Before After was written during a period of deep contemplation about relationships, parents, marriage and the volatile nature of Time. Can time be reversed? Can the story be changed?
Before After
It was dark inside the tank. Anita closed her eyes and opened them again quickly, hoping for a glint of light, but there was just the dark. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eye sockets, waiting for the silver foetus to appear. When she digs deep enough she can always find it. Sometimes there are two joined together, like Siamese twins. “An hour and a half should be long enough,” Merisel told her.“ What if I can’t stand it?” Anita had always been afraid of the dark. “Don’t worry; you can press the alarm button, but you won’t need it.” Merisel gave her a reassuring hug.Trust. That’s what Anita was doing. Learning to trust.
“It’ll be worth it.” Merisel closed the door and with a clank, her radiant smile hovering in the dark long after she’d gone. Anita shivered and lay back, drawing warm water round her bony shoulders. She pictured Mr Bloom, sitting nice and safe behind his clinical desk .“We think we can contain it for you,” he said, as though rehearsing lines to an empty chair. He gave it a fancy name. Carcinoma-in-situ which made it sound mysterious, inviting – like a treat.
“Carcinoma in what?” Anita asked.
“Car-cin-oma in sit-u,’ he articulated, as if that would explain everything. “Oh,” she said, nodding. Whatever it meant it still began with the letter C. “I’m afraid you won’t be able to have children,” he added, looking down, rustling papers. That bit didn’t worry Anita. She couldn’t think of one good reason why she’d ever want children.
‘Thank you,’ she said, although why she thanked him, she didn’t know. “Operation on the 30th alright?” He hadn’t looked up, but when she didn’t respond, he peered at her briefly over the top of his half moon glasses and scribbled on his notepad. “Sooner the better,” he said, his lips edging towards a smile. Merisel nodded and smiled back, but his eyes had already dropped back to the papers on his desk. She waited a moment, but the appointment was clearly at an end.
“Yes. Thank you,” she said again as she left the room. Her heels tapped down the corridor to the rhythm of Can-cer; Can-cer. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.
Two weeks earlier, Mr. Bloom had welcomed her into the examination room. His freshly-cut hair lay against his head like an executioner’s cap. He asked her to get up onto the plastic-covered couch and to put her feet in the shiny stirrups, “for the Colcoscopy.” He gave her a lipless smile, revealing two disproportionately large front teeth. Colcoscopy. The strange word made her think of shells. She dreamed up her own definition. Colcoscopy: The Art of Collecting Shells from the Edge of a Cliff. She smiled at him, as she did at the dentist, the doctor and the customers at the bank where she worked. Smiling was her best defence. No-one questioned a smile. People thought ‘How nice!’ and left you alone – didn’t ask you things.
Two nurses hovered around Mr. Bloom, fetching instruments, clattering in the echoing room. They glanced at one another now and then, as though they shared a secret, which perhaps they did. Anita imagined she was a prisoner on the rack; Mr. Bloom a cardinal in the Spanish inquisition. It was all she could do to stop herself from shouting ‘I confess!’ Laughter fizzed, and died on her lips. She often made jokes when she was nervous. On the inside she felt small and dull, the way she used to when her mother told her she was a stupid, clumsy, fit-for-nothing, and later, David too.
“Alright?” Mr Bloom was poised above her, ready to begin. No, she wasn’t ‘alright,’ but what difference would that make? She nodded and smiled and parted her knees. Her vaginal muscles contracted at the thrust of the cold steel instrument. “Try and relax,” one of the nurses said, squeezing her hand as if it were a lump of play-dough. Anita smiled benignly at the ceiling and counted shells.
She felt exposed lying there in the tank, confined, helpless, unable to see, no-one to smile at, just her invisible body and her own thoughts for company. That was the whole point of a flotation tank, Merisel said. No distractions. She flicked beads of water. They hit the tin-can walls like grains of gravel on a window.
