Detached
Created | Updated Apr 21, 2006
Already it was not a part of her. Anne was Not Thinking About It. She had spent a long time last night Not Thinking About It and this morning she was exhausted. Time had played cruel tricks, as it does in these situations. She had tried to sleep, of course, tried to compose her mind, to dissolve her thoughts into a soft haze that might slip over into sleep. It had not worked and anatomy had intruded time after time. Time. At night, time was not measured by the clock, at least not from the beds. It was measured by footsteps. Nurse Mary Batts, a low heel that clicked precisely; Nurse Gwendoline Higham, flats that shushed with each dragging step and Sister Rosa Jenkins, low boots with a medium heel that thudded with all her weight and force. Listening to their steps as they moved about their duties marked time better than the ticking of the white plastic clock at the end of the ward. She would not have been able to mark the passage of the day staff in that way. During the day there was noise and bustle and time flowed normally through it all. This footstep chronometry was a night phenomenon of low lighting, hard floors and the shifting of bodies uneasily asleep or reluctantly awake.
Listening and drifting and trying to be not quite there, not quite real and Not Thinking about being Not Whole was how she had spent her nights since they had told her what they would do to her. Anne had resigned herself to the surgery. She had divorced herself so thoroughly from that part that was to be removed that she could imagine, almost anticipate, that they would cut her open in a few hours and find nothing but a blank space. A dark, empty hole where tissue and blood should be. But she was thinking about it again. Thinking about it not being there was cheating. She had decided that three nights ago, just as the shush, shush, shush, of Nurse Higham going past her bed to check on poor young Helen had recalled her attention to Non Thought. It was a way around the Not Thinking About It Rule and so she had made a Rule about that too. Three nights ago.
A rolled up ball of tissue landed on her bed, just above her knees, making her jump. She looked over at the next bed. Kay was smiling at her.
‘Sorry love, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling today? You don’t look worried, but I suppose by now it’s a relief to be having it done.’ Kay was old and she liked to talk. She talked about everything to anyone who would listen. She talked about her daughter most of all. She had been on the ward longer than Anne had. Her daughter had not visited yet.
‘It will be a relief when I can go home,’ Anne answered carefully. She picked up the ballistic tissues and started to unravel them.
‘Well, that’s good,’ Kay said, ‘it doesn’t do to fret about things you can’t change. I’m always telling my daughter that, but will she listen? Not a chance, you know what children are like…’ Anne stopped listening, once Kay got onto talking about her family participation stopped being necessary.
You know what children are like…funny, how people assumed that. She felt a mocking twist at the centre of her body that physically defied her Non Thought policy. Or perhaps it was the drift of thought that caused her flesh to protest. That was the thought that had kept her awake that first night after they had told her that they would have to…but no, she wouldn’t think about that. She had made a rule and she would stick to it. That first night had been terrible, one appalling thought stacked upon another in the static twilight of the ward. But the worst of them, the one that had tipped her over, was that she would never…and then she had been crying, then sobbing, and trying to stop and not being able to until she heard the click click, click click, of Nurse Batts crossing the ward to stop at her bedside and put the little reading light on. ‘Come and have a cup of tea and tell me what’s upset you,’ she had said and what could Anne do but put her dressing gown on and do as she was told. Nurse Batts took her to the staff room, and with pristine efficiency gave her a box of coarse hospital tissues and made her a cup of tea that was too strong and too sweet. The room was horribly bright and Nurse Batts questioned her calmly and thoroughly while the tea went cold and a mound of tissues accumulated in her lap. She was not unkind, precisely; she was simply unrelenting in her insistence that Anne tell her everything that was bothering her while she nodded calmly, and spoke in platitudes. Anne had wanted to tell her to stop, to say; stop, please, stop asking me about these things it’s too much and you’re hurting me…but her treacherous lips would not say the impolite things that would make Nurse Batts leave her alone. She did not blame Nurse Batts. She was doing her job. The polite, attentive line of her posture as each efficient question was crowbarred further into Anne’s distress was a testament to her professionalism.
