Wapping Station

A carrot, a turnip, my tumor: objects that can reach fifteen centimeters without being too much. I grew the tumor slowly, the way a woman cradles a pregnancy inside her, long and slow until the baby is ripe. When my sister was pregnant, she would call me each week to tell me what item of food the fetus resembled, as though thinking of my unborn niece or nephew as being grape-like was supposed to make me more attached. No one makes similar guides for the progression of cancer.

It was June that the doctors later reckoned is when it started to form, though I found that conjecture odd. June in London was an optimistic month where people would go shirtless even when it wasn’t very warm, their hope for a tan outweighing their discomfort. My skin didn’t bother with that. I always looked like I had the paleness of an angel from a Renaissance painting, a sort of unearthly white. I looked forward to the sun as much as the rest of them, though.

June was moving into a new flat that had a balcony overlooking the river Thames. I was embarrassed about not being able to pronounce it the right way, the British name that looked to me like it should be said as tame. But that was wrong on two counts, and instead I walked past a construction project detailing the weekly sewage overflow into the river’s tides, practicing saying the name aloud, quietly.

That month, I was still letting the accents wash around me: the constant other languages in the street and the odd British phrases, their caste systems obvious to each other but not to me. People looked at me with distaste when I asked if they were from London originally, as though I should’ve known their exact heritage (class) from the cadence with which they said hello.

I kept my shirt on even when invited to go swimming in Shadwell basin, preferring to watch my acquaintances in the glimmering water instead. I wonder if I had been more inclined to swim, more inclined to have and keep an influencer’s body, if I would have noticed the rounding in my abdomen earlier. Would have minded.

#

That summer, I never closed the blinds.

I liked the idea that the commuters passing by on the city connector, or the rich people in their sail boats, or even those packed into a corporate party boat with the music blaring songs from twenty years past, could look up and see me if I was close to the window, or at night almost lean in and take stock of my furnishings. A bed a dozen years old. A desk anonymous in its IKEA design. A sofa for two, used by one. A coffee table at which I could sit and eat my stir fry. A single piece of art furnished (discarded) by the landlord, showing a scene on the river in the days when it was so crowded with ships you could cross on foot and never get your shoes wet.

That was a proud phrase I saw a few times in museums. Boasts.

As though Jesus hadn’t done it first.

I missed my period, but that wasn’t too unusual. My body never regulated the way it did for others, was never sensitive to time and moons. I wondered if this was another symptom of my spiritual desert, my failure to connect not just with the religion of my family but even the astrology column. Instead, I could tell only when it had come: a day of feeling undeniably low and, three days after that, murky brown spots staining the inside of my underwear. I thought it was unfair that blood dried into such an ugly color from the burgundy it began in.

#

July was different. I started feeling rounder in July. I had always found myself more spherical than normal. Eyes too round, not in that way that made men compare women to deer in an uncomfortably bestial way, but just that made me look perpetually weepy. A bulbous nose. And a belly that was always going to be rounded, even at my skinniest. Which I wasn’t. British pub food had proved a temptation in the last few months, along with British beer. I resolved to diet, but half-heartedly. The bartender at the pub nearby was nice in a way that I never had to worry about if he was hitting on me.

I hadn’t made many other friends, though I couldn’t really have considered him a friend, either. We talked about our plans for the week ahead without ever exchanging names. Good customer service from his perspective. A lifeline from mine, the normalcy of someone noticing my existence. The acquaintances who swam felt like a mirage. They had slowly stopped inviting me, and I hadn’t noticed until it was too late to course correct.

July was waiting for the DLR to get me closer to the City and then walking to lectures. I would try to sit at the front of the train, giving up my seat for children who wanted to pretend to be driving it too. Hiding my reluctance to do so. Into the tunnel we all went, a low-budget version of an amusement park ride. Their parents were sweaty and frustrated under the accumulation of detritus small kids seemed to need, under the frustration of not being able to just shoo them into school but instead needing to entertain them over the lengthy days of summer. They’d give me grateful, weak smiles as we plunged into the darkness of the tunnel at the end of the ride. The only friendly strangers.

