Mixed emotions: an excerpt from Distortion
Copyright © Gautam Malkani, 2018
You wiped away the bloody discharge. Told her it weren’t her fault. That it had happened cos of your shaky hands.
When the discharge wouldn’t stop discharging, you weighed up foning NHS Direct. Or the after-hours GP. Ambulance, even? Be a few more years before you was old enough to drive.
(Later you’d learn never to mention the future like that.)
(The future brought up sad memories.)
(Better still, don’t even think about the future.)
(Who the hell puts 999 on speed-dial?)
You decided to give it one more shot. Resterilise your hands. Brand-new gauze pads. Fresh pair of latex gloves. Started cleaning from the centre of the wound and then worked your way out to the suburbs. Standard procedure, standard. Truth is, you were glad for the change. To be changing a dressing on her leg for a change.
After cleaning, don’t rub dry – just gently, pat it, gently. Avoid the sutures. Check if drainage or discharge has become darker or thicker. Remember to follow the safe disposal protocol for binning old dressings. Her brave face just a data visualisation of pain levels.
She asked you what was wrong. Why the bloody hell were you crying?
You told her, because I hurt you, Mama.
Couldn’t ever predict which part of the process would hurt her, tho. You’d think it’d just be the sting of the antiseptic or the surgical tape. Or maybe you was just crap at doing this – same way some kids was just shit at Maths? Wasn’t even any body hair anyway.
She never got angryfied with you for hurting her, tho. Or for any other carefulness fuck-ups. For bruising her veins. For looking away. For changing the subject. For suggesting a sedative. For contaminating her pillbox with those little candy love hearts. For offering all those reassurances that you didn’t really believe yourself. For getting all mashed up inside every time you tried being her rock.
One of the nurses had told you to call him if you ever had any problems and that. Didn’t never fone him, tho, cos you always had problems. And also cos you wanted to do this. Love and compassion and so on, not duty or obligation or some audit-style give-and-take vibe. Didn’t matter that government cutbacks that were designed to attack sick people had forced more and more kids into doing district nursing work. If your mum had got stung by a bee or burnt her finger on a milk pan, you’d want to make her better, standard. So size of the wound shouldn’t make no difference. (Plus you thought of all them splinters she’d removed from your fingers.) (Weren’t as tho she’d got traumatised by changing your nappies.) You wanted to show your mum that you being her carer was a good thing. Even put it on your CV even tho you didn’t need no CV. Even did a first-aid course so you could boss it and get a certificate. Even advance-schooled your technique by scoping out videos on YouTube. Didn’t need no district nurse doing shit for you. You just needed . . . You didn’t know what you needed.
Steadier hands, maybe.
Or stronger hands.
Truth is, you needed better hands.
Truth is, sometimes you told yourself that it wasn’t her, it was just her body you couldn’t be near. Then you told yourself it wasn’t her body – that you weren’t some toxic masculinity asshole who was afraid of her body – it was just her.
Truth is, I leave her crying in the bathroom and then hate myself for heading to uni.
Don’t matter that I’m late for lectures again. Back row seat but still way out in front of the rest of this class. Ain’t my fault that being Mama’s carer has been sweet for my career. Kept me off the streets, made me school up for my GCSEs, got me into this big boss uni. Today’s lecture about some bullshit I already taught myself – I bossed the whole reading list the last time she was rotting in hospital. My brain like a Tampax for textbooks and the side effects of her Tamoxifen tablets. Cos whatever it takes, okay? Whatever grades I needed to attain for her to carry on smiling and fighting and live-blogging parents’ evening. My positive exam results = her negative test results = forget fucking chemo, just intravenously administer my academic accomplishments. Well, good for me, yeh.
The lecturer up front starts giving it some serious Powerpoint action – we’re talking pie charts with all the trimmings. Some guy sat beside me starts highlighting the whole fucking everything – he should’a just printed the lecture handout on day-glo yellow paper. The auditorium radiators start randomly bleeding and sniffling –
– and so I message home to check that she’s okay.
Some girl to my left starts crying on the quiet.
And so I message home to check she’s okay.
