Page 104 of While I’m Still Here

“It isn't weird.”

“I've just been thinking about it.”

I wait, because I've also learned that Bea will eventually explain herself if nobody rushes her. She wraps both hands around her coffee. “I'm terrified I won't recognise myself.”

There is no joke attached this time. No exaggerated expression or comment designed to make the fear easier for both of us to look at. She simply says it, and something about that makes me sit a little straighter. “I know I'll still be me,” she continues. “I understand breasts don't contain personality. Mine certainly haven't displayed any evidence of higher reasoning.” The corner of my mouth threatens to move, but Bea barely seems to notice. “But I know this body, Marcus. I've spent years criticising it, which feels fucking rude now. Too fat. Too saggy. Wrong dress. Lose weight before buying that. Maybe when I'm thinner, maybe when I look better, maybe when I'm some imaginary version of myself I've apparently been expecting to turn up and take over.”

Her gaze drops towards her chest. “And now I'd give anything to keep the body I've spent half my life insulting.”

I don't interrupt her. There isn't anything useful to say to that, and I suspect she doesn't need me to tell her she shouldn't have criticised herself in the first place. She needs to be allowed to mourn the fact that she's only discovering tenderness for this version of her body when she's about to lose part of it.

“I keep trying to imagine myself without them,” she says. “I stand in front of the mirror and cover them with my hands, but it doesn't work because I can still feel them underneath. My brain knows what flat means, but it can't make me flat. And I've looked at photographs online until I don't think there's a mastectomy scar on Google I haven't seen, but they all belong to somebody else.” Then she looks at me. “I want to see someone I know.”

“All right.”

Her eyebrows lift. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Now?”

“Not in the café.”

Relief transforms her face so quickly that I almost laugh. “Oh, thank God. I thought this was about to become a very strange afternoon for that family.”

I glance towards the table behind her, where a child is eating chips while his mother attempts to persuade him that ketchup doesn't constitute a vegetable. “I wasn't planning to undress beside the sufar and spoons.”

We find a fitting room large enough for both of us in the men's department, which Bea finds significantly more entertaining than the situation warrants. “This feels illicit,” she whispers after I close the door.

“It's a changing room.”

“A man and a woman disappearing into one cubicle together is definitely how rumours begin.”

“Nobody here knows us.”

“That has never stopped a rumour.”

I look at her, and the joke dies on its own. Not because I've silenced her, but because she remembers why we're here. The fitting room suddenly feels smaller. I take off my jumper first, folding it over the small bench, then begin unbuttoning my shirt. I've shown my scar more times than I can count. Doctors have examined it. Nurses have dressed it. Partners have touched it. Peter saw it once after support group when he'd been newly diagnosed and terrified by the clinical photographs he'd found online. I showed him because somebody had once done something similar for me, and because sometimes seeing a healed body is more useful than hearing someone promise yours will heal.

I haven't considered the scar particularly private for a long time. Yet opening my shirt in front of Bea feels strangely like undressing. The reason becomes obvious almost immediately.

I care what she thinks.

The realisation arrives far too late to be useful.

I let the shirt fall open. Bea's eyes settle on my chest. The left side has been flat for more than two years now, the scar pale and settled against skin that no longer looks newly altered. There was a time when it dominated every reflection, when my eye went directly to it before noticing anything else. Now there are mornings when I dress without consciously seeing it at all.

Bea looks for a long time, and I let her.

There is no disgust in her expression, nor the fascinated discomfort people sometimes get when they're trying very hard to prove that something doesn't bother them. She simply looks. Her gaze follows the scar and the flat plane of my chest, taking in the thing she's spent weeks trying unsuccessfully to imagine on herself.

Then her eyes fill. “Is it frightening?” I ask her.

She shakes her head immediately. “No.”

“What is it?”

She steps closer. “It just looks like you.”