When you leave the hospital, the air is metallic in your mouth; on your tongue you can taste the car exhaust, the cigarette smoke, the stale rubbish rotting away in industrial sized bins. You, yourself, feel like a motor engine with cogs and gears whirring inside of you and some turn in the wrong direction with no way to fix them. The doctor talked to you as if you owned a car. There’s your problem, he said. Only one works.
Once, years ago, you saw the skeleton of the Elephant man in a museum around here and where you expected to see smooth bone you saw what looked like jagged coral on the mandible and the femur and the ulna. Your boyfriend sat down, half watching a grainy film about keyhole surgery, half listening when you told him to come and look. Look at this, you said; you wanted him to see the fifteen inch metal pole that was used as a catheter and you wanted to laugh as he, like everyone else, imagined it getting inserted into the end of their own penis.
The thought of a penis makes you scrunch up your eyes. Reproductive organs and eggs and fallopian tubes and wombs and lining and ovaries and only one works.
Over the road, as you walk past the Post Office collection point, a small boy crawls along the floor outside the underground station. You watch as his mother, phone lodged underneath her chin, stumbles frantically after him with her arms stretched outwards and her fingers just about managing to hook him from the armpits. As if flying, he is in the air, feet flailing five inches above the ground. He enjoys the feeling of hovering. When you were small, your father would put your small body in a blanket and gather up the corners in his fist. You would be in darkness for a second, making a peephole for yourself, the rough cotton smothering your skin and swaddling you like you remember as a baby. In the blanket, he would pick you up, and swing you around and you feel weightless, flying past the light wooden cupboards in the kitchen and narrowly avoiding the flat stool that rested against the ‘breakfast bar’. Your heart would feel like it was being tickled on the inside, you know now that what you felt was adrenaline and it was the same adrenaline that you felt when you found you were swinging too high and you couldn’t get back quick enough to the ground.
It is only through a younger memory that you can remember an older one; like you remember remembering.
Do you want children? He had asked you.
You thought of your mother. You thought of lying on her chest in the morning after crawling in from your own bedroom. She was warm, her nightdress a soft cotton. Her heart beat was slow, peaceful, timely. Her small eyes scrunched up in the daylight after a heavy night’s sleep, and you would often wonder how she could recognise you so early in the morning. She held you tight to her chest, and you drifted away again. When she got dressed, she would hoist on her underwear as if strapping on a parachute. Deep, straight veins of pink skin from the rubbing of her bra strap developed after a few hours; she would constantly adjust it. She told you that before you were born, her breasts had been much smaller. Your first bra fitting was with a woman who felt too handsy and gave you something you didn’t want. Young ladies wear cotton t-shirt bras, she had said, but you wanted one with a strap that would rub just like your mother’s. Somehow it signified to you what being a woman was like. Opposite the doctor you realised this was not the case.
On the way down the steps to the underground, you are met with a disgruntled rumbling of a train.
CHESHAM (Metropolitan line) 1 min.
Your oyster card does not have enough money to board. By adding five pounds you have missed your train. You feel the inside of your handbag, the photocopies. Dr Mann had printed off six sheets on a black and white printer for you; they were detailed, with diagrams and flowcharts and the first one he had handed to you was a quiz; get mostly As and you should freeze your eggs now.
Now, the platform is rumbling with the sound of two trains arriving at the same time. The breaks hiss and screech, and you watch as the doors open simultaneously, a familiar jingle as they do.
EDGWARE ROAD via VICTORIA (Circle) 3 min.
This is not your train. The doors jam shut, lock themselves. You breathe. You hate to spend time down here, in the pit right at the bottom of a staircase that ascends to the summit. You can’t stop thinking. Then, you are nervous and your heart skips a beat and it reminds you of when you used to get panic attacks. You went to therapy and you didn’t do your exercises at home. You couldn’t ride the tube because somehow it set you off. You couldn’t drink or get drunk because you didn’t feel in control and then you would go again. Therapy didn’t work. You grew out of it. Your mum bought you something from Boots. It came in a bottle with a pipette and you dropped a few drops onto your tongue and it was meant to calm you.
Princess Diana used it, your mum said.
What good did it do her, you asked. She’s dead, now.
Sssh, your mum said and scolded you. Don’t speak about her that way.
And then you wondered why all older people, mostly women, are obsessed with Princess Diana.
EDGWARE ROAD via VICTORIA (Circle line) 4 min.
This is not your train.
You pull out the leaflets in your bag; all six of them, and shift through them slowly. When someone drags their suitcase by your feet, you pull the papers away from view and wonder why you are looking through them in a train station. The colour is off; this is not black and white, this is grey. You wonder if you should call your doctor, tell him to invest in some more ink, in some office toner, in something to fix his shit printouts. You wonder how long it has been since he printed in colour.
A carriage roars in to the platform next to you, and it is only when the train begin to warn its departure that you realise that this, this is your train. You run, get your bag caught in the hungry doors, they chomp; open and close until you manage to snatch it free. As you pull away, one of your printouts flutters on the platform in the breeze. ‘FREEZE YOUR EGGS’.
The train pulls you away as though you are hovering, and you can feel yourself loosening. The carpeted seats scratch at your back through the shirt, and you cannot put your arm upon the rest because of the broad man sat beside you, but still you are easing. You are melting into the metal, re-moulding into another person on another train. You pick up the newspaper, slot your printouts into the middle in between the television guide and fold it away under your seat. The train grinds to a halt.
‘I’m sorry about the delay ladies and gentlemen, but we’re just waiting in the tunnel whilst they fix something on the train ahead. We should be on the move shortly’, he says.
And then:
‘Ah, there’s your problem! There’s a signal failure up ahead. We might be here for some time.’
