PROLOGUE
8 SEPTEMBER 1934
I have a secret place no one knows about, not even Tom. I go there when Mother and Father drink and argue because they are so loud. It is a secret cave in the rock that looks onto the water and sometimes, if I am very quiet, I can pretend I have disappeared. The birds sing to me there and I wonder what they are saying.
Sometimes I think about running away to my secret place even though it is windy, but there is a flat rock for a bed and I could make a fire to cook and make tea. I wish I could run away from them all. It would be a better future than being like Mother, or she says I could go away and work in a factory and send back money when I am older, like Molly, the daughter of the Taggart family along the way. But I have seen Molly and she looks like death warmed up and much older than eighteen, she already stoops and her face is lined. I do not think working in a factory is much fun.
Mother says, be grateful you have a roof over your head. But I prefer my cave. No one can find me here and that way no one can hurt me.
ONE
‘Can you just slow down a little, Dan?’ Deborah Sutherland winced as her boyfriend took a sharp turn too fast. Every time she breathed, it felt as though she was being stabbed by a bag of knives that some kindly doctor had left in her abdomen.
‘I’ve got to get back for the football,’ Dan muttered, as if that was any kind of answer.Nice to know what the priority is here,she thought. Dan had already made it clear that picking her up from the hospital was a huge imposition. He hadn’t said it, but his manner and body language had done that for him, without words.
So sorry that I couldn’t walk home, the day after a hysterectomy, she thought, bracing herself as Dan made a sudden stop at traffic lights. Pain ripped through her and she gasped involuntarily.So sorry that I didn’t catch the bus.
Dan glanced at her.
‘You all right?’ he asked.
‘Not too bad,’ she found herself replying, and almost laughed.Not too bad.The most British of responses.
Actually, Dan, I’m not all right. I’ve just had my uterus removed by laser and pulled out through my vagina, was what she wanted to say.Bit sore, if I’m honest.
All Deb wanted was to get home, right now. She was trying not to think about how she was going to get up the stairs to bed, but she’d have to do it, somehow. And then, hopefully, she could take more of the painkillers that the hospital had sent her home with, and pass out for a few hours.
It was hard to think about recovery when she was in this much pain. But, at the same time, Deb was glad that she’d had the operation. She was excited to startlivingagain: her life for the past few years had been lacklustre because of her symptoms.Goodbye, constant bleeding, she thought, as Dan turned into the end of her street and she saw her house approach.Goodbye, eternal abdominal pain. Ta-ra, dizziness from lack of blood.See ya, anaemia.Maybe she could start planning a holiday now – somewhere she could wear a bikini, in a few months’ time, or even a year. She could wear white underwear. Sleep on the bed without a towel under her. It was the small things as much as the big ones.
Endometriosis. It affected one in ten women worldwide, apparently, and the medical community still had no idea what caused it, or could offer any good cure, apart from what she’d had. Hysterectomy.
That in itself had been a struggle to get. Because she was in her thirties still, because she was unmarried – Deb failed to see howthatwas anyone’s business – and because she didn’t already have children, she had been refused the operation multiple times.You might still want children, you see, one consultant had said, looking over the top of her glasses at Deb.We wouldn’t want to do anything we’d regret, would we?
We?Deb had thought.No. I will make my own decisions about my own body, thank you. Because I am thirty-eight years old.
The comment had rankled with her. Deb had joined an online hysterectomy support group and found that many otherwomen had been told the same kind of thing, or refused the operation on the basis that doctors thought they would regret it, because at some point they would want children.
Would men be doubted in the same way?Deb wondered.Would they be questioned and queried, as if they were children, about whether they really meant what they said?She doubted it. If a woman had made up her mind that she wanted a hysterectomy – an operation that would once and for all remove all the pain, bleeding and discomfort that was ruining her life – then she should be trusted in that decision. Not second-guessed, as if she was a child.
In the end, Deb had asked for a second opinion and been passed to another consultant, who couldn’t have been more different. He’d listened to her sympathetically and, after examining her, had agreed that only an operation would solve the problem – not the other, medieval-style treatments she’d been offered in the past, like having the inside of her womb lasered off while awake, or hormone treatments that had made her suicidal and only slowed, not stopped the bleeding.
Neither had worked, and both had been distressing. But they were hoops that the medical community had required her to jump through – adding almost two years onto her suffering – before they would even consider her for surgery.
After waiting so long to be allowed to make the decision for herself, she’d saidyes. Yesterday, they’d taken her malfunctioning uterus out. Today, she began her new life.
As Dan brought the car to a sudden halt outside her house, Deb let out a cry of pain. The knives in her abdomen felt as though they were cutting through her stomach and she bit her lip to try and control herself.
‘Come on, then. Let’s get you inside,’ Dan said, looking at his watch. ‘Almost kick off time.’
Charming.
Deb thought about the tale of the Little Mermaid as she opened the passenger side door and gingerly manoeuvred one leg onto the ground outside, and then the other. The mermaid had paid a high price to have her tail transformed into legs. To be able to walk on land, and to follow the man she had fallen in love with, she had agreed that every step she would take with her new legs would feel as if she was walking on broken glass.
This felt somewhat similar. Deb took Dan’s hand and slowly got to her feet, trying to use her back and her legs and not her stomach muscles to stand. Yet, it was impossible to do that without the stabbing pain in her tummy. She felt faint.
Come on, now, she pep-talked herself.Your life was completely untenable before this. You’re going to get better, and your new life is going to start. No more blood, no more pain. It’s worth it. Be strong.
Deb took a deep breath and took a step, and then another, Dan guiding her into the house. At the bottom of the stairs, she found herself wishing that he would carry her up them, like a hero in a romance novel. But Dan just looked at her expectantly, and so she put her foot on the bottom step and began the long climb up the twelve stairs.