#

In August, the barkeep expressed concern, gingerly, about if I should still be drinking. I’d done the mental math, though; I knew I couldn’t be knocked up. Even so, paranoia increasing, I had taken a pregnancy test in response to the growing roundness, my abdomen protruding with some pride. The bartender listened to my confession, as the cliches of his profession required, and suggested I go to a clinic.

I didn’t. Instead, I started measuring out my beer at home, rationing myself half a pint at night. A piece of fruit in the morning. My phone helped me count the calories, assuring me I should be diminishing.

I didn’t go to class much, either, despite that ostensibly being the reason I was here in this country. I stayed in my flat, watching the ferry boats pass. Although they weren’t called that here. The boats had fallen prey to the part of the city that wanted to be modern and new, willing to sell itself to multinational conglomerates for naming rights. Or maybe that was unfair: a city that required kowtowing to private sponsors for public goods.

#

In September, we had a blustery day, and I donned my sneakers and a coat, deciding to ride the ferry not ferry to North Greenwich. As far as I could tell, North Greenwich was tied for the most culturally bankrupt part of the city with its Canary mirror across the river. It had a stadium with unfilled ambitions and newly built everything, sold to the highest bidders as a way to launder their cash, but empty; not populated even by sad souls in identical suits like Canary Wharf. I was supposed to be writing a paper on modes of public transport. If private partnerships would make up for or chip away at the growing wealth disparity swallowing the world. I figured the cable cars sponsored by an airline would be as good a start as any. How much did it cost, I wondered, I enquired, to name a whole transport line? The airline had got a bad deal, paying more than a software developer did a few years later.

I rode the gondola round trip, not bothering to exit and stretch my legs. Once, as a kid, my parents had taken me skiing, and there we similarly dangled from a wire, without a glass box to enclose us. Now, the city seemed to stretch as endlessly as the slopes pockmarked with pines had then. Famous landmarks were an afterthought to endless building in less famous directions. I could see the apartments I lived in. Everything looked like toys from this distance.

On the return trip, I shared the car with a family and an elderly couple. Everyone smiled knowingly at me, my body’s shape now considered an ice breaker, now considered public domain. The loose dress I had bought from the charity shop to disguise my changing waistline instead clung to me with the surprise of a last gasp of heat from the summer. I kept my eyes to the view, refusing to return their smiles. After exiting, I entered a transparent building held up with yellow steel supports where I slurped an iced coffee before heading back to the pier. I’d glared at the barista when she’d asked if I wanted decaf.

A man offered me his seat on the clipper, his girlfriend practically choking on her admiration for him, matched only by his admiration for himself. I didn’t correct him, didn’t tell him there was a reason I didn’t have a little pin on to ask for courtesy so I could grow the next generation in peace.

Instead, I murmured thanks and took the seat. The model city had become a real place again, not a collection of architectural whims. I could again hear the gentle lapping of the river and the brownness of the water was no longer at a distance.

The pain started as the boat sped off the pier, a sharp cramping that seemed to be the long-awaited period, the worst one I had ever had. There was a brief sense of relief before it ratcheted up another, unfamiliar level. The vomiting started soon after, as we sped under the gaudy, blue Tower Bridge. I missed my own feet, the beige of my sick washing over the deck into the river as I stumbled to the railing. The man who had been so gallant moments before was paralysed, frozen in the middle of a selfie with his girlfriend. Frozen maybe in disgust as I sunk to my knees and clutched the metal bars separating me from the river before he started to offer help.

All I could think about was the pain and the sign telling me how often sewage leaked into the water. At least I didn’t have to feel guilt about further polluting it.

That was the last thought I had for a while. Everything else flashed like a montage. The clipper staff helping me off the boat. An ambulance taking me somewhere safe. The doctor telling me I had a tumor. It all seemed inexplicably long when it was happening, but afterwards I couldn’t remember a full scene from those hours and then days.