At first she’d enjoyed the sensation of buoyancy in the warm, saline water – fancied herself in the Holy Land, floating on the Dead Sea. Now little threads of anxiety were weaving their way through her guts. She sent her breath down into the soles of her feet, as Merisel had taught her to do: held it for a count of ten and whooshed it back up through the top of her head, like a steam engine. Breathe, hold, whoosh… breathe… hold… whoosh… She continued until her head started spinning and the pictures began, like clips from familiar films; shots of her past.
David first; David, as he was when she met him: wild coppery hair, shabby green corduroy jacket, leather elbow patches. After her mother had died she’d gone along to join the local choir to make friends, but mostly to sing. She used to love singing. Once she’d sung a solo in the Christmas concert at school. Her mother sat in the front row with her arms tightly folded. Everyone else clapped. Later, she’d mocked her – told her she had a voice like a corncrake. ‘Just like your father,’ her lips thin and tight, curling round her teeth like a cracked leather whip. Anita stopped going to choir, took up knitting and stayed in every evening: knit one, purl one, two, three, five, a hundred… rainbow scarves, hats with pom-poms, babies’ shawls…It was curiously comforting, the routine and the click, click clicking of it all. The needles sang like crickets on a summer’s night: Anita Armitage can’t sing. She’ll never be good at anything.
“I’ve got a voice like a corncrake,” she giggled nervously at David, although she’d often wondered what a corncrake really sounded like. Perhaps it wasn’t so dreadful after all. He asked her to sing up and down a scale or two. As she sang, she watched him examining her, his owl-grey eyes magnified by thick horn-rimmed spectacles.
“Voice is a bit weak” he said in his Welsh-chapel accent. “But you can join the altos, if you like”
Oh, she more than liked. It was love at first sight for her. Her father had worn glasses with thick lenses. After he’d left, she’d found a pair down the back of the sofa and kept them under her mattress. She used to take them out at night, put them on, and stumble around the room in a blur of borrowed adulthood, her father’s face concussed by the passage of time.
Anita quickened her breathing as Merisel had taught her to do when she wanted to move away from a memory. David faded and another face loomed, too close to the camera, distorted – determined to be seen. Her mother. Anita moaned and slid her head under the water to escape the elongated eyes. Eyes of an alien, like those in a Sci-fi film she’d once seen with David. She’d always gone with him to see his films, but he never went to see hers.
“Why would I want to waste my time on that puerile rubbish?” he’d say, pooh-poohing Anita’s tastes and he’d look at her pityingly, eyes bulging through the thick glass, “At least my films are mentally stimulating,” adding, “yours just turn round on the same boring old subjects.”
Meaning, Anita thought: Love, Feelings, Passion – that which makes life bearable: Everything that she had never experienced – a dream of life on a silver screen. She used to believe he had feelings buried somewhere inside him – that perhaps the Snow Queen had put a splinter of ice in his eyes, like she had with Kay, and that she, with her boundless love would be the one to melt it. In truth he was simply cold. Centuries of slate-mining had hardened the family genes. Expressing romantic feelings was to David a sign of weakness. He approached music as if it were a mathematical problem to be solved and love like convenience food. Sex was a silent, unvaried affair done in the dark two or three times a week with him always on top. He never once asked her if she’d come – which she hadn’t – not ever. He was her first, her only lover. As long as he was alright, that was what mattered. For once he agreed with her, which was marginally better than nothing at all.
“You can’t change someone else. You can only change yourself,” Merisel told her. It was true. She’d always thought everything was her fault, so it made sense – changing herself. Every morning she was to go to the mirror, look deeply into her own eyes and say, “I, Anita, am a beautiful, fulfilled, sensual woman.” It was her special mantra. Only, so far, she’d been diverted by her spots, the tiny red veins in the whites of her eyes and the fine wrinkles, caused by too much smiling, fanning out from the edges like public footpaths on a rambler’s map. The other day she’d discovered a white hair in one of her eyebrows.
