The Alto Who Stopped Singing in the Middle of Kyrie

I sing second alto in a community choir in Pretoria, which is a grand way of saying I stand in the back row on a Thursday evening and try not to drag the sopranos flat. We are not a famous choir. We are mostly women between fifty and seventy, a few patient husbands, and a conductor named Rina who waves her arms as if she is trying to land an aircraft. We rehearse in a church hall that smells of floor polish and instant coffee, and we have done so for eleven years.

The woman who stands to my left is Lettie. She has stood to my left since the beginning. Her voice is lower than mine and steadier, and for years I have leaned on it the way you lean on a wall you have stopped noticing. When Lettie is there I sing better. I do not have to think so hard about the notes because her certainty carries me along. I never told her this. You do not tell the wall you are leaning on it.

The gap in the back row

One Thursday in autumn Lettie was not there. Rina said she was not well and we carried on, and I sang badly and told myself it was because the hall was cold. The next Thursday she was not there either. By the third week there was a gap to my left that I kept turning towards out of habit, the way your tongue keeps finding the place where a tooth used to be.

It was Rina who told us, after rehearsal, with the coffee going cold in our hands. Lettie had found a lump. She had been for a scan, and then for more scans, and the word that none of us wanted to say had been said to her in a consulting room while the rest of us were singing Kyrie without her. She was going to be alright, Rina thought, because they had caught it early. But early, Rina said, was not luck. Early was because Lettie had gone for a Mammogram when the little card came in the post reminding her, instead of putting the card in the drawer where most of us put things we are afraid of.

I drove home that night and I did not put the radio on. I am sixty-one. I have breasts that I have, if I am honest, treated as a kind of inconvenient furniture for most of my adult life. I had never had a mammogram. Not once. There had always been a reason. The children, then the grandchildren, then the fear itself, which is the most honest reason and the one I dressed up as all the others.

The thing we never talked about at coffee

Here is what struck me in the days after. Lettie and I had stood shoulder to shoulder for over a decade. We had talked about everything. Her son's divorce, my hip, the price of meat, the soprano who thinks she is a soloist. But we had never once talked about this. Not the scans, not the checking, not the fear. It was as if our whole generation had agreed, without ever discussing it, that this was a thing you did alone and in silence, if you did it at all.

When Lettie came back to the choir, three months later, thinner and with a scarf tied in a way that was new, the first thing she did was make a joke about it so that none of us would cry. The second thing she did, a few weeks later, over the cold coffee, was tell us plainly what it had been like. The waiting. The machine. The relief, and then the next waiting. And she said something I have not been able to forget. She said the mammogram was not the frightening part. The frightening part was all the years she had nearly not gone.

That sentence went round the back row like a note passed in school. By the end of the evening four of us had admitted, quietly, that we had never been either. Four women who have sung about mercy and grace a thousand times, who could not do the small merciful thing of a Breast Examination for our own bodies.

Going together, the way we do everything

So we did what a choir does. We made it a group activity. It sounds absurd, perhaps, to turn a medical screening into an outing, but it is how women like us survive things. We decided we would all go, the ones who never had, and we would go in the same week, and we would phone each other afterwards. Lettie organised it, of course, because she has decided her job now is to make sure the rest of us do not nearly not go the way she nearly did.

I will not dress up my own appointment as brave. I was terrified in the car park. I sat there for ten minutes listening to the engine tick as it cooled, finding and discarding reasons to drive away. Then I thought of the gap to my left in the back row, and how close we had come to that gap being permanent, and I went in. I had booked through a service I had read about, and I found afterwards that the practical side was far gentler than the version I had built in my head over the years. If you want to understand what is actually involved, rather than the frightening story your own fear tells you, the plain information about Mammograms is a far kinder companion than silence.

The procedure itself took minutes. It was uncomfortable, I will not lie, but it was the discomfort of a firm handshake, not of anything cruel. The radiographer was a young woman who talked to me the whole time about her own grandmother's choir, and I was out in the sun again before I had finished being frightened.

What the waiting taught me

The hardest part, as Lettie had warned, was the few days of waiting for the result. I understood in those days something about her that I had leaned on for eleven years without ever seeing. All that steadiness in her voice, it turns out, was not the absence of fear. It was fear, carried well. My own result came back clear, and I sat on the edge of my bed and wept in a way I had not expected, not from relief exactly, but from the strange grief of all the years I had spent not knowing because I had been too frightened to find out.

We are a slightly different choir now. We still smell of floor polish and instant coffee, Rina still lands her imaginary aircraft, and the soprano still thinks she is a soloist. But the little cards do not go in the drawer any more. When one of us gets the reminder, she says so, out loud, at coffee, and someone offers to drive. We talk about it the way we talk about our hips and the price of meat, which is to say as an ordinary part of being a woman of a certain age and not a shameful secret to be sung over.

Lettie stands to my left again. Her voice is back, lower and steadier than mine, and I lean on it still. But I have stopped pretending the wall will always be there simply because it always has been. Early is not luck. Lettie taught the whole back row that, in the key of Kyrie, and I think it may be the most important thing any of us has ever learned in that cold hall.