Mia Uys
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Mia Uys is a writer and PhD Candidate in the field of Historical Studies. She is interested in exploring the entangled historical relations between humans, animals, and science in South Africa. Her story, “Heatwave”, was longlisted for the 2022 Toyin Fálọlá Prize for African Literacy. She lives in Cape Town. You can connect with her on Bookstagram at @sabookworm.
Waiting Room
When Anna arrived, I was in one of my low moods again, tears streaming uncontrollably, rubbing my hands roughly over my face. Feeling like I wanted to peel the skin off my finger, pinch myself until I bled. I never actually did those things, but I wanted to feel pain, or at least the anticipation of it. Anything but grief. When I was on my own, I went as far as holding a pair of scissors while thinking about what sort of injuries I could inflict. I would shake as I held the scissors, imagining different scenarios. I only ever put the scissors back in the drawer, but it would have worked. I wouldn’t have felt sad anymore.
Do you want me to leave? Anna asked gently.
This only made me cry more. Instead of leaving, she went into the bathroom and ran water into the tub. I protested but she ignored me, adding the bubble bath I kept on the shelf. She helped me undress and climbed in with me. It was the start of summer. I hadn’t bathed in weeks. The tub was much too small for the both of us, Anna had to keep her long legs bent. I blew foam at her from across the water. Her breasts looked bigger than normal, obscured by the bubbles and floating freely.
She smiled and said, Look how cheerful you are now.
Your boobs look really big, I said.
She laughed.
When we got out, I felt warm and sleepy. If I closed my eyes, it felt as though I might never wake up. We spoke for a while about a new series we were watching, but I was too tired to offer any insightful opinions. Anna hardly ever slept over. She still lived at home with her parents who thought she had a boyfriend. When I woke up, we were holding hands and her face was pressed up against my chest. Her body was radiating heat and she was breathing loudly through her nose. My body was an empty vessel, one that had been damaged in some ways. I could picture it clearly, my body, as the vessel, and the parts that had been broken. I tried to think about my body in a different way, to compare it to something I admired or loved, but I couldn’t. When Anna woke up, she didn’t say anything. She just kissed me, and her mouth tasted stale.
Do you have to go to work? I asked.
She smiled. I have that big pitch meeting, and I don’t have any of my clothes. Plus, don’t you have a deadline?
I sighed. I can’t write without you, I said. You’re my muse.
You managed so long without me, though.
I suffered, I said.
You always suffer, she said, touching my arm. I wasn’t sure if we were still joking.
It was Thursday morning. I did have a deadline for a chapter of my thesis, but I’d already emailed my supervisors to tell them that I had a doctor’s appointment. Neither of them had replied. In the kitchen, I turned the kettle on, took two white mugs from the shelf. I picked at the skin around my nail. There was nothing to be done. I was feeling anxious about the procedure.
The evening before my mother died, I started feeling incredibly anxious, more so than I had during the months we had spent at home looking after her. I lay on the couch and clutched my chest.
I don’t know if I can do it, I said tearfully.
What do you mean? my sister asked. By that point, my mother had been in a coma for three days. We would all have to work together to shift her body into different positions to avoid bed sores. We wiped her mouth and smeared lip balm over her cracked lips. She breathed softly, looking so tiny and tired, like she might disintegrate into the bed covers and disappear.
I can’t watch her stop breathing, I can’t be there at the end. I thought I could, but I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it.
My sister hugged me. A rare gesture. No nightshift tonight, she said. We will wake you if anything happens.
That night, I slept so deeply, as if someone had drugged me. I didn’t dream. No one woke me. I felt calm when I resurfaced. While my father made coffee in the kitchen, I crept into their room and lay next to my mother. She was in a different position but breathing just the same, maybe slower. I remained by her side until it was over. It was nothing like I imagined it to be, the death rattle, her eyes opening to say some final line, her body shaking, her chest lifting as she spoke. Instead, her leaving the earth was so gentle and quiet, if I hadn’t been looking, I might have missed it. Anna was the first person I messaged. We weren’t even having sex then.
