

  Packing for Hospital

  You sit down and write a list—

  this is for a different sort of journey,

  travel for the adventure-minded.

  Inward Bound Holidays—give us your body

  and we do it for you.

  What do you pack for a trip

  like this? What do you own?

  Photos, those still windows

  into another planet,

  your sleeping clothes—

  dress is casual here

  but life is expensive.

  Here’s the suitcase, open-mouthed

  at where it’s going. Take care

  what you put there. It will

  follow you everywhere,

  like a dog

  bringing all that you give it.

  You’re ready? Then begin

  the mystery tour. Here

  is the beating chamber

  that Bluebeard killed

  and died for.

  Enter it carefully.

  See where love lies

  like a terrible flower, wider

  than the walls, higher

  than the ceiling. Pick it up

  anyway. Wear it in your hair,

  close to your heart,

  behind your ear.

  Keep it with you everywhere.

  Wherever you go. And when

  you need it, it will sing you

  all the way home.

  Last Menstruation

  ‘… the object of secluding women at

  menstruation is to neutralize the dangerous

  influences which are supposed to emanate from

  them at such times … The girl may not touch

  the ground nor see the sun. Whether enveloped

  in her hammock and slung up to the roof … or

  elevated above the ground in a dark and narrow

  cage (sometimes for years), she may be

  considered to be out of the way of doing

  mischief, since, being shut off both from the

  earth and from the sun, she can poison neither of

  these great sources of life by her deadly

  contagion …’

  The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer

  I

  You came a few days early,

  perhaps it was stress

  but I like to think

  you came to say good-bye

  to
me. Old unappreciated

  friend. All this beloved blood

  that has performed so cleanly

  for me, washing the womb

  each month, the tender nuse,

  wise blood of the un-wounded body

  bringing each month the brimming

  chalice, the living news,

  Ishtar’s dreamed, forbidden moon.

  II

  I remember at twelve

  when a girlfriend said

  she couldn’t touch plants

  because of you. She was told this:

  that the witch would rise out

  of her, grim and sharp

  as the tip of the spindle.

  This is the unclean one,

  the night visitor,

  head on the pillow,

  who laughs and sizzles

  at the withering bed.

  III

  And I think too of the caged girls

  of Borneo, taken from light

  for seven years of bloom.

  Brought out finally, they are

  pale as wax flowers. Now,

  they are told, you can be new.

  I think of them everywhere, the feared

  girls of the Indians of Alaska,

  the Esquimaux, Bolivia, Brazil,

  the girls of Rio de la Plata,

  hung up high like frozen,

  terrified spiders,

  and the Orinoco, where they know

  that everything she steps

  upon will die …

  IV

  This is what I will do.

  I will go out into the world,

  my feet deep and rich in the living

  earth. I will raise up

  my arms higher and higher

  until the sun sees every

  part of me. I will grow leaves

  for you, the night flowering

  jasmine, the ash, the cedar of Gilgit

  wreathing from my fingertips

  onto doorways, armchairs, stoves,

  the domestic cat. I will bring in

  the fields at midnight and the dark

  reeds where the river pulses

  like an aorta. I will live.

  I will teach you to my daughter.

  Uterus

  At first they thought it was you,

  old wanderer whom the ancients

  knew, the seat of emotions,

  cause of hysterical women

  in your clumsy journey,

  bumping and bumping around the room,

  looking for whom? Was it those

  roses of the ovaries,

  blooming each month

  and you wanting to collect

  them in your red basket,

  was it the moon …?

  I don’t know how

  to say good-bye to you

  little mother, wandering bowl

  of the soul. But I remember,

  you took care of my daughter

  and when the time came, pushed

  her into the world. Time comes

  for everyone. In every birth

  there is a dying.

  IT TAKES ME A COUPLE OF days to get through to all my patients. There is also the task of telling friends and family. One friend, whom I don’t see often, says immediately, ‘Would you like me to come over?’ I am enormously touched. We go for a walk together in the warm summer evening. I don’t tell many people, only my closest friends. It makes an interesting touchstone. You find out quickly who you think are your closest friends, by who you decide to tell. As I ring them, I’m aware of a need to be in contact with people who care about me. It feels like a blanket I can bring with me into hospital.

  My friends are concerned and supportive. But almost universally, they don’t want to entertain the idea that it might be a deadly cancer. I can understand their reluctance: who wants to think about someone you care about having cancer? But the continued insistence that, ‘It’ll turn out to be nothing’, becomes frustrating. I don’t want to dwell on the prospect of cancer, but I do want the chance to think about it, sort out issues and emotions, prepare myself.

  And then, of course, there is the other end of the spectrum. Such as the acquaintance who, having heard the news, rings up to commiserate and tells me that regardless of whether it’s cancer or not, the hysterectomy will be my undoing. I’ll never be the same again, she informs me darkly.

