The Phone-in

THE PHONE-IN

   Holding a radio phone in on discrimination was always a tricky business. It was the kind of subject that even programmes and presenters who prided themselves on being frank and fearless still approached with a degree of trepidation. Live radio and high emotions can lead to words being spoken on air that should not be, no matter how frank and fearless you are and encourage others to be.

    If anyone can handle it, Andy can, his colleagues agreed. Andy Whitmore was one of the great assets of Radio East Coast, and his departure to pastures new and national had been regarded as imminent for the last ten years. Andy could, within the space of a minute, smooth ruffled feathers and ruffle over-smooth ones, puncture pomposity and coax people out of their shell. He was not averse to contradictions. He scorned the clichés of tabloid papers proclaiming Political Correctness had gone mad, but had been known to scoff at it himself. He was an open book and an enigma at the same time. He had become, at least locally, something of a cult figure, but was quite happy to let callers appear to take over the programme – until he decided it was time for that to stop. 

    He treated every caller with initial courtesy, but could cut them off abruptly with a couple of well-chosen words if they were irritating him. And he had a distinct feeling that the caller who said she was “Anne” (which he was pretty sure was not her real name, but he had said people were entitled to remain anonymous if they wished) was going to get the proverbial short shrift. 

    “Andy, I am white, straight, well-educated and reasonably well-off,” she began. 

    Next to Andy in the studio, Moeen, a spokesperson for the local Asian community made an impatient little movement. Andy understood why, but was not averse to giving people enough rope to hang themselves. It was almost a given that on such programmes there would always be the Angry White Man (fair enough, this was an Angry White Woman) who was not racist, but and thought themselves very hard done by. In principle, Andy thought everybody had a right to have their view heard – but some views were best not heard for too long.

    “What’s your point, Anne?” he asked, in what someone had once termed his dangerously patient tone. 

    “But I have been discriminated against every day for years and years.” On the verge of cutting her off, Andy let her speak. He told himself that the minute she mentioned being a forgotten minority or assured him some of her best friends were then she’d had it. 

    “Why do you say that? And what’s your most recent experience?” That was a favourite strategy of his. When asked, directly, to speak of a recent experience, the most bombastic caller could sometimes splutter and fall silent, and defensively mutter that “I knew I wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

    “This morning,” Anne said, quietly, “Less than an hour ago. It was a child – of course children can be thoughtless – but his mother seemed to agree with him. I heard her mutter “makes you feel sick” as they left the shop. “

    “Go on,” Andy said, quietly. She still didn’t have absolute free rein, but she had his attention.

    “It began when I was a child. When I first talked to you, instead of saying I’ve been discriminated for years, I nearly said “all my life” but it wouldn’t have been true. I wasn’t born like this, and it wasn’t like this when I was little. Everyone thought I was a happy child, and they weren’t wrong, and I was a pretty child, too – I still have the pictures, though I don’t look at them very often, not now. Oh, not one of those chocolate box kids, but – well, just a normal, pretty little girl with long fair plaits and a few freckles, and a little snub nose – and a nice smile.” Andy tended to get restless with childhood recollections, but he let her carry on.

    She had been the younger child of an accountant and a teacher. The family wasn’t rich, but they didn’t lack for anything they needed. Her parents were loving and though they both worked, they always had time for their children. She hero-worshipped her big brother, and he was kind and patient with her. There was a swing in the back garden, and a paddling pool that was always filled in summer, and a snowman on the lawn in winter. She was no child prodigy, but was bright, and though she sometimes liked to drift off into a world of her own, she was sociable, and starting school had been no trauma for her. By the time she was six she had already decided she wanted to be a teacher, too.

    “But I’m not,” she said, with a sigh that may have become a habit, but still held genuine sadness. “I never was. I knew it wouldn’t have worked out without needing to be told – not that it stopped people telling me.”

    She did not know the date. She often thought she should, though it would not have helped her. But she knew she was eight years old, and knew it was spring, and knew that it had been raining heavily in the morning, but fine weather was forecast for the afternoon, and her mother had told her the whole day would be like that. The morning might be a bit of an ordeal, though not nearly as much of one as she imagined, but then in the afternoon it would be over, and everything would be fine. She would have a new book to read, and the pain would be all gone.

