Between You and Me

by Carol Mason

  He stares at our hands touching for a split second before I retract mine. ‘Not really sure how it happened. I must have. Or something.’

  ‘Do you suffer from dizzy spells . . . Dave?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Blackouts? Headaches? Migraines?’

  ‘Aren’t those for girls? Honey, I’ve got a headache?’ When he sees my face he says, ‘Sorry, that was a really crap joke . . .’ He briefly looks down, blushes. ‘I have had a few headaches lately. Mostly in the morning. Maybe because I’m not sleeping very well these days.’

  ‘Do you take recreational drugs or drink alcohol?’

  ‘No!’ he says, a touch defensive. ‘I mean . . . few beers on the weekend. But drugs have never been my thing. Mess with your brain, don’t they?’

  ‘Prescription medication?’

  ‘I just finished a course of antibiotics. Do they count?’

  ‘What were they for?’

  ‘Family doc thought I might have an ear infection.’

  ‘Symptoms?’

  He reels off a few, mentions this niggly headache again. Interesting, I think. Not sure I’d have been so quick to diagnose an ear infection.

  ‘Can I look in your ears?’ I move in closer.

  ‘If you tell me you’re single, then definitely. If you’re married, I have to think about it.’

  ‘I’m married.’ I take hold of the pinna and give it a deliberate little tug.

  ‘Ouch! How long, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  I peer in there. ‘Since December.’

  ‘Just two months! Suppose he hasn’t had time to foul up yet, has he? Not boding too well for my chances now.’

  I smirk. ‘Believe me, they weren’t all that high before.’

  ‘Would you go out with me anyway? Call it keeping your options open. Like any sensible person would.’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea. I’d like to get your shoulder X-rayed. Plus I’m going to order a CT scan of your head.’

  ‘Head?’ He frowns. ‘Why?’

  ‘Just being thorough. You can’t say we don’t look after you in here!’ I make some notes on his chart. ‘Let’s start with that, shall we. I’ll be back to see you in a bit. Okay?’

  ‘That’s the only good thing you’ve said so far.’

  I step outside the curtain and walk back to my computer feeling a little warm, my brain ticking hard. Even though I’m beginning my second rotation in Foundation Year 1, it still often feels like I’m fumbling in the dark. My role is no longer just to observe and learn. Now I’m hands-on, dealing with new symptoms, puzzling test results, equipment malfunctions, consultants testing me with tricky questions. Sometimes I’m the only doctor on my shift. It can be daunting. I hope ordering the CT scan is the right thing to do. On the positive side, I don’t think anyone got sacked for over-ordering tests . . .

  I sit on my stool and make some notes on my jobs list, do the appropriate requisitions. Some bloods are back for Mrs Shipman, the eighty-year-old who was admitted with sudden onset confusion and auditory hallucinations. Her inflammatory markers haven’t gone up so that rules out my first suspicion of a bladder infection. One of the nurses was convinced it’s dementia but I haven’t seen it present like this. I decide to get the duty psychiatrist to weigh in. I’m just filling up a glass of water at the cooler when Paul, one of the residents, taps my back. ‘Have you been for lunch yet?’

  ‘Lunch? Oh! That thing!’ I look at the clock for possibly the first time today. Six hours. No break. No wonder he’s asking; he can probably hear my stomach growling a mile away. Time flies in A&E. If I were to work here permanently I wonder if that would be a good thing, or would I feel my life was passing too quickly? Everybody needs a bit of healthy boredom, right?

  ‘Go,’ he says. ‘It’s quiet but we don’t want to jinx it.’

  I could use a dose of fresh air, so I pull on my wool coat, dig out a flattened relic of a peanut butter sandwich from the netherworld of my bag and stuff it into my mouth as I head through the maze of shiny-floored corridors that leads out to a square of manufactured green space with a few benches dotted here and there. I sit down, feeling the damp penetrate my coat, and pluck open a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. I’m just stuffing the last handful into my mouth when my mobile pings. A text.

  All good?

  I quickly reply, Just gone on break! Call me! Joe never phones me at work in case he’s interrupting.

  No sooner is it sent, my phone rings. ‘Good timing!’ I tell him.

  ‘Must be that special GPS I put in your handbag that detects handsome predatory doctors.’

  I chuckle. ‘Is that what that thing was? I was wondering!’

  ‘It’s got a special shoot-to-paralyse mode that can be activated remotely.’

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind. If they start dropping like flies . . .’

  He does his endearing masculine, three-beat laugh.

  ‘Are you still taking me out for dinner tonight?’ Sometimes I still feel like we’re newly dating rather than newly wed.

