PROLOGUE
She sits on the edge of the bed, dressed in a hospital robe and tight surgical stockings. She is very aware that she is naked underneath the robe. It is as if all her authority as a grown-up has been taken away with her clothes, which are folded up neatly on a chair by the bed.
Don’t worry. We’ll make you look normal again after this,the surgeon assures her briskly in his well-spoken, no-nonsense voice.
What do you mean?she asks, wondering what he is going to do to her when she is asleep, other than what she knows he is going to do, which is horrific enough.
I mean, a reconstruction. We can rebuild the breast. Plastic surgery.He gives her a friendly nod, still brisk, which on one hand she appreciates – no point being coy or maudlin – but on the other, she resents, as if losing a breast was of no real concern at all.
Can I decide afterwards?she asks, and he nods.
Of course, of course, we can think about that later.
She wonders which medical school he went to. He is a little older than her, but not that much older. It’s feasible they could have gone to the same university: he has that same well-bred assurance about him that so many of her university friends did. They came from money, and expected it to open doors as they grew up, qualified as doctors and lawyers and accountants, and strode confidently along a well-worn road of privilege.
She has managed to join their ranks, even though she doesn’t come from money in the same way. Still, now, they accept her:fake it until you make it, isn’t that the saying? She has faked it for years: keeping up with the clothes, the holidays, the skiing and the shooting weekends. All of it.
But all of her efforts matter little now, now that she is sitting on the edge of a hospital bed, a potentially deadly thing growing inside her, betraying her, the cells turning on themselves. What do designer clothes matter after you have received a possible death sentence?
She asks the surgeon,Am I going to die?She feels her gorge rise as she speaks the words, but she has to know, and she hasn’t been brave enough to ask the question until now. Yet, it has been the only question in her mind since receiving the diagnosis. It’s odd that he thinks she is worried about how she willlookafter the operation. All she is worried about is whether she will be alive in six months.
He reassures her that she is not going to die, not right now anyway, and thatsurvival rates are higher than ever before.
Survival rates.
That is, there is a chance that she will not survive – either this surgery, or, more likely, the disease, in a matter of months or years. There is a calculation. There is a percentage chance applied to her survival, now.
She remembers that there was another relatively unlikely chance that she once mastered: an academic scholarship. At the time she had been told there was a ten per cent likelihood that she would be accepted to Oxford to study law, and, because she had worked for it, and because she was lucky perhaps, she had got it. She had conquered that ten per cent. And she had made it to the ranks of the blessed, fortunate ones and fought hard to stay there.
Surely, she has used up all her luck now? She isn’t sure if she has the strength to fight to stay among the fortunate ones anymore. She lies down as instructed, and lets the kind nurses tuck the blankets around her as they prepare to wheel her bed down to the operating room.
We’ll make you look normal again.
She repeats the phrase in her head as she watches the ceiling lights flash above her, being wheeled along the corridor.Normal. What is normal?she wonders as they open a door and wheel her into a kind of anteroom where the anaesthesiologist is waiting.Can I ever be normal again after this? Do I want to be?
She is told to count to ten, as the anaesthesiologist gently sticks something into the back of her hand.I am counting away my life, she thinks, just before she blacks out.If I get through this, then I’m never going to waste another second. Whatever the odds. That’s one thing I know.
