What everyone waiting here shares is a kind of gentle cynicism. They deal with the indignity and anxiety of this place with little jokes, knowing smiles and endless patience. We are in this thing together, they seem to say, and I feel a rush of love for these people. It is no surprise that my nan acts as though she knows them. They remind me of everyone I grew up with.
Eventually we see the specialist, a doctor whose name my nan has difficulty with, so she always calls him “that nice Indian gentleman,” although I have no idea if he is really an Indian; his name could just as easily be from some other part of the world, and he is a good man, I like him a lot too, so we don’t even complain or roll our eyes or sigh when he immediately tells my nan that he would like her to go and have an X-ray and get a blood test and then come back to him later.
More waiting. More standing room only. Another little ticket that you hold on to until your number appears after a wait that seems never ending.
The blood test is easy enough. I go into the little room with my nan, watch her roll up the sleeve of her blue Marks & Spencer sweater and stare at the needle with a childlike curiosity as the nurse slips it into her pale, papery skin. The nurse sticks a Band-Aid on top of the bubbling pinprick of blood and we are out of there.
I can’t accompany my nan into the X-ray department. People have to get undressed in there, my nan has to get undressed, and so of course I stay in the waiting room while she goes inside to get changed. But the terrible thing is she gets a little confused after she undresses for the X-ray, and I can see her standing in the middle of the corridor of the X-ray department in her hospital smock, and what really does me in is that she hasn’t fastened her smock at the back, she has left it open, so the world can see her poor old back and legs, those bones so delicate they always remind me of a baby bird, and I want to protect her, I want to do up her smock and find out where she needs to go, but I can’t, I am not allowed in there, and she wouldn’t want me in there, wouldn’t want me to see her not coping, with half her clothes off, so she just stands there half-naked in the X-ray department, looking around, her face frowning with confusion, when all she wants is to be at home with Frank Sinatra and the National Lottery and a nice cup of tea, not much to ask for, until a friendly nurse with a loud, cheerful voice sees her and points her in the right direction.
Then we go to see the nice Indian doctor that my nan likes so much, and he tells her-so matter of fact that I will remember it forever-that she is dying.
“We’ve had a look at the result of your biopsy, Mrs. Budd, and I have to tell you that we have found a tumor in the lining of your lung. And, as I would expect in someone of your age, the tumor is malignant.”
They have known this for how long? Hours? Days? Weeks? Certainly before we arrived today, before the hearty good mornings and my nan wandering the X-ray department with her hospital smock undone.
But it is news to us.
Tumor. Malignant. Nobody says the word. And I feel ashamed that nobody in my family-not me, not my mother, not my father-has had the courage to say the word since all this began. We assumed-we were so sure-that the word would go away if we never said it. And here it is, still not being said out loud, but growing in the lining of my grandmother’s lung.
They didn’t know, the doctor says, absolving my family of cowardice at not saying the word. They couldn’t know until the fluid was drained from her lungs and the biopsy had been performed. And he really is a good man, but he does not burst into tears or allow his voice to tremble with emotion when he tells my nan that there is nothing that can be done, no chemo, no surgery, no miracle cure, and that the tumor in the lining of her lung is secondary, meaning that the source of this thing, this terrible thing, is somewhere else, could be anywhere else in her poor old body, and they just don’t know.
It is not the first time that the doctor has given this speech. Perhaps not even the first time today.
More undressing, more examination. When the doctor and I are alone, and my nan is chatting happily to the young nurse on the other side of the screen, I ask him the obvious question.
“How long has she got?”
“In a patient of your grandmother’s age-probably a few months. Perhaps even until the summer.”
He talks about the medical term for what my nan has, the technical word for this pleural tumor-it’s called mesothelioma-and I get him to write it down, mesothelioma, thinking how you should know how to spell the thing that is going to kill you.
When my nan is examined and dressed, she thanks the doctor. She really likes him. She is a woman of courage and manners, and I feel ashamed again, wondering how I will carry myself when this day comes for me.
Outside the hospital her mouth is set in a firm line. I notice how crooked her eyebrows are drawn on today. The gap between her desire to look nice and her inability to do it as well as she once did shreds my heart.
She rubs her side, the side where they drained her lungs, and I remember that we thought it was where the tube had been stuck into her side that was hurting, a wound that wouldn’t heal, but we now know it was always more than that, this pain that comes in great waves and doesn’t let her sleep and takes her from her bed in the middle of the night.
“I’m going to beat this thing,” she declares, and I don’t know what to say, because I know it can’t be beaten-can it?-and so anything I say will sound either like surrender or a lie.
We go back to her little white flat and she slips into her old routine. Kettle on, music on, Sinatra singing “I’ve Got the World on a String,” the Mirror on the coffee table, turned to the TV page, circles in blue ballpoint around the programs she wants to watch while the rest of us are off doing something else when we should be with her, making the most of every day, every moment, and these shaky circles around her favorite TV programs make me feel like crying.
She is singing. I am shaking, scared of what I have to do. I have to call my father, I have to call my mother. But that can wait. Now we sit on the sofa, drinking our hot, sweet tea, listening to Sinatra sing “Someone to Watch over Me,” and my nan holds my hand like she will never let it go.
When I go to the park for the first time in ages, the morning is cold and frosty, the scrubby grass covered in a mist that the weak winter sunlight can’t burn away. He is there, of course, as I knew he would be, and I watch him for a while as he moves under the bare trees with that unhurried power, making what he is doing look like everything-meditation, martial art, physical exercise, breathing lesson and slow, lonely dance. Making every movement special, making every second sacred.
But today George Chang is not alone.
There’s a bunch of young business types in their dry-cleaned running gear politely watching him. There must be ten of them, mostly young men, their soft office bodies pumped up from weight training and contact sports, but there are also a couple of thin women with dyed blonde hair, good-looking but hard as nails. Modern boys and girls. They all look as though they should be going for the burn in a gym, or whatever it is they do in there.
“Alfie?”
It’s Josh. He looks a little heavier than I remember. And I am accustomed to seeing him in a suit from Hugo Boss or Giorgio Armani or Paul Smith, not a tracksuit from Nike. But it is definitely old Josh.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
He indicates George.
“Our company sent us to him.”
“What for?”
“Tai Chi is part of our new corporate strategy for stress management. Our firm loses too many person-hours to stress.”
“Person-hours?”
“Yes, too many person-hours. Tai Chi is said to reduce stress levels. And it’s also to help us think outside the box.”
“Think outside the box? What’s that supposed to mean?”