She’s gone, I texted.
My heart is with you, she replied.
I imagined Anna’s heart breaking free from her body and traveling the distance to my house, all the way into my hands. It made me want to weep. But I didn’t cry when my mother’s body was carried out, covered in a black sheet, held up by two people I would never see again. I didn’t cry in the shower, when I got dressed, made breakfast, ate the first meal without my mother, the way I would eat all the meals for the rest of my life. I couldn’t cry properly for weeks and weeks. I felt different now, not necessarily worse, but different. My experience of grief was ever shifting, unstable. Sometimes looming large, but other days, fluid like liquid, spooling into the corners of the room. I suppose it could never have felt like it did in the beginning.
While Anna was in the shower, I scrolled through Instagram. I thought about phoning my father to tell him what was going to happen.
A doctor is going to cut out a piece of my cervix, I imagined saying to him. It sounded so dramatic.
You should talk to your sister, my father had said to me the last time we spoke.
There are many things I should do, I wanted to tell him. But instead I only said: You’re right.
I didn’t have much time. I phoned my sister. I explained my situation.
Can’t you change the date? Wait until you’ve been paid?
It’s an emergency, I told her.
It’s tight this side with the kids. Don’t you have that grant to cover your living expenses?
It doesn’t cover medical aid.
She sighed. Don’t you have like three degrees?
Don’t, I said. You sound like Dad. It’s not going to be like this forever.
I’ll see what I can do.
Thanks, I said weakly. I appreciate it.
She had already put down the phone. I stared at it in my hand. Anna came up behind me and kissed my shoulder. I was not sure how much she had heard.
I have to get going, said Anna.
I walked her to the door. Thanks for coming over, I said.
My pleasure, she said, giving a little wave. Before she turned down the staircase, she stopped and spoke softly: Hey, good luck with your appointment.
I met Anna during my first year of university. While I had majored in anthropology, she’d studied finance and now worked for a start-up tech company that seemed to be expanding rapidly. The numbers and systems she used felt so far removed from anything that I knew, another foreign language I heard only on television.
Back then, she was dating a friend of mine, Harry, who took history with me. He was loud and opinionated in the seminars. He started every assignment the evening before it was due and enjoyed boasting when we received similar grades. I started my assignments the day I received them, working slowly through the texts, renewing library books, saving articles to my desktop in separate folders. Despite the extra effort, I still struggled to formulate the main thesis of my argument. This was often highlighted by my tutors. Where is your golden thread? they wrote. Harry, in contrast, found it easy to argue about everything.
One evening, when Harry was busy, Anna and I went out, just the two of us. We drank half-priced cocktails at a family restaurant. After that, we went to a nightclub. We took shots at the bar, let strangers buy us more drinks, danced to bad music, watched drunk men fight in the street. In the bathroom, we kissed frantically in the small cubicle, pressed up against the toilet seat, laughing the whole time, like we were only joking.
I like you so much, I had told her. I kissed her properly, holding one hand on her jaw. I’d meant what I said. I didn’t care about Harry.
You’ll be the death of me, she whispered.
The next morning, I woke up alone in my apartment, my eyes caked with makeup, the light streaming into my room through a gap in the curtains. Anna had attended a conservative Afrikaans high school, and her father was a pastor at the local church. She continued dating Harry. We never spoke about that night again, not even now, all these years later.
I called an Uber. My car’s battery had died, and I didn’t have enough money to replace it. I walked to the postgraduate room on campus every day, so it didn’t bother me. Stellenbosch was a small town. One day I would need to start behaving like an adult, like Anna, with her tax-free savings account and her investments, but that seemed so far away, once my dissertation was complete. It was October, and I had barely written a chapter. I needed to send a progress report to the funding office soon. Sometimes, when I thought about how much I needed to get done, I would run to the bathroom to be sick.
