Hunkered down in our bunker, from which we venture once a fortnight in our hazmat suits to get rations, we haven’t yet - touch wood - been attacked by the virus. If I do get it, I fully expect it to be nasty, if not fatal. I’ve been receiving daily bulletins about a friend who’s just emerging from a very nasty fortnight in intensive care. As her husband, who sends the bulletins, is a doctor himself, they’re detailed in their account of her battle to survive. The ICU staff, he says, have been brilliant.
Our bodies are strange things. I haven’t a clue what goes on inside mine but on the whole, it’s quite co-operative in getting me through the day without any major mishaps. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s not giving up on me, but at least it has the grace not to remind me of that too often. The doctors seem to find far more wrong with me than I’m aware of myself.
It’s ten years now since my wife, seeing a curious spot on my back, said, ‘I don’t like the look of that.’ I duly went to the dermatologist, who scraped a bit off, and when the results came back, said it was nothing. So we went away on holiday, and when we got back, she’d left a message on the answer phone: ‘Can you come in and see me? We’ve had another look and it’s a melanoma.’
This time it was thoroughly excavated by a cosmetic surgeon who also took the opportunity to remove a spot from my temple because ‘better safe than sorry and besides you'd look better without it.’ Then she swooped on my wife, who’d come to fetch me. ‘Dear me, what an unsightly wrinkle! I can get rid of that in a jiffy with a bit of Botox.’ We never went back to her again.
Whether the spot on my back was a melanoma or not remains in doubt to this day. I was sent to see a specialist in Marseille who said that from the laboratory report, it was impossible to tell one way or the other. Now, I have the utmost respect for the medical profession, and I willingly submit myself to whatever they suggest, but I do sometimes wish they’d make up their minds. On the other hand, I concede that it’s not easy: bodies, as I say, are mysterious things.
Personally, I’ve decided it wasn’t because for one thing I’m still alive, and for another I’d rather not worry about it. Nonetheless, I return every so often to the dermatologist for a check-up, and every so often she cuts another chunk out of me. I don’t know how she chooses where to cut among the multiple blots and freckles – to me it seems entirely random – but I feel a bit like the couple in Open Water, nibbled by tiger sharks till there’s not a lot of them left. Not that I’m suggesting she’s a shark herself, even if her fees do vary wildly every time I go.
It so happens that Magali Rousseau’s ex-husband, whom she refers to as Dickhead, is a cosmetic surgeon. Any resemblance to a real person is of course entirely fortuitous.