Falsie

Ann MacLaren

In 1958, when I was six years old my parents took my grandmother, my sister, my brother and myself to Port Seton for our first holiday at the seaside. They had rented what would nowadays be called a chalet for two weeks: actually it was just a hut. It had only one room, although part of that had been sectioned off to hold a built-in double bed, and there was a cupboard with a single bed inside, where Granny would sleep; everything else was crammed into the living area, including stove, sink, table, chairs and bed-settee. The toilet was at the end of a grassy lane and was shared by all the other huts in the field. We thought it was heaven.

On our first night the three of us sat up in bed, Peter and I at the top, Margaret at the bottom, waiting for Granny to get ready for bed because she had promised she would come in beside us and tell us a story. She had a great fund of stories, my granny, none of which were of little bunnies or fairies or good little boys and girls. She favoured the ghost story, the more horrific the better, and whenever we spent the night with her she would come into bed with us and scare the wits out of us with her tales.

She climbed in beside us and as I snuggled into her I felt that something was wrong, that things werent as they should be. Her chest felt hard against my cheek. I sat up and stared at her, noticed the flatness of her chest beside me, the roundness beside my sister. It was clear she only had one breast.

Granny! I was horrified. Youve only got one of them! At that age I probably didnt know what they were called. What happened to it? Grannys eyes narrowed to give us one at a time that special stare she kept for the scariest part of her stories, and in a deep, gruff voice announced:

It got blown off in the war.

In the stunned silence that followed I had a clear vision of a bomb slicing past Grannys chest, hitting her breast and knocking it clean off, without a scrape or scratch to the rest of her body.

That cant be true. Margaret, who was ten and knew everything, was indignant. The war was a long time ago. And you had two of them this morning. Granny smiled, stretched across to the chair beside the bed, and from under her clothes extracted a small flesh-coloured object that looked a bit like one of those bean bags we played with in the gym at school, only rounder and heavier. She laid this on the flat side of her chest then hoisted up her other breast to make a matching pair.

This goes inside my brassiere, she said. So nobody notices that ones missing. Its called a falsie. Then she lifted it off her chest and threw it to Margaret at the bottom of the bed, who caught it easily and tossed it back up to Peter, who dropped it as if he thought it would bite him. Granny picked it up and passed it over to me. It felt warm and soft and a bit squishy.

I laid the falsie back on Grannys flat chest and, using my cheek to hold it in place, cuddled into her. Granny lowered her voice again and began her ghost story. I dont remember that story now. It might have been the one about the young man whose brow was sliced off and used for bacon, or the one about the old woman who dug up graves and used the bones for soup. But whatever it was, Im sure it couldnt have been half as exciting as my first sight of Grannys falsie.