    Anne was a plucky little girl. She hadn’t cried when she fell over and cut her knee open on the school playground, and when she got her finger caught in the door. But this had been a different kind of pain. It had nagged and throbbed and not let her sleep, and the junior aspirin her Mum had given her (this was before people were told it was a bad thing to give children aspirins) hadn’t helped much.

    Despite what some would have us believe, you can’t always stop children getting a bad tooth and needing to have it extracted. 

    So far as she knew (though she now had decided doubts about Santa) her Mum had never told a lie to her. And she would never make her face something horrible. Would she? She certainly believed her Mum over the silly scare stories they told in the playground. So she was, yes, just a little bit scared, but not terrified, and trotted into Dr Mason’s surgery with her Mum, if not exactly happily, then calmly enough. Her tooth hadn’t been aching that morning, and she’d asked if they couldn’t just leave it for a while, but she hadn’t kicked up a fuss when her Mum said, kindly, “That’s always the way, love. But honestly, you’re best having it seen to. It’ll come back and you know how much it hurt yesterday.” Yes, it had. She had cushioned it on a cool pillow and sobbed.

    She looked round Dr Mason’s surgery quizzically, but with no massive trepidation. He let her play for a couple of minutes with his strange chair that was a bit like a baby’s high chair, but could move and tilt. Then he gently probed in her mouth with a narrow metal instrument. It wasn’t a nice sensation, but didn’t hurt. “I can see why that was painful, Anne,” he said. “You’ll be better off without it. “

    “Are you – going to stick a needle in me?” she asked, and now she couldn’t help sounding a bit nervous. Her Mum had told her it was nothing to be scared of, and she’d already had needles stuck in her when she was vaccinated as a baby – but she couldn’t remember that! 

    “Or would you prefer just to go to sleep for a few minutes and wake up when it’s over?”

    “Oh, yes please!” Dr Mason looked to her Mum, and she nodded. 

    That, Anne thought, as she collected her thoughts, and Andy let her, was the decisive moment. The moment that ruined her life and made her someone people thought it fine to pick fun at and make cruel comments about. She didn’t have any kind of needle phobia! When she’d had a flu jab before visiting a friend who was having chemotherapy, though obviously it wasn’t a barrel of laughs, she’d been fine. 

    The second Dr Mason put the mask over her face, she was seized with blind panic. She was sure she was choking to death, that something heavy and vile-smelling was pressing down on her face and on her chest. She flailed against it, and then she was in a kind of crazy, distorted half-consciousness. She could see strange oval shapes floating around and thought they were going to bear down on her too, stealing her breath, flooding her with that poisonous smell.

    The strange thing was that after she woke up, the reaction didn’t kick in at once. It was almost as if, for a while, she was in denial. She later found out that Dr Mason had told her Mum she’d had a “bit of a bad reaction” to the anaesthetic, but it was nothing at all to worry about. And that afternoon was nice! She lay on the couch, and read her new story book, and was even allowed to watch TV in the daytime – a rare treat!

    Then the nightmares started. Nightmares where her face and chest were being borne down on, when poison was being pumped into her, and strange oval shapes were hovering round her. She began to panic at any whiff of gas, even refused to visit a friend’s house because they had a gas stove, and to wear sweaters with close-fitting necks. That did, in fact, pass, or she learnt to live with it and even to rationalise it. But what she could not rationalise was her utter terror of going anywhere near a dentist.

    She had never been prone to tantrums, even when she was a toddler, but now, even when a check-up was mentioned, she screamed like a banshee, and flailed more than she had in the chair, and was sometimes even physically sick. “Love, he won’t give you any gas!” her Mum tried to persuade her, “I promise you! Even if you need anything doing, he won’t give you gas!” But it was no good. She had been promised it would be just like a little sleep, and look what happened to THAT promise.

    In the end, after a couple of years, her parents gave in. It would be easy to say they shouldn’t have, but they loved their daughter dearly and many would have done just the same. 

    “Look – I can see how ghastly it must have been, but – aren’t we supposed to be talking about discrimination, not phobias?” Moeen asked, not unkindly

    “Please let me carry on!”

    Andy made one of his split-second decisions. “Okay. Carry on. But – try to get to the point!” He suspected he knew what the point was, but it was her place to say it, not his.

