for Jane
You get boils. Boils that ache with gravity. Boils that don’t burst but get trapped in their own thick skins beneath which you picture Hogarthian scenes playing out–A Rake’s Progress, A Harlot’s Progress, Gin Lane–moral tales.
Thick skin is not an advantage when it comes to the boil. It’s a paper-thin skin you need. Skin that breaks easy. Skin that drains. It’s like having a thick neck. If the boil was your head, it would take two, perhaps three big swings to cut it off and it’d still be hanging.
Between boils, you get peace. You live in clarity. You organise your life in bullet-points:
- vitamins
- two litres of water per day
- marital sex
- sewing
- cooking
- Dinner!
Between boils, you stay in the ‘now’, as advised by almost everyone since the last boil. You stay present on your walk to work which takes you through a wasteland of pylons, satellite stacks, lands laid with poison, jagged, impenetrable fences, rundown warehouses, rubber tubes and syringes, pants with shit on them, broken glass, the odd shoe, dog faeces: yellow, khaki, brown, solid, smeared, trod on.
Eight hours later, you walk back the same way. You see a dead dog surrounded by some kids cheering on some activity that reeks of predatory
thrill. You smell the strange works of factories that pump out anything from ‘extreme biscuit’ to wafts of molten wax. A hint of boiling bones. You walk on through the industrial chomp into west Dublin’s suburbia. You pass the flats and keep pace as a bunch of feral kids runs up behind you, one jumps on your back. Hah ha! You pass a drunk lying on the path. You circumvent crime tape around the bollards where the flasher usually lurks. You hear police sirens. You feel your heart beating irregularly, you get chest pains. You can barely breathe. You make it home. Your foot goes through the floorboard in the hall. Your husband has stashed the wet laundry in the ancient and unplayed piano rather than deal with it. Your kids wait for dinner. You open the fridge, mould. And upstairs, mould on the ceilings, a leaking tank in the attic. You
think: These are my ‘now’ moments.
You start to create alternative ‘now’ moments. You do not see this as cheating; you see it as self-preservation. You find yourself looking upwards, through ceilings and beyond pylons; you go upwards, skyward, spaceward, anywhere but down. You are spellbound by the likes of Tintoretto’s Descent from the Cross, Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum, and the moon, of course, the moon, sleepless and solitary and scarred. Your sense of smell sharpens. You become feral, hunter-like. You ache for an unspoken tactile smash.
At a funeral of a colleague, you do not hear one bit of the service; rather, you spend the entire time gazing at gothic arched ceilings, nostrils palpitating. Somewhere in this church, pews away, is someone at the peak of pheromonal resonance. You scent him through the death and incense and aerosol. The first thing you will say to him when you meet him is: Lose the deodorant.
Why you are hostage to certain men’s sweat is a mystery. You assume it’s some sort of reproductive sleuthing to remedy the gnarly bits for the next generation–the imperceptible scoliosis straightened, the malfunctioning kidney fixed, the streak of lunacy eradicated. But why now? You have no interest in mating. You have spent years waiting for the havoc-wreaking post-natal gore to fade so you can live in peace, free of men, love and heartbreak. You look forward to the end of all reproductive activity as a cessation of mayhem. But no. Nostrils flared, you find yourself at a new yet familiar junction, a forbidden armpit of desire.
You only meet in public: canal-bank seats, park benches, bar stools, cafés. You always sit beside him so you can take furtive inhales of his scent. You become convinced you are in love. Worse, he becomes convinced he is in love and,
being divorced, is free to love you. He is concerned he will break up your family. He realises the situation is untenable. We love sadness, he says. You both do a lot of talking. Anything but touching. Your sexual glands sting. This machine, the unconsummated despair of lust. Your glands swell, tumescent. Untouched. Functioning. Untouched. You feel like a splayed flower that refuses to close. The one time you sit opposite him, he reaches across a table and touches your face, pulls his hand back, and looks over his shoulder–the marriage police, he says, and then, what do I even get you for Valentine’s?
A worn T-shirt. Worn for days, slept in.
The T-shirt arrives in the post, balled up, inside out. In the early hours of a sleepless night, you stick your head in it and tie the arms around your neck. You stay like this for as long as possible, inhaling pheromones into your body. You twist the knot around your neck until you are lightheaded.
How did people deal with boils in the olden days, with no surgery, no antibiotics? In a barber shop? Maybe not; the men would likely have had none of it; your type of boil would be the domain of women, like midwifery, or laying out a corpse, or terminations, women with generational nous: kill the boil before it kills you. An elderly neighbour once told you a trick used in the past was to incise it and suck the rot out. You were dumbstruck. Who the hell would suck a boil out of you? Would you even want them to?
You did not, of course, mention _where_the boil occurs.
You will now consider where the boil occurs.