After all, I ain’t in primary school no more: no one’s gonna confiscate my fones. Check my app for checking Mum’s oxygen levels. One-click replacement cylinders. Now an ad for pre-bereavement bereavement counselling. Story about a miracle cure. Twenty-four-hour flash sale on post-surgical lingerie. My fones hit me up with different ads depending on whether I’m signed on as Dillon or Dylan or Dhilan. On whether she’s dying or dead or fine. Different ads, different Facebook stories, Google results and YouTube videos, different solutions for dealing with different kinds of bodily fluid. You know how all the ads, stories and search results are custom-tailored according to your own individual search history and click history – your fone soaking up all your thought-stains? Well, trust me, you got no idea how proper fucked this can get.
One time when I was signed in as Dylan and googled with franticness the words “Female, Body, Unresponsive”, I got hit with ads and articles about erectile dysfunction. As for when I log on as Dhilan – well, that shit’s between me and Google. Don’t even ask what happens when I google what gift to get Mummy for Christmas. Or more like what gift not to get in case it’s once again her last-ever Christmas. Or her latest last- ever birthday. Or her last Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day. Got me a different gift and game plan for each different prognosis. Mum trusting Google and Facebook more than she trusts the doctors and specialists and experts. Me trusting Google more than I trust my mum. Now an ad for a memory foam bed wedge. A story about conjoined urns. Special offer on long-sleeved latex gloves. From outside the lecture hall, ambulance sirens sound like some maniac life- support machine. Accelerating then silent.
I tell myself don’t be a dick about things. Everybody’s got messed-up mummy issues. And don’t be no wuss about it, either. Don’t suddenly start listening to Coldplay. Next thing, my fone starts randomly swiping all on its own. With a quickness – like as if train carriages covered in ads are dashing across my home screen. Special offers on Kleenex, discounts on disinfectant, Horlicks, ear plugs, a hazard button and baby monitor, step-by-step instructions for cleaning radioactive secretions, silicone prosthetics that won’t harm the planet when they finally cremated, side effects, body fresh, nasal cannula, the chemical composition of the scent of her night sweats. I hide my fone from the girl sat beside me and swipe back to an article about mammary scar tissue. A manual for deep-tissue massaging. YouTube videos for teaching myself advanced paramedic driving skills. Hoping the girl beside me will somehow carjack my attention. But truth is she don’t even come close. Because my mummy is the most prettyful woman in the world. That’s right. My mummy is the most prettyful woman in the world. Cos I ain’t some bodily objectifising masculinity asshole. Cos I ain’t just meaning prettyful in terms of looks and Insta-pics, I mean the kind of prettyful that stays there even if they become sick. Kind of prettyful that perfumises the scent of their puke. Because my mummy is the most prettyful woman in the world. Just like that mantra I’d told myself each morning on the bus to school. My mummy is the most prettyful woman in the world. My mummy is the most prettyful woman in the world. My mummy – the woman who made my packed lunch this morning – the world’s most prettyful lady. We’re talking the best of the best of the best. And then a few years later, just like Daniel Day-Lewis at the Oscars or Roger fucking Federer, my mummy was still the best. Only, this time, with the sweet smell of her scalp where her hair should’a been. The mess of scars on her chest where her breasts used to be. The sweetshop stench of her regurgitated meals. The soaking-wet night sweats. That fine film of her hair whenever she re-entered remission, like the scalp of a newborn baby. Her howling like a baby, staring at her disfigured self in the dressing-table mirror that I kept on re-repairing for her. Screaming at the irradiated B-movie zombie alien. The mirror itself howling back. Louder and madder and more piercingly. Later, just smashing her own fone screen. Crying herself to sleep in the bed that she and me way-too-often shared. Me not leaving her side in case she woke up dead. Cuddling the safe zone above her tummy but beneath her scarring. The positions she collapsed into beside our non-slip bathtub. Her madly fluctuating body heat. The toxic medicine in and out of every orifice. Mopping it off the bathroom floor; the exact same squelching sounds all day, on the daily, still inside my brain. The chemo sweat on her fone brought to the boil by my hydrochloric tears. Me screaming at her in my own sleep like some silly, soap-opera drama queen: Please, Mummy, please don’t fucking leave.
*The above excerpt is a mashup of two sections from the novel.