Chapter 4 Birdy
BIRDY
Six months earlier
Nobody wants to be themselves anymore, everybody wants to be somebody else.
Including me.
I wish I could be her.
I lie on the cool metal bed wearing nothing except a flimsy hospital gown.
I am in a white room and I am alone. Again.
Like always. The fake-friendly nurse made me remove my jewelry when I arrived.
All of it. Taking off my rings made me feel even more naked and my fingers feel too light without them.
All of me feels weightless in this moment, untethered to a reality that is too loud, and in my imagination I float up to the ceiling and stare down at myself.
I do not look like me. Or her. My long black hair—it wasn’t always this color—looks untamed and wild, having been released from the braids I normally wear.
My skin looks too pale, having been starved of sunlight for too long.
The only familiar things about me are the tattoos stretching from the top of my right arm to my wrist. I trace the outline of the swallow on my right hand with my fingertips as though stroking a pet.
Without my rings, my skinny fingers and short, neat nails remind me of my mother’s hands instead, and for a moment I wish she was here with me.
I’m forty years old. My mother has been dead for most of my life, and yet I still miss her every day.
Selfish fucking bitch.
I tell myself that it isn’t really her that I miss.
It’s the idea of her. The concept of unconditional love.
Fuck her for abandoning me the way she did.
Some relationships are harder than others but sometimes we use the word complicated to describe something that is surprisingly simple.
The parent is always the parent, the child is always the child.
Time and age shouldn’t bend those rules, because things can get broken when they do.
The sense of loss I still feel seems illogical—you can’t lose something you never had—and there wasn’t enough love to go around when I was a little girl.
Besides, what happened was a lifetime ago—another life, another time, another version of me—and our memories can make liars of us all.
She’d hate my tattoos. She’d hate what I’ve done with my life.
I often wonder, if she were still alive, whether my mother might hate me.
I loved her so much it still hurts.
There is a clock on the wall and it ticks loudly, reminding me that my appointment was meant to start an hour ago.
I fucking hate hospitals. The only reason I’d ever set foot in one is if I was presented with symptoms and facts suggesting I might die if I didn’t.
The thought fuels my fear, which soon translates into anger, an emotion I am fluent in.
First, they kept me waiting in the aptly named waiting room, now again here in this white-walled room.
I hate it when people behave as though their time is more important than mine.
As though I have all the bloody time in the world.
When maybe I don’t.
I want to cry but I won’t.
I want to leave but I can’t.
I need to know what’s wrong with me because I know that something is.
So I stay. And the clock ticks my time away. And I wait a while longer.
The fake-friendly nurse comes back into the room and smiles.
She’s pretty and young and inexplicably cheerful and I do not like her.
Her voice is too high pitched and she sounds like a fucking mouse.
I tell my face to smile back anyway, but I am too terrified to function normally so it doesn’t listen.
I can’t do hospitals. I can’t do this. I have an overwhelming urge to get up and get the fuck out of here—
“So sorry for the delay,” she squeaks.
“Oh, no problem at all. I know how busy you must be.”
You insincere bitch.
The sound of my own voice out loud—instead of the one I am more familiar with inside my head—surprises me.
I sound like the polite and friendly person everyone thinks I am.
The person they expect me to be. I suppose we’re all actors on the stage of our own lives, some of us are just better at it than others.
I can smell the cigarettes on the nurse’s breath.
She’s probably just been on an elongated smoking break, and I hate her for that too.
I’d kill for a smoke right now even though I gave up years ago.
She starts wrapping a contraption around my arm to take my blood pressure and I can feel it rising already. Her fingers touch my skin and I recoil.
“Sorry. Cold hands, warm heart,” she chirps.
That wasn’t why I flinched. I don’t like to be touched. By anyone.
I can’t remember the last time someone did, and the thought makes me shrink inside myself a little bit further.
“Trust me, this won’t hurt a bit,” the nurse lies, smiling with all her teeth.
What a warmhearted bitch.
I wasn’t always the person I am now. A life of crime has turned me into someone else.
I suspect my heart is cold, and hard, and smaller than it used to be, and I don’t trust anyone.
When you have seen firsthand what people are really capable of doing to each other, the way I have, it is only logical to never let anyone ever get too close.
Not a lot of people could do what I do for a living.
Or see what I have seen. Or feel what I have felt.
My job is easier when I feel nothing at all.
Self-preservation meant flicking off my feelings the way you might flick off a light, and I learned to see in the dark.
There are things I have done because of my job that still keep me awake at night, but I’m good at what I do.
Sometimes I think it might be the only thing I am good at.
“Try not to look so worried,” the nurse says, and I imagine taking the pencil from her pocket and stabbing it in her eyeball.
I wish she’d stop talking and get on with it.
“The MRI machine looks and sounds scarier than it is,” she adds, pushing buttons on the enormous contraption I will shortly be inside.
I am not used to people speaking to me as though I were a child. Nobody ever has. Even when I was a child. Before she died my mother often said that I was born old.
I wonder if that means I might die young?
Stop it.
Is forty considered young?
Isn’t it?
I try to shake the negative thoughts from my mind, but they linger and join all the others. Fear can kill a person far faster than anything real so I try to ignore it.
If only I’d ignored the damn letter from my GP inviting me for a routine health check when I turned forty, I’d still be none the wiser and none of this would be happening.
That’s a lie. I knew I was ill, but I thought it was just my body reacting to grief.
Grief is the Grim Reaper of hope and without hope we are nothing.
Blood tests resulted in more blood tests.
A CT scan followed. Then there was the call from the doctor, which I have replayed in my mind so many times since.
“Is this a convenient time to talk?” she asked a few weeks ago.
The answer was no, but it was never going to be yes, so I told her to tell me.
“I’m afraid the CT scan revealed some sinister-looking shadows,” she said, and then there was a pause.
I didn’t know what to say so I said nothing.
Life has taught me that the whole world is full of sinister-looking shadows and people are almost always responsible for causing them.
I had sinister-looking shadows beneath my eyes as a result of lack of sleep.
I thought it might not be as bad as it sounded—
“We’re putting you on the cancer pathway,” she added, interrupting my thoughts.
That didn’t sound good.
“We’ll need to do some more tests. An MRI and some biopsies.”
That didn’t sound good either.
Then she put me on a waiting list, and the waiting began to find out how bad the bad thing might be.
Thinking about the last few months of appointments and anxiety and endless waiting makes my heart beat faster.
It feels like someone is pushing down on my chest and I can’t remember how to breathe.
I try to get a grip, but my fingers have balled themselves into fists and are clinging to the bottom of my hospital gown.
I have an overwhelming urge to get off the bed and run right out of here.
But then I still won’t know what is wrong with me.
Or if I can be fixed.
How much longer is this going to take?
“We just need to go through a few more questions before we start,” the nurse says as though reading my mind. She stares down at me and then at the clipboard in her hand. “Can you tell me your full name again?” she asks.
“Olivia Bird.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“Thank you, but I didn’t choose it.”
She pulls a face that suggests I said something wrong, and I want to say something right to cancel it out. To try to make her like me. I could tell her that my friends call me Birdy but that would be a lie. I don’t have any friends.
“Any chance you could be pregnant?” she asks.
Not unless it’s an immaculate conception.
“No.”
“And you’ve chosen not to have a sedative, is that right?
” I nod. “Just to remind you that if you change your mind once you’re inside the machine—people often do—we can still sedate you.
But you won’t be able to drive yourself home, and you’ll need someone to stay with you and monitor you for twenty-four hours. ”
“I’m fine without. Thank you.”
I would very much like a sedative, but I don’t have anyone who could take me home and stay with me. Nobody even knows that I am here. My scooter is parked outside.
“Okey doke, we’re all set. Ready?” the nurse asks. She touches my shoulder and I know she is just trying to be kind, but I flinch again.
“Lie back and try to relax. Think of it as a day off work. What do you do?”
None of your fucking business.