“That’s just the ‘made-up you’ trying to sabotage the ‘real you’,” Merisel said. “Start by noticing the positive things.” She’d tried, but she couldn’t find any. So she plucked the stray white hairs from her eyebrows, squeezed her spots and bought an anti-ageing cream that promised miracles.
Her mother’s face wouldn’t go away. “You’re as plain as a pikestaff!” sneered the face. “You’ll never make anyone happy,”
Anita came up out of the water, breathing in hard little gasps. The atmosphere inside the tank was heavy, oppressive. She fancied she saw faces leering at her – like the gargoyles on the church near the bank. She poked out her tongue, in case they might be real, and not just in her head. Taking a big breath she sank back under the water, comforted by the dull churning of the electric pump.
She was an only child. Her father disappeared when she was six. She never found out why. After he went, her mother kept on saying, “Good riddance to bad rubbish!” Glass in one hand, cigarette in another, she’d lean down to Anita’s height, adding “- and he was really bad rubbish.” She puffed up the word ‘really’ like a pantomime witch.’
“Why was he really bad, mummy?” Anita would ask, naively copying her mother’s tone. She was sure it was then that the hitting started.
“If you tell anyone you’ll just get more.” Her mother wore a fake diamond ring, with sharp little edges. Anita’s whole attention went into avoiding contact with it. Once, she’d landed up in hospital with a thin and bloody gash across her forehead. “Playing silly buggers with the scissors,” her mother told the doctor, with the voice she reserved for men, running her hands through her bottle-copper hair, her smile an advert for toothpaste – only there was no ‘ring of confidence’ about her teeth. They were stained yellow and her breath smelt of sour smoke and formaldehyde: the scent of a poisoned liver.
Anita came up again gasping for air. She put a hand to her forehead, tracing a little ridge that would always be there. Her reminder. She was afraid of her mother, even now she was dead. Panic rose, a bad phoenix from the past – the smile, the mouth, the smell moving closer, swallowing her up. She went to press the alarm button, but the face popped, like a bubble, and there was Mr Bloom-the-Consultant standing over her.
“Well, now,” he said. He looked like a Llama. His teeth really were awfully big. Anita shook her head. Her hair slapped the water and sparks, like fireflies, shot around her, making pin-pricks in the dark. I’m beginning to feel more like Alice by the minute, she thought. Without the prop of sight, her reality was changing. Was she actually in the scene, or was she simply looking at it, remembering?
“Well now.” Mr. Bloom persisted in being a llama. She could see the hairs undulating in his cavernous nostrils, like waterweeds. He studied her notes.
“We’ve got most of it,” he said. “Quite a neat little job, really. Anita waited… ‘And?’ She wanted to say, but she was too woozy.
“A spot of radiotherapy won’t go amiss.” He stood up straight, dropped her notes into the hands of a sanguine Asian student. “Yes. That should do the trick,” he said.She could have sworn he snorted as he shot out of the curtains, leaving her with questions piling up in the pit of her throat.
Anita sighed, gathered her breath and hummed a long low note. She’d learnt to imitate the sounds of whale-song. Merisel told her it was the fastest way to integrate your lower self with your higher self. Her voice spun around the intimate space like a humming-top. She was pleased with the tone, deciding she sounded more like a whale than a whale did. Not that she’d ever heard a live one.
She was out on the sticky tarmac roof at hers and David’s first flat. Six floors up and no lift. Sunbathing. “You’ll get cancer,” David said, his head emerging through the trap door, his voice diminished to parochial Welsh. “Your skin’s too fair.” He said it as if she were to blame for being born with fair skin. “There! What did I tell you?” he’d have said triumphantly, if he’d known about the cancer. He always had to be right. “But it’s not skin cancer,” she’d have replied, happy, if only to prove him wrong.