At the frontier of all gynaecological heat, on the gland responsible for lubrication with a secretion duct that sits just inside the wall of the vagina, closer than you’d think to the anus. To put a gland like that at the dispatch zone in the warehouse of female stock–blood, faeces, urine, sweat, pleasure, sex, semen, lovers, rapists, babies, goods in/goods out–seems counter-productive. Is this nature’s way of weeding you out? Punishment for excessive loving?
All love affairs are the first and last. You know this. You do not need to relearn this. You struggle to maintain between-boil status.
- it has not happened yet
- excise this immediately
- all kisses end in beheadings
- you cannot live with the guilt
- you cannot live without the guilt
*
You love with no outlet. You love and your love gets trapped. You love and your skin won’t let it out because it wants the love to stay. The love pools and festers and turns toxic. The boil grows where you want him to get inside you. Small at first. A pearl. But dense. And it grows. It spreads out. Barring entry to your body. Then comes the swelling. The pain. You do not listen to the boil. You know it is telling you something. But you grit your teeth and become delirious.
The boil gets bigger, and you attempt to break it at home with a bread poultice. It does not work. If anything, the yeast leavens the boil.
You cannot eat. You cannot sleep. You lose weight. You lose hair. Your blood travels nettle-like, effervescent, livid through your veins. You are holy with condemned love.
What now? That’s what he says the first time you visit his home. You are safe to meet privately since the boil–now abscess–precludes all touch. Here you are careful not to drink wine but accept tea and find the softest place to sit–a bean bag–that shapes well enough around the boil. You do not tell him about the boil. You do not mention that this relationship will never be consummated because of your Hogarthian security guard. Instead, you say you are out of time. You’d need two lives, three, many to love him. But love is timeless, he says and asks sadly: What about me?
What about you? Do we separate, divorce, remarry, buy furniture together, go on a cruise? Blend families, make a commune; why not? It takes a village. Or eke it out in poignant spells in hotels and the likes, each visit chipping away at a flesh-and-bone epigraph:
Here lies
You whose scent was right
Who never said, we are out of time Who said instead, we love sadness.
The boil has a proper noun. Bartholin’s cyst. Handy for your medical letter so when your absence is noted at a management meeting the team don’t have to conjure a toxic vagina. And toxic it is, for despite the fancy name, at the end of the day, the Bartholin’s is your bog-standard abscess of the dark ages, peculiar to the female.
*
The boil will not yield. Nor is it in an easy place to squeeze manually. Nevertheless, you try self-surgery–a glass of whiskey, a ‘sterilised’ needle, an antiseptic swab on standby. You pierce what you think is the heart of the boil. Not once, but four times. One. Two. Three. Four. Nothing. Somehow, you bypass the poison and draw blood instead. You slump back on the sofa, hyperventilating and sweating.
You drag your leg through the wasteland to work since the boil precludes a decent strut. The pain sharpens your sense of enlightenment, and you behold the sky in glassy-eyed agony, feeling an affinity with vastness, clouds and stars. At work you sit in the pose of one at the start of a race, ensuring your body weight is pitched to the good side. The boil becomes furnace-like, angry, brawling. The more you picture his armpit crease, the more the boil swells. Aching. Heavy. Excruciating.
It occurs to you that this might not be real, that you have made him up.
You have made him up to get through all the pebbledash, spreadsheets and mould. The boredom. The routine. You start to think the sky is watching you. You are convinced you will be arrested. You know from experience this sense of imminent persecution is part of the boil cycle, delusions you have conjured, but to you, it is real enough to prepare for arrest while lying awake at night, leg elevated so you can air the boil. If you have committed a crime, you can’t remember when or what it was. You know you must confess. But about what and to whom? You know you must present yourself to some authority.
Your temperature soars. You know you are ill, but you don’t know how to get better. You know you must get to ground; you can’t remember how you left the ground in the first place, where it started. You go to his house to ‘discuss the situation’. He answers the door in a manky black T-shirt with a pungency that sends the abscess into paroxysms of renewed agony. You look different, he says. You don’t look right.
You follow his scent to the kitchen, where he scalds a teapot, and your heart breaks a bit when you notice he doesn’t flinch when the boiling water splashes the backs of his haired fingers.
You lie on your back in his garden, legs arranged discretely to allow for the boil’s tumescence. I am destroying you and you me, he says.
You get a sickening feeling. The feeling of endings.
You stare at the sky.
House martins circle clockwise, anti-clockwise, their tails like arrow fletchings; how do they manage their own crossfire? But they do. Like all of nature, it manages. If you were a bird, a bee, a butterfly, a tree, a piece of fruit, you would trust your instincts and die right now not knowing any different. You realise your problem is you don’t want to be human. Which is not the same as wanting to die.
