Testing cervixes and times

It’s a bit late on in the season to be gushing about the emergence of spring, but some mornings, I still half-expect to wake up to the same withered view outside my window.

In my newly found hindsight, I remember living winter through a woolly vicariousness, receiving drip-feeds of reality through convenient distillations of stories and memories, rather than living life directly.

Last winter was the same. In the same first few wakeful weeks of spring, I remember pushing E on a swing as he watched my beaming face, illuminated by sunlight, getting bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller, and he told me he loved me for the first time.

This year, the smoothness of spring’s arrival also gives me some confidence for our own transition. Our time in this house is coming to an end, so we’ve begun house-selling and -hunting.

On our way to view our first house, I tell R that I’m thinking of giving up this newsletter, trying something new. Perhaps I need to shed an ageing projection of myself as the newsletter writer with thousands of readers – which belongs to our current house – to make room for the new ones that will come rushing to me when we view this house.

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We are, the estate agent tells us, amid the entrails of a divorce. Only the husband lives here, now, and he has books everywhere, illustrating the lost battle for his attention.

The estate agent says something about how weird it is to deal with someone so formally after doing something so intimate as walking around their most private spaces. Not as intimate, I think, as her admission that she thinks walking around someone’s tidied, empty house is intimate.

I’m visited by no premonitions of my idealised future self. We don’t put an offer in, I decide to keep my newsletter going for a bit longer.

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When I get home from my smear test, I check my emails and see that someone wants to view our house. A quick Google search tells me it’s an obs and gynae consultant who moonlights as a property investor. I put my morals aside and hope he buys it, if only for my cervix’s karma.

I think about how I can make the house appeal to him, if I have any books about medicine I can display around the house, and wonder where I can get some ‘Save the NHS’ stickers. I ask R to fix a leaky tap in case a few drops of water change the trajectory of our future.

I assume the consultant is overworked and underpaid, and sees property development as his only way to retire before burning out. I bet, when he walks around our house, he’ll be consumed with memories of being the age he thinks we are now, when big life transitions felt exciting, rather than existential.

He’ll probably imagine his future tenants eating breakfast in our kitchen before going to work to earn his pension, maybe he’ll look at our sofa and ask himself how everyone but him seems to be able to relax.

He’ll wonder how the estate agent’s passionate monologue is about objects, rather than life and living things; then decide that, perhaps that would be as absurd as him showing patients the various shines on his speculums.

He’ll think back to the last time he moved house - and remember he made a vow to himself to work out a way to stop life feeling like something he sleepwalked through. He’ll realise that the answer – living in the present moment – is why he’s chosen to set up a property investment business, which is predicated on a process that forces you constantly think about the past and the future.

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The developer cancels his viewing, and no one else books one that week. I worry we’ll never move house, and we’ll only teach E to settle for good enough.

The sun stays out for seven days and, in some blurred pause in mine and E’s urgent week of parks and bike rides, I open a letter formally informing me that my cervix is fine, that the consultant didn’t jinx anything other than his own peaceful retirement.