Could death suddenly be so close at hand without her havingrealised it? The thought saps the moisture from her mouth and leaves her heart racing. Lying there listening to Cam speak, the thing Anika knows with absolute certainty is that she’s nowhere near ready to relax into surrender. Even at almost thirty years of age, she’s barely evenstartedto know what she wants out of life, or how to get it.
The wordNorattles her brain. This isn’t her time – she feels it soul-deep. It can’t be.
This has to be a beginning, not an ending.
Tuesday 3rd July
Weak summer sunlight struggles in through the dirty window of the sparse hospital room the next morning as Anika sits up in bed. Shameeka is at her bedside, leaning forwards on the plastic chair they managed to pilfer from the ward, elbows resting on her knees. As promised, her friend had been straight back first thing this morning. Shamz’s short hair is divided into neat cornrows that end above the shaved sides of her head, her slender frame draped in a casual dark-brown linen trouser suit that offsets her warm brown skin, a Janelle Monae tee beneath it, relaxed but meaning business. Anika is glad her friend is there to hear Dr Elachy explain his plans. A small gaggle of trainee doctors look at their tablets so that they don’t have to look at her while the older man breaks the news that they’re planning an operation to remove the ‘indeterminate mass’ from her guts before it …perforates them and ends her life? Less than twenty-four hours earlier she was buying coffee and trying to avoid annoying workmates. It is extremely surreal to find herself now in an uncomfortable hospital room while a machine drips liquid medicine directly into her veins.
‘And … and you don’t think it’s …’ Anika can’t finish her sentence.
Dr Elachy waves his hand in the air. ‘The only thing we think at the moment is that we need to remove this mass quickly. What has caused it, we do not know, and this is not too important right now. We will know more once it is done.’ He looks her in the eyes, his shining with kindness. ‘Do not worry. Remember, we conduct operations of this nature all the time.’
‘But it’s serious, right?’ She glances around at the others in the room, then back to Dr Elachy. ‘Like, dangerous?’
The doctor makes an expression somewhere between a smile and a grimace, then nods. ‘But, trust me, you are young, fit, healthy …’
Anika snickers softly at the assertions sounding like an out-of-context compliment. She and the gym are hardly well acquainted.
‘The percentages of things going wrong are small, I assure you, Anika. The risk is much, much bigger if we do not do this as soon as the antibiotics have done their work.’
She swallows, taking in the serious knit of his brows. The doctor is out of his scrubs this morning, wearing tweed trousers and a green knit tie like a 1970s professor.
‘But I go in, whip this out, no problem.’ He gesticulates in the air like he’s pinched the thing out of her with his fingers, then gestures quickly to one of his juniors for some notes and begins to discuss the procedure involved.
Anika feels Shamz reach out to squeeze her hand. She turns to look at Shameeka’s face, which is stony and impenetrable – her no-nonsense look. In this mode, she’d kill whoever was required with her bare hands to get Anika the treatment she needs. Anika squeezes her hand back.
‘I suppose I’d better call my mum, eh?’
Nella sounds like she’s just woken up when Anika calls her, and says she’ll ring back in a few minutes. The delay forms atight ball of irritation in Anika’s guts and she imagines it sitting somewhere near the ‘blockage’ that nestles there.
Just as her phone starts to ring, Anika realises that she’ll be spending her thirtieth birthday in the hospital.Happy fucking birthday.
‘Hello?’
‘Anika?’
‘Hi, Mummy.’ The seldom-used word slips out on Anika’s latent vulnerability. Shamz had to head home a couple of hours ago, leaving her with thebeep-beep-dripof the machine she’s hooked up to and the nurses coming in to observe her vitals on the hour.
‘Are you OK?’ her mother asks quickly. She sounds more alert now and Anika feels guilty that her calls are infrequent enough for Nella to know something is wrong. Then she suddenly remembers that her mother and Philip, her new(ish) husband, are in New York. Something about him having a conference and her mother accompanying him for a shopping trip. It’s only six in the morning over there.
‘Shi—’ She still avoids swearing in front of her mother. ‘Sugar. Sorry, Mum, I forgot you were away …’ Anika sucks in a breath and quickly gives the step-by-step of her afternoon yesterday as a lead-in to the ‘I require life-saving surgery’ finale of the anecdote. Nella listens quietly, but Anika can hear her mother’s breathing growing increasingly shallow on the other end of the line. ‘It’s OK, though,’ Anika says unconvincingly. ‘I mean, they’re going to do the surgery by tomorrow and the doctors are confident about how it should go, so …’ She finally peters out.
‘Anika,’ her mother says softly. Anika reaches for the tepid water in a cup by her bedside, swallowing some thickly. ‘Let me look for flights. I can be there first thing tomorrow.’
‘No, it’s fine—’
‘I’m coming.’
Anika feels an unexpected wave of relief that allows Nellato really be her mother in that moment. They can ignore the complexities of their relationship – of Anika’s itinerant childhood, Nella’s serial relationships and her desperate need for her daughter to cement protection of her own through a marriage or job that would make Anika ‘secure’. Her mother only really nailed that for herself when Philip came along – long after Anika had flown the nest and landed with a thud. Right now, though, they settle into a simple bottom line: love.
‘OK. Sure. Thank you,’ Anika says quietly.
She hangs up after discussing a few more arrangements, but then sees a message alert in her work’s group chat. It’s from her line manager, Kate, making some tentative enquiries about how she’s doing, probably not realising she’s doing so for all to see rather than directly to Anika alone. Anika remembers that she hasn’t called in today to explain she won’t be coming to work for … well, who knows how long? Since Kate says shedidn’t want to disturb, Anika decides to just type back a brief response.
Yeah, sorry, got a life-threatening blockage in my guts, so won’t be in today.
She stares at the words on the screen for a moment, amused at the liberation of it, but then chickens out and deletes it. Instead, she writes a long-winded, apology-laced message about what’s happened. She hits send and then waits.Sorry to hear thats and oh my Gods flood into the chat before she puts the group on mute.
