Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies Read online

  Bananas

  The sun

  Egg yolk

  Cheese

  Autumn leaves

  Rubber ducks

  Sundays

  The waterproof plasters in the bathroom

  Butter

  Patience

  Lemons

  Iris’s blazing spirit

  Yellow

  Ah. Here. You can tell the ones that mean the most because they are more than gabble-panic fragments or faceless voices. For example:

  We will call this one Yellow.

  This one’s good.

  She is skipping along the walls, flushed gold with the excitement of it all, and I am reminded of sunlight

  sliding along the side of a house.

  The sight of her makes me a little achy,

  a little soft and breathy like a Marilyn birthday song

  or a Christmas cold.

  She listens closely, waiting, as voices splice through the hot air in various directions, pitches, squawks, clamours;

  Off-kilter! Rotten! Sour!

  Let’s fix it! Slay it! Snuff it out! Delay it!

  Blood feels mighty thin.

  Must be vigilant, cautious.

  Trust no one.

  She laughs. It’s so gentle a laugh it catches me off-guard.

  What’s the plan? When can we start?

  You search the liver and we’ll search the heart!

  Soon, she says, soon, when everyone gets here.

  The light of Yellow’s voice is so warm and bold I feel it clasp me, spoon me up, and for a moment I know what it feels like to be a mouse in a child’s palm or yoghurt touching lips for the first time, but the chorus launch excitedly again into their speculations and I am back, back thinking, Oooooohhh how I do love these beginnings before the pen is sharpened, the cannons are lit, the pistols are fired. Before the search begins.

  The Great Democrat

  When Iris was seven, her teacher asked everyone to write down what their parents’ jobs were and also suggested they drew a picture as a Creative Exercise.

  There were shopkeepers and teachers and nurses and dentists, dads in IT with computers for hands, a mum drowning in bank notes, another with a spade potting small flowers with faces on.

  Iris had written

  across the page.

  She had drawn a creaturely cell with licks of ink fingers searching out from all sides, and in the cell’s centre was a mouth, but the mouth was not ominous – instead it wore a sort of sad I’m-ever-so-sorry smile. A stick-figure mum with long red hair and hands bigger than her head stroked the cell like a pet.

  When it was Iris’s turn to present her work to the class, she stood and held the sheet of paper up proudly.

  Teacher coughed out a laugh covered in thorns.

  That isn’t funny, Iris.

  A boy at the front with the computer-hand dad frowned.

  But Miss, you just laughed.

  It’s OK, Iris had said. It’s fine. Lots of people don’t know how to handle it.

  We do we do we do we do.

  The class sang quite suddenly:

  My aunt has it my dad had it my grandma my neighbour my dog my babysitter’s boyfriend’s mum has it.

  Iris’s face remained solemn, her eyes widened by the thrill of sudden responsibility.

  Do you want to see how it works?

  Show us show us show us.

  It’s all about cells, see.

  She dragged her tiny chair to stand on, up in front of the whiteboard, its metal legs shrieking against the vinyl floor. Teacher hadn’t the heart to stop her. She drew a diagram of cancer in the body and the way that it works, the way it sometimes multiplies and travels through different systems, like the cir-cu-la-to-ry or the lum-pa-tic-ory but sometimes, most of the time, it gets destroyed by other clever chemical creatures that stop it in its tracks. She told them how breast cancer which was her mum’s cancer had lots to do with lymphs, which were these spirits like nymphs but without wings – they controlled a great deal of very complicated things – and the kids had sat and watched in awe.

  Everyone learnt something that day.

  Iris took the picture home and Lia framed it on the wall that got all the sun in their kitchen.

  Thank you, lovely.

  For what?

  For drawing me with all that long hair.

  Oh. Well, I wasn’t going to let them know I had a bald mum.

  Lia often thought of this time. Thought of Iris sitting in hospital waiting chairs with her tiny legs dangling down,

  spotted tights,

  small shoes,

  glowing face,

  asking questions like,

  What have you got?

  As if the world was a competition of terribleness and they would absolutely win it.

  But this time there was no Iris.

  There was hair, but it had grown back so tentatively, so undecidedly she almost wished it hadn’t at all.

  Lia was sitting in the hospital waiting for instruction with her mother, who looked hollowed out.

  Anne had insisted she be there. She had accompanied Lia to her chemotherapy sessions a few times before, and Lia was convinced Anne had decided hospitals were safe, perhaps even ideal environments for Mothers Making Amends. It was the fact of their being supervised by nurses, perhaps. Restricted by noise regulations. Rooted to the place, immovable, through the drip in Lia’s arm. Lia was trying not to feel pleased to see her.

  Anne was wearing the same grey cardigan she wore for special days like Palm Sunday or the Pentecost. She had meant this thoughtfully, but it just made everything feel monumental and sombre.

  They hadn’t said much to each other since they had arrived, both staring blankly ahead at children’s drawings, pinned up from their corners on a noticeboard. As if prompted by the bad art, Anne turned and asked suddenly, How’s work?

