Contents ( 123)
- Praise for The Cancer Ladies’ Running Club
- Also By Josie Lloyd
- Copyright
- Note to Readers
- Contents
- 1
- Bah Humbug
- 2
- The Gravy Arc
- 3
- Everybody’s Having Fun
- 4
- New Friendship Turf
- 5
- Pilcharding
- 6
- Resolutions
- 7
- Scatter Cushions
- 8
- The Family Zoom
- 9
- The Extension
- 10
- Luna
- 11
- Washing Away the Bad Juju
- 12
- Dog Ambush
- 13
- The Promise of Fireworks
- 14
- Inner Superhero
- 15
- Tent Call
- 16
- Oystercatchers
- 17
- Rob’s Declaration
- 18
- Hard to Forgive
- 19
- A Sliver of Hope
- 20
- Snow Swim
- 21
- A Glimpse into Next Door
- 22
- Date Night
- 23
- Quad Bike
- 24
- Back to the Office
- 25
- The Jab
- 26
- Dawn Call
- 27
- Life Drawing
- 28
- Equinox
- 29
- Home Hairdresser
- 30
- Beach Clean
- 31
- Bunny Ears
- 32
- Bombshell
- 33
- The Nightingale
- 34
- Destruction
- 35
- Home in a Box
- 36
- Back on Call
- 37
- Upfront and Honest
- 38
- A Trip to Hampstead Pond
- 39
- That Unmistakeable Profile
- 40
- Full Moon Swim
- 41
- The Unexpected Cwych
- 42
- Caught Out
- 43
- Shallow Water
- 44
- From The Pier
- 45
- Taking Flight
- 46
- Eels
- 47
- Facing Facts
- 48
- Breakfast of Champions
- 49
- The Betting Shop
- 50
- A Promise Kept
- 51
- A New Companion
- 52
- Adios
- 53
- A Family Celebration
- 54
- Towards the Horizon
- 55
- The Windfarm
- 56
- Round the Pier
- Acknowledgements
- Reading Group Questions
- Extract
- New Year’s Eve
- 1
- About the Publisher
I stand naked from the waist up feeling cold and exposed and trapped inside her ominous silence, whilst the lyrics ‘He’s got to be so macho, he’s got to be big and strong enough to turn me on…’ roll around my head. Of all things, how has that song and its ridiculous lyrics managed to lodge itself in the filing cabinet of my memory?
As she marks lines on my breast with a pen and adjusts the machine, she’s concentrating so hard, I don’t feel like I can talk. I have to forcibly gag Sinitta in my head.
She skilfully, clinically, manoeuvres my breast onto a cold plate in front of a giant white machine and the other plate comes down and squishes it. A sort of boob sandwich. It hurts. More than last time, back in December, when I was up to my eyeballs in work and my appointment was a quick in-and-out job and not like this at all.
After she’s taken some shots and is squinting at the screen, I pipe up, ‘Can I take a look?’
‘Oh, are you medical?’ she asks.
‘No… er… no, just curious.’
She swings the screen round.
There’s my left breast in dark outline, looking like a distant planet in outer space. Or it could be a scene from a Planet Earth programme about the deepest part of the ocean. Strange tendril-like white things float around. What are they? They are spidery and spindly and creepily floating. Are they milk ducts or something?
At no point in my life have I really paid attention to the internal workings of me. My cells, blood, organs, tissue. It’s a shock to have a glimpse into this inner world, which is living, evolving, doing stuff all by itself. It’s like seeing time-lapse photography of moss in close-up. It’s a world that I own, except I don’t. The machine does.
‘Can you tell anything? From the images?’ I ask Sinitta, but she lowers her eyes.
‘I’m afraid it’s not my job to interpret the data,’ she says.
Data? Is that what I’ve become?
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
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Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
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22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor
Toronto, ON, M5H 4E3, Canada
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India
HarperCollins India
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Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India
http://www.harpercollins.co.in
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
195 Broadway
New York, NY 10007
http://www.harpercollins.com
Dublin
HarperCollinsPublishers
1st Floor, Watermarque Building, Ringsend Road
Dublin 4, Ireland
http://www.harpercollins.co.uk