  ‘Do you want to go?’

  I think about this, shove my rubbish back into my bag and pull my coat around me tightly. On any given shift I never know what’s coming through the door, or how wiped out I’ll be by the time I’m done. ‘Can I reserve the right to just stay at home?’

  There’s a small delay, an interval where I can almost feel him smiling. Then he says, ‘I love when you say that word home.’

  The afternoon flies by. I deal with a fractured hip, a head pain that should have required a trip to the dentist, not A&E, and then on a slightly more challenging note, an elderly man with a bowel blockage and an eight-year-old boy with severe stomach pains. Kelly Kimpson, the duty psych, confirms Mrs Shipman had an acute psychotic episode, not dementia, and we send her home with a prescription for Risperidone. And then David Wilson’s CT scan comes back. I stare at it on the monitor, along with the radiologist’s report.

  My usual drill is to hop on the bus from the hospital to East Croydon station. But tonight I need to walk even though it adds half an hour to my journey. It’s a route that takes me through the neighbourhoods where kids in hoodies loiter on corners and cease conversation to give me solid stares as I pass them. Where I’ll get hit up for spare change, or occasionally offered drugs. Where, a while ago, I had my bag ripped clean off my shoulder – I didn’t even feel him behind me until it happened. The shock somehow came a distant second to the fact that it was the fantastic jade green suede bag I’d bought in France; I was in love with that thing.

  Tonight I keep my head down, my hands planted deep in my coat pockets, and push out clouds of breath into the damp air.

  On the train to Victoria Station I try to pay attention to my audio book. Usually I can get lost in a good historical yarn, and the hour or so it takes to get home, door to door, vanishes. But today, I don’t hear a single word. Eleven minutes later I’m off the train, trotting along the platform, then crossing the concourse to the entrance of the underground, losing myself in the rhythmic click of my heels, in the practised art of cutting a path through the wave of commuters coming at me, heading south. Out into the fresh air briefly, then I canter down the twenty or so steps to the Tube, push through turnstiles, disappear down long escalators to the platform, where I wait briefly for the train that will shuttle me to north London.

  At Hampstead, where I emerge, he is standing there with Mozart, the kids’ Portuguese Water Dog. A lone and graceful figure, long legs in dark jeans, a form-fitting black collarless windbreaker. The second he sees me, his face breaks into a smile.

  This is our routine. I text him every night as I leave work. I’ve told him he doesn’t need to come and meet me just because it’s dark; I’m of tough northern stock – there’s very little that makes me quake in my boots. But I know this is a novelty for him. He’ll disguise how much he loves it by saying It’s no big deal. Motz gets to go for a pee. I get to stretch my legs.

  He once told me that he never k
new when Meredith was getting home, never had any sense of them coming together as a married couple at the end of the day. He said it was a bit like she just returned to base, a necessary transition to take her into the next work day.

  ‘You’re late and you didn’t text or reply. I was worried.’ He kisses me on the mouth. His face is warm and he smells of faded aftershave that’s found its way on to the wool of his scarf.

  ‘Sorry. I must have forgotten to turn my ringer on.’ I briefly rest my head on his shoulder. ‘Bad day.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ he says, as we take a sharp right and meander up the steep and windy incline to our home, Mozart leading the way.

  And so I do.

  I’m still talking about it when we’re in bed a couple of hours later. He made me some scrambled eggs because I couldn’t face the seafood and chorizo hotpot he’d pulled together after we’d agreed to stay home. Joe is an amazing cook. Until I met him, I’d never known a guy who could even boil an egg, let alone care about whether I was eating something nourishing and healthy. ‘I just love feeding my people!’ he once said, in his big, rather extravagant Chicagoan way. And I loved knowing I was one of them.

  ‘I don’t know why I wasn’t prepared for it,’ I tell him. ‘People get ill, die . . . I’ve been trained for this. I’ve seen this.’

  I didn’t want to bring it home with me; I remember a professor telling us that no matter what happened on the ward, when you leave it you must ‘return to your world’.

  ‘Because he’s your age,’ he says. ‘Because you guys had a bit of banter . . . Hell, you liked the guy!’

  He’s right. I appreciated his messy charm. In another life he might have even been someone I dated.

  ‘Look . . .’ He draws me into him, tightly. ‘No one wants to tell someone they’ve got a brain tumour – certainly not someone virtually your own age. It’s an unthinkably horrible position you’re in.’

  ‘But if I’m like this every time I’ve got to break bad news . . .’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You won’t be.’ He turns my chin, makes me meet his eyes. ‘Lauren, you’re caring and kind, and you feel things on a very deep level. That’s an asset! It makes you you. It doesn’t make you less strong, or less professional. In fact, it makes you a much-needed addition to this cold, cold world.’

