Read Wilderness Tips for Free Online Page A

before they went in. He spoke of “going in” the way she’d heard old veterans in TV documentaries speak of assaults on enemy territory. There was the same tensing of the jaw, the same fierce gritting of the teeth, the same grim enjoyment. Except that what he would be going into was her body. Counting down, waiting for the anaesthetic, Kat too gritted her teeth fiercely. She was terrified, but also she was curious. Curiosity has got her through a lot.
    She’d made the doctor promise to save the thing for her, whatever it was, so she could have a look. She was intensely interested in her own body, in anything it might choose to do or produce; although when flaky Dania, who did layout at the magazine, told her this growth was a message to her from her body and she ought tosleep with an amethyst under her pillow to calm her vibrations, Kat told her to stuff it.
    The cyst turned out to be a benign tumour. Kat liked that use of
benign
, as if the thing had a soul and wished her well. It was big as a grapefruit, the doctor said. “Big as a coconut,” said Kat. Other people had grapefruits. “Coconut” was better. It conveyed the hardness of it, and the hairiness, too.
    The hair in it was red – long strands of it wound round and round inside, like a ball of wet wool gone berserk or like the guck you pulled out of a clogged bathroom-sink drain. There were little bones in it too, or fragments of bone; bird bones, the bones of a sparrow crushed by a car. There was a scattering of nails, toe or finger. There were five perfectly formed teeth.
    “Is this abnormal?” Kat asked the doctor, who smiled. Now that he had gone in and come out again, unscathed, he was less clenched.
    “Abnormal? No,” he said carefully, as if breaking the news to a mother about a freakish accident to her newborn. “Let’s just say it’s fairly common.” Kat was a little disappointed. She would have preferred uniqueness.
    She asked for a bottle of formaldehyde, and put the cut-open tumour into it. It was hers, it was benign, it did not deserve to be thrown away. She took it back to her apartment and stuck it on the mantelpiece. She named it Hairball. It isn’t that different from having a stuffed bear’s head or a preserved ex-pet or anything else with fur and teeth looming over your fireplace; or she pretends it isn’t. Anyway, it certainly makes an impression.
    Ger doesn’t like it. Despite his supposed yen for the new and outré, he is a squeamish man. The first time he comes around (sneaks around, creeps around) after the operation, he tells Kat to throw Hairball out. He calls it “disgusting.” Kat refuses point-blank, and says she’d rather have Hairball in a bottle on her mantelpiece than the soppy dead flowers he’s brought her, which will anyway rota lot sooner than Hairball will. As a mantelpiece ornament, Hairball is far superior. Ger says Kat has a tendency to push things to extremes, to go over the edge, merely from a juvenile desire to shock, which is hardly a substitute for wit. One of these days, he says, she will go way too far. Too far for him, is what he means.
    “That’s why you hired me, isn’t it?” she says. “Because I go way too far.” But he’s in one of his analyzing moods. He can see these tendencies of hers reflected in her work on the magazine, he says. All that leather and those grotesque and tortured-looking poses are heading down a track he and others are not at all sure they should continue to follow. Does she see what he means, does she take his point? It’s a point that’s been made before. She shakes her head slightly, says nothing. She knows how that translates: there have been complaints from the advertisers.
Too bizarre, too kinky
. Tough.
    “Want to see my scar?” she says. “Don’t make me laugh, though, you’ll crack it open.” Stuff like that makes him dizzy: anything with a hint of blood, anything gynecological. He almost threw up in the delivery room when his wife had a baby two