    At first it didn’t seem to matter too much. Initially under her parents’ supervision, and then her own, she observed strict tooth-brushing procedures. For several years, as she grew up, moving on to secondary school, probably nobody would have guessed that she hadn’t been near a dentist for five years or more. There are lucky folk whose teeth seem to thrive on neglect, and who have a full set in their nineties after never darkening a dentist’s door and living on a diet of toffee. But Anne, it turned out, wasn’t one of them. There were little chips, there were fillings that should have been done. But nothing too dramatic. She had toothache sometimes, of course, and as soon as she could be responsible for such matters herself, she made sure she had a supply of painkillers on hand just in case.

    She was sixteen when she lost a tooth on her lower jaw. It wasn’t even as if she were biting into an apple or gnawing at a spare rib (though she didn’t exist solely on soft food, at least not then, she didn’t push her luck). She wasn’t even eating at the time, and hadn’t thought it was especially loose. It happened at school. She would have preferred nobody to notice, but of course they did, and Ms Haynes, the geography teacher, said in her practical way, “Oh, bad luck. Let’s hope your parents can get you an appointment.”

    She knew that was not going to happen. Her parents tried to persuade her, but they knew that was not going to happen. The gap was there to stay. Folk thought it odd, but grew used to it, and though she had a nickname, with some of her peers, of Gap-Tooth-Annie, it was not really meant nastily.

    There’s a saying that if you kill a fly, its relatives come to its funeral, and the same seemed to apply to losing teeth. In her second year at university she lost one on her top jaw, and others were becoming crooked, never seemed to be quite clean no matter how much she brushed them. Friends and lecturers who meant well offered the unasked for advice that, “You really should get that fixed, you know, it’s such a shame!” Others, or sometimes (and that hurt) the same ones said behind her back that they didn’t know why she didn’t get her teeth fixed, and she was going to regret it if she didn’t. Her personal tutor, who had a habit of prefacing sentences with “I know it’s none of my business, but” had a heart-to-heart with her and mentioned specialist dentists who dealt with nervous patients. Anne made the right noises and thanked her for her concern.

    The tutor was persistent. At the next meeting she talked of “not fulfilling your potential” and suggested a psychologist. Anne reminded her that she was an adult who made her own decisions, and they had words, though they parted on fairly good terms. 

    She knew her notion of being a teacher was out of the question now. Oh, nobody would say it in so many words – though the children would. A teacher did not have to be good-looking (though everyone knew that in the real world it certainly did no harm!) but nor did they have missing teeth. She did not fulfil her potential, but told herself, for a while, she didn’t mind. She managed to get a job in the local bookshop, and did some freelance translation. She told herself that wanting to be a teacher had just been the kind of thing all little girls think they want. 

    She began to realise, and could see exactly why, that customers in the bookshop said that although Anne was always helpful, and they liked her, she was a solemn sort, and they’d like to see her smile more. But they soon realised why she did not. She had developed a way of talking that, if it did not exactly hide her teeth, or lack of them, did not call attention to them (her boss, only half-joking, said she must have been a convict or a ventriloquist in a previous life) but it didn’t always work. Despite that, she enjoyed working in the bookshop. It was one of the old-fashioned kind, where misfits fitted, and if people did have prejudices, they didn’t show them.

    But old-fashioned bookshops haven’t always thrived in the internet era, and Anne knew that her little refuge there would not last forever. She missed it, but was quite glad to have to deal with the public less often, though she got on well with the customers. For a while she lived off her savings and the bits and pieces she got from her translation work, but the day came when she had to claim benefit. She dreaded them saying that they might think she had “rendered herself unemployable” – they didn’t, but it didn’t pass by unnoticed.

    And it got worse. Only the previous day, she told the radio phone-in, she had accidentally bumped into someone when she was talking on her mobile. She had apologised, and without thinking, hadn’t adapted her usual speaking method, even though it was often second nature. The other person wasn’t a thoughtless teenager. He was a fairly smartly dressed middle-aged man. And what he said wasn’t, “Oh don’t worry love,” or even “Well, look where you’re going in future” but “Ever thought about modelling for the health warning on a fag packet?” She didn’t need to look in a mirror – and she kept her mouth shut in front of mirrors – to know exactly what he meant.

    “I know you’ve been more than patient,” she said, “And I’m not looking for pity. I just wanted to tell my story. Thank you.” The little click made it plain the call was ended. 

    “Well, that was an – unusual call –“ Andy said. “And thank you, Anne, for your courage and honesty.” He didn’t know if she were still listening, but his words were sincere and not just formulaic.

