Eating the Underworld (3 page)

It is my first encounter with this particular version of the old truth ‘knowledge is power', and I will meet it time and time again. The power of nurses, receptionists, clerks, radiologists holding papers, letters, notes, pathology results—your future in their hands and refusing to reveal it. ‘Your doctor will tell you,' they say, discounting the fact that it may take hours or days before you can make contact with your doctor. And that each minute of this waiting is what Dante didn't describe about hell.

I go home and ring my new GP.

‘It wasn't a fibroid,' I say, expecting her to suggest further investigations, more tests, another meeting at her office. Instead, she says she knows; the radiologist has already rung her, and she has taken the liberty of making an emergency appointment for me with a gynaecologist in half an hour from now. Can I be there?

The question is, of course, rhetorical. I get out my diary and change whatever it was I was supposed to do that day. Martin comes with me; fortuitously he's not at work today. There are no parking spaces available at the medical rooms when we get to them, so he lets me out while he searches for a spot. I walk into the doctor's rooms, grateful that I don't have to be circling and circling looking for somewhere to put the car.

I am still digesting this new feeling. It's like the air before a thunderstorm; an aura that says to you: something's going to change, and it's going to be big and dangerous. I know I am about to encounter something that will shift my whole life to the edge. I could
deduce it rationally, of course—you don't get sent on emergency appointments to doctors because you have something benign. But my knowing is also beyond the rational. It is not anything I can delineate or dissect. It is just there. And I am certain of it.

My GP has referred to this new doctor as a gynaecologist. A nice, neutral word. The most traumatic thing I associate with gynaecologists is pap smears. But as I walk into this gynaecologist's waiting room, I see that we are clearly beyond pap smear territory. An elderly woman is weeping loudly, being comforted by her family. ‘No!' she is saying. ‘I won't go in! I won't go in!' over and over again. The rest of the waiting room sits quietly, heads bent. The elderly woman in black continues to wail. It is hard to witness such distress and not do anything about it.

The room has the standardised features of waiting rooms everywhere—neutral-coloured paint on the walls, a coffee-table piled with out-dated magazines, a scattering of utilitarian chairs and couches. I am thrown back to the anonymity of being a patient, a reduced person. Sitting here in this nondescript room knowing that a stranger, to whom I mean nothing, is soon to deliver news that will wrench my world apart, I feel an urgent need, an anxiety almost, to reclaim myself. I don't want to be an illness. I don't want to be an anonymous number. If someone is going to do this to me, I want them to do it to
me.
The intensity of my need surprises me. If someone had asked me what my reactions would be sitting in a doctor's room waiting to be told I had cancer, this would not have been high on my list.

I see now, though, that the simple experience of being diagnosed with cancer is such a stripping experience that we need all the sense of self we can get. At a very primitive level, it says: you have lost something, you have been set apart; the weaker impala, singled out from the herd. You are vulnerable. You are not like the others.

This stripping of identity continues in many ways. In hospital, your clothes—those other skins that you wear as part of your name—are taken from you. In their place is the anonymous sameness of the hospital gown. If you are in for a stay, you are tagged with plastic name bracelets on your wrist and ankle. It is not your name they carry, but that of your doctor's. As if you are now property, a possession. Secrets about you are collected—the view inside your body, the intricate composition of your hidden blood—and they are kept from you in folders that are not for you to leaf through. The keepers of the secrets hold them; will tell you when they are ready what they think you need to know.

Half an hour into our wait, Martin's phone rings. It is the alarm-monitoring company. Our house alarm, usually so well behaved, has gone off and will not stop. It is programmed to shut down after ten minutes, but is refusing to. Its nerve-racking wail will continue for two hours until we finally get home. In all of the years since its instalment, it has never done anything like this. When we do get home, to its klaxon echoing through the streets, I am reminded of a dog, lost and howling at the moon.

The waiting room is still half-full. It is a busy morning. I have been squeezed into an already overflowing schedule. My mind blinks on and off from the wrinkled women's magazines in my lap. They are not enough to distract me. I hear the receptionist saying to someone that the doctor was supposed to be in surgery an hour ago. I think of the impatience with which I have waited in doctors' rooms in the past and wonder if their schedule was delayed because of someone like me.

Every now and then, a footballer in a suit wanders past. I wonder vaguely what he is doing here—accompanying a wife or mother perhaps? Suddenly, with a sense of unnerving incongruity, I remember the last time I sat in a waiting room, speculating about footballers. It was on the other side of the world, a few light years ago, in Washington DC.

I am in Washington to publicise one of my books. American publishers have developed a wonderful subset of professionals called author's escorts. They should be cloned immediately and made available to all, regardless of class, gender or profession. All wars would cease, famine would be wiped out, productivity increased and peace on earth would reign.

The sole purpose in life of an author's escort is to pamper you, feed you and get you to your work on time. There are two down-sides. One, is that on the
typical frenzied schedule of an American book tour, there is precious little time for pampering. The second, is that it is difficult to re-embrace normal life with quite the same fervour, once you've experienced an author's escort.

I've had an author's escort in all the other cities I've been in, but for some reason—possibly the effect of a sunspot flare interfering with normal neural functioning—my publishers have decided that I don't need one in Washington. ‘No sweat,' I say. ‘I'll be fine.'

Just
how
fine, I begin to get a glimpse of, when my plane lands at Dulles airport. I am excited because it is only 10 pm and by my calculations, that means I'll be settled in my credit-card-guaranteed-late-night-arrival room by midnight. That means (oh joy!) that I'll actually get five hours' sleep before having to set out on my rounds of TV and radio interviews the next day.

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
?