Eating Pomegranates

By: Sarah Gabriel

On the Eve

It’s 13 March 2006. I am propped up on the sofa with a pink
leaflet about how to perform breast self-examination open on my chest
and a glass of Chardonnay by my side. R (husband) is at the other end
of the sofa, watching Manchester City play Tottenham Hotspur on the TV.

Strictly speaking, R does not like Chardonnay. He says it is a
‘nasty’ drink, laden with chemicals that thicken his head in the
morning. But he keeps me company loyally. Has done for many years.

His mother’s drinking has always been a problem for R. So he
drinks to limit me to my half of the bottle, in case I go the same way.
As a result, at times he has had a half-a-bottle-of-Chardonnay-a-day
habit. When he goes to visit his mother, it’s worse. Whisky. Maybe if
he keeps pace with her, is true to her in the place she has to go to,
she won’t have to go there. Maybe she will turn about and focus the
mother’s mirroring gaze on him. My darling child, how could I desert
you? And for what, after all? A mess of toxins at the bottom of a
bottle.

It never works. He never stops. He is the wandering knight to her Belle Dame Sans Merci. So a psyche is born.

‘It says here you draw the hand in concentric circles outward
to the perimeter of the breast and then bring it back again in radial
lines.’

I turn back to the diagram with a sigh. Confronting me, in
fuzzy black-and-white print, is a semicircle standing on its tip. It
looks like a protractor, or a rubber drain plunger perhaps. Inside it,
a tangled mass of black lines converge angrily on a knob at the end.
These are the ducts. In any one of these ducts, I am told, designed to
carry milk from the fatty tissue to the nipple in response to the
baby’s sucking motion, a lump might form. Struggling to map this bleak
geometry on to the living body, I finger my breast desultorily, unsure
how to distinguish its naturally grainy texture from anything more
sinister.

Writing this, I am aware that this woman has something
childish about her. Dishonest, even. She should be upstairs, in front
of a mirror, without a glass of wine, doing the job properly.

Embarrassing.
The instinct is to move on. So instead we’ll do the opposite, and move
in closer. Lean over on creaking knees and take a little look. What is
going on there? There is a picture of myself at thirteen. The bedroom
of a large manse in Scotland, a little chilly, windows open on to a
view of hills. I have a few drops of bright blood between my legs. I
found them earlier, in the toilet, freshly staining the skin. I am
frightened. I have managed to tell my mother. This was not easy. She
had five children and was often unavailable.

The next image is a scuffed green prefab building, 1970.
Primary Seven, the last year before secondary school. We are gathered
to hear a lecture by head teacher Mrs Cormack on ‘The Facts of Life’.
Diagrams are pinned to the blackboard, showing a man’s penis, the
insinuating twin-bean shape of the ovaries connected by the pendulous
‘u’ of the fallopian tubes. I have seen these shapes for years
inscribed on toilet walls and bus shelters. To see them posted up on a
blackboard in this way seems obscene. A calculated affront.

Mrs Cormack explains that to make a baby, the man’s penis is
inserted in the woman’s vagina. This releases something called ‘sperm’.
The sperm fertilises the egg, which is implanted in the lining of the
womb and fed via the umbilical cord with nutrient-rich blood from the
mother. ‘If you have any questions about this process, please feel free
to ask. You may do so confidentially.’ She invites us to write our
questions anonymously on pieces of paper and put them in a basket. ‘Can
you have a baby without the man’ s penis going inside the woman’s
vagina?’ I write solemnly, folding my little note many times. At the
front, I watch her unfold it and frown. ‘This class was set up for
serious matters,’ she says, tossing it aside. ‘If anyone is going to
turn it into a joke, I’ll put a stop to it immediately.’

And I shall not die. Suddenly and catastrophically at forty-two. Leaving five children and a husband behind.

So perhaps it’s not surprising that I am unable to examine my
breasts properly. Childish? Yes, certainly. Until my dead mother walks
back into the bedroom, kneels before me, and talks me tenderly through
how to put on that contraption, with her eyes resting calmly on mine,
her voice kind and measured, how am I to grow up? Half-made woman? Yes,
certainly. I may be forty-four. I may have children now myself. But I
am still waiting. Didn’t Orpheus look back for his Eurydice though it
was mortal folly? Didn’t Persephone eat the pomegranate pips though it
condemned her in per petuity to six months of every year in the
underworld? For how long did Hades have to press them on her before she
ate? And what did those sweet seeds taste like? Did they carry the
bitterness of his kingdom? Or did they taste of the great green upper
world, and the tumult of her mother’s longing for her daughter? Isn’t
mitosis — self-division — at the very heart of things?

‘R, I think I might have found something.’

‘Mmmn?’

I put down my glass and finger the lump with fascination. It
is about a centimetre in diameter and neatly spherical, with a shallow
raised ridge. It feels like finding the shilling in the Christmas
pudding.

‘Look, I’m sure . . .’

‘Mmmn? I can’t feel anything.’

But in this room, now, there is stillness. What does the
merchant mean by his upraised hand? What does the woman mean by her
inclined head, plump with shadow, the tenderly gathered folds of green
velvet at her belly? And what does the spectator mean, reflected in
miniature in the convex mirror behind them? Is he a witness to the
ceremony, as some have inferred?

This is northern light, the painter seems to tell us. Not so
much fleeting, as scarcely emergent. Much of the room is already in
shadow. And these two, blessed by it at the height of their union, when
everything is full of promise — from the pendulous red bolsters
suspended from the bed, to her swollen belly; from his mysterious
gesture of command, to her subtle half-screened smile — are already in
the act of vanishing.

Now, in an inversion of the painting, I take R’s hands, which
I have always loved, which are not tapering like the merchant’s but
have a masculine blunting at the tips, and are dusted with hair at the
knuckles, and place them carefully at the site of the lump.

‘Oh yes.’ And in his voice I hear the mirror of my own curiosity. Not fear. Just a detached kind of wonder.

Tomorrow we are due to report to the cancer genetics clinic of
the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, where I will have a routine
annual check for breast cancer. I have inherited M18T, a mutation on
the BRCA1 gene, a gene known to be involved in the body’s suppression
of tumours. We don’t yet know for certain whether M18T is harmful, or
‘deleterious’. Only a hundred or so of the many mutations that can crop
up on the long and complex BRCA1 gene are critical to its function. But
if M18T is one of them, then I have a very high risk of developing
breast or ovarian cancer at a relatively young age. At present, the
head of the cancer genetics clinic at the Marsden has described M18T as
technically ‘of uncertain clinical significance’ . But it’s not looking
good. There’s my own mother, who died of ovarian cancer at forty-two;
her mother, who also died f ovarian cancer; and a cousin in my own
generation who developed breast cancer at the same age.

You might have thought that all this would make me
particularly careful in my breast examinations. But no. It doesn’t seem
to work like that. If I think of my mother and her premature death, I
become a little breathless. At forty-four, I already have the sense of
living on borrowed time. But I had a mammogram eight months ago that
pronounced me clear of cancer. And in general, the new knowledge that
medicine has offered does not always tend to make me more careful. What
it actually makes me, in respect of my own risk of contracting breast
cancer, is running scared. And that is something different.

‘I think I should probably tell them tomorrow, shouldn’t I?’ I repeat.

‘No,’ says R, more decisively. ‘I really don’t think they’re
for bothering with that. If you’ re worried about it, you should take
it to the GP.’

Suddenly, I’m angry, more than angry. So furious that I can hardly get my words out.