This Is Not a Pity Memoir by Abi Morgan

Author:Abi Morgan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

Seven

Superheroes come in many forms.

This is the mantra that will go around and around in my head. Keeping time with the steady intermittent electronic peeps of the MRI, like a bad 1970s sci-fi. It reminds me of the Smash ad I used to love as a kid, where metal-headed aliens scoffed at how we earthlings made mashed potato. As I slowly glide through the tubular machine, the theme tune is humming in my head.

“For mash get Smash . . .”

I watched a lot of TV as a kid. Before it was bad, or thought to drain your brain, it was the electronic babysitter that kept us happy. The Banana Splits, Poldark, the original Doctor Who, the Tom Baker years, The Two Ronnies, Morecambe & Wise. There’s not a theme tune that I can’t sing, that Huw and Dorcas won’t recognize.

“Are you dancing . . . Are you asking? Yeah, I’m asking . . . Then I’m dancing.”

I once wrote to Jim’ll Fix It and asked if he could “fix it” for me to be on The Liver Birds. He never did.

I count my blessings.

The voice through my headphones calmly interrupts as the clanging momentarily stops.

The Clangers . . . That’s one I missed.

“OK and the next one will be in three minutes.”

I have asked them to break my scan down into chunks. To talk to me. Talk me down. It has taken an hour and half a Valium to get me in here. Dorcas is waiting for me outside, and the radiographer’s assistant almost had to unpeel my fingers from her before bringing me in. It’s a simple process. I lie on my front, my breasts hanging in two Perspex boxes, which is weird but maybe in a certain light could qualify as kinky. A mirror reflects the image of the radiographer and the assistant in the control room, heads down, eyes grazing across the images coming through, speaking to me over the two-way radio, their voices reassuring me through the headphones I am wearing.

Last week I lay in a bone scanner, a flat metal plate a centimeter above my face, but no wider than your average TV. My mother is holding my hand. I can see her smiling. If I turn a little to my left, while trying not to move my spine, because they need to get my skeleton in perfect shot, I can see her smiling. It’s a little like being inside a sandwich toaster. Yet I cry. Like I have never cried before. Weeping like a child, calling out for my mother until she grips my fingers, whispers reassurances to me.

“It’s all right, I’m here.”

Machinery is my Achilles heel. The clangs. The peeps. The “suck” in suctioning. The wheeling out and wheeling in. I have struggled with all of these, while I’ve watched Jacob, and now it’s happening to me. My children are used to this phobia. Mabel, leaning in, talking me down when we stop momentarily in a lift. Jesse, reassuring me as the train dips down into the Underground.

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