  Good. Fine.

  What’s this one called?

  Lia kept her face as straight as she could.

  A Children’s Guide to Lexical Spectacles.

  Anne frowned. She searched Lia’s expression for the answer to whether this was a joke.

  Really?

  Yes. It’s an interactive language learning book. Supposed to encourage creative thinking. That sort of thing.

  How unusual, Anne said, adjusting her body in the seat,

  hoping the exchange had reached an acceptable conclusion.

  Lia had been producing these sorts of books since Iris was born. Lexical Spectacles had been inspired partly by their many years of bedtime word-talks. She had been working on the illustration plans for a few months, now; each lexical entry would be surrounded on the page by sketches, paintings, loose strokes of wild landscape or precise, inky detail, depending on the word, and at the end of each lexical entry –

  a blank space,

  to fill in one’s own definition.

  The words could be homonyms, like bolt, buckle, entrance, fair, hatch, mine, squash. Or just beautiful, unusual words. Cherish or cascade. Elixir. Susurrus. Petrichor.

  Anne looked relieved when the nurse called them in.

  Here was the Current Situation:

  There was a small scattering in

  the liver, just a shade,

  a deep sore kiss of it,

  ink blotting about in the lung.

  Both doctor and Wikipedia said: when breast cancer spread to the lungs or liver it could be treated but could not be cured.

  Lia had grown very fond of her doctor. He had been looking after her and her insides for eight long years on and off and was the perfect cancer doctor in every way, except for the fact that he had just gone and died.

  It is ridiculous that doctors die.

  It is ridiculous that oncologists can die of cancer.

  She asked the nurses how this could possibly happen when surely he had VIP access to all of the most sought-after, tried and tested, tumour-blitzing drugs, and they raised their eyebrows and said it did not really work like that. Knowing something inside out does not make you immune to its power. Lia thought of difficult mothers and books she’d read a thousand times that still made her cry and thought, yes, this seemed very true.

  So here was a new man in front of them with this younger face, black emperor eyes, and something very uncomfortably confident about the way he twitch-sniffed his nose before he answered a question, like he was gathering drips of Important Information at the back of his mouth, relishing in the new tastes of life-death data.

  He may have also had a cold.

  This one – it’s a bit of a beast,

  he said.

  Anne’s eyes paced the room.

  Nicknamed the Red Devil.

  She puffed her chest out, let out a small thin sound, which was followed by an abrupt stillness.

  Because of its colour, its toxicity, its very strong, very severe side effects.

  Lia nodded along to his medical song, his chemotherapy combinations, his Doxorubicin, mustard gas, Cyclophosphamide, his nausea and vomiting and low blood counts and anti-sickness pills and rapid growth and targeting cells, and as her mother made her final wince at the strike of the ‘cell’ word,

  Lia wondered what it was that she thought bodies were made up of;

      just bones,

  light and

  holy water, perhaps –

  Let’s see how you handle this first, the doctor said, looking at her suddenly very seriously.

  First?

  Yes. First.

  Can’t that be all? Won’t it work?

  Shhh, Mum.

  There was the clasping of bruised speckled hands,

  Lia’s thumb pressing gently on her mother’s soft purlicue.

  Purlicue

  Noun

  [plural
purlicues]

  1. The skin between one’s forefinger and thumb.

  2. A review of a sermon.

  3. The end of a discourse.

  4. ........................................................................................

  Dove

  Here is another. She is monumental. Speckled and sombre. A little hollowed out.

  Because I am feeling kind, we will call her Dove, but she looks much more like a

  scrawny street pigeon.

  Look who’s turned up, eh?

  She is greeted by an eruption of broken mock-applause.

  Look who’s taken some time out from their holy duties!

  There are thick layers of filth coating her once-white feathers; the soot and dust and debris gathered over years of rare exchanges and scratchy landline calls made far too late; she stinks with it, shrinks in it, can’t rid her lead-grey life of it, and I feel quite encouraged, quite invigorated by this one, as she puffs her chest out and makes a few snide comments about a time when life was pure,

  before regret and penance and me.

  Proteus

  Harry was delivering a lecture on Ancient Greek Water Deities but was thinking about the freckles on Lia’s body. How much he would miss them if she died. He wondered if it would be possible to skin her and turn her into a blanket if she ever did die.

  Hang her on a wall all splayed out like cowhide.

  Harry never used to think awful things like this. The image floated to the electric bit at the very top of his brain and vanished. One can train awful thoughts to perform acts of all kinds, Harry thought, even vanishing acts. Lia did not know the extent of these thoughts, the extent to which they unravelled her husband. They had got steadily worse over the years and he knew it had a lot to do with this seeing Lia as a body,

  a body that was ill,

  a body that got in the way of this staying-alive business.

