Women's Business
Doctor Cartier is more expensive than I can afford. Instead of a bunch of flowers at reception, there’s a floral composition. But the receptionist’s frosty smile tells me that I’ve come to the right place. Her mouth and nails are bright blood red. Against her white blouse and skin, they look like neatly contained little murders.
‘May I have the name under which you made the appointment, please?’ she says.
I give my name, and wonder why her question left wiggle room – if many women make appointments under maiden names, without telling anyone else.
‘Referral,’ I add, though she hasn’t asked – and it’s not exactly true.
‘Cartier is one of the best in Paris,’ my general practitioner told me, almost apologetically. ‘I can recommend other specialists who wouldn’t cost so dear.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘À la guerre comme à la guerre.’
So my GP did not direct me here; I chose.
The receptionist drums on her keyboard, sees I’m here for a check-up.
‘Ah oui,’ she says. ‘C’est pour le contrôle demandé par le docteur Dubois.’
‘Oui, le contrôle,’ I say.
‘Le contrôle,’ she repeats, and I wonder if I’ve said more than I meant to – if she’s understood not just what I’m here for, but also why.
The receptionist shows me to the waiting room, where everything is hard-edged. Ceiling and floor are incised with scalpel-slit straight lines that intersect at right angles. Metal frames keep the sag of the leather chairs in check. The corners of the side table could kill.
There’s satisfaction to be had from this – a certain reassurance. But it’s not enough; when I close my eyes, even just to blink, I still see the division of cells: soft-skinned alien eggs from inner space, slowly stretching, pulling apart, multiplying… It was the same when I got pregnant – only then, it felt like a private viewing of the Big Bang. Now, it’s a vision of the enemy.
From an obsidian stack of art magazines I take the top slab, and flick through too fast. I learn that the damask rose was brought to Europe by crusaders, and that Spartan women who died in childbirth were buried with the honours of soldiers killed in battle. When I come to a full-page print of a Barbara Kruger masterpiece, I stop. In white lettering set against 999-emergency red, it hollers: ‘Your body is a battleground.’
I look quickly left, right, all around as if the assailant might be hiding in the waiting room rather than lying low inside me. The receptionist raises an eyebrow.
‘Puis-je avoir de l’eau, s’il vous plaît?’ I say, asking for water so courteously it sounds like a cover-up, even to me.
The receptionist indicates the water fountain, and offers, ‘Un petit café?’
I nod, smile. She slips out, and returns with an impeccable white cup.
‘Je vous remercie,’ I say, still playing the polite guest. As I take the cup, I wonder why I am holding out my little finger. A crusader’s bloodied hand comes to mind, pinching a rose stem delicately between forefinger and thumb. I look down at the coffee – at the tightly packed espresso froth – and see bubbles of life in deepest, darkest space, pulling apart till they pop into two, four, eight, multiplying in time to some cosmic beat, clustering, teeming… I knock back the coffee. One swallow, bitter as bile.
The pleasure lasts for longer than that though; the coffee is chased by a burn like a blast from a blowtorch, scalding from throat to belly. But even as I’m savouring this satisfaction, it is more than matched by bloodlust: I want the burn to go lower – down, right down… To shock and awe my body into submission.
Control, I think. Self-control. I slow-breathe, to pacify my mutinous heartbeat.
I felt this irrationally fierce once before. I was just pregnant, and had told no one. It wasn’t planned. I was investigating options, so I could say it had been my choice. And this guy came too close on the metro – at least that’s how it felt. I had to chew my bottom lip to stop myself snarling, and could easily have gone at him teeth bared, talons out. I was surprised by this sudden awareness of my nails and canines, but I realised then that I’d made my choice. Or that I didn’t have as much choice as I wanted to lay claim to. What I knew in my belly was this: if I was drowning, I’d slash my stomach with whatever was to hand, be it butter knife or rough-edged stone; I’d claw open my womb with my nails if need be, and I’d rip out my child and hold her above the waves, that she might live.
‘I want to keep the baby,’ is how I explained that to my husband. I tried to smile sweetly, like the cradle-gazing mother in that Berthe Morisot painting. I had qualms of course – wondered if I should have invited him to share from the start in the messy business of deciding over life and death. I still don’t know who I was protecting – our daughter, him, or me. But when his poor sweet mouth turned infantile with shock – horror and delight all at once – I was glad I’d offered him my best effort at a rose-bud smile.
A phone rings. The receptionist engages in a murmured exchange, then leads me to the surgery door. Doctor Cartier greets me with a gaze that is blue and pitiless. Her handshake leaves me feeling delightfully frostbitten. With a chin-raise, she directs me to the chair by her desk.