“Do you smoke Mrs Armitage?’ Mr Bloom had asked. “It’s Miss actually, and – no I don’t.’
After David left, she’d reverted to her own name. She wanted nothing to remain of him. Nothing.
“Wart virus,” Mr Bloom said. Anita looked blank. She’d nodded anyway.
Later, Merisel spelled it out where Mr. Bloom had failed. “It’s one of the major causes.” Anita still didn’t understand, but when Merisel added, “Nuns don’t get it,” she understood. Sexually transmitted; warts on his prick. Dirty bastard! Cancer of the cervix. Neck-of-the-womb. Sounds like a diction exercise, she thought, and tried saying, neck-of-the-womb, out loud to the dark: neck-of-the-womb, neck-of-the-womb, as fast as she could, her lips the shape of a kiss on the word ‘womb.’ She moved her hands down through the water to between her legs, parted the soft flesh and entered herself with two fingers, feeling for scars, reaching up towards the severed neck and the headless space beyond. Of course she couldn’t get that far. It was a long way up. She thought of David: Seven years of passionless pumping, in and out, chafing her, pasting his viral gift around the walls of her secret passage.
Mr. Bloom had left her ovaries. Where do the eggs go? What happens to them now? She wanted to ask, but she hadn’t dared. Anita withdrew her fingers, felt the muscles contracting – wondered if she’d ever have sex again. It had all been so invasive. She felt for the neat little scar like a nylon zip, hidden now by the new growth of pubic hair. Inside, she thought, I’m a mass of pulpy matter, like Morello cherries that have been left to boil too long. Dark. Red. Dangerous.
She wondered how long she’d been in the tank. All sense of time had gone. It was like that in space she’d heard. It must be like that for a foetus in the womb – floating, dreaming, no sense of past or future, only the unmeasured moment, the now. What if I’m still in the womb, dreaming my life? She thought. What if it hasn’t even begun yet? What if I’m dead?
David reappeared.
“I’m leaving.” Cold. Hard.
“Oh and with whom?” she’d asked, wanting to add, “who’s prepared to live in the fridge with you?” But she hadn’t. She’d played the part he expected of her. Gave him the satisfaction of crying, screaming, begging, making an idiot, a fool of herself; acting out the role that had waited for her in the wings of their drama. She remembered now, before she was six – this was how her mother had been, screaming at her father. She was behaving just like her mother. Suddenly she was glad it was over, the self-blame, the pretence, trying to please David. Now she could try to find out who she really was – for she couldn’t bear to be her mother. That wasn’t an option. She would try to re-call herself from a great distance, from before the reason why her father left had begun, before the crying and the hitting, and the hating – back to before, not after. She was tired of after. She wanted to know how to begin again. Oh let me live in the Before, she wailed in her sleepless bed the night David left, pleading with a God she’d never thought about until then. Please, God! Please!
Not long, months only after David left, the pattern of her periods began to disintegrate. Great clots, like fresh liver, fell out of her. She was alone, afraid. Not that anyone would have guessed. Her smile was so natural, warm, and genuine, that everyone who met her believed she owned the secret to inner peace. Of course, she knew what it was. Her mother had died of it. Cancer ran in families. Well, didn’t it? Or was it just the guilt? She filled the tank with her tears: big, crocodile tears, floating higher and still higher….
“Rebirthing is the thing for you,” Merisel announced.
“What on earth’s that?” She had been beating a cushion, frustrated at her inability to express anger over her mother, David, or herself. Her heart wasn’t in it. She’d convinced herself she deserved cancer, that it was some kind of punishment. For what, she couldn’t say. “Most of the time I just feel guilty,” she told Merisel, unable to justify it in concrete terms. Yet there was a dark shape, glimpsed sometimes, lurking just beyond the edges of consciousness. If she could only catch hold of it – see what it looked like.
