The Book Club That Booked Appointments Instead

The loud one went quiet

Our book club has met on the last Thursday of every month for eleven years. Five of us. We rotate houses across the northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and whoever hosts is meant to have read the book, though at least two of us usually haven't and just nod along while eating the snacks. I am fifty-one, and I have been in this group since I was forty. We started because we wanted to read more and ended up with something closer to a family that happens to own a lot of paperbacks.

Thandeka is the loud one. Was, is, still is, I keep tripping over the tense. She is the woman who arrives late, parks badly, and announces her opinion about the ending before anyone has had a chance to say they didn't finish. She laughs from her whole chest. She once told a waiter at a restaurant in Parkhurst that his recommendation was "a betrayal of the concept of food," and then tipped him double because she felt bad. That is Thandeka.

So when she went quiet in the group chat for a couple of weeks, we noticed, the way you notice a fridge that has stopped humming. We assumed work. She travels for a logistics company and sometimes disappears into airports. Then one Sunday evening she typed a long message into our WhatsApp, and I remember I was standing at the stove stirring a pot of samp, and I read it with the wooden spoon still in my hand.

She had found a lump. She had gone in. It was cancer, early, and there was a plan. She wrote it plainly, no drama, which from Thandeka was the most frightening part of all. The three dots appeared and disappeared under her message for a long time while all of us tried to type something that wasn't useless. I don't think any of us fully succeeded.

The silence that came after

For a while nobody in the group said the word. We are grown women. We have buried parents between us, we have divorced and remarried and raised difficult teenagers, and yet we tiptoed around this one small syllable like it was a sleeping dog. We sent her food. We drove her to one appointment and sat in the parking lot of the hospital in Sandton drinking bad coffee from a machine. We were loving and we were completely, uselessly avoidant about ourselves.

Because here is the thing nobody said out loud at first. Every one of us, alone in our own bathrooms, started touching our own bodies with new attention. I know this because eventually we admitted it. Standing at the mirror after a shower, I found myself pressing my fingers into my own skin in slow circles, not knowing exactly what I was feeling for, feeling faintly ridiculous, feeling suddenly and totally mortal.

I was the worst of us for avoiding it. I am not proud of my reasons. Part of it was busyness, the ordinary kind, the calendar that fills itself with other people's needs. But part of it was superstition, plain and childish. My mother used to say don't go looking for trouble, and somewhere in my chest I had turned a medical screening into exactly that, as if the act of checking could summon the thing you were checking for. I had spent years not booking. I would think about Mammograms in the abstract, the way you think about updating your will, and then I would remember I needed to buy dog food, and the thought would evaporate.

One by one

It was Priya who broke first. She is the quiet one, an accountant, careful with everything including her own fear. She simply posted into the group one Tuesday: "Booked mine for Thursday. Anyone want to come sit with me after for cake." No preamble. Cake was, of course, code. We understood.

Then Lerato went. Then Susan, who is originally from Durban and treats all medical matters with the brisk cheerfulness of someone who has raised four children and refuses to be intimidated by anything. Susan came back into the chat and typed a description of the whole thing that made us cry laughing, something about being pressed like a sandwich in a very serious toaster, and honestly that broke the spell more than any encouragement could have. Suddenly it was not a dark unspeakable thing. It was just a Thursday, and a toaster, and cake afterwards.

That left me. The holdout. The one who had lectured everyone else about their cholesterol for a decade and had never once faced the machine herself.

Booking it, and taking Priya

I called on a Monday morning before I could talk myself out of it, sitting in my car in the driveway with the engine off so nobody could hear the wobble in my voice. When the woman on the phone asked if this was my first Mammogram, I said yes, and it came out smaller than I intended, almost like a confession. She was kind about it in a matter-of-fact way that I found I needed more than sympathy.

I asked Priya to come with me. Not because I needed a lift. Because I did not want to sit in that waiting room alone with my own thoughts, which are not always good company. She said yes before I finished the sentence.

The waiting room was beige in the way all these rooms are beige, with a fish tank that had two fish and a lot of ambition, and a stack of magazines from a year when we all still cared about different things. There was a woman crocheting something enormous and violently pink. There was another woman, older, in a church hat, who caught my eye and gave me a small nod, the kind that says I have done this many times, you will be fine, and I have thought about her nod many times since. Priya held my handbag on her lap and did the crossword badly and out loud, and I was grateful for every wrong answer.

The strange intimacy of it

When they called my name I stood up too fast. The radiographer was a young woman named Nonhlanhla with warm hands and a very calm voice, and there is an odd tenderness to the whole encounter that nobody warns you about. A stranger asks you to undress from the waist up and then arranges you gently, the way you might arrange a child for a photograph, turning your shoulder, telling you where to breathe. Part of the appointment was a physical Breast Examination, her fingers methodical and unhurried, and I stared at a poster on the ceiling of a beach I will never visit and thought about Thandeka, and about my mother, and about how strange it is that we go through so much of our lives never letting anyone truly look after our bodies until something makes us.

It was uncomfortable, briefly, the pressing. Susan's toaster was not wrong. But it was over quickly, and Nonhlanhla told me I had done well as though I were six, and I did not mind at all. I got dressed with slightly shaking hands and walked back out to where Priya was waiting, and she looked up from the crossword and just said, "There. Not so bad," and I burst into tears in the middle of the beige room, not from fear, from something closer to relief, the letting go of a breath I had been holding for years.

Cake, and what it was really about

We got the cake. Carrot cake, at a coffee shop in Rosebank, and Priya let me have the bigger slice without saying anything, which is its own language after eleven years. I photographed the two forks and the two plates and sent it to the group with the words "done," and the phone lit up like a switchboard.

Thandeka is doing well, as it happens. She is loud again, thank God, opinionated about the last book, parking badly, alive. But that is almost beside the point of what I want to say. The point is that her fear, quietly shared, moved through five women like a current, and one by one it made us turn and look after ourselves in a way we had been too busy and too superstitious to do for years.

I used to think love in a friendship was the big gestures, the airport pickups, the funerals, the being there. I still think it is those things. But I have come to believe it is also this smaller, less romantic thing. It is one woman typing "booked mine for Thursday" into a group chat so the next one feels brave enough to do the same. It is holding a handbag in a beige room. It is a bigger slice of carrot cake, and a nod from a stranger in a church hat, and five friends who read books together and, in one particular year, quietly taught each other how to stop looking away.