An answer for everything
Briar no longer had the answers for everything, just as she had no idea what had driven her husband away. Maybe it had been the night sweats. That was when Francis moved to the spare room.
To give you some space; you know I’ve got work in the morning.’
And she hadn’t had to work in the morning? Selfish prick.
*
Bloody menopausal madness, why couldn’t she just sleep? She flicked the light back on. 3am. Last time she’d looked it was 2.45am. Maddening, the entire shemozzle. Briar couldn’t keep up with things at work, was dropping the ball—her line manager Henry called it ‘zoning out.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Do you need to see someone at EAP? We can give you three free sessions to sit and talk confidentially; about whatever is going on.’
‘Have you seen your GP?’
*
So, she’d taken some sick leave and seen her GP, who confirmed what she already knew about ‘The Change’ her mother had once hinted at over a cup of tea, with an arched eyebrow. The GP also sent her off for blood tests, ‘Just to be sure, Briar.’
Why didn’t people speak plainly, for crying out loud? She wasn’t a mind reader. No, it wouldn’t do, this lying in the dark watching the illuminated hands of the clock turning.
Throwing off the covers, she wasn’t that hot and it didn’t happen every night now. ‘The Change’ had approached like a car skidding on a wet corner. One that smashed into a culvert, before levelling up and careening back onto the road haphazardly.
In the kitchen, Briar flicked on the range hood light, out of habit, but she lived alone now. There was no need to worry about waking anyone.
‘Fuck that,’ she spoke to the white walls, and turned on the overhead light. Better to see what she was looking for in the cupboards.
‘Where is it?’
Her fingers searched around the back of an assortment of jars: rooibos teas CAFFEINE FREE, the passionflower and valerian (that had nothing to do with passion but sought to knock her out); cacao PURE, UNADULTERATED, SUGAR FREE (from one of those ceremonies Daphne took her to suggesting it was ‘the latest thing’ for enlightenment, but from an ancient culture in Peru). Why on earth did people think taking a sacred ritual from another land would soothe a lifetime of dislocation and talking to a white God?
‘Ah, there you are.’
Her hand caressed a canister marked FOR EMERGENCIES ONLY.
‘Liquid gold … my lovely … my precious,’ she murmured in her best gravelly Gollum voice; the one that had, once upon a time, cracked the kids up.
Christ, if they heard her now, they’d put her down with a ‘Shit mum, that’s so dry!’ It was true, she had gotten older, nothing anyone could do to prevent that.
Briar smirked, while calling to mind the woman next door. She, who trotted off each month for her mani-pedi-peel sessions, always returning in a chemical-wake that jet-streamed behind her.
*
Switching on the jug, she opened the canister, dipped her finger in, withdrew it and licked. Guilt made a brief appearance, with images of starving children, as she fed herself without constraint.
*
Two years ago, Briar won a small writing prize, and remembered celebrating with the family her success. It was a short story, written in lunch breaks and after dinner when everyone was glued to their devices, or shuttered in bedrooms to the thud of bass-heavy music. She’d come out of nowhere, a newbie, a nobody, but people briefly paid her some attention.
Briar had beaten a raft of other writers, better known than her. She didn’t understand why they were better known, after she’d read some of their work. All of it appeared to be focused on social issues following a trajectory of whatever was trending. They wrote about the same things. Perhaps that was it. Decades younger than her, most coming out of the Wellington school of the writing elite. Several were already published, by the same university presses where they’d completed their degrees, and subsequently flooded the writing festival circuits.
She’d made a point of going to as many festivals as possible, even the ones out of town; observing, making copious notes, and occasionally asking for an autographed copy of a book from a writer she considered an underdog. One who wasn’t writing about global warming or discovering a missing part of their identity, but someone who wrote about the kinds of struggles she faced.
*
The male specialist at the hospital, Dr Piers Ballantyne, decided she’d be better off without her womb. As she processed this, with a little laugh he’d said, ‘It’ll stop you bleeding like a stuck pig,’ while staring at his computer screen.
As he continued to stare at the computer screen, she wondered what it was that gave male doctors this permission to treat women’s bodies with such entitled precision.
The surgery hadn’t gone well. They’d found other things growing in the fertile depths she imagined her womb to be. Nobody at home knew what to say, so they said nothing. Briar retreated further into herself. Like the growths inside her, one by one they removed themselves.
*
When she’d won the short story prize, the judges commended her skills with ‘realism and character development’ and ‘making the story believable,’ which it was, because it was about her life.
People often said your first successful story was usually you on the page. Apart from the online groups she was a floating part of on Facebook, Briar didn’t talk to anyone about her writing. Since she wasn’t from Wellington, and didn’t live in Wellington, she knew that the odds were stacked against her.