  I am embraced by this rare ability he has of always saying the right thing. And maybe I will eventually grow a thick skin and stop being so riddled with self-doubt.

  ‘Think of him before you go to sleep!’ he says, with a certain bright humanity. ‘Send him a dose of the fighter spirit.’

  ‘I will,’ I tell him, touched that he has the capacity to feel empathy for someone he’s never met, to let some other man be the last person on my mind as I fall asleep.

  Four months after we met in Santa Monica, I had arrived on the ward as usual to start my volunteer shift. One of the admins looked up from her computer and said, ‘Oh, some post just came for you.’ She rooted through a pile and handed me an envelope.

  It was addressed to Lauren Matheson c/o my hospital. I recognised the neat block capitals instantly.

  Dear Lauren,

  This could perhaps be a wild goose chase in more ways than one. But in case by some miracle this does actually manage to find you, and if there is even the remotest chance that, after all this time, you still vaguely remember me, I wanted to say that it’s not complicated anymore and I would love to take you to dinner.

  Joe Johnson.

  THREE

  Grace is sitting at the dinner table tinkering with her phone when I come in. She’s wearing an oversized denim shirt, and her long, bare legs are drawn up into a yogic half lotus.

  ‘Hi,’ I chirp, noting I’m a bubblier version of myself when I’m around Joe’s daughter – almost like my inner teenager is compelled to come out in a rather feeble attempt to relate to hers.

  She doesn’t look up.

  As I pass her chair I can see that behind a curtain of silky, honey-coloured hair, she’s immersed in watching one of her own vlog posts – an entertaining tutorial on how to get the designer T-shirt look for under ten pounds. What you do is, you buy the cheapest, plainest one you can find from H&M, then slash holes in it. I’d sneakily watched her go to town with a pair of scissors the other day.

  ‘How’s your day?’ I ask, fascinated that she can find herself so enthralling. As I glance back at her again, I realise I can see right up her shirt – and it doesn’t look like she’s wearing any underwear. I make a point of looking away, set the shopping bags down on the Carrara marble counter. Joe and Meredith’s custody arrangement has the kids staying with us Sunday to Tuesday, and alternate Saturdays. ‘How did your exam go?’

  ‘Fine,’ she mumbles.

  I wait for more, but nothing is forthcoming. That’s okay. If she doesn’t want to talk, I’m not really in the mood to drag conversation out of her. I haven’t had the best day. A consultant gave me a telling-off for something that was actually another junior doctor’s error, not mine. Instead of putting him straight, I took one for the team. But I’ve spent the rest of the day berating myself for being spineless.

  I start setting out vegetables and pulling things from the fridge. We live in a charming garden-level Victorian conversion that Joe rented, at vast cost, after his marriage broke up. It’s one of those civilised, spacious, serenely decorated spaces in tones of cream and elephant grey that’s ideal for a couple who earn enough to afford the luxury of the square footage, but it’s not the most practical place for a family, being rather open-plan – pretty much one big living space – and free of escape hatches. Last week Joe told Grace off for always walking in the door and disappearing straight to her room. So I’m assuming this is why she’s dutifully sitting here now.

  ‘It’ll be a while before dinner . . . You know . . . if you’ve got things to do,’ I say, trying to give her the green light to leave, but I might as well be talking to myself.

  To fill the awkward silence, I pop on my playlist and start humming along to Billie Jo Spears’s ‘(Hey, Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song’ – one of those rare and catchy melodies that even the most tone-deaf among us can sing along to.

  After a time I hear her say, ‘Do you have any idea where my dad went?’

  She has plucked out an earbud and is staring at me with a certain idle curiosity.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘Isn’t he just out picking up Toby with Mozart?’

  No answer.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ I ask. ‘I bought stuff to make tacos.’ I’ve noticed in the past that if I buy chicken, she wants beef. If I get us fish, she wants chicken. So this time I thought, Right. I’m going to buy the lot! ‘I thought I’d set it all up as a bar and we can build our own.’

  ‘Build our own?’ There is no mistaking her disdain.

  Hmm. I’ve the internet to thank for this particular brainchild. How to make meal times entertaining for kids of all ages. They should have said but not teenage girls who seem determined to hate what you cook for them anyway.

  Her phone pings.

  Saved by the bell!

  As she reads her message I watch her smirk, her pretty, coral-painted lips turning up at the corners to show charmingly uneven teeth, the eye-teeth a slightly deeper ivory than the rