I am in a hospital waiting room. Large windows overlook an urban landscape stretching into the distance, but first the car park, sprawling like a religious convention of cars. Not a single tree.
A floor polisher with a man moving slowly, almost standing still. No piped Smooth FM, just air con drone and the muzzled tension of all of us here. It’s not crowded, we have a few plastic chairs between us. It smells of disinfectant and also something cloying and artificial, crushing out the other smells. I know this will be on my clothes later, reminding me of here. Breast Clinic.
A woman’s phone rings, and she smothers it, shifts into the corridor with all her bags and has a furtive conversation with long gaps. We can’t hear. We mustn’t open up our real lives here. It’s not safe.
I am dog tired and have B with me. He’s sleeping on my lap, but not for long. He looks flushed and hot. He stirs and a woman gives me a kind look. The terror of a baby that might wake up. She’s middle-aged, whatever that means. Kindly. The sort of person who is nice to you in a supermarket queue. Says she’ll watch your trolley so you can scoot off and get the thing you’ve forgotten.
I don’t want to be here. This limbo where I will get to go one of two ways, through one door or the other door. Death or life, cancer or not cancer. I know it may be treatable, but it’s going to be a car-crash whatever, to have all that cutting and poison treatment.
My body’s impending mutilation (destruction?) (endgame?). I’ve seen the pictures of those women, who have documented their lives in daily photographs.
My Cancer Journey. Please, give me a break, it’s not a holiday, lady, it’s not going to go well. You don’t come home from this and find the house as you left it, just the post has piled up. Pre- and post-surgery. It’s horrific. I don’t want to think about it.
X is a not breast man. Thankfully.
God—I feel cold. I’ll just not think about it. Auto(fucking)pilot. This is too fragile.
And I’m still breastfeeding my eight-month-old. Here you are little B, Still sleeping. Unaware, as you should be.
Who do I tell?
Who deserves to know, who do I have to tell? I mean have to tell; do I have to tell anyone?
I could walk out of here, right now, and leave this for another day.
Today started like this. It’s the same most days. I am lucky. The lucky duck. Loved and cherished. X comes in with a tray of tea. I am emerging from sleep, my thighs sticky from semen, sweaty, relaxed in our nest of duvet.
He places the tray on his side of the bed. Opens the curtain a bit. Kisses me. He smells of aftershave, toothpaste, good smells. He leaves the room, shuts the door so the glare of morning sun won’t burn through my sleep-state too harshly.
I wake slowly, afraid of my day, though nothing in particular. I sit up and drag the tray over to my side of the bed and pour milk into the mug of tea (from a delicate blue jug he gave me, that I don’t want to break). I sip the tea. It’s cooling off from my dozing. Not as hot as I’d like it to be, if I’d been more enthusiastic about waking up.
His car crunches out of the drive, and he has disappeared from us for the day. I miss him already.
The children are still asleep. Tired from their lives. This gray morning. It’s lovely in its calmness. Nothing is claiming me yet.
In the shower, soaping under my arms, I feel something, there, in the side of my breast. A barb of ice pierces through to my centre. I know what this is in less than a split second. There was before and after, but before was only for me to not know, as the planning and organizing of this event (bash? social gathering of rogue cells? a mini cabal?) had been in process for, what, a few weeks? months? and possibly not just a local little party, could be city-wide, or even country-wide. Revelry. A bit like a while the parents are away party that someone inadvertently puts on socials and literally everyone comes, mainly unknowns. And the damage is rapid, crazy. Here’s Nigel with the Brie.
I run my fingers over it: a definite lump in the outer curve, gritty, like a chunk of peanut brittle under the skin. I leave the water, still rushing, and step out of the shower, to stand dripping. I stare at my breast in the mirror, the steam erasing my reflection with a genie’s mist. But there is nothing to see easily. I lift up my arm to outline the breast and there it is, only small, a little interloper, what, under an inch?
My lovely children are waking up. They appear in the bathroom, emerged from sleep like zombies, hair sticking up in crests of pale fluff and stuck with sweat to their foreheads. Soft limbs and warm skin. I grab a towel, turn off the shower.