“Admin mostly,” I tell her. It’s not a complete lie.
She looks sufficiently bored by my answer and I’m glad. I never tell people what I do for a living. Aside from the obvious reasons, I’m not sure why. I guess, if people know what I do it makes them look at me differently, and I’d rather they didn’t look at me at all.
“I just need to double-check that you have removed all your jewelry?” the nurse asks before pressing the button that will slide me inside a giant magnet.
I nod again, but she looks down at my hands as though I might be lying, checking for a wedding ring I might have forgotten to take off.
There’s no need. That’s the only finger I never wear a ring on.
“I’m going to leave the room now, but there is an intercom and a camera inside the scanner, so I’ll be able to see you and talk to you at all times.”
Just when I thought things couldn’t get any bloody worse.
I wonder how many times she says this. I wonder how many patients have already been through this today, and whether she remembers any of them once her shift is over.
People who pretend to care are even worse than those who don’t.
It’s like she’s just reeling off a script she’s had to repeat a thousand times before.
“Once you’re inside it’s going to feel a little cozy,” she says, even though nothing about this situation feels cozy to me. “And it’s going to get a bit loud, so I’m just going to pop these earplugs in for you.”
“Thank you.”
Fuck you and all who sail in you.
The nurse presses a button and the motorized metal bed I am lying on starts to move backward. The MRI machine swallows me headfirst until I am deep inside it, and she was right, it is loud. My ringless fingers ball into fists again, and I hold my breath while the machine scans my body.
“You’re doing really well, Olivia,” says the voice on the intercom. “You okay in there?”
No.
“Yes,” I lie.
“Good. Only twenty minutes to go.”
The roar of magnets flying around me at tremendous speed is too loud in my ears.
The space is too small, like a coffin, so I keep my eyes shut.
I imagine being by the sea, in the place where I was happiest as a child—Hope Falls—and I tell myself that it is the roar of waves crashing on the rocks around the pretty little harbor that I can hear.
Not a man-made machine that will predict my fate and future.
Afterward, I wait in a different waiting room.
The hospital seems to have a lot of them.
I stare at the other patients and wonder why they are here and what is wrong with them, as though you can tell just by looking at someone whether they are seriously ill.
Trust me, you can’t. I try to see myself through their eyes: my long dark hair now restrained in an elaborate plaited bun, my tortoiseshell glasses, the tweed jacket, white shirt, skinny jeans, polished laced shoes.
My rings are back on my fingers, and my polite smile is fixed on my face.
We all choose a costume to wear every time we open the wardrobe, and this is my armor.
I feel vulnerable without it. My tattoos are hidden, except for the swallow, and I look like me again. Even if I don’t feel like myself.
The doctor appears, calls my name, and I follow her to a private consulting room.
She invites me to take a seat and I do. She sits behind a desk and her face gives me the diagnosis before her words do, but it is still a shock when they confirm it.
Turns out those shadows on the previous scan didn’t just look sinister, they are.
“I’m afraid there are multiple tumors growing inside your body…
” she says, and the room seems to get smaller, colder, darker.
I hear the sound of waves inside my head again, so loud that they drown out a lot of what the doctor is saying.
I see her lips moving but I don’t hear another word.
Can’t. Won’t. It’s as though the sea is calling me home and that is all that matters.
“How long do I have?” I ask, interrupting her. Everything is suddenly silent, as though the room itself is holding its breath.
“It’s hard to say.”
“Then give me your best guess.”
Her eyes fill with sympathy. “Not long.”
It feels as though someone just shook the Etch A Sketch of my life; one minute it was there, now it’s gone.
She talks about options and opportunities but none of them are really that.
She talks about choices as though I still have any.
Then she tells me she is sorry, and I wonder why and what for. I don’t cry.
Fuck that.
And fuck her.
And fuck this life because it’s been out to get me from the start.
I don’t want to waste whatever time I have left feeling sorry for myself.
Sometimes you just have to accept the shitty hand life dealt you and play to win anyway.
There are things I need to do before it is too late.