Eating the Underworld (4 page)

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 experi
ence 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.

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.

It seemed to Rachel that she felt what they said. Not in the sense of experiencing emotions, but in the sense of touching. Rachel felt like a blind woman brushing fingers delicately over the objects offered to her, trying to ascertain their texture, their density, their shape; trying to feel the force lines, as invisible as gravity or magnetic waves. Rachel believed that if she allowed these objects to rest, held in her hands in some way that she could not define, they would eventually begin to assert themselves. They would move from a jumble to a pattern, aligning themselves in the way that metal filings aligned themselves to the true call of the magnet.

Rachel never knew how this was going to happen. It was a mystery to her as much as it was to the person with her. She knew, certainly, the technical aspects of her craft. She understood about narrative structure, theme and counter theme; but this, the final issue, would remain always mysterious, unable to be communicated in any texts or classrooms. It was based on some communion, some curious alchemy between herself and the person sitting with her, and she saw sometimes that it enabled them to turn the solar winds around, to slowly shift their own magnetic home.

Rachel wrote a regular piece for one of the Saturday papers. It was called ‘Tales for our Time'. They were short pieces, compressed, in the way that poetry and dreams are compressed. Rachel sometimes felt that she was dreaming onto the page. She thought of them as fairytales. Fairytales for adults.

Rachel knew that as people grew up, something happened to their memories of fairytales. They became
cloudy, tinged with a roseate glow. They forgot the real and terrible details of the stories. They forgot that the witch had wanted to roast Hansel and Gretel in the oven and then eat them. They forgot that Snow White's stepmother had wanted to kill her and that her father had been no protection at all. They forgot the rage, the desolation, the primal terror. They forgot the heated iron shoes. Rachel thought they forgot because they wanted to forget what children truly knew.

Rachel came from a home where God did not exist. He had died in the concentration camps—from where her parents had emerged, skeletal, but somehow alive. Returning to their native Czechoslovakia was not an option. They needed to be as far from what they used to call home as water would take them. They picked the furthest country they could think of. And then they picked the furthest place on it. And so they came to Tasmania.

The first of the precious children—Rachel's sister—arrived in the first year of the new country. Then, two years later, there was Rachel. The two grew up with nothing denied them. That was where the fairytale was supposed to begin.

In Rachel's family, the Holocaust was not much mentioned. It was deduced; the gap in the family history, the absent relatives. It was nevertheless understood that after the camps, who could believe in anything but the random dice of the universe? God was not denounced; he was simply not talked about. As a child, she had had untutored fantasies about God, but only as a presence akin to the elderly senior-school headmaster. Stern but not omnipotent, detached from the everyday life of the junior school.

In Anthropology 1, Rachel had learned that men had created gods in order to explain the mysteries of the natural world—how the sun rose, why the crops grew. Rachel did not believe this. She believed that men had created gods in order to protect themselves from evil, from darkness, from the night without stars; in order to understand what was beyond understanding.

That was why Rachel loved fairytales. In fairytales, evil was punished and good won out. What could you do in a world where this did not happen? She loved the language of fairytales written as they were in the third person; stories to pass on from teller to teller, everybody's property and yet belonging to the listener alone. People rarely had names in these stories. They were the King, the Stepmother, the youngest Prince. To name these people would be to tie them down to the particular. They were apart from that. They had been there a hundred years ago and they would be here a hundred years hence.

Rachel thought that stories helped you to understand. That was Rachel's passion, to understand. Her sister wanted only to explain. She could explain anything. She could explain things so well that she could make you believe that night was day.

Rachel did not believe explanations were so easy. That was why she loved the old stories. On the outside they seemed so simple, but once you wandered inside them, they were intricate—a detail here, a detail there; things you hadn't noticed at first, that made you pause; odd images, echoes, connections, opening like doors into unexpected places. The longer you stayed there, the more you saw and the more there was to understand.

In the old days, fairytales were what ushered in the night. In those days, day was day and night was night. And it was the storyteller who linked them, guiding the audience from twilight into dark-time; into the rich, strange meanderings of dream. Rachel knew that one of the original names for fairytales had been ‘wonder tales'. She loved that name. That was what fairytales did best, she thought. They made you wonder.

Rachel had been asked to collect her columns of tales for a book. She had them assembled on the table in front of her now. She was struck by the odd shapes they formed. Some were long and some were short. Some wove in and out of themselves. They were pieces, she could see now. Like the shards of diamond in a mosaic, separated from, but reflecting off, each other. When she wrote them, she had seen only each single piece. Now she could see there was something more they were trying to say.

At university, Rachel had learned about Gestalt, the principle of closure in perception. If you showed someone a circle with a piece in the circumference left out, they would perceive it as complete, the mind filling in the gap. Rachel found this oddly moving. The optimism of the mind. The belief in wholeness. Rachel was fascinated by gaps, by blanks, by vacuums, by what was missing. Even the mind created itself across gaps. The spaces between synapses—the nerve endings of neurons, those curling, communicating tendrils of the brain. They never touched each other, sending their messages out instead into the electro-chemical aether of the brain.

Rachel shuffled the tales around on the table. They sat
separately from each other, a series of clues. Rachel waited quietly. She knew that if she was patient enough, they would somehow assemble. Each one leaning toward the other, an unfinished circle in bloom.

Rachel imagined that inside the brain there would be an absence of light, a darkness deeper than the most isolated country night. She imagined the synpases, those fabulous, delicate creations, each separated from the other: the storytellers, passing their messages on and on through the dark.