  I think back to what I know of ovarian cancer. If it is late-stage, I’m guessing that I may have a prognosis of about two years. Amantha is sixteen now. In two years, she will be eighteen. Too young, much too young to lose her mother. I can’t bear the thought of her being motherless at eighteen. I meet an oncologist friend for breakfast. She says that two years used to be the norm for ovarian cancer, but with the new drugs coming on the market, she thinks they can give me five years. I feel relieved. In five years, Amantha will be twenty-one. Still too young, but at least it’s not eighteen.

  How strange it seems now, from the vantage point of the future, to feel relieved at being told, at forty-four, that I might have only five years to live. How readily we get into bargaining positions with cancer. Everything becomes relative. A little more time, a little less pain, a little more mobility. All triumphs that carry with them hope, renewal, reprieve.

  I am hyper-aware of my body. Not in a nervous or hypochondriacal way, but with a deep sense of amazement. Of awe. It is something, I remember now, that I have experienced once before, years ago, in the days following the birth of my daughter.

  I remember the sense of being astonished, in the fanatical way of one who has seen the face of God, at what my body had done. It had produced life. It was as if I had been allowed a revelation. My body had produced this incredible, this extraordinary, this perfect human being. I was as stunned as if the broom cupboard with which I had lived all my life had suddenly unfurled wings, stepped forward and revealed itself to be an angel. The feeling lasted for a few weeks and then dissipated as invisibly as fine mist in sunshine. I did not come back to it until this moment sixteen years later.

  And it is as if once again, I am aware of my body for the first time. Not the exterior of it, but the interior, the essence, the work it does. I remember reading a Jack London story as a child, where the hero is starving and close to death in the snow. His attention is caught by his hand and he notices for the first time what a miracle of engineering it is and how, in all the hours and days of his life, he has never appreciated it before. It is that same sense that I now feel, of being lost in a marvel. All the more so for the fact that it has been there all the time; going about its work humbly, unnoticed, unheralded, unappreciated.

  It is not the way I expected to feel. Decades ago, I was diagnosed with an underactive thyroid. It took years before a doctor ordered the simple blood test that confirmed the diagnosis. I didn’t know why I felt unwell. All I knew was that my body wasn’t functioning normally. Even though it was summer, I felt cold all the time. My skin, which had been oily, became dry. My hair grew thinner and felt brittle. My metabolism would have been perfect for a hibernating bear. I was permanently tired and every time I sat down, I fell asleep.

  It was the time when food allergies were flavour of the month. It didn’t take long before someone decided that they were my problem. For several years, I did the rounds of doctors, naturopaths, homeopaths and every other kind of path in an attempt to find out what was wrong with me. They put me on every kind of weird diet under the sun—although they managed to neglect boiled eye of newt and toad’s testicles. When the food combinations failed, they tried lack of food, prescribing three-day fasts, four-day fasts, six-day fasts. None of them did any good. Finally, I visited my old family doctor whom I hadn’t seen for years. He listened to my symptoms and immediately sent me off for a thyroid test. Bingo! I was put on a small amount of thyroid medication and all my symptoms vanished.

  During that time of feeling unwell, but not knowing what was wrong with me, I was enormously frustrated with my body. Wh
y wasn’t it working? Why couldn’t it just function normally? I felt let down by my body, betrayed by it and at times enraged by it.

  If I had thought about the scenario, I would have imagined that being diagnosed with cancer would lead me to similar feelings; an impatient anger that my body wasn’t working properly. My actual response—this tender admiration for it and the work it does—has engulfed me without pre-thought or planning, and it startles me. I am flooded with a kind of loving wonder at the intricacies and genius of the body that I have ignored, even belittled, for so many years. It has the force of revelation.

  I am aware too, of wanting to say goodbye to my uterus and ovaries; to farewell them and thank them for all they have given me during their time. My menstrual period isn’t due until after my surgery, by which time, of course, it will have ceased to exist. Despite the fact that I have often cursed it and the discomforts it brings, I feel sad to think that I have experienced my last period without knowing it and without being able to acknowledge its departure. To my surprise and delight, however, my period—normally as regular as the proverbial clockwork—comes early; a few days before the date of my hospital admission. I am absurdly moved. I feel as if it has come to say goodbye to me.

  My patients’ appointments have all been shifted. Before surgery, I have a few days completely clear. It is curious having so much free time in the day, as if I am on holiday.

  It is summer and I sit outside, eating peaches and reading novels. I have a sense of being enclosed in a special space, a pause. The word ‘interstitial’—the adjective describing gaps, the spaces between parts—keeps coming to my mind. I am reminded of a magical clearing I once read of in a children’s book. It is a quiet, grassy place. Within it are several still, deep pools. They are ‘doors’; the jumping off points for other worlds. The clearing, as I imagine it, is empty but in an impossibly beautiful way. Nothing has happened in it. Everything is about to.