#

It wasn’t till two weeks after the incident on the boat, in October, that I was back in my flat, watching the same vessels float on the river. My professors gave me extra time to do my assignments. The news came out for the tolls for the tunnel still under construction taking the same route as the cable car. It would be at least two pounds cheaper, even at peak time, to pollute your way from one side to the other than to ride in the sky across. And that was if you were alone in your car. For families, the math was even more distorted. Pollute your child’s lungs and receive a discount.

My sister stopped telling me the size of fruit her womb had. The baby wouldn’t arrive for another two months, but each call had changed. Now, weekly, it was just minute variations of asking how I really was, evidence of her lack of belief in my reassurances.

I hadn’t bothered telling friends from home. The days I had been in the hospital where I was too weak to text back to the regular chit chat. And then the realisation that none of them had noticed my silence. Every day now, I had to challenge myself to go on a small walk, slowly, slowly. First just half a block. Then a full one. Then two. I could almost persuade myself back into the old habits, trying to deduce the languages I overheard, wondering how much the luxury flats would sell for. The flats a few blocks away from the river appeared to be an entirely different neighborhood, and would sell accordingly. I pondered if this was like the accents too, if natives to the city could discern from postcodes alone what type of childhood you’d had.

What type of adulthood you were having.

My favourite (favorite? I could feel the change creeping in, a surprisingly resilient tendril of sweet pea clinging anywhere it fancied) part of my walk was next to Wapping station, where the entrance to the Thames path required passing luxury apartments marked with a closed gate that was legally mandated to be left unlocked, but clearly designed to ward off the public. There was a measure of spite in entering there and going to face the water. They couldn’t keep us out.

Us.

As if there was an us, even if I started to put a ‘u’ in my word, even if I had lain abed in a ward and realised that this was a city of immigrants: the other patients, the doctors, the nurses, the woman who was in charge of giving me a juice each afternoon and evening along with whatever sad food had been chosen. Was there a postcode for us? Could we unify under an amalgamation of accents, but not let our class show?

No, I was as divided from the Irish woman who’d screamed in pain in the bed next to me as I was from the Rwandan nurse and the Romanian doctor and the half-Australian bartender who was now putting out his cigarette and smiling at me. It had been a month since I had been strong enough to walk here. And another month where I was too ashamed to.

I still had my too round eyes. My nose veering into a sphere. My elbows which lacked any points. But my belly was concave, the tumor gone, the evidence of nights eating chips for dinner gone, the fantasy, too, of one day being able to carry a child. I had imagined that being thin would make me beautiful, that I could suddenly wear oversized t-shirts and find them flattering. I had imagined this my whole life, but I just looked ill without the roundness of my belly to complete the picture of me.

#

In November, I was no longer mistaken for four times my age as I shuffled along. I allowed myself an extra step to crunch a leaf without feeling the exhaustion. A wisp of cigarette smoke corrupted the autumnal air.

“Fuck mate,” the bartender said, “I was beginning to think you left for Montana without bothering to fix my bus route.”

“I don’t work for TfL.”

“Yet.”

I smiled. Here was someone who knew two things about me, who thought I was part of the tapestry of his version of the same city.

“I’ve been getting to know the NHS.” I thought about telling him that he was right, I should’ve gone to the doctor. My gauntness said it loud enough.

He nodded, stubbed out his smoke. “Come in, I’ve got a new alcohol-free beer we’re testing, it actually isn’t bad.”

I knew they didn’t open for another half hour. I followed him into the wood-panelled depths and took a seat at the edge of the bar. The view was of the river; I hadn’t realised before. Every other time I’d been here, the place had been crowded, friends chattering to each other and blocking the small windows. But here, the river was closer than from my flat, almost foreboding with the idea it could rise at high tide and seep between the floorboards with gaps larger than  those in the smile of a child missing a tooth.

From here, you could see people digging into the grime of the shores, hoping to uncover old clay pipes or other debris. “Mudlarkers,” he said, following my line of sight. I savoured the word. Added it to my collection.

The bartender drew me a pint. I had never caught him gazing out at the water and, even now, view unobstructed, he was drawn to the grains of wood in the bar and labels of what’s on tap.

I made determined eye contact, mustered a hey, and asked his name. Offered mine.