By the time Nurse Batts was satisfied that she had exposed every drop of Anne’s misery and would allow her to go back to bed, Anne had formed her Not Thinking About It Rule. The next morning, just before the shift changed, she apologised to Nurse Batts for causing a fuss and thanked her for being such a good listener. She was running out of tissue to shred. The ball that Kay had thrown at her had been reduced to a scattering of pastel filaments that clung to the thin blue hospital blanket across her knees. She started to gather them back into a ball.
Anne’s was the first surgery of the day and the sun was rising. That must mean they would be coming for her soon. Kay had said ‘well that’s good, there’s nothing worse than hanging about all day not being able to eat anything.’ She was probably right. Sister Jenkins had been around before she went off shift, to prepare her. The thud, thud, thud of her heavy feet had roused Anne before she had reached her bedside. It was impossible to sleep deeply here. Perhaps if she could sleep thoroughly and for long enough she wouldn’t need her Not Thinking Rule. Her mind would be able to sort everything out for her without the intrusion of body, space and clutter that being awake brought. As Sister Jenkins had manhandled her out of her jewellery and nightwear and into a hospital gown, her feet had marked time around Anne’s bed: thud, thud, thud. It had been almost soothing. Anne had worried that her Rule would not stand up to the nerves of the last few hours but Sister Jenkins was as big and impersonal as furniture and the dispassionate ritual had calmed her.
A nurse, one of the day staff, whose name she didn’t know, came and injected pre-op anaesthetic into the tube in the back of her hand, then left. The tissue was back together in a murky clump. She put it on her nightstand.
The injection started to make her head a little woozy but it didn’t make her want to sleep. She was a little disappointed by that. It might have been nice to go to sleep here and wake up again in the same place and to be able to pretend that nothing had happened in between. No. No, she would not give in to Thinking About It now.
Kay had, at some point, stopped talking. She was doing a crossword. Anne tried to think of something to say to her, to start a conversation. She felt silly sitting here with nothing to do, waiting to be….
‘Kay, they’re going to cut out my womb and I’ve never had children because it was never the right time and there was always more time to think about it, and there was always something else that was more important and now they’re going to take my womb and there’s no more time.’ Anne stopped, and her inadvertent confession ricocheted dizzily around her head. No more time. Never had a child. Something more important. No more time. Nothing more important. Never going to have a child. Cut open and never going to have a child. No time.
Her words swirled in her head as she waited for Kay to say ‘there, there it’s not the end of the world you can still adopt,’ like the nurse had.
‘That’s done with then,’ Kay said softly. The scratchy blue hospital blanket blurred, the crosshatch of its weave blending into indistinct fuzz. Kay’s hands, papery and thin, entered Anne’s field of vision to deposit some tissues onto the blanket. Done with, yes, that was the right way to put it. Done with mess and cramps once a month, the tidal pull of the moon and her body aligning with the women around her. Done with seeing young women out with their babies and thinking, one-day…. She tried to stop thinking about it, reminded herself that she was breaking her rule. She concentrated on spreading the tissues out as flat as possible on her lap, one on top of another: blue, white, green, peach, yellow and white again. She took the white one back off the top of the pile and used it to wipe her eyes.
‘Yeah, done with,’ she echoed unhappily. Kay tutted and Anne looked at her, surprised.
‘Children aren’t the only good thing in life,’ Kay said. She smiled to take the harshness from her words. It was not a stiff, forced little sympathy-to-a-stranger smile. It was a real smile, relaxed and kind. She was an old woman. Her lips were thin, her skin loose and wrinkled and her glasses exaggerated the yellowing around her eyes, but she smiled like a young woman who has not learned yet that life is difficult and disappointing.
‘I know that,’ Anne said. But she did not believe it. She tried to think of something that could fill her life and there was nothing. She had no great talent, no burning ambition. Nothing big. Nothing that mattered. Why hadn’t it mattered before? She could not think of a reason. It should have mattered. Stupid, so stupid, why hadn’t she looked ahead? Time. She had always thought there would be more time. Time enough to get a job that did more than pay the bills, and always more time to find someone to settle down and start a family with. If she had worried about that sooner…but it was useless to wonder which man had infected her with the virus that had made the cells of her uterus turn vicious.
She wondered why she was breaking The Rule like this. She should smile and say something vague. Thank Kay, apologise, put her off…why didn’t she? If it were night it would be easier to stop. She could listen for the sound of Nurse Higham going to the medicine lockup, then count her footsteps as she made her way to a bedside, listen to her make her lethargic way back to the nurse’s station, shush, shush, shush. She could have concentrated on it so intently that there was no room to think at all.
‘I know that,’ Anne said again, slowly, ‘but I still want to get pregnant and have morning sickness and swollen ankles and silly cravings and all the rest of it. I don’t know how to stop wanting that.’ She adjusted the yellow tissue on the top of the pile into a neater position.
‘Well, you’ll have to adjust and move on because you can’t have that any more,’ Kay said. Through the muzziness of watery anaesthetic Anne was shocked. This was no kind of sympathy. She looked over at Kay, uncertain, and saw that she was still smiling. She looked kind and certain and it made Anne feel like a rebellious teenager.
‘You have a daughter,’ Anne paused and fidgeted with the tissues, turning the whole pile over so that the blue tissue was on top. She was already regretting what she was going to say. She said it anyway; ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She almost expected to be struck down for such rudeness but Kay just shook her head, her gentle smile still firmly in place.
‘My daughter hasn’t been speaking to me for ten years. The nurses called her, when I came in,’ she trailed into silence and for a moment her smile was gone. Anne could see such lines of disappointed hope in her face; then she smiled again and was familiar. ‘But she wasn’t interested.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anne said.
‘Don’t. You didn’t do anything so why should you be sorry? We fell out, it was my fault and sorry doesn’t always fix everything,’ Kay said. Anne struggled to find something to say…but there wasn’t anything. Kay picked her crossword back up. Anne fixed her eyes on her tissue pile; running her fingers over the edges and lifting the corners, letting them fall back down, softly…silently. Her Not Thinking Rule was in pieces and she was not sure if she wanted to put it back together. She should, she knew that. With each moment that passed her awareness of her operation, and everything that it meant, was becoming more intense, pressing at her temples and making the pile of tissues blur at the edges, melting them into a spreading pastel fuzz. She should be more disciplined and force her thoughts back into order. But the silence between her bed and Kay’s was oppressive and her thoughts were too jumbled now. She tried…but it was too hard, with Kay there in the next bed and her thoughts swimming away each time she tried to pin them down.
Kay was tapping her pen against her crossword book. She hadn’t filled anything in since she had picked it up.
‘It seems as though all there is for women is to be mothers,’ she said. ‘We have this collective sense that we don’t exist if we don’t have children.' The pen beat a lazy drumroll...'It’s not the same for men. I don’t say a man wouldn’t be upset to be told that he can’t have children but it wouldn’t do this to him.' Tap tap, tap tap, tap tap...'It wouldn’t take so much away from him.’ Tap tap, tap tap, tap, tap...
‘It's a big con, isn't it? And I know it's stupid, to buy into it, but I can't stop myself. It hurts. I can't be philosophical about it, it hurts too much.’ The pen stopped. Anne focused on the blue plastic lid resting on top of the crossword book. She had not realised she had been watching the movement of the pen lid so intently untill it stopped.
‘So let it hurt for now,' Kay said.
Anne turned this idea over untill the nurses came to collect her. She looked back at Kay as they reached the door. Her eyes were very bright and a few tears were tracking over her cheeks but she was still smiling. Anne felt her own eyes fill and she smiled, just as brightly as Kay was.
The nurses were busy looking where they were going and didn’t notice but the anaesthetist saw her tears and hesitated with the needle poised over her hand.
‘What’s the matter? Are you scared about the surgery?’ he said kindly. Anne smiled as tears welled into her hairline.
‘I’m crying because I’m sad,’ Anne said in such a forceful tone that the anaesthetist and the nurses exchanged looks and decided that it would not be polite to ask questions.
Anne smiled and cried and as she felt the anaesthetic rush up her arm, she repeated, ‘I’m crying because I’m sad,’.
Listening and drifting and trying to be not quite there, not quite real and Not Thinking about being Not Whole was how she had spent her nights since they had told her what they would do to her. Anne had resigned herself to the surgery. She had divorced herself so thoroughly from that part that was to be removed that she could imagine, almost anticipate, that they would cut her open in a few hours and find nothing but a blank space. A dark, empty hole where tissue and blood should be. But she was thinking about it again. Thinking about it not being there was cheating. She had decided that three nights ago, just as the shush, shush, shush, of Nurse Higham going past her bed to check on poor young Helen had recalled her attention to Non Thought. It was a way around the Not Thinking About It Rule and so she had made a Rule about that too. Three nights ago.
A rolled up ball of tissue landed on her bed, just above her knees, making her jump. She looked over at the next bed. Kay was smiling at her.
‘Sorry love, I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling today? You don’t look worried, but I suppose by now it’s a relief to be having it done.’ Kay was old and she liked to talk. She talked about everything to anyone who would listen. She talked about her daughter most of all. She had been on the ward longer than Anne had. Her daughter had not visited yet.
‘It will be a relief when I can go home,’ Anne answered carefully. She picked up the ballistic tissues and started to unravel them.
‘Well, that’s good,’ Kay said, ‘it doesn’t do to fret about things you can’t change. I’m always telling my daughter that, but will she listen? Not a chance, you know what children are like…’ Anne stopped listening, once Kay got onto talking about her family participation stopped being necessary.
You know what children are like…funny, how people assumed that. She felt a mocking twist at the centre of her body that physically defied her Non Thought policy. Or perhaps it was the drift of thought that caused her flesh to protest. That was the thought that had kept her awake that first night after they had told her that they would have to…but no, she wouldn’t think about that. She had made a rule and she would stick to it. That first night had been terrible, one appalling thought stacked upon another in the static twilight of the ward. But the worst of them, the one that had tipped her over, was that she would never…and then she had been crying, then sobbing, and trying to stop and not being able to until she heard the click click, click click, of Nurse Batts crossing the ward to stop at her bedside and put the little reading light on. ‘Come and have a cup of tea and tell me what’s upset you,’ she had said and what could Anne do but put her dressing gown on and do as she was told. Nurse Batts took her to the staff room, and with pristine efficiency gave her a box of coarse hospital tissues and made her a cup of tea that was too strong and too sweet. The room was horribly bright and Nurse Batts questioned her calmly and thoroughly while the tea went cold and a mound of tissues accumulated in her lap. She was not unkind, precisely; she was simply unrelenting in her insistence that Anne tell her everything that was bothering her while she nodded calmly, and spoke in platitudes. Anne had wanted to tell her to stop, to say; stop, please, stop asking me about these things it’s too much and you’re hurting me…but her treacherous lips would not say the impolite things that would make Nurse Batts leave her alone. She did not blame Nurse Batts. She was doing her job. The polite, attentive line of her posture as each efficient question was crowbarred further into Anne’s distress was a testament to her professionalism.
By the time Nurse Batts was satisfied that she had exposed every drop of Anne’s misery and would allow her to go back to bed, Anne had formed her Not Thinking About It Rule. The next morning, just before the shift changed, she apologised to Nurse Batts for causing a fuss and thanked her for being such a good listener. She was running out of tissue to shred. The ball that Kay had thrown at her had been reduced to a scattering of pastel filaments that clung to the thin blue hospital blanket across her knees. She started to gather them back into a ball.
Anne’s was the first surgery of the day and the sun was rising. That must mean they would be coming for her soon. Kay had said ‘well that’s good, there’s nothing worse than hanging about all day not being able to eat anything.’ She was probably right. Sister Jenkins had been around before she went off shift, to prepare her. The thud, thud, thud of her heavy feet had roused Anne before she had reached her bedside. It was impossible to sleep deeply here. Perhaps if she could sleep thoroughly and for long enough she wouldn’t need her Not Thinking Rule. Her mind would be able to sort everything out for her without the intrusion of body, space and clutter that being awake brought. As Sister Jenkins had manhandled her out of her jewellery and nightwear and into a hospital gown, her feet had marked time around Anne’s bed: thud, thud, thud. It had been almost soothing. Anne had worried that her Rule would not stand up to the nerves of the last few hours but Sister Jenkins was as big and impersonal as furniture and the dispassionate ritual had calmed her.
A nurse, one of the day staff, whose name she didn’t know, came and injected pre-op anaesthetic into the tube in the back of her hand, then left. The tissue was back together in a murky clump. She put it on her nightstand.
The injection started to make her head a little woozy but it didn’t make her want to sleep. She was a little disappointed by that. It might have been nice to go to sleep here and wake up again in the same place and to be able to pretend that nothing had happened in between. No. No, she would not give in to Thinking About It now.
Kay had, at some point, stopped talking. She was doing a crossword. Anne tried to think of something to say to her, to start a conversation. She felt silly sitting here with nothing to do, waiting to be….
‘Kay, they’re going to cut out my womb and I’ve never had children because it was never the right time and there was always more time to think about it, and there was always something else that was more important and now they’re going to take my womb and there’s no more time.’ Anne stopped, and her inadvertent confession ricocheted dizzily around her head. No more time. Never had a child. Something more important. No more time. Nothing more important. Never going to have a child. Cut open and never going to have a child. No time.
Her words swirled in her head as she waited for Kay to say ‘there, there it’s not the end of the world you can still adopt,’ like the nurse had.
‘That’s done with then,’ Kay said softly. The scratchy blue hospital blanket blurred, the crosshatch of its weave blending into indistinct fuzz. Kay’s hands, papery and thin, entered Anne’s field of vision to deposit some tissues onto the blanket. Done with, yes, that was the right way to put it. Done with mess and cramps once a month, the tidal pull of the moon and her body aligning with the women around her. Done with seeing young women out with their babies and thinking, one-day…. She tried to stop thinking about it, reminded herself that she was breaking her rule. She concentrated on spreading the tissues out as flat as possible on her lap, one on top of another: blue, white, green, peach, yellow and white again. She took the white one back off the top of the pile and used it to wipe her eyes.
‘Yeah, done with,’ she echoed unhappily. Kay tutted and Anne looked at her, surprised.
‘Children aren’t the only good thing in life,’ Kay said. She smiled to take the harshness from her words. It was not a stiff, forced little sympathy-to-a-stranger smile. It was a real smile, relaxed and kind. She was an old woman. Her lips were thin, her skin loose and wrinkled and her glasses exaggerated the yellowing around her eyes, but she smiled like a young woman who has not learned yet that life is difficult and disappointing.
‘I know that,’ Anne said. But she did not believe it. She tried to think of something that could fill her life and there was nothing. She had no great talent, no burning ambition. Nothing big. Nothing that mattered. Why hadn’t it mattered before? She could not think of a reason. It should have mattered. Stupid, so stupid, why hadn’t she looked ahead? Time. She had always thought there would be more time. Time enough to get a job that did more than pay the bills, and always more time to find someone to settle down and start a family with. If she had worried about that sooner…but it was useless to wonder which man had infected her with the virus that had made the cells of her uterus turn vicious.
She wondered why she was breaking The Rule like this. She should smile and say something vague. Thank Kay, apologise, put her off…why didn’t she? If it were night it would be easier to stop. She could listen for the sound of Nurse Higham going to the medicine lockup, then count her footsteps as she made her way to a bedside, listen to her make her lethargic way back to the nurse’s station, shush, shush, shush. She could have concentrated on it so intently that there was no room to think at all.
‘I know that,’ Anne said again, slowly, ‘but I still want to get pregnant and have morning sickness and swollen ankles and silly cravings and all the rest of it. I don’t know how to stop wanting that.’ She adjusted the yellow tissue on the top of the pile into a neater position.
‘Well, you’ll have to adjust and move on because you can’t have that any more,’ Kay said. Through the muzziness of watery anaesthetic Anne was shocked. This was no kind of sympathy. She looked over at Kay, uncertain, and saw that she was still smiling. She looked kind and certain and it made Anne feel like a rebellious teenager.
‘You have a daughter,’ Anne paused and fidgeted with the tissues, turning the whole pile over so that the blue tissue was on top. She was already regretting what she was going to say. She said it anyway; ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ She almost expected to be struck down for such rudeness but Kay just shook her head, her gentle smile still firmly in place.
‘My daughter hasn’t been speaking to me for ten years. The nurses called her, when I came in,’ she trailed into silence and for a moment her smile was gone. Anne could see such lines of disappointed hope in her face; then she smiled again and was familiar. ‘But she wasn’t interested.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Anne said.
‘Don’t. You didn’t do anything so why should you be sorry? We fell out, it was my fault and sorry doesn’t always fix everything,’ Kay said. Anne struggled to find something to say…but there wasn’t anything. Kay picked her crossword back up. Anne fixed her eyes on her tissue pile; running her fingers over the edges and lifting the corners, letting them fall back down, softly…silently. Her Not Thinking Rule was in pieces and she was not sure if she wanted to put it back together. She should, she knew that. With each moment that passed her awareness of her operation, and everything that it meant, was becoming more intense, pressing at her temples and making the pile of tissues blur at the edges, melting them into a spreading pastel fuzz. She should be more disciplined and force her thoughts back into order. But the silence between her bed and Kay’s was oppressive and her thoughts were too jumbled now. She tried…but it was too hard, with Kay there in the next bed and her thoughts swimming away each time she tried to pin them down.
Kay was tapping her pen against her crossword book. She hadn’t filled anything in since she had picked it up.
‘It seems as though all there is for women is to be mothers,’ she said. ‘We have this collective sense that we don’t exist if we don’t have children.' The pen beat a lazy drumroll...'It’s not the same for men. I don’t say a man wouldn’t be upset to be told that he can’t have children but it wouldn’t do this to him.' Tap tap, tap tap, tap tap...'It wouldn’t take so much away from him.’ Tap tap, tap tap, tap, tap...
‘It's a big con, isn't it? And I know it's stupid, to buy into it, but I can't stop myself. It hurts. I can't be philosophical about it, it hurts too much.’ The pen stopped. Anne focused on the blue plastic lid resting on top of the crossword book. She had not realised she had been watching the movement of the pen lid so intently untill it stopped.
‘So let it hurt for now,' Kay said.
Anne turned this idea over untill the nurses came to collect her. She looked back at Kay as they reached the door. Her eyes were very bright and a few tears were tracking over her cheeks but she was still smiling. Anne felt her own eyes fill and she smiled, just as brightly as Kay was.
The nurses were busy looking where they were going and didn’t notice but the anaesthetist saw her tears and hesitated with the needle poised over her hand.
‘What’s the matter? Are you scared about the surgery?’ he said kindly. Anne smiled as tears welled into her hairline.
‘I’m crying because I’m sad,’ Anne said in such a forceful tone that the anaesthetist and the nurses exchanged looks and decided that it would not be polite to ask questions.
Anne smiled and cried and as she felt the anaesthetic rush up her arm, she repeated, ‘I’m crying because I’m sad,’.