You turn on your (good) side, away from the sky. You see cranberry-winged butterflies dancing over oxeye daisies, meadowsweet and vetch. You see a copper beech keeping autumn–cinnabar and rust–a hearth in summer. And rising from bramble and nettle you see a tree flush with early-ripened apples. You lie on your stomach, propping yourself up on your elbows, your face close to the ground. Your neck at this moment could be bared for kisses or the axe. You shut your eyes and wait. But you know never to close your eyes when it comes to endings. You know the eye preserves a snapshot of your final view in that split second before you are baton-passed to stars. Besides, what are you afraid to see? Or what would you miss if you did not open your eyes? You would not see the tightening petals around the face of a daisy. You would not see the under-pleats of mushrooms that weren’t there yesterday or the ants transporting your shedding skin to line their colony. Sparrows migrate, the butterfly lives just for days–does it matter whether it’s the kiss or the axe? It
all ends. And begins.
You put his scent out of reach.
Let the grief begin.
Grief starts in the eyes. Once it starts, it’s like this for weeks. Not so much a colour-turn but a lightening of the iris, cataract pale. Where to go with eyes like these? They won’t cry but feel drenched and full of white light, and you think: this is what it is to stare out of an over-exposed photo. You wonder if your pupils have gone entirely, perhaps the irises too. You walk around in sunglasses lest your eyes look like boiled eggs. You wonder if eyes get bleached with grief, the way fingertips go in the sea. Saline pools, brimming. Or breaching. You realise your grief may not be about love, or desire or a broken heart. You wonder if grief is about something else, something you’ll never be able to name.
You find a church and sit on a pew, balancing on one buttock. You stare at the stained glass, the sad mother, the crucified Jew, with your bleached eyes.
And finally, at last, come tears. Sometimes it takes bleached eyes to see God again.
You present yourself to the emergency department in the Coombe Women’s Hospital, Cork Street, loquacious and panicking. From a supine position, knees apart, you brace yourself not so much for the examination but for the expression of horror on the medic’s face, for you have not seen a professional yet that didn’t wince at the sight of it.
How long has it been like this? The gynae is incredulous.
Don’t know, don’t know. It builds up. It’s a cycle. It’s the insanity version of Dorian Grey, it’s an existential concentrate.
The gynae is unimpressed: it’s just a blocked duct, and now it’s infected. You should have come in the minute this started. The whole lymphatic system is infected. IV antibiotics, fasting, no water; we’ll operate in the morning.
You are delivered of your poisonous legacy. As usual, you are put on St Gerard’s ward for women-things that go wrong: miscarriages, hysterectomies, ovarian menaces, undelivered stillborns and, of course, the Bartholins. In the ward, we women weep and lie on our sides and return ourselves to infancy. We befriend each other and lend each other shower creams and shampoos. As always, post-op, you are made aware of the procedure itself: marsupialisation. The thick skin has been incised, the flaps stitched back on themselves to prevent the site from sumping up, so now you wear the ghost of the boil in a vacant pouch, which, you are told, should remain vacant. And this, too, you will defy; conjure new boils on marsupialised danger zones–only a matter
of time.
You are lucky, the gynae tells you when you come round. The boil was so ripe that it gave easily under the surgeon’s scalpel.
Like a fine cheese, you say.
They pack the wound. Still weeping. They pack it with coiled cotton tape called a wick. The management of the wick depends on the size of the wound. The wick is extracted within 24 hours by uncoiling it slowly with some tweezers: an eye-wincing moment, a moment of clarity with a sharp twinge of medieval gore.
Pity the healthcare professional who gets the job of the wick.
Pity the team of students gathered round the open legs for a bit of learning.
Pity the student who pulls a whitey at the sight of it and swiftly reassesses their career path.
If the crater is deep, the wick must be re-inserted daily, reducing in diameter till the wound seals safely, so you can walk, piss, shit and menstruate (blood stings wounds, oddly), not in comfort as such, but without pain killers. You won’t even think about sexual intimacy since the thought of that, the desire and all that comes with it, is what causes the gland to overwork in the first place. You have learned your lesson.
On release day, the surgeon checks that all is okay and writes up the prescription antibiotics and painkillers. He’s nice enough. You’ve had him before. You wonder if he even likes women. You never know. Others have wielded the vaginal carjack (sorry, speculum) with sadism; some, you suspect, even enjoy the rag-doll complacency of a woman anaesthetised and under the knife.
It’s psychosomatic, you say, feeling the need to explain yourself.
Look. He takes a pen to a notepad and draws an outline of a hairless vulva. It looks like the gynae version of one of those body charts a medical examiner uses in autopsies.
He draws a gland that leads to a duct, that leads to a blockage. He marks the site with an ‘X’. You wouldn’t know what the doodle means unless you’d done time. Lived it. Or, in his case, done the surgery.
It’s badly designed. He is genuinely bothered. And hats off to him to dare say what could get him cancelled or even sued, that is, to intimate in any way that a vagina might have evolved poorly over time. To put a gland _there_of all places, at the confluence of all life?
You don’t disagree. Unless this _is_evolution?
Then, what does that say? Does it matter?
For now, at least, anything that needs to be said can be said in bullets:
- the boil is dead
- long live the boil.