The word “growth” can mean very different things. All my life it had meant the academic kind: school, exams, scholarships. In the consulting room we were shown into a week later, it meant a growth on the scan, a shadow the size of a bean.
“You were lucky to come when you did,” the doctor said. “It’s an early stage. Operable, treatable, good prognosis. If we’d found this in another two or three years, this would be a different conversation.”
I knew how this conversation would have sounded in another two or three years; I knew it by heart: I had heard it in the first life, in a room exactly like this one, except that then the words were “too late”, “palliative care” and “months”. Then it had been Mum holding my hand, mine, the grown woman’s, because of the two of us I was the one unable to stay on my feet. Now everything stood where it should, and the rightness of it made my head swim.
Mum listened to the doctor with composure, nodded in the right places, asked practical questions: how many days in hospital, what would happen about her shifts, who would water the plants, whether the operation could be put off by even a week because the shop had already accepted a large order. The doctor said it could not. Mum sighed and agreed with the face of a woman agreeing to pay a surcharge for urgency. Mum had always met disaster with a stocktake.
I went out “to the toilet”, walked to the end of the corridor, sat down on the windowsill by the fire escape and cried, once for both lives, without a sound, into the sleeve of somebody else’s coat. They were strange tears: there was grief in them that had already happened and happiness that was still only due to happen, and the two could not come to any agreement. Below, under the window, cars were parking, a man went past with a Christmas tree held crosswise. The town went on living, and for the first time in both my lives I wanted to live alongside it, and not in place of somebody else. Then I washed my face and came back wearing the expression of a person who had simply spent a long time washing her hands.
“Well then, General,” Mum said on the bus. “Satisfied?”
“I’ll be satisfied after the operation.”
“The cake’s on me,” she said, and turned to the window. After a short pause she added, without turning round, “It was a good dream, my girl. A nuisance, but a good one.”
In her reflection in the glass I could see that she had understood everything about my dream. Mothers read dreams better than any dream book.
The operation was set for the end of February. And a day later my own application very nearly collapsed.
Hanna rang after nine in the evening, no “hello”, straight to the point, the way people ring from a fire.
“Open the regulations. Section four point two, the annexe on project support. Read who signs.”
“The supervising teacher…” I opened the file and stopped short. “The headmaster.”
“The headmaster. And what you’ve got is Hartmann’s signature. I read it through four times; by the third I thought I was going mad.”
“Two days to the deadline. The headmaster’s in Munich, at a conference.”
“Then you’ve got one evening for panicking,” Hanna said. “I’m giving you ten minutes. After that you ring Hartmann.”
I did it in seven. Hartmann heard me out without interrupting, said “wait” and hung up. The next day he got through to the headmaster between sessions, dictated the text over the telephone, and the signature came through as a scan six hours before the deadline. When we had both got our breath back, Hanna pronounced,
“Dates underlined twice. I always said it: this is not a neurosis. This is a way of life.”
And on the Friday it emerged that Julian had not been given the Windhagen award. It was not because I had withheld my statement, though Charlotte almost certainly told herself otherwise. The panel had asked for a sample of written work and an independent interview. Without my cards, without Charlotte’s father smoothing the corners, Julian wandered, argued, answered at length where he should have been brief, and at last admitted honestly that he could not talk about his own goals without it sounding like a complaint against fate.
That sentence reached me through Hartmann, who had heard it from a member of the panel and repeated it with something close to respect.
“At least he told the truth.”
“The truth doesn’t win scholarships.”
“No,” Hartmann agreed. “But sometimes it keeps you from winning the wrong competition.”
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