    And he also knew that she did not want to have her courage and honesty appreciated. She only wanted to be able to smile. And not to be thought repulsive.THE PHONE-IN

   Holding a radio phone in on discrimination was always a tricky business. It was the kind of subject that even programmes and presenters who prided themselves on being frank and fearless still approached with a degree of trepidation. Live radio and high emotions can lead to words being spoken on air that should not be, no matter how frank and fearless you are and encourage others to be.

    If anyone can handle it, Andy can, his colleagues agreed. Andy Whitmore was one of the great assets of Radio East Coast, and his departure to pastures new and national had been regarded as imminent for the last ten years. Andy could, within the space of a minute, smooth ruffled feathers and ruffle over-smooth ones, puncture pomposity and coax people out of their shell. He was not averse to contradictions. He scorned the clichés of tabloid papers proclaiming Political Correctness had gone mad, but had been known to scoff at it himself. He was an open book and an enigma at the same time. He had become, at least locally, something of a cult figure, but was quite happy to let callers appear to take over the programme – until he decided it was time for that to stop. 

    He treated every caller with initial courtesy, but could cut them off abruptly with a couple of well-chosen words if they were irritating him. And he had a distinct feeling that the caller who said she was “Anne” (which he was pretty sure was not her real name, but he had said people were entitled to remain anonymous if they wished) was going to get the proverbial short shrift. 

    “Andy, I am white, straight, well-educated and reasonably well-off,” she began. 

    Next to Andy in the studio, Moeen, a spokesperson for the local Asian community made an impatient little movement. Andy understood why, but was not averse to giving people enough rope to hang themselves. It was almost a given that on such programmes there would always be the Angry White Man (fair enough, this was an Angry White Woman) who was not racist, but and thought themselves very hard done by. In principle, Andy thought everybody had a right to have their view heard – but some views were best not heard for too long.

    “What’s your point, Anne?” he asked, in what someone had once termed his dangerously patient tone. 

    “But I have been discriminated against every day for years and years.” On the verge of cutting her off, Andy let her speak. He told himself that the minute she mentioned being a forgotten minority or assured him some of her best friends were then she’d had it. 

    “Why do you say that? And what’s your most recent experience?” That was a favourite strategy of his. When asked, directly, to speak of a recent experience, the most bombastic caller could sometimes splutter and fall silent, and defensively mutter that “I knew I wouldn’t be taken seriously.”

    “This morning,” Anne said, quietly, “Less than an hour ago. It was a child – of course children can be thoughtless – but his mother seemed to agree with him. I heard her mutter “makes you feel sick” as they left the shop. “

    “Go on,” Andy said, quietly. She still didn’t have absolute free rein, but she had his attention.

    “It began when I was a child. When I first talked to you, instead of saying I’ve been discriminated for years, I nearly said “all my life” but it wouldn’t have been true. I wasn’t born like this, and it wasn’t like this when I was little. Everyone thought I was a happy child, and they weren’t wrong, and I was a pretty child, too – I still have the pictures, though I don’t look at them very often, not now. Oh, not one of those chocolate box kids, but – well, just a normal, pretty little girl with long fair plaits and a few freckles, and a little snub nose – and a nice smile.” Andy tended to get restless with childhood recollections, but he let her carry on.

    She had been the younger child of an accountant and a teacher. The family wasn’t rich, but they didn’t lack for anything they needed. Her parents were loving and though they both worked, they always had time for their children. She hero-worshipped her big brother, and he was kind and patient with her. There was a swing in the back garden, and a paddling pool that was always filled in summer, and a snowman on the lawn in winter. She was no child prodigy, but was bright, and though she sometimes liked to drift off into a world of her own, she was sociable, and starting school had been no trauma for her. By the time she was six she had already decided she wanted to be a teacher, too.

    “But I’m not,” she said, with a sigh that may have become a habit, but still held genuine sadness. “I never was. I knew it wouldn’t have worked out without needing to be told – not that it stopped people telling me.”

    She did not know the date. She often thought she should, though it would not have helped her. But she knew she was eight years old, and knew it was spring, and knew that it had been raining heavily in the morning, but fine weather was forecast for the afternoon, and her mother had told her the whole day would be like that. The morning might be a bit of an ordeal, though not nearly as much of one as she imagined, but then in the afternoon it would be over, and everything would be fine. She would have a new book to read, and the pain would be all gone.