Together they’d explored so many therapies and techniques: Aromatherapy, Regression-therapy, Hypnotherapy, Yoga, Reiki, Rolfing, not to mention the books, tapes and lectures – all promising the ultimate answer to eternal well-being on every possible level. Now it was to be the turn of Rebirthing.
“It’s simply about using the breath,” said Merisel: “Conscious Connected Breathing.” She stressed each syllable with great reverence. Rebirthing was one of her personal favourites. “Some people even remember their own birth.”
Anita looked incredulous.
“It’s all locked away in our cells. We need only find the key and use it to recall – everything.” Merisel’s expressive hands drew a circle in front of her that Anita supposed represented the entire universe.
The water had reached the top of the tank. Anita was aware of a sense of suspension, like being in space, weightless. She fancied she was sliding along the Milky Way on a carpet of tiny, budding flowers that were her cells beginning to blossom, opening up their secrets to her. Not long now and she’d be in the Before. Then she’d know everything.….
Sometimes, during re-birthing sessions, she’d seen herself moving along passageways, passing doors she didn’t dare open. Preferring the dreamless comfort of the baby at its mother’s breast, she’d turn and nestle up to Merisel, drifting into sleep, the scent of patchouli in her nostrils.
Soon after the operation, the radiotherapy sessions began. Every day for two weeks. ‘Zapping stray cells,’ Mr. Bloom called it. Anita thought of a nuclear weapon blindly doing its job at the flick of a switch, blasting everything in its sphere, incapable of distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad.’ Nuclear. New-clear. Such a misnomer, she thought. She changed the word, reversing the ‘n’ and the ‘u,’ so it became ‘Unclear,’ which was how she felt.
The sessions drained her. She felt herself shrivelling up. After the operation, she’d received an oversized Get-Well-Soon card from the bank, signed by all of them. There was a crude cartoon on the front of a blonde bombshell with enormous breasts sitting up in bed surrounded by eager young medical students – stethoscopes a-quiver. The caption inside read, ‘Getting well looked after!’ Anita was neither blonde, nor a bombshell, and her breasts were more the size of lemons. Once the duty visits had stopped, she’d put the card away in a drawer. They never knew what to say, or do – any of them. Cancer frightened them. With David gone, there was no-one. He’d been her whole life. Her friends had been his friends, and, of course they’d gone, along with him: the lover’s of Bach and Byrd and Thomas Tallis – as far away from this century as possible.
She began to think of her father. He must be out there somewhere – but where?
It was at the beginning of Anita’s second week at the clinic that she’d first seen her – this radiant, calm, beautiful woman, her russet hair dipping and swirling about her like a vibrant jungle creature, misplaced in this desert of pale, drawn creatures. She sat across from Anita holding the hand of a thin, nervous woman, soothing her with delicate bird-like strokes, whispering to her in bursts of breathy sound, part sung, part spoken. Fascinated, Anita couldn’t stop staring. She should have felt embarrassed, as it was definitely out of her comfort zone, but she wasn’t. She was transfixed.
The radiant woman turned and smiled,“Hello. I’m Merisel,” she said. Anita blushed. “And you must be Anita.” The blush halted in its tracks. “How -?” “Because I knew you’d be here”, Merisel stated, as though it were perfectly normal to know things before they happened. Anita stared at this woman who seemed to know her. “Time doesn’t really go in a straight line, you know.” Merisel’s laugh drifted in the atmosphere like fine silver powder.
And so it began – the slow return upwards from the bottom of her lake of fear.
“Dis-ease is an outer reflection of one’s inner state.” Merisel said, as she drifted slowly down Anita’s back with her geranium-drenched fingers. It was revolutionary stuff for Anita. Dis-ease. She’d never thought of it like that. But of course, it began to make sense. “If you want to be well – and I mean truly well – you must learn to take responsibility for your own life.”
