Matty was distracted by something, I could tell. We were in the bedroom. He was damp from the shower and buttoning his shirt, on his way to work, a little late. I was sitting up in bed with a cup of tea by my side and a pile of marking on my lap – the papers I had done already fanned out on top of the duvet. When I’d finished all thirty I needed to do a moderation exercise on the whole group, for consistency. ‘Dunno why they still ask you,’ he said.
This annoyed me. It was as if the hospital was his territory, and I was encroaching upon it, even though I had a perfect right to be there.
‘She was talking about a bone density scan a while back.’
‘You don’t need one of those!’ he snorted.
‘Actually my vitamin D levels were low for a bit. No harm in it, is there?’ This wasn’t true – it had been mentioned as a possibility but bone density issues weren’t a particularly common side effect. If there was one area of medicine where I felt I knew as much as Matty, it was my own medication. I wanted him to take me seriously.
‘Unless you’re going back on an AED I don’t see the point.’
‘Well, I can’t rule that out, can I? For the future I mean?’
Matty picked up his jacket from the bed, shrugging it on with one fluid movement of his shoulders, then gave a small shudder so that the arms would drop.
‘Darling,’ he said, coming round to my side of the bed and bending to give me a light kiss on the top of my head, by way of goodbye. ‘You don’t need to go back on an AED for those pseudo-seizures you have occasionally. Enjoy your lie-in.’
Pseudo-seizures is a medical term, now falling out of use, to describe seizures that wouldn’t necessarily show up on an EEG. When I was first diagnosed with epilepsy at the age of fourteen, they could induce seizures by getting me to hyperventilate when I was hooked up to the monitor, but that passed with adolescence. I grew out of epilepsy in the way that many people do, but because my mum had it most of her life they continued to monitor me and once in a while I still had what they called NESs, non-epileptic seizures that wouldn’t register on an EEG. My mother had them as well. The two types of seizure often went hand in hand. ‘Pseudo’ didn’t mean the seizure wasn’t genuine; it just meant there would be no discernible electrical traces of it in the brain. The weight of the word ‘pseudo’ was unmistakable though, with the emphasis that Matty put on it.
I wanted to say, It hurts my feelings that you use that word even though it is technically correct, but I knew that the discussion would then become about how ridiculous it was of me to be hurt. He would say, You’re so oversensitive.
‘You really should try applying for a driving licence now,’ he said as he went out of the door. ‘I’ve got a double amputee in the clinic who’s determined to drive. Imagine the obstacles she’s facing.’ He left the bedroom and a minute or two later I heard the door bang shut.
*
By the time I finished my marking and got dressed it was too late to walk to the hospital so I got a minicab, feeling guilty about the expense. Dr Barnard’s clinic was running to time, amazingly, so I didn’t need the marking I had brought with me as a precaution against a long wait. After the nurse had done the routine checks, Dr Barnard called me through and I told her about the NES I had had in the wine bar, not long after Matty and I had met.
There was a junior doctor in the room, Dr Adebayo. He listened while Dr Barnard questioned me and took notes and afterwards she said, ‘Is it alright if my colleague asks a few supplementary questions? He’s doing a study.’
‘Of course.’
Dr Adebayo said, ‘I’ve read your notes. Can I just ask a bit more about your family history?’ He questioned me about my mother’s seizures and her general health. I told him about the miscarriages she had had both before and after me. He asked about my father’s medical history. After a few minutes, he sat back in his chair and looked at me with a thoughtful gaze and said, ‘And how would you say it affects you, psychologically, having this condition? In the past I mean, I know that technically you’re not epileptic any more.’
I hesitated. ‘Well, I’m never sure whether the two are connected or not. It’s hard to say. I suppose I’m a bit, well, what you’d call timid, about physical things, normal things like driving I mean, it’s quite a big thing for me and I suppose I …’
Interesting, isn’t it, the way we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves when someone else asks? ‘It’s fair to say I don’t, well, I’m not sure how to … I don’t really trust myself.’
