Eating the Underworld by Doris Brett

I am very, very irritated now. I have to make the tape for the third time! I decide to do a Scarlett O’Hara and think about it tomorrow. Instead, I get down to cancelling my patients for the next few weeks.
    Within a couple of hours I’ve managed to contact most of them. When I explain that I need to cancelappointments because of some unexpected surgery, I notice that my non-oncology patients assume it’s something simple like a gallbladder or appendix. My oncology patients are the ones who immediately say, ‘Is it dangerous? Is it cancer?’
    I wake in the morning and realise that I left an important suggestion out of yesterday’s tape. If the distracting sound hadn’t made me scrap the second tape, I would have taken it to hospital without thinking about it. Trying for third time lucky, I make the new tape, complete with new suggestion and minus the mysterious sound.
    The mysterious sound is about to get more mysterious. A few days from now, I will wake in my hospital room. It is midnight. I was operated on at 4.00 pm and have spent most of the time since then asleep. The room is very quiet. As I adjust to the dark silence, I recognise a familiar sound. It is the soft, regular beat I last heard on my ditched tape. I have just worked out that it’s coming from the intravenous drip when the door swings open and a torch, followed by a nurse, enters.
    â€˜Just checking the drip,’ she says, padding over. ‘Ah, it’s running too slow.’ She makes a few adjustments and the soft, beating rhythm speeds up. Just as it had on my tape.
    The sound takes its place as one of those odd events that elude explanation. They arrive sometimes, like seeming wrinkles in time or space, and remind us that perhaps we do not know all there is to know. To this day, I have no idea what caused it.
    In the months before all this happened, I’d been struggling with a major case of writer’s block. My new poetry book is only two-thirds finished and I’ve been stuck. Finally I decide to turn instead to my new novel. The opening scene is set in an operating theatre. As I write, I realise I know nothing about operating theatres. Damn, I think, I’ll have to find some way of seeing one. I am clearly offering myself up to be the embodiment of that cautionary phrase, ‘Be careful of what you wish for …’ Ten days later, as I’m wheeled in for my surgery, I will be looking around me, frantically trying to memorise everything I see.
    But in the meantime, the poetry has come back with a rush. It happened the instant I realised I was in for something serious, life-threatening. I have found the cure for writer’s block! Words and images are flowing through, as if a door had suddenly been opened in my mind. It feels wonderful to have them with me again. I am gripped by the totally irrational certainty that as long as I write, I will live. The poems pour out, telling me what is happening to me, guiding me through the journey.

 
    The Waiting Room
    Arthur Stace was an Australian eccentric who spent forty years writing the word ‘Eternity’ across the streets of Sydney
    In the back room behind it
    the doctors flit backwards
    and forwards like fishes
    doing the secret thing.
    There is the woman who is sobbing
    in the corner and the woman on the wall
    staring up to the pale, pure ceiling.
    There are flat princesses
    on the table
    in their Woman’s Days
    and women are dying here
    and where are you, Arthur Stace
    rising at midnight,
    grey as the pale slate pavements
    of Sydney, writing ‘Eternity’ …
    â€˜Eternity’ …?
    And I think that if we all
    reached out, wingtip
    to wingtip from where we sit,
    including the receptionist
    typing in the corner
    we could stretch out our arms
    and slowly lift, rise up,
    rise up …, lighter than flowers
    over the rusty roofs
    and hover
    strange great blooms
    and look, see—
    the houses are breathing
    in and