Scan

She was deep in London clay, a hundred feet underground, the train having paused for a rest just short of Baker Street. In the darkness outside was visible the enfolding curve of the tunnel and also, at a distance, a gleam of yellow, a worm with lampy eyes making its way in another direction altogether. There came into her mind wartime images of burrows and shelters, the leaf-encircled entrance to a green lane; landlocked landscapes with no sky or sea, no people bar the odd melancholy dreamer like her reflection in the window. The urge to hide was what powered so many children’s books of that time, escaping into wardrobes or living under the floorboards; the hobbit in his cosy bunker; midnight gardens silvered with nostalgia, clocks transfixed so that time stood still. Since last week’s diagnosis she had herself fallen out of time.

Perhaps this was what it was like, being born, the claustrophobic tunnel; you were being squeezed by the passage walls themselves, you were being pressed on centimetre by centimetre, with no inkling of the future but that far gleam of light. What about before you were born, though; before you were conceived? Well, you can’t remember it so it can’t have been too bad, she told herself; presumably it will be the same after you’ve died. The trouble with this idea was, before you’ve been born you’ve not been you; but once you’ve been alive you definitely have been you; and the idea of the extinction of the you that has definitely existed is quite different from the idea of your non-existence before you did exist. Why were they stuck here? Had the train broken down?

She peered through the window and was able to make out thick cables running along the walls of the tunnel, regions of ribbed felty dust. When you’re dead, surely you don’t know you’re dead. That would be too horrible. That would be a contradiction in terms. No, it would be like when you passed out; there was no memory of that afterwards.

She’d started collapsing, blacking out, which was why she was now on her way for another test. ‘Let’s take a look inside that head of yours.’ They wanted to see whether it had spread.

Now when she woke up in the morning the old unconscious happiness only lasted a few seconds before she remembered and thought, ‘I wish this hadn’t happened.’ But it had. There was an Anglo-Saxon word that meant ‘terror in the morning’. Morgencolla, that was it: morgencolla. You’d wake just as it was getting light, and see death coming up the river, the men with axes poised to leap out of their longboats and set fire to your home and disembowel you.

There came a whir, a whirring grumble, then a tense high-pitched hum and a rhythmic chunk-a-chunk vibration. Come on, she thought, come on or I’ll be late. She glanced at her watch. There was a lurch, then nothing; another lurch, and they were inching towards the platform. It’s all right, she thought once the doors had opened, it’s all right, I’m not late yet, and she hurried with the others along tiled tunnels and up flights of sliding stairs.

Outside, on Baker Street, there were three lanes of traffic under a veil of fine-needled rain. A tall beaky sad-faced boy in deerstalker and tweed cape from fifteen decades ago stood handing out leaflets to a general lack of interest. She took one and glanced at the sketch of Sherlock Holmes peering through his magnifying glass, the great detective on the trail of Moriarty. Past the shops selling bears in beefeater outfits she hurried, past the tourists struggling with maps and collapsible umbrellas, then turned right at a church courtyard where cherry trees were loaded with sodden blossom, foolishly pink against the downcast sky. Another short cut and she was into the windy wastes of Harley Street with its heavy one-way traffic. She checked the number of the place where she was to have this scan, and saw how near it was. She wouldn’t be late after all. A family dressed in full-length black stood weeping on its steps, their robes flapping in the wind. She averted her eyes and made her way inside.

Here, everybody was brightly lit, neutral and flat-faced. Thirty-four. Single. No children. Journalist. Yes, her employers provided private health insurance. MasterCard. The girl didn’t look up once.

She paused at the mouth of the waiting room as if it were the entrance to the cave of suffering. Instinctively she knew about what went on in there, the long waits, disappointments, apparent improvements and the ugly reversals. She grabbed a magazine from the central table and stared at it. How to get the body you always wanted.

So it was her fault, then, what had happened. She hadn’t been trying hard enough. In the absence of trouble she had imagined herself to be well, but now it seemed health was something that must be worked at; it must be courted with blueberries and pedometers and other expensive tokens of love. You had to be constantly on the qui vive for signs of betrayal or you were a fool. I thought I was my body, or at least friends with it, she observed; but obviously not. ‘No truly happy person grows a teratoma,’ said the reiki healer she had consulted in her initial alarm. ‘Have you allowed yourself to be angry in your life?’ Angry?

It was tempting to turn the blame inwards, but it wouldn’t do. ‘Am I responsible for the filth in the air I breathe?’ she railed silently. ‘Is the arrival of electrosmog my fault? My workplace is now an official Wi- Fi hotspot where we’re all gently microwaving our internal organs, Bluetoothed radiation nibbling away at the blood–brain barrier. Maybe that’s why I’m here, that bit further along the electromagnetic corridor, waiting for an exposure of my insides, and the promise of gamma rays next week.’ She was allowing herself to be angry now, certainly.

In the mirror of the changing cubicle her flesh looked denatured beneath the shadowless halogen light. Remove all jewellery. Once naked she realized she was still wearing her watch, and unstrapped it. She was outside time now, along with the sick and the dead.

Last of all she shed her earrings, the starfish studs he had bought her in Brighton. Mr X was how he was known at work — her new mystery man. She placed them carefully in one of her shoes. It was a definite farewell. She hadn’t known him long enough to claim his company on such an unlooked-for journey. ‘This has all been very sudden,’ she murmured, which was what you used to say when someone asked you to marry them. It wasn’t just him, she hadn’t told anybody yet; she needed to get used to the idea.

He might have enjoyed this unseemly hospital gown under other circumstances, open at the back, inadequately secured with tapes. Never mind seeing her with no clothes on; she was about to be seen with no flesh on. The medical gaze was nothing if not penetrating.

They were after pictures of the inside of her imploding head. She lay down in the white gown on the motorized bed and inch by inch was drawn inside. The inexorable gliding pomposity of it reminded her of something, but she couldn’t immediately think of what.

What was it? she wondered as she lay stiff and still in the viewless tunnel. Oh, of course, she thought as it came to her, it was the coffin’s slow glide to curtains hiding the fire. This noise was very loud, the same as the walloping grumble and whine of the underground this morning but magnified tenfold. Someone had used the phrase ‘in case of claustrophobia’ when they were explaining about the process and now she realized why: the tunnel wall was six inches above her forehead.

So there would be twenty minutes of this, and she was still in the first. Her mind began leaping around all over the place. Keep calm. Think of something else. She’d been ignoring his texts and emails and the flashing answerphone. She felt pulled towards him but she must push him away; she couldn’t face him but she wanted him. In her dream last night she’d been immune to traffic jams, high on a velvety camel swaying down St Martin’s Lane. It would be good if all this was just a dream, if in a little while she might wake up out of it, and stretch, and shrug it off.

It wouldn’t work, she wouldn’t be able to play at being a corpse for another eighteen minutes if she didn’t get a grip. Time was getting stuck again, like the train in the tunnel. Time equals distance over speed. Time was supposed to slow down as it approached a black hole; the gravitational pull was so strong there that even light couldn’t escape. A black hole was a star which had collapsed in on itself. She would have to harness her mind, put blinkers on, for the duration; otherwise she’d moan and groan and spoil the scan. Think of some careful time-consuming process, spin it out. Risotto, that would do.