This year, she’d stopped going to the writers’ festivals, because it was just the same people doing the circuit, the ones who’d been doing the circuit forever, and hadn’t written anything new for eons.
‘Where the fuck is the fresh blood?’
Briar took another lick of what lay in the jar, catching a whiff of bees and earth. She smiled; it had begun to work its magic.
*
The specialists told her the growths would be back, removing her womb had probably exacerbated the condition, but they’d done ‘the best we could with the knowledge we had at the time.’ No apology. No time for questions either, as that gang of white coats, with spectacles and clipboards flicked back the flimsy curtains that did nothing for privacy, exposed her momentarily to the ward, and moved on to the next bed to another weeping woman. For a prize-winning storyteller, Briar didn’t have one eloquent word for what she felt. The shock was a mixture of relief, fear, confusion and resignation.
*
She wasn’t even from the esteemed Dunedin writing school, having missed that boat by being born a decade too late, on the outskirts of the city, and moving away as soon as she could to study something else. Accounting. Growing up, there’d never been enough money coming in, and she didn’t want to end up like her parents living in a council flat, smelling of pee and stale cigarettes, depressed, and eating TV dinners. She’d had big dreams back then.
‘Stuck up bitch,’ her cousins called her. ‘You think having a degree and a job makes you better than us. Hah! We know where you come from.’
*
But she’d persevered. None of that mattered now she supposed because she was alone, practically jobless, and perpetually pissed off with the world and most of its inhabitants who continued insinuating themselves into other people’s wars, doctors who did nothing and made life hell for anyone who didn’t agree with the status quo. Briar couldn’t get the images of starving children out of her head. They’d always been there, the images and the children.
She didn’t know who she was any more. Floating in a wasteland of memories, there was nothing much to look forward to. Maybe she could write about that, but who would be interested? She wasn’t young, attractive, clever or sexy. Briar didn’t have a master’s degree, had never been on stage at a festival, or interviewed—other than by the reporter from the local rag. He did a lovely write up on her prize-winning story, but that became a firelighter beneath kindling fast.
*
Crooking her finger, Briar took another scoop from the canister.
‘Magic honey, my precious,’ she grinned.
It ran through her like a different pulse, as though she was lying alongside somebody else and they were breathing for her. Everything was slackening and her eyes, she knew, would look shiny.
One day in the work bathrooms, Denise, a work colleague, had suggested ‘medicinals might help you with menopause’ as they both patted at necks and chests with wet paper towels and reapplied their makeup. She’d liked how unafraid Denise was of speaking about the things everyone else in her life was avoiding talking about.
‘Men-o-pause. They call it that for good reason—it means a freaking pause from men!’
After that they’d meet at lunchtime, sharing snippets of their lives and cackling like a pair of crones, only topics that were work-appropriate, and with no real depth.
*
The next time she went to hospital, her eldest arrived afterwards with flowers, before scurrying off. Duty done—mission complete! Nobody else came. They all knew what was going on but again, chose not to speak about it.
Denise turned up, bringing the first of many small canisters with her. She’d placed it gently into Briar’s palm and said, ‘Call me when you’re back home and I’ll come.’
She hadn’t called and retreated beneath her covers, aching and trying to process everything.
Then she was back to hospital. More male doctors, white coats, spectacles and clipboards. The scraping of metal curtain rings on rails in their wake, but in an open ward with men this time. She’d peed the bed rather than walking the gauntlet between their beds and the loo, with the back of her gown flapping in the breeze, showcasing her arse like a toddler.
*
Briar took a final lick off her finger, withdrawn in slow-motion from the canister, and smiled. Maybe she could write a new story. One where she imagined herself incinerating Francis’s new lover. Or where she, a svelte heroine, flew in a tireless fashion business-class around the world in wrinkleless designer linen clothing, while pledging to save all the starving children.
Laughter exploded from her mouth at the idea, and she was unable to stop. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she watched from outside of herself. What on earth was she thinking, plenty of famous movie stars and musicians had already written that fake-arsed story.
Her back slid down the kitchen wall until she sat doubled up on the floor in hysterics. Go back to the incinerating, that packs more of a punch. There was no stopping the laughter.
*
Struggling to compose herself, she wiped at tears with the palm of her hand, and sniffed up the snot that had also made an appearance. She turned off the overhead light, after a minor fumble misjudging the distance between her finger and the switch.
‘My precious,’ Briar said, in what she decided was an even better Gollum voice, ‘you haven’t deserted me yet.’
The rangehood light winked at her departure.
Iona Winter is a poet, essayist, storyteller and editor. With several published collections of poetry and hybrid fiction, her most recent book, A Counter of Moons, is a creative non-fiction memoir. When she’s not writing you’ll probably find her in the garden. Iona lives on New Zealand’s southern West Coast.