I scoop B up out of his cot and bring him into our bedroom, lie him on the unmade bed, and take his onesie and then his nappy off, and he’s happy, stretching; I put on a clean nappy and lie down next to him and pull him over to me, tummy to tummy and he finds my breast, and snuggles in. I pull the duvet back over both of us, my body still wet from the shower. His mouth over my nipple, the nipple sucked in, proper experienced breast feeding, he’s a pro.
What the hell. I am exhausted with what this means. Sick.
What is going to happen? Maybe I am growing an appendage, and it’s nothing that abnormal, something benign and friendly like a third nipple, or maybe it’s just a new tail, a vestige of evolution, a recurrence of the hind limb of a snake, or wings sprouting in a flightless bird. Oh god, maybe it’s the remnant of an embryonic twin I didn’t know I had, left over from early in our cell division, growing now in a weird puberty with intent to do me harm. That happens doesn’t it? The twin thing.
I check it with my fingertips, in case I imagined it, and nothing is there. But it is there, rocky, a little chunk of masonry under my skin, hiding. A weapon of war from another world, a little bomb that might (will) explode. I pull my hands away, I remember a patient who wouldn’t have surgery, because it would “spill out the cancer.” She died anyway. She was young, with two children, little boys, I remember them, coming to the hospice where I worked. The dreadful story about her choice. What was in her mind? She went to Brazil to eat grass. Remortgaged the house to pay for it. Didn’t take the kids or the husband. Then she goes and dies anyway.
Am I going to die? Maybe and maybe not, but today may be my last normal day, and it’s not normal already. I must phone the doctor, get an appointment—a task in itself.
I must tell X, but he’s at work, it can wait. I should tell him face to face, for his sake. I must tell . . . but why? Maybe I won’t, it just makes me a sick person, that can wait. I don’t want to be sick. I don’t feel sick. I feel fine. I am well: in my prime actually.
Glutted with milk, B spits my nipple out, he’s strong now, rolls away and greets the day—awake and happy, stretches again, chatters, holds his feet. He flips onto his tummy and sets off so I catch him before he falls off the bed, lift him and put him down like a turtle, onto the floor, and push the door closed so he can’t escape.
I stare at my naked body in the mirror, it looks okay, nothing has changed. Hiding its secret well. I dress carefully—fastening a necklace I wouldn’t usually wear, green and gold with fake jewels. Over the top. I choose a lush dress. Who cares about practicalities today? My body is misbehaving. Tiered red silk falls over me. At least the shroud is gorgeous.
I dial the GP phone number, it’s busy; I try again, and again. A rush of anger as I tap harshly on the phone, as if that could make a difference.
B and I set off into his room, find a vest and a Babygro. I lie him in his cot and dress him there, he’s the cartoon baby, glowing and smiley, I lift him up again and we go downstairs, wriggly boy. He’s happy, makes himself light to carry now.
In the kitchen, there’s no milk,
C, dressed in school uniform, has poured cereal into two bowls, for her and T.
I put B in a highchair.
My phone, finally through, a tinny voice now: You are number seven in the queue. Who are you phoning, Mummy?
No one—just a robot.
I go outside through the back door and onto the road, with the phone under my ear, it’s wet underfoot, no shoes on. Crouching down, I reach for two bottles of milk left by the gate, a snail is halfway up one, I brush it off with the other bottle. As I stand up, (you are number 6 in the queue) one of the bottles slips out and smashes.
T appears outside as milk spreads onto the pavement in a huge white blanket. He steps on a chunk of glass, his little foot. I pick him up as he screams, my darling, my lovely boy, I am so sorry. Blood drips from his foot onto my dress. He is screaming. The world is turning on me.
I carry T inside, try to avoid the broken glass with my own bare feet, and run the tap to warm, hold his soft three-year-old foot under the water, washing away the glass, as if this will be enough. We stay under the warm tap for a while as he settles. I stroke the bottom of his foot with my fingertips, but can only feel smooth plumpness. A chunk of glass is in the sink, carried in on his foot, the corner must have pierced his skin. It’s in the shape of a kite, with a slight curve. I show him, Impressive hey? Look—you were so brave and now it’s gone, it’s out. It looks like, a, hmm, maybe a window from a tiny spaceship, so a small Martian could look out at Earth, as he was flying in.
