...

‘You’re not going to send me to boarding school?’ said Michael.

‘We are not,’ said Bridget.

‘It’s just …’ Dad stopped. ‘Well your mother’s not too well … she’s got … she’s got to have an operation.’

‘What’s the matter, Mum?’

‘Ah it’s not much really,’ said Bridget. ‘I’ve just got this old lump and the doctors think it’s better out. Probably nothing, you know what fuss pots these medical people are.’

Michael wanted to be told yet couldn’t seem to ask where the lump was, but by the way his mother had one hand cupped about her chest he guessed. ‘Boobs’, ‘bosoms’, ‘tits’, he tried the names out in his head. None of the words sounded right. They were what girls had -- not your mother.

Bridget went to hospital and came home in a few days. Michael looked at the Greenpeace tee-shirt she was wearing, everything seemed the same. He didn’t inquire and she didn’t say.

The next day when Michael got back from school, Mum’s friends Trish and Alison and Sue were in the garden. Mum was sitting on the verandah on the cane chair and the other three women were standing by the flower bed.

The first page of Coral's short story Dublin Bay, as it appeared
in The Dubliner (October 2001).