‘First, let me explain,’ she says.
Although her tone makes it clear that the ‘let’ is purely decorative, I nod.
She tells me about cervical cellular anomalies and how they are graded. She sketches a diagram. I see the neat partitions of a garden à la française, where nature is subject to the ruler, divided, controlled. Or a military situation map. She points to lines from which anomalies are considered pre-cancerous or cancerous.
‘Beyond this, they must be removed,’ she says. ‘By electrosurgical loop, laser, or cold-knife excision.’
Cold, I think. Knife.
‘Do you understand?’ she says.
Her blue eyes stare, unblinking.
I understand that she needs me to tick the terms and conditions box with another nod, which I cede.
‘I like to explain everything,’ she says. ‘To give the patient ownership.’
And with that, she wrong-foots me. No longer myself, I am now a patient. Somewhere between home and here, I have lost my name.
Doctor Cartier stands.
‘Undress,’ she says. ‘Lie down.’
I lie knees together, arms crossed. Then I remember this pre-natal check-up where a doctor asked me, as I lay supine, if I wanted to know what breastfeeding was like. I figured I’d breastfeed so I nodded ‘yes’. And she tweaked my nipple. Hard. Just like that. At the time, it felt like nipple rape. But my daughter came at me just the same way – like a snapping turtle, hungry for human flesh. So maybe it is better to know – to go in owning that much, at least?
I part my knees, press my feet harder into the stirrups.
‘Prête?’ says Doctor Cartier.
She doesn’t wait for an answer before inserting her state-of-the-art equipment. Her monitor fills with the much-magnified pink and red shininess of my insides. My mind free-associates, confuses this with a pre-natal ultrasound, and for a split-second, I seek the heartbeat of the beloved spaceman visiting my body. Then I remember what my body is gestating now.
‘Last time I saw myself like this, I was pregnant,’ I say. It’s an attempt at gallows humour, but Doctor Cartier does not smile. She does not turn from her monitor.
‘Pregnancy starts the same way,’ she says. ‘With the mutation of cells.’
I almost cobble together some joke about how consent should be a prerequisite to both states. Almost say that the pink-edged pregnancy leaflets never made the comparison. But Doctor Cartier is shaking her head like a cartographer faced with tricky terrain. She re-labels the land in her own language:
‘Severe dysplasia,’ she says. ‘Carcinoma in situ’.
Still, it is only when she says, ‘There is confusion as to where to draw the line between the two,’ that I realise I have been dropped behind enemy lines – that labelling alone will not be enough to reclaim the territory. I say nothing, but press myself into the couch till a protective lip of padding rises around me.
‘Dress,’ she says, when she has finished.
I slip behind her screen and dress curled in on myself as if the screen were no bigger than a beach towel. With my underwear on, I skim a hand over arms, legs, earlobes – a sad inventory of things still uncolonised that maybe belong just to me. Then I pull on the too-thin protection of my summer dress and wrap my cardigan round me tight.
*
At reception I write a cheque that would normally make me wince, feeling only numb.
‘I’ll give you the scenic route to the metro,’ says the receptionist, like I’m the sort of lady of leisure who can afford this place. ‘There’s a garden,’ she says. ‘You’ll see. It’s very pleasant.’
I follow her instructions unthinkingly, stupefied.
As I walk, I wonder how best to tell my husband about the operation to come. I imagine him moon-eyed, his jaw loosed as if the shock had come at him from the end a fist.
‘It’s the very earliest form,’ I’ll say. ‘Just one grade off pre-cancer.’ And I won’t say ‘cold-knife excision’. I won’t even say ‘operation’. I’ll call it a ‘surgical intervention’.
Then when I’m alone, I’ll call my sister. She found a lump last year, so I will spare her nothing. I will reclaim the violence as mine. All the slash. All the burn. But I’ll let her share in it.
‘What happens if they don’t eliminate the anomalies?’ she’ll want to know.
‘They’ll do another operation,’ I’ll say. ‘Then another biopsy, to check. And then another operation, if they need to. They’ll keep hacking away at me like so much salami, until the cells are obliterated.’
My kindly sister, sweet-natured mother of three, will pause. Then like a cold-blooded killer, she’ll say one more word: ‘Good.’
Sonya Moor is a French and British writer of short fiction. She previously published under the pen name P.V. Wolseley. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies, and recognised for awards such as the Fish Short Story Prize, Cinnamon Press Literature Award, Seán O’Faoláin International Short Story Competition and Bridport Short Story Prize.
To continue enjoying stories like this one and support our writers, please consider donating to Silver Apples Magazine.