  So Poseidon had a son. He is known, as many gods are, by different names. You may have heard of the Old Man of the Sea, yes, well he was also called Proteus and he could change shape at will; a great deal of philosophers, psychologists, writers and scientists (some of which we will be looking at today) have taken inspiration from his slippery form, his unknowability; he did not have a container as such; instead he could take the shape of a lion or a snake or even water itself depending on his particular playful temperament that day –

  It is a shame, such a shame, Harry thought,

  that to be a human is to be one thing, to be

  contained, to have these walls of skin and a singular sense of self

  that sloshes and slaps around the inside of us like water on the inside of a well.

  He also had the gift of prophecy granted to him by his father, which meant he knew the nature of Truth but would only ever reveal it if he was captured and squeezed into his real original state –

  Would he continue to love Lia if she were to change into something else? Does love even continue like we think it does? Does love preserve itself?

  According to Homer, Proteus was an old man with a bandit hat. The first ever cowboy, if you like.

  Click went the slide, Harry’s frame silhouetted against blue light and an etching of a sea creature riding wild folds of water.

  Is that why they’re called white horses, Sir, the froth on waves?

  Most likely.

  Cold Cap

  Before Lia put on the cold cap, she dampened and conditioned her hair in the hospital as if she were baptising a child.

  She could hear very clearly Iris’s

  I wasn’t going to let them know I had a bald mum.

  It hadn’t worked last time. Perhaps it would now.

  It all felt very futile, very vain, but then Iris had announced quite recently that vanity is just self-respect after Lia had suggested she take a break from staring in the mirror, and it had seemed very profound.

  Iris was not beautiful, at least not in any traditional sense of the word, but she was so fascinated by her own appearance that it shocked Lia. Left her with a metal taste in the vaults of her mouth.

  So many things could have been possible in Lia’s past if she had the kind of vanity, the kind of confidence that Iris had. Somewhere between her forefinger, thumb and

  soapy wet ends came the

  strange fact that

  mothers could be jealous of their daughters.

  Lia wondered whether her mother had ever felt it. This kind of gentle, natural jealousy.

  Drying between each of her fingers with a paper towel, she stared down at the veins that, with age and illness, had risen from the back of her hands like trembling blue roads on a map. She examined her skin, her smell, the familiar taste at the back of her throat, the gentle clutch of cold on her shoulders, soaking in the exquisite sensation of normalcy; You won’t feel this for a while. This human. This clean.

  Her mother was waiting next to the chair where it all happened, where they’d put her in the cap, rewire her, fix her fuses then plug her in like a Christmas tree, caged in

  nothing but bright red lights

  that scorch at slightest touch.

  She did not look jealous.

  Warm-Ups

  He’s coming.

  The little devil, unlikely hero

  singing, staining his way

  through the peripheral vein,

  all strange and red and

  perfectly cooked for destruction.

  For one brief moment

  blush-quick, a fearful something

  slips and limps within me, so much that I

  sink

  sink

  sink past ribbons, scoops,

  I sink on through

  serosa,

  parietal,

  stem, great mountains of

  mucus before

  enterwhatsisname?

  Enteroendocrine, marks of some

  hard laughs here, footprints

  headed home, Yes Chief,

  I sink on down like a moon

  rips through night, or faith parts

  reason like a comb, and

  hide deep enough to be mistaken for

  a mere dodgy dinner,

  or a spot of

  salmonella.

  Daisy Bell

  Anne spoke quietly, respectfully, of new curtains and a holiday planned for March. Lia nodded along. Their eyes fell for a moment on the liquid red drip, the silence like a burning prayer.

  Drip,

  drip,

  drip,

  Amen.

  Her mother began to doze off, the wrinkles on her forehead tumbling between her brows, piling up on the arch of her nose. She looked so odd, so old, so tired. Anne seemed out of place everywhere except church. Lia used to marvel at the way her mother’s form would slot into church, as if the two made each other whole, somewhat understandable. After Peter’s services, while he was at the front Playing Priest Perfectly and the church was squeezing the congregation out two by two by two, Lia would catch her mother turning to face the altar, gazing up at the dove and the olive branch pieced into the window, receiving, it would seem, direct instructions from the Lord Himself. Catching the end of a secret meant only for her.

  Despite the violence of her bible tongue and the crippling silent codes she shrouded every inch of their lives in, for those five seconds, with slices of stained window light behind her, she was the saintliest thing in the world.

  Dribble had started to leak from the corner of Anne’s lip, beginning a glistening journey down the hard line on her chin. It was funny, funny watching the person that once governed your life look such a fool. Lia wondered if she’d ever really forgive her. She focused on the stalk of spit, willing it to keep going, wilt down onto the grey cardigan, trying not to think about how the freezing felt.

  She had made a song for the cold cap chemo hours. To remedy the boredom, the strange, relentless pain. Lia and Iris often made songs. This was not one of their best; they’d just rewritten the words to ‘Daisy Bell’ with its marriages and carriages and looking sweet on a bicycle seat. It had been hummed so frequently by Lia’s father that its tune had etched itself

  unthinkingly

  but

  politely inside the place

  where music is made.

  Cold cap, cold cap

  Give me a cold, you do,

  I’m half brain-dead