    Anne was a plucky little girl. She hadn’t cried when she fell over and cut her knee open on the school playground, and when she got her finger caught in the door. But this had been a different kind of pain. It had nagged and throbbed and not let her sleep, and the junior aspirin her Mum had given her (this was before people were told it was a bad thing to give children aspirins) hadn’t helped much.

    Despite what some would have us believe, you can’t always stop children getting a bad tooth and needing to have it extracted. 

    So far as she knew (though she now had decided doubts about Santa) her Mum had never told a lie to her. And she would never make her face something horrible. Would she? She certainly believed her Mum over the silly scare stories they told in the playground. So she was, yes, just a little bit scared, but not terrified, and trotted into Dr Mason’s surgery with her Mum, if not exactly happily, then calmly enough. Her tooth hadn’t been aching that morning, and she’d asked if they couldn’t just leave it for a while, but she hadn’t kicked up a fuss when her Mum said, kindly, “That’s always the way, love. But honestly, you’re best having it seen to. It’ll come back and you know how much it hurt yesterday.” Yes, it had. She had cushioned it on a cool pillow and sobbed.

    She looked round Dr Mason’s surgery quizzically, but with no massive trepidation. He let her play for a couple of minutes with his strange chair that was a bit like a baby’s high chair, but could move and tilt. Then he gently probed in her mouth with a narrow metal instrument. It wasn’t a nice sensation, but didn’t hurt. “I can see why that was painful, Anne,” he said. “You’ll be better off without it. “

    “Are you – going to stick a needle in me?” she asked, and now she couldn’t help sounding a bit nervous. Her Mum had told her it was nothing to be scared of, and she’d already had needles stuck in her when she was vaccinated as a baby – but she couldn’t remember that! 

    “Or would you prefer just to go to sleep for a few minutes and wake up when it’s over?”

    “Oh, yes please!” Dr Mason looked to her Mum, and she nodded. 

    That, Anne thought, as she collected her thoughts, and Andy let her, was the decisive moment. The moment that ruined her life and made her someone people thought it fine to pick fun at and make cruel comments about. She didn’t have any kind of needle phobia! When she’d had a flu jab before visiting a friend who was having chemotherapy, though obviously it wasn’t a barrel of laughs, she’d been fine. 

    The second Dr Mason put the mask over her face, she was seized with blind panic. She was sure she was choking to death, that something heavy and vile-smelling was pressing down on her face and on her chest. She flailed against it, and then she was in a kind of crazy, distorted half-consciousness. She could see strange oval shapes floating around and thought they were going to bear down on her too, stealing her breath, flooding her with that poisonous smell.

    The strange thing was that after she woke up, the reaction didn’t kick in at once. It was almost as if, for a while, she was in denial. She later found out that Dr Mason had told her Mum she’d had a “bit of a bad reaction” to the anaesthetic, but it was nothing at all to worry about. And that afternoon was nice! She lay on the couch, and read her new story book, and was even allowed to watch TV in the daytime – a rare treat!

    Then the nightmares started. Nightmares where her face and chest were being borne down on, when poison was being pumped into her, and strange oval shapes were hovering round her. She began to panic at any whiff of gas, even refused to visit a friend’s house because they had a gas stove, and to wear sweaters with close-fitting necks. That did, in fact, pass, or she learnt to live with it and even to rationalise it. But what she could not rationalise was her utter terror of going anywhere near a dentist.

    She had never been prone to tantrums, even when she was a toddler, but now, even when a check-up was mentioned, she screamed like a banshee, and flailed more than she had in the chair, and was sometimes even physically sick. “Love, he won’t give you any gas!” her Mum tried to persuade her, “I promise you! Even if you need anything doing, he won’t give you gas!” But it was no good. She had been promised it would be just like a little sleep, and look what happened to THAT promise.

    In the end, after a couple of years, her parents gave in. It would be easy to say they shouldn’t have, but they loved their daughter dearly and many would have done just the same. 

    “Look – I can see how ghastly it must have been, but – aren’t we supposed to be talking about discrimination, not phobias?” Moeen asked, not unkindly

    “Please let me carry on!”

    Andy made one of his split-second decisions. “Okay. Carry on. But – try to get to the point!” He suspected he knew what the point was, but it was her place to say it, not his.