They were both silent, interested.
I was hitting my stride. ‘I’m thinking, what I mean is, if you’re used to the idea that, in the past, you’ve let yourself down, abandoned yourself by becoming unconscious, it means you never really trust yourself not to be absent.’
Dr Adebayo gave an indulgent smile. ‘You do know …’ he began.
I cut across him. ‘Yes, no, I know all that. It’s not a moral judgement. It’s just, it leaves you with this sense, I’m not sure to what extent you ever stop feeling epileptic even when you’re medication-free. There’s just a sense that anything can happen, you don’t trust yourself to look after yourself in the same way. This morning in fact, Matthew, my boyfriend, he used the term pseudo-seizures …’
They were both looking at me.
‘He’s a doctor,’ I added. ‘He works here in fact.’
‘Oh, whereabouts?’ asked Dr Adebayo. I guessed he was around the same age as Matty.
‘Fracture Clinic. He’s the Senior Registrar.’
Dr Adebayo slapped his knee. ‘Oh, Matthew Goodison, yes, I know him, fantastic guy! He’s your boyfriend, really? We’ve done some A & E together …’ He shook his head with a smile, recalling, I guessed, a particularly hectic shift. ‘Matty! Hey, say hi from me!’
‘In view of the recent seizure,’ Dr Barnard said, ‘I think we’ll make it six months for the next check, is that okay?’ She didn’t say whether she knew Matty or not, but her reaction to our connection seemed a little cooler.
*
I hadn’t texted Matty as I had arrived in the building – I had felt annoyed with him after that morning’s discussion. He had not been remotely excited I was coming to the hospital. He had not said, ‘Great, pop up and say a quick hello, I can introduce you to the people I work with.’ He had not even said, ‘Oh what a shame, things will be so busy in clinic, I won’t have time to see you.’
But on my way out, in the wide airy atrium, I stopped and wondered whether to get a coffee from the Costa franchise and thought of the open smile that had lit Dr Adebayo’s face when I had mentioned Matty’s name. I hovered for a bit, wondered whether to go up to his department, then decided it wasn’t a good idea, but I pulled my phone from my pocket and texted, just to remind him I had been on the premises. Elvis is leaving the building. xx
A takeaway coffee was an unnecessary extravagance. I’d make myself something at home. It would be my reward for walking.
I was halfway down the driveway leading from the hospital when my phone buzzed in my pocket. Matty must have checked his phone between patient appointments.
You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog xxx
I smiled and slipped my phone back into my pocket.
*
It was a forty-five-minute walk home, along Bretton Gate, then Atherstone Avenue. Halfway down Grange Road, I stopped and leaned against a low redbrick wall for a few minutes. The air was mild and light. The street was very quiet. A man backed his car out of his drive opposite me, pulled away. No other cars passed by. I closed my eyes and tipped my face to the sky. When I opened them again, there were tiny spots of light in my vision, those pinprick white sparks that appear sometimes, then vanish, and a strange thought came into my head: how perfect it would be to die, right now, right here, in this moment, because it is all so beautiful and still, on this road, midweek, and then this beautiful and still moment would never end.
*
If all stories happen in three acts, beginnin
g, middle and end, then my relationship with Matty happened in three visits to Spaghettini – the first, where he had fed me from his own plate and leaned forward in his seat and watched my face closely as I talked; the second, where he questioned me about Ian; and the third.
It was the last time we would ever go there, although neither of us knew that at the time.
*
It was the week after half term, nearly four weeks after my birthday, a Saturday night. Matty had told me earlier that day that he had taken on board my feedback that he was boring, and booked us Spaghettini. I had dressed up, an off-the-shoulder top and hoop earrings, and was wearing the necklace he had bought me for my birthday. The meal had been pleasant. He seemed a little tired and distracted – we talked amiably enough but I had the feeling that his responses to me were, in some way, effortful. Perhaps he would rather be at home, I thought.