I tried to ensure this didn’t happen around Anna, but sometimes it was unavoidable. She wouldn’t make a big fuss, just boil the kettle to brew us rooibos tea which we would sit drinking on the bathroom floor until I felt better. We would normally drink in silence, but sometimes she offered ideas about how to move my research forward: a journal of daily reminders or reaching out to other colleagues. I would smile at her and say: yes, I will try that this week. I never spoke to the other doctoral students in my department, some who had their own offices and never worked in the communal research room. I had lost the confidence I had once possessed about the quality of my work, when my mother was still healthy enough that my life felt manageable. I had a different life back then, one I felt far removed from. But back then I didn’t have Anna, not in the way I did now. I tried to be there for her too in different ways, listening to her vent about her parents’ worldviews, or buying her tulips—she loved tulips, especially bright yellow ones, and I would carry them back with me from campus. But these acts never carried the same weight. She was so generous with her love, more so than I deserved.
On the way to the hospital, the driver talked loudly on the phone in a language I didn’t understand. He laughed so much that he had to wipe his eyes. This made me smile. He dropped me off in the parking lot, next to an ambulance and an elderly couple walking slowly towards the main entrance. The weather was pleasant. I shouldn’t have worn jeans. Security guards called out to each other. Red-winged starlings landed on the gutter overhead.
In the doctor’s rooms, I sat on a beige couch close to the exit. There was no one else waiting. The receptionist answered calls and typed things on her computer. I tried to read the novel that I had brought with me. It was dystopian fiction, a world where everyone hated each other, and a young boy was trying to find his father. I wasn’t enjoying it. In my purse I found half a granola bar which I finished. The doctor was twenty minutes late. I could hear him speaking in the other room. He had a nice low voice. Eventually his door opened, and a pregnant woman walked out, holding one hand on her stomach and thanking him in a sincere voice. He told her not to worry and that he would see her soon. Thank you, she said again. I waited patiently for this interaction to be over.
Hello, the doctor said to me. Come on in.
As I sat down in his office, he showed me my pathology report and explained that I was an unusual case—something about finding no detection of a virus but still being at risk of having a high-grade lesion. I was struggling to concentrate on what he was saying. He had cut his hair since my last appointment.
Your hair looks nice, I said.
He seemed startled. Thanks, he said. Listen. Because you’re so young and haven’t had children, I’m hesitant to go straight to a LLETZ.
I had researched LLETZ on the internet but now couldn’t remember anything useful. I think the E stood for electrical because it involved burning off a part of the cervix that was abnormal. If I needed this, I would have to come up with a plan to pay for it.
I’ll take a good look at the cervix and if I see anything abnormal, I’ll take a biopsy, the doctor said.
Sounds good, I said. I wasn’t planning to have children.
Okay, he said. You know the drill. The gown is hanging on the back of the door.
I stripped naked in the small cubicle attached to the examination room. I touched the gown and thought about the other women who had wrapped it around their bodies. I thought about Anna wrapping me in a towel when we climbed out of the bath. I was shivering. I opened the door and walked towards the examination bed. The doctor was plugging a white machine into the wall. This was the microscope, I realised. It seemed massive. I got onto the bed and lay with my legs stretched out straight in front of me. He gently pried them open. An object that looked like a trap was inserted. Cool air rushed in. The sound of a lever cranking.
Alright, he said. You’re doing great. Take deep breaths.
The anticipation of this pain was nothing like when I had the control. I felt properly afraid now, not knowing how this could turn out. I’m going to use some vinegar, it might burn a little, he told me. I bunched my eyes, waiting for the sensation. I didn’t feel much.
Okay, I’m not seeing anything abnormal. I’m going to insert some liquid iodine.
I imagined him seeing all the broken parts of my body, the cells mutating to form ugly masses. It felt like he was barely moving, just looking, quietly, saying nothing. I tried to think of something calming. I played a piece of classical music in my head.
A few days before my mother died, we played Vivaldi on her phone. She was sitting upright in her bed, the same bed in which she would lie down and stop breathing. She moved her arms to the beat like a conductor, perfectly timed. I laughed and let the music pass through me with its beauty. The world contained no life-like qualities, everything was hazy, with no permanence. I wanted the song never to end, for us to keep listening over and over, but it did. Back then, I couldn’t believe these things really happened, that the person you loved more than anything could become ill and die, and you would still have to get up the next day, open your mouth, find words to speak.