    At first it didn’t seem to matter too much. Initially under her parents’ supervision, and then her own, she observed strict tooth-brushing procedures. For several years, as she grew up, moving on to secondary school, probably nobody would have guessed that she hadn’t been near a dentist for five years or more. There are lucky folk whose teeth seem to thrive on neglect, and who have a full set in their nineties after never darkening a dentist’s door and living on a diet of toffee. But Anne, it turned out, wasn’t one of them. There were little chips, there were fillings that should have been done. But nothing too dramatic. She had toothache sometimes, of course, and as soon as she could be responsible for such matters herself, she made sure she had a supply of painkillers on hand just in case.

    She was sixteen when she lost a tooth on her lower jaw. It wasn’t even as if she were biting into an apple or gnawing at a spare rib (though she didn’t exist solely on soft food, at least not then, she didn’t push her luck). She wasn’t even eating at the time, and hadn’t thought it was especially loose. It happened at school. She would have preferred nobody to notice, but of course they did, and Ms Haynes, the geography teacher, said in her practical way, “Oh, bad luck. Let’s hope your parents can get you an appointment.”

    She knew that was not going to happen. Her parents tried to persuade her, but they knew that was not going to happen. The gap was there to stay. Folk thought it odd, but grew used to it, and though she had a nickname, with some of her peers, of Gap-Tooth-Annie, it was not really meant nastily.

    There’s a saying that if you kill a fly, its relatives come to its funeral, and the same seemed to apply to losing teeth. In her second year at university she lost one on her top jaw, and others were becoming crooked, never seemed to be quite clean no matter how much she brushed them. Friends and lecturers who meant well offered the unasked for advice that, “You really should get that fixed, you know, it’s such a shame!” Others, or sometimes (and that hurt) the same ones said behind her back that they didn’t know why she didn’t get her teeth fixed, and she was going to regret it if she didn’t. Her personal tutor, who had a habit of prefacing sentences with “I know it’s none of my business, but” had a heart-to-heart with her and mentioned specialist dentists who dealt with nervous patients. Anne made the right noises and thanked her for her concern.

    The tutor was persistent. At the next meeting she talked of “not fulfilling your potential” and suggested a psychologist. Anne reminded her that she was an adult who made her own decisions, and they had words, though they parted on fairly good terms. 

    She knew her notion of being a teacher was out of the question now. Oh, nobody would say it in so many words – though the children would. A teacher did not have to be good-looking (though everyone knew that in the real world it certainly did no harm!) but nor did they have missing teeth. She did not fulfil her potential, but told herself, for a while, she didn’t mind. She managed to get a job in the local bookshop, and did some freelance translation. She told herself that wanting to be a teacher had just been the kind of thing all little girls think they want. 

    She began to realise, and could see exactly why, that customers in the bookshop said that although Anne was always helpful, and they liked her, she was a solemn sort, and they’d like to see her smile more. But they soon realised why she did not. She had developed a way of talking that, if it did not exactly hide her teeth, or lack of them, did not call attention to them (her boss, only half-joking, said she must have been a convict or a ventriloquist in a previous life) but it didn’t always work. Despite that, she enjoyed working in the bookshop. It was one of the old-fashioned kind, where misfits fitted, and if people did have prejudices, they didn’t show them.

    But old-fashioned bookshops haven’t always thrived in the internet era, and Anne knew that her little refuge there would not last forever. She missed it, but was quite glad to have to deal with the public less often, though she got on well with the customers. For a while she lived off her savings and the bits and pieces she got from her translation work, but the day came when she had to claim benefit. She dreaded them saying that they might think she had “rendered herself unemployable” – they didn’t, but it didn’t pass by unnoticed.

    And it got worse. Only the previous day, she told the radio phone-in, she had accidentally bumped into someone when she was talking on her mobile. She had apologised, and without thinking, hadn’t adapted her usual speaking method, even though it was often second nature. The other person wasn’t a thoughtless teenager. He was a fairly smartly dressed middle-aged man. And what he said wasn’t, “Oh don’t worry love,” or even “Well, look where you’re going in future” but “Ever thought about modelling for the health warning on a fag packet?” She didn’t need to look in a mirror – and she kept her mouth shut in front of mirrors – to know exactly what he meant.

    “I know you’ve been more than patient,” she said, “And I’m not looking for pity. I just wanted to tell my story. Thank you.” The little click made it plain the call was ended. 

    “Well, that was an – unusual call –“ Andy said. “And thank you, Anne, for your courage and honesty.” He didn’t know if she were still listening, but his words were sincere and not just formulaic.

    And he also knew that she did not want to have her courage and honesty appreciated. She only wanted to be able to smile. And not to be thought repulsive.