That first day, Anita got through a box of Merisel’s discreetly placed pink tissues. In thirty three years, Anita had never really questioned her life, its purpose; what part she played in any sense other than simply existing and trying to please others. For the sake of survival she’d learnt to hide herself away from her mother, and later, out of habit, from herself too. She’d drifted from one day to another, accepting generalised opinions, never daring to form any of her own. She’d worked in the bank, taken her annual holidays, lived in her hothouse marriage, until the day David came home and announced he was leaving. Only then did the structure of her carefully contrived world begin to collapse. Without David to hide behind, she was forced to re-evaluate. She began to think about her father, and had just made the first tentative steps towards tracing him when the cancer came along.
Her mother’s cancer was diagnosed far too late for treatment. Anita had taken time out to be with her, wanting to help, to make it better, hoping for some closeness in tribulation, yet receiving nothing but the abuse to which she’d grown accustomed. When her mother died – hours only after being admitted to the hospice – Anita ran down the street, crying for joy. Then the guilt kicked in. How dare she be happy that her mother was dead? Surely that wasn’t natural, was it?
After the funeral, she started having a recurring dream. She dreamt she was flying over cobalt-coloured cypress trees. Every night she woke, unable to move. She would lie there in a panic waiting to be returned to herself. Stress, the doctor put it down to, signing a prescription for Prozac. Everything dulled down, turned to greys or dun brown. She stopped flying, joined the choir and married David.
Anita was sinking into the Milky Way, down through the flowers that were now gliding above her like a tight white flock of birds. Intense aureoles of non-reflecting light hung in the black sky, like bubbles of crushed ice. She was certain she saw Merisel dressed in a robe of shimmering gold, poised on the surface of a bubble. But when she reached out, the figure disappeared, merging into the light-speckled sky, leaving nothing behind. Not a trace. As if she had never been.
She was propelled upwards at great speed and deposited face down, suspended high above the budding flowers that stretched beneath her. Watching the flowers begin to blossom, she felt no fear, only a sense of curiosity, of anticipation. There were billions of them, giant bleached poppies, opening up their petals, lining up in ever diminishing rows like carefully cultivated crops. Once the papery petals were fully open, Anita could see into the heart of each flower. She saw the history of her world mapped out in tiny islands of time, each one complete in itself and yet joined together to make one vast, pulsating image; a restless picture of swirling blues, flashes of light, of cool water trickling – of imagined forms glimpsed, dancing away into mercurial mists – essences of memory – not so much seen as experienced. It was an abstract vision of pure energy, the majesty of which words can only suggest; a pale parody of personal exposure, a vision alive only in the limitless space before time began…Anita knew she was looking at the core of her self – a self far richer than the lifeless image in the mirror, the shabby, shallow covering she had, until now, assumed was the sum total of her being.
The vision below rippled in time to the rhythm of her thoughts. Individual flowers pushed up towards her, extending their translucent petals – inviting her to step inside, beckoning, like rival Soho touts. ‘This one! Try this one! You’ll like it in here!’ She thought of her father, and as she did so, a single flower pressed upwards, above the others, expanding, reaching for her, urging her to enter. She drifted down towards it, moving inside the sticky mouth, its membranous petals closing after her. It was dark inside; completely dark. Anita closed her eyes and opened them again quickly to see if she could catch a glint of light, but there was only the dark…
“Well now,” a voice said. Anita opened her eyes. Mr Bloom was standing over her. He looked like a Llama and his teeth were awfully big. She tried to speak, but… hadn’t this all happened before? She closed her eyes, looking for the heart of the poppy. Stars, flowers, figures, swirling lights, voices, jumbled behind her eyes like washing in a spin dryer. Slowly everything settled, until there was nothing left but a pulsing dark red. She opened her eyes again – just a crack. There was a man sitting in the plastic maroon arm-chair next to her bed, a thin, middle-aged man, reading a book, wearing glasses with thick lenses.
“Daddy?” she whispered.
The man quickly put his book down and looked up at her.
“Yes?”