In the morning I rang my youngest.
“Mum? What’s happened?”
“Dov. Could you run me up to the hospital? I think it’s time I found out what this is.”
He was at my door in nineteen minutes.
And when I opened that door and he saw me standing in my own hall in a dressing gown, I watched my fifty-six-year-old son’s face do something he did not manage to get hold of in time.
“Mum. Why didn’t you tell me it had got like this?”
“I didn’t want anybody making a fuss.”
And he put his hand on my shoulder and said: “That’s the entire job, Mum.”
At Ardenne General I was seen by a consultant called Dr. Henrike Opoku.
She is about forty-seven.
She took a full history. She examined me properly and told me what she was doing before she did it.
And she did not once, in forty minutes, talk to my son over the top of my head — which I noticed at the time and which I have since told her I noticed.
And she sent me for an ultrasound.
The woman doing it went quiet.
She moved that probe about four times and then went back over the same area. Then she took a run of images I could hear her saving.
And then she said she was going to get the doctor, and went out, and was gone about eleven minutes.
I looked at Dov.
“Is it bad?”
“Let’s hear what she says, Mum.”
Dr. Opoku came back with a second doctor.
“Mrs. Vanterpool. There’s a large fluid-filled mass in your abdomen.”
I made myself say the next bit.
“How large?”
“Large. We’ll need a CT before I’ll give you a number.”
“Is that what’s been pressing?”
“Almost certainly, yes.”
Two hours later the three of us were in her office with the CT done.
And she told me what it was, and I am going to put that in the next part because of the order it came in.
Because then she opened a different folder. A thinner one. And she asked me a question that had nothing to do with my stomach.
“Mrs. Vanterpool. Have you ever been seen through a private research facility?”
“Not that I know of.”
“There’s an archived reference in your record. It’s attached to something called Kastellis Biomedical.”
And I sat up in that chair.
“Kastellis?”
“Yes. Does that mean anything?”
And I turned and looked at my son.
Because for twelve years I had kept one thing to myself and never said it out loud to a living soul.
Three days before my husband died, a woman came onto that ward.
Mid-sixties, grey, a small silver case. She asked for Rutger by name at the nurses’ station and she knew exactly which bay he was in.
She was in there about twenty minutes with the curtain pulled round the bed.
And I sat on a plastic chair in that corridor and did not think one suspicious thing about it, because I was sixty-eight years old and my husband was dying and I had other things on.
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