I can see a small lesion, the doctor said. It could be normal, but I’m going to take a biopsy.
Okay, I said. I was sweating under my armpits; I could feel it soaking into the gown.
I’m spraying local anaesthetic, he told me.
He dug around for another instrument. I felt something else being inserted and a small pinch, the object sliding out again. He was muttering to himself.
I’m sorry, he said. I need a bigger sample. Last time now, nearly there.
The instrument was pushed higher, and this time, when it pierced, a sharp pain radiated into my pelvis. My eyes filled. I bit the inside of my cheek.
It’s all over, he said. You’re done. I just need to stop the bleeding.
I couldn’t tell what he was using now, my vagina felt sticky and warm. My legs were shaking.
There is quite a lot of bleeding, he said, which we expect, so please take a pad from the cabinet. It’s important that you avoid bathing, intercourse, even using a tampon for at least the next week to decrease the risk of infection. It is quite common to expect spotting for the next few days, he told me, so don’t be alarmed.
I nodded and got off the bed. In the cubicle, I took five pads from the shelf and put them into my handbag. I removed the toilet paper. There was blood everywhere, in bright patches, and brown spots from the iodine. Don’t be alarmed, I thought.
I pulled up my underwear, felt the pad turn wet immediately. I was starting to feel nauseous. I had blood all over my fingertips. I rinsed them under the basin. Slowly, I put the rest of my clothes back on, breathing through my nose.
At his desk, the doctor was inspecting something in a small container. I sat down in one of the chairs. I felt exhausted, more tired than I’d ever been. My abdomen was bloated and I had started cramping.
Here it is, the doctor said, holding the container up to the light. In the liquid, a piece of white pulp was floating. It looked like a tiny jellyfish. It was a chunk of my cervix, I realised. This felt insane.
It’s so small to have caused this much pain, I said.
Oh no, he said. This is a big biopsy. Very big.
I felt proud of my efforts, of my ability to suffer.
You’ll hear from me in about a week. If it’s normal we can wait another six months to do a smear, but if it’s anything else, we will operate.
We have a plan, he said. I’m not worried.
The last time I was here, I had received good results. I remember him telling me how the body was constantly in flux. It was amazingly adaptable, fighting off the virus, managing other infections. Cells could change and become normal again.
The most important thing is that we catch it early, he said. It’s so good that you come for regular checks.
I thought about my mother, how none of these measures had saved her, how futile all those regular checks had been.
Thank you, I said.
Take care, he replied, opening the door so I could escape.
I took my phone out to check my bank balance. No transfers had been made. The pain in my abdomen was increasing.
Fuck, I whispered.
I couldn’t look at the receptionist.
I’m so sorry about this, I told her. I would just like to inquire about the possibility of paying this procedure off in installments.
Don’t worry, she said warmly. It’s already been taken care of.
What do you mean?
The receptionist gestured towards the waiting room where Anna was sitting cross-legged on the beige couch, frowning as she typed on her laptop. She was wearing a white linen shirt, and her dark hair was pinned in a low bun at the base of her neck. She had her Air Pods in.
If you present it like that, it should go well, she was saying. I know its inconvenient. Like I said, it’s a family emergency.
I rolled the word family around in my mind. I felt lightheaded. I wondered if I was going to faint. It was almost like having a spiritual experience.
Anna was putting her laptop back in its sleeve, coming over to meet me.
God, you’re pale, she said. Let’s get you home.
I could feel the pad’s weight between my legs. I imagined the blood seeping through, dripping down to stain the carpet. But none of that was real. There were other things happening inside my body, complex systems I could not control. Organs with their own functions, valves opening and closing. It was a beautiful thing.
Anna took my hand, the same way she did when we were teenagers. I let her lead me down the corridor. All around us, bodies on their way somewhere, trolleys wheeling past carrying medical equipment. Outside, the sound of a car starting, people laughing as they walked up the street.
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