I kiss his foot and lift him onto the floor. He walks—doesn’t limp. Over to his cereal, I pass over the remaining milk bottle, he pushes his thumb into the foil cap and lifts it off, and pours the milk into his bowl; I let him, so much milk, glugs to the top of his bowl, why not eh, why not enjoy that excess.
You are number 4 in the queue.
I make packed lunches, pick up an apple, and my thumb goes through a bruise into wet softness, the scandal of a rotten inside.
I drop the older ones at school, and keep B with me.
We go to the GP surgery in the hope they will see me. Already a queue has formed. I’m not the only one.
Later, armed with a letter I am here, waiting.
I am being called in. Women dressed in pale blue scrubs are attending to me, standing close. I am being stripped of my old life and admitted into heaven. My clothes and bag are taken from me. They are austere, unsmiling but calm. I struggle into a white hospital gown, all the while with B who won’t be held by anyone else.
They talk amongst themselves, then someone takes B from me.
My breast is pushed and squeezed between two metal plates and the women disappear. I can hear B crying but have no idea where he is, just a wall away but separated forever. Clicks and buzzes from the machine. The women come back, unlock the clamps on my breast and move the machine to clamp the other one.
B, B, B don’t cry.
Then they take me into another room and lie me down on a couch and put an ultrasound probe on my breast, ah yes, here it is, and then the needle into the lump and I understand the woman who went to eat grass, I see your point now, Lady, spilling my cells like a dandelion head once touched scatters its seeds far and wide.
B is given back to me, and we sit again, in another waiting area.
I look at my phone. Messages from my mother, from X, emails, work stuff.
And then we are told we can go.
In the car I drive too fast as if I could lift off. I want to take power, to control what happens. B is wide eyed, strapped into his seat next to me. Is this fun?
I slow down.
A man walking along the road in his pyjamas his hair awry, his movements
not of this world, living in another space, inside his head. This reality is not his reality.
We pass under a high concrete bridge; a lone woman walks across, above us.
A child passes her slowly on a bike.
At traffic lights we watch a businessman kick up leaves, then stand still in the sun.
All of it fragile. Every single one of us. It’s all on a knife edge. Beautifully futile.
I’ve seen cancer cells on a scan, dotted through the lungs in an infinite array like the sky at night. And one time on a YouTube video, the replicating cells seemed busy, warm, friendly, with things to do in their little settlement, with a pulsating road system, individuals with a sweet family life.
We collect C and T from school and bring them home. TV tired, all of them and me.
I cut up meat to cook, dissecting it out, sectioning bits off. This will be me. I put the children to bed. X is late tonight, I know this.
I lie in the bath, the water still and smooth around me. The house silent. I touch my breasts, brush over the lump, lightly brush my nipples with my fingertips. I keep still, as if I can stop time.
The feeling of my babies’ mouths on my breasts a thousand times still a physical sensation, and all the memories of X’s mouth on my breasts.
I rehearse telling him, and his reaction, maybe I won’t tell him. Not yet.
Does this all have to change?
Finally X is home.
He eats.
He checks his emails, he is not thinking about me.
Later, in bed, I make love to him. He responds. As Andy Warhol said, I’ve always liked sucking cock. X touches all of me but still doesn’t notice; why would he, it is erotic, his mouth on my breast, moves across to the other side, his tongue on my nipple, and he moves between my breasts to my tummy and then down.
Afterwards, safe, and nothing has changed in a way, my body still desirable.
I could tell him: I found this, and bring his hand to my breast, take his fingertips,
brush them over it and let him feel it—
He rests his head on my tummy and I say nothing.
The semen on my thighs wet.
Lucy Campbell is a writer and filmmaker based in Manchester, UK. She is also a doctor. Her short films have been funded by BFI, Film4, BBC Films and have won multiple international awards. She is known for sci-fi dramas Pig Child and Marina & Adrienne. She won the Aesthetica International Creative Writing Award in 2023 with her short story “Mr Street.”