The waiter cleared our plates. I told Matty I needed the Ladies, wiping my mouth with my napkin as I rose, shouldering my handbag.
When I returned, Matty was on the phone. He had a serious expression on his face. As I sat down, I threw a look at him and he blanked it. When I continued to look, lifting my eyebrows, he raised a hand with a pointed finger in a give me a minute gesture, still with the same blank expression.
He was nodding and making a sympathetic murmuring sound to the person on the other end of the phone. After a while he said, ‘Did they take a spinal sample?’
Oh, I thought, a work call, and felt guilty about being irritated, although my irritation did not dissipate – it was a Saturday evening, after all.
He carried on nodding and making the sympathetic noises for some minutes. I got my own phone out of my pocket and started scrolling through Instagram. Then I heard him say, his voice soft and low, ‘Look, don’t, it’s okay … it’s completely natural, of course you are … oh God, really?’
There was something about his tone of voice. It didn’t sound very colleague-to-colleague to me.
‘No, of course not, don’t be silly,’ he said then. ‘No, she won’t mind at all. Of course, look, why don’t we see if we can get a lunch in some time? No, don’t be daft … Okay, okay. Take care, Trouble.’
I watched his face. His expression of concern had melted and something softer, sweeter, was in its place – a kind of pleasure, as you might feel when someone paid you an extravagant compliment.
He ended the call, slipped the phone back in his pocket, looked at me and said, ‘Dessert?’
I hated the fact that I had to ask – although what I hated more was that he was obliging me to do so, rather than just volunteering the information.
‘Who was that?’
His expression was neutral. ‘Jasmine.’
‘What, Jasmine-Jasmine?’ My surprise was quite genuine. ‘What’s she calling you for?’
‘She was upset about something …’
I was finding this a little tricky to compute: the younger sister of a friend of mine, who as far as I knew had only met my boyfriend once, at my birthday party, was calling him because she was upset. ‘How does she have your phone number?’
A degree of wariness – was it wariness, or irritation? – entered his tone. ‘I gave it to her that night, your birthday.’
‘When?’
‘I don’t know when, probably when you were pissed and ignoring me on the other side of the room, I suppose. Bloody hell, when we’ve finished the interrogation can I get a coffee?’
‘You didn’t mention it, that’s all.’
‘I wasn’t aware I had to.’
I thought back to that night, our argument the following evening, about my bad behaviour and ingratitude, the expression on his face when he had said, What are you implying? and how for an hour I had insisted I wasn’t implying anything and he had insisted I was. He hadn’t mentioned giving Jasmine his phone number at that point, nor since.
‘Why’s she ringing you on a Saturday night?’
He looked to one side, sighed, pressed his lips together. At that point, the waitress materialised by our table. Her timing was unhelpful. ‘Any desserts or coffees for you at all?’
‘Black Americano,’ Matty said. He gave a tight smile.
‘Have you got any mint tea?’ I asked, in a tone of voice that sounded excessively jolly, as if I was competing with Matty, wanting her to like me more than him.
The waitress could smell my insincerity. She was maybe fifteen years younger than me, which would make me ancient in her eyes. She had the callousness of a young woman who thought she would never feel obliged to placate a man. I wondered if she spent whole evenings pitying women whose boyfriends had upset them over a plate of pappardelle.
‘Fresh mint or peppermint?’
‘Um, either. Fresh. Thanks.’
The waitress turned away.
Pride kept me silent. We sat without speaking for some time. I thought, oh no, we are that couple, the couple that sits in silence and everyone else in the restaurant wonders what is wrong.
We were silent so long that the young waitress had time to return with our drinks: Matty’s coffee in a small, thick cup; another cup and a squat glass teapot that contained my mint tea. I picked up the spoon that rested on the saucer and lifted the lid of the pot, squashing the leaves down. We both knew I was doing it to buy time.
‘If you must know,’ Matty said eventually, with a weary sigh, leaning forward across the table towards me and keeping his voice low, ‘she called me because a baby died. A baby died on the ward and the registrar was called to certify death. The parents wanted to be there, and the senior nurse was busy elsewhere, so Jasmine was sent in as the nurse to support the parents. They got very distressed when the samples were being taken. Jasmine had to hold the mother up. It’s her first neonatal death and she was really upset.’ He took a sip of coffee and gave me a cold look. ‘Happy now?’
‘That’s awful …’ I say.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Matty.
I picked up the pot of mint tea and poured a thin, yellow stream into my cup and looked down into it, my other questions silenced by the unambiguous awfulness of the death of a child. When did this happen? Why was she calling him, on a Saturday night? Wasn’t it a bit of a coincidence she called just when I happened to go to the loo? And how had she had time to explain all that, because I had been really quick – I had used the disabled toilet a few metres away because I couldn’t be bothered to go downstairs in my heels. Was that their first phone chat? Didn’t sound like it from his tone of voice. Wasn’t there someone else she could talk to about how upset she was? Wouldn’t you want to talk to a close friend rather than your friend’s boyfriend who you had met only once?
The baby, the distress of the parents, Jasmine’s own distress and hard work as a nurse – all these rendered my questions paltry, self-absorbed. I would have to leave a decent interval if I wanted to know more.
We hadn’t asked for the bill but the young waitress returned with it anyway, the white slip of paper weighted down by two square chocolates wrapped in gold foil. Matty was on a Saturday night, away from work, he deserved to be relaxing and we had had a perfectly pleasant evening up until then but thanks to the call from Jasmine, his head was elsewhere now.
I thought through the timeline of my brief trip to the toilet. Was it her that called him, or him that called her? Perhaps she texted him. I’m really upset about something, can we talk? If it was him that made the call, then he must have known I would return from the toilet while he was still talking to her. Why say it was her that called him? Why not just say, she texted me; she was upset so I thought I’d better give her a call? I wanted one of the chocolates but felt too small.
*
Jasmine became a thing between us. I should have just left it, never mentioned her, let whatever was or wasn’t happening burn out, run its course. Instead, I found myself asking, a few days later, as we were in the bedroom getting undressed, ‘How’s Jasmine, is she feeling better?’
‘Yes, much better ac
tually,’ he replied. ‘It’s sort of a rite of passage for any medical professional. I really feel for her. I went through something similar myself, I told her, everyone does. First time a child dies, it’s really bad.’ He pulled his shirt over his head and then gave it a single hard shake, like a bullfighter, before crumpling it between his fists and tossing it into the laundry bin with one swift, accurate motion.
‘When did you speak to her?’
This was too much: I got the cool look. ‘I haven’t spoken to her, actually, we’ve been texting. That okay with you? Ask your best friend Rosie if you don’t believe me.’
‘No, don’t be silly, I just wondered, that’s all.’ We’ve been texting: the present continuous.
‘Oh, you “just wondered”, did you?’
I turned away towards the bathroom to brush my teeth. I had humiliated myself quite enough for one evening.
As I rammed the toothbrush up and down with unnecessary vigour, Matty came and leant against the doorpost, folding his arms. He watched me for a moment or two. I had put too much toothpaste onto the toothbrush and was foaming at the mouth. I spat into the sink.
‘What are you afraid of?’ he asked.
I spat again. ‘Nothing,’ I said. All at once I was sorry I had raised it. I really, really did not want to be having this conversation.
‘Do you think I’m sleeping with her?’
‘No!’ I turned to him. What did he mean? Of course I didn’t.
‘Well then,’ he said, and turned away. Then turned back. ‘For the record, she’s very cute. She’s also rather needy and a bit immature. Do you really think that’s my type?’
‘No … I never said …’
‘Well then,’ he repeated.
‘I don’t blame you for fancying her,’ I said, ‘not at all. She’s got something, she is young and, not pretty exactly but she’s got something …’
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