Defiant Grace

The Rose Reception room at Blackpool Teaching Hospital had been designed by someone who believed that the dying and the merely frightened could both be soothed by the color of weak tea. The walls were the shade of a biscuit left too long in the tin. The chairs were the stackable kind, blue plastic on chrome legs, arranged in a circle that was never quite a circle because somebody always dragged one out to sit nearer the radiator. The radiator did not work. Cath had reported it twice.

She arrived first, the way she always did, and counted the chairs. Eleven out, nine needed. She left them. Counting was a thing her hands did while the rest of her caught up.

The first Wednesday of every month, excluding January, six thirty in the evening. There was a Breast Specialist Nurse on-site, a fact printed on the laminated sign by the door, and tonight it was Sandra, who was good, who knew when to say nothing. Sandra was setting out the urn. The smell of it, instant coffee and the faint chemical sweetness of the hospital’s hand gel, was the smell Cath now associated with the closest thing she had to a confessional.

Donna came in like weather. “It is Baltic out there,” she announced, to nobody, to everybody, shrugging out of a coat the color of a traffic cone. “I have walked from the prom and I have lost all feeling in me tits, which, before anyone starts, is medically hilarious.”

Mo, two steps behind her, crossed herself. She did this at Donna roughly the way other people said bless you, an automatic small mercy. “Maureen,” she said, by way of greeting, settling into the chair nearest the dead radiator. Her cardigan was buttoned to the throat. It was always buttoned to the throat.

“Mo.” Cath nodded.

They came in then in their ones and twos, and the room rearranged itself around them the way it did every month, a held breath of small talk before the work of it. Yvonne arrived in a cloud of something expensive and kissed the air beside Cath’s cheek. Priya gave a small wave from the doorway and took the seat she always took, near the exit, a pharmacist’s instinct for knowing where everything was. Saoirse and Bex came together but sat one chair apart, which was its own kind of language. Tracey slipped in last and quietest, a woman folding herself smaller than her actual size, and took the chair Cath had not bothered to put away.

Nine women. One disease, eight versions of it, and a postcode.

“Right,” said Cath, when the urn had done its work and the cups were full. “Shall we.”

It was not a question and they knew it. The circle settled.

“Who wants to start.”

“I will,” Donna said, because Donna always would. “I had me final fitting. The new ones. And I will tell you, ladies, I have waited eighteen months for these, eighteen months on a waiting list longer than the queue for the big rollercoaster at the Pleasure Beach in August, and they are magnificent. They are a triumph of the National Health Service. I have never had better and I include the originals.”

Donna spoke the way the seafront spoke, the way Cath’s own grandmother had, the my flattened to me, the words run together warm and fast and unbothered. Cath had grown out of it in Lytham, the way you grew out of a coat. She rather missed it. There was a confidence in that speech, a refusal to tidy yourself for anyone, that her own careful vowels had never quite managed.

“Donna.” Mo, faint.

“What. I am celebrating socialized medicine.”

“You are celebrating your bosom.”

“I am doing both. They are not mutually exclusive, Maureen, that is the beauty of it.”

A laugh went round, the loose easy kind, and Cath let it. She watched it move through them. She had learned to read this room the way Sandra read a chart, and what she read was this: that the same body, the body every woman here had lost some part of and rebuilt or refused to rebuild, came out of each mouth as a different word. Donna said tits like a woman ringing a bell. Mo could not say it at all and reached instead for the one I’ve got left, the cardigan, the buttoned throat. Yvonne would say the girls later, or my décolletage, with the faint amusement of a woman who had paid not to wait. Priya would say the clinical word, the correct one, because that was the language she trusted.

And Cath would say nothing about her own at all. Which was, she knew, its own register. The most fluent one in the room.

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She did not tell them, in the round table, why she had built it.

She had told them other things. She had told them she founded the group because Blackpool needed one closer than Preston, which was true. She had told them she had the time, which was also true, in the way that a thing can be true and be a door you have closed. She founded the Wonky Wobblers, she said, because nobody should drive forty minutes to sit in a room with people who understood. All true. All the surface of the truth, polished until you could see your own face in it and not what was underneath.

What was underneath was her mother.

Her mother had been forty-nine. Her sister had been forty-one. The disease had moved through her family the way the tide moved up the flat Lancashire sand, not dramatic, not a wave, just the patient and total reclaiming of ground you had thought was yours. Her mother first, when Cath was nineteen and certain it would not touch her. Her sister second, when Cath was thirty-six and beginning to understand the arithmetic. And the letter, after that. The genetic counseling. The word positive, which in every other context she had spent her life wanting to hear.

She had read the outcomes. She was good at outcomes. She had sat with the consultant and asked the questions in the order a sensible person asks them, and she had booked the bilateral mastectomy the way she booked the car in for its MOT, because the alternative was to sit and wait for the tide, and she had watched two women she loved sit and wait for the tide and she would not, she would not.

Forty-four. Preventative. The only one in the room who had chosen.

That was the part she did not say, because saying it out loud invited the question she had no answer to, which was how do you grieve a thing you gave up on purpose. There was no service for it. No casserole arrived. You did not get to be brave in the way the others got to be brave, because you had not been ambushed, you had seen it coming and stepped sideways, and the breasts you had given to keep yourself alive went into a medical waste receptacle and you went home and made the tea.

She had not mourned them. She had been efficient. Efficiency was a place you could live, if you kept the walls clean.

Greg had matched her. That was the thing she loved him most for and understood least. When she had come home from the consultant with the date written on the back of an appointment card, he had not wept or held her too hard or said any of the things that would have made her have to manage him. He had read the card. He had asked two sensible questions. He had booked the time off work and learned to drain the surgical drains without flinching and brought her tea in the recovery weeks at intervals so regular she could have set a clock by them. He had loved her in her own language, fluently, and neither of them had ever once said the word frightened out loud, and she had thought, at the time, that this was the same as not being frightened.

She was beginning, lately, to wonder if it had only been good handwriting over a blank page.

Her mother and her sister sat just behind her left shoulder, where they always sat, where they had sat for nine years now. Not ghosts. Cath did not believe in ghosts. Just the permanent slight weight of the people you carry because nobody else can, the way you carry your own spine without thinking about it until the day it goes.

Across the circle Donna was demonstrating something about underwiring with both hands and Mo was scandalized and Tracey was laughing into her cup, a small sound, a sound that had cost her something. Cath catalogued them. This was the work. Keep the room safe. Keep the urn full. Keep the chairs in their almost-circle and your mother behind your shoulder and your own grief filed under a heading you never had to open.

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At the end they passed the sheet around, the dog-eared one with the columns, names and numbers in eight different hands. This was the part Cath had not planned and had come to value most. The group was the structure. The pairings were the thing that actually held.

“Give me your number,” Donna said to Tracey, not asking, holding out her phone. “You are in Preston, I am doing a chip run Thursday, you can come and be miserable on the front with me. It is good for you, the front. All that vinegar. Sorts your sinuses and your soul.”

Tracey gave her the number. Cath watched her give it, watched the small surprise on her face at being chosen, at being the one Donna reached for. Tracey had come to the group clinical and clenched, every sentence pre-checked for safety, a woman who said reconstruction and procedure and recovery and never once said anything that might let you see the size of the hole her husband had left when he walked out during chemo because he could not, in his own words, handle it. Cath had taken an instant and quiet dislike to a man she had never met.

“I’ll come,” Tracey said. “Thursday.”

“That’s the spirit. Bring nothing, I’m buying, it’s a B and B perk, I can write off two portions of chips as market research.”

Across the circle Saoirse and Bex were standing, doing the thing they did, the half-step coordination of two people who shared a bed and a diagnosis and a great deal they did not say. Saoirse was twenty-nine and frightened underneath all the noise she made, mid-reconstruction, expanders that pulled when she reached. Bex was flat by choice and at peace with it in a way that Cath suspected Saoirse found unbearable some mornings, the two of them lying there, one body grieving toward a shape it did not have yet and one body finished and certain. They never fought about it in the room. Cath thought they probably never fought about it at all, which was worse.

“Same time next month,” Sandra said, gathering cups.

“Excluding nothing,” Donna said. “December an’ all. I’m not having Christmas as an excuse. Christmas is exactly when you want a room full of women who get it.”

“December,” Cath agreed.

Yvonne was pulling on gloves, actual leather gloves, in a hospital. “I did wonder,” she said, in the carrying voice that was not quite aimed at anyone, “whether we might think bigger, at some point. As a group. There’s such marvelous energy in here. It seems a waste to keep it in a beige room.”

“Bigger how,” said Priya, near the door, coat already on.

“Oh, I don’t know, darling. I’m not the ideas one. I just write the checks.” A light laugh. It landed wrong and right at once, the way Yvonne often did, the truth of it sitting just under the joke. She had paid. She had waited zero days. Some of them had waited eighteen months and Cath could see, in the small stillness that followed, exactly who in the room was doing that arithmetic.

But it passed. It always passed, for now.

Mo was the last to leave, save Cath. She had the cardigan done up and a headscarf going on against the cold, knotted under the chin the way her own mammy had knotted it, the way every woman of that street in Marton had knotted it walking home from the early Mass. She paused at the door.

“You do a good thing here, Catherine,” she said. “I want you to know I know it. I don’t always say much. The talking isn’t for me, the way it is for some.” A glance, not unkind, toward where Donna had stood. “But I come. I keep coming. That’s my saying it.”

“I know, Mo.”

“I know you know.” Mo’s hand went to the top button of the cardigan, checked it, the way Cath’s own hands counted chairs. A thing the hands did. “Goodnight, then. Mind how you go. Them illuminations bring all sorts out.”

“Goodnight.”

They went out in their twos and threes into a Blackpool evening that smelled of salt and frying and the electric ozone tang of the illuminations warming up along the front. Cath stayed to stack the chairs. Eleven of them, back to nine in the rack, the room returned to its beige neutrality, ready to soothe the next frightened circle.

She turned off the dead radiator out of habit. She turned off the light.

Behind her left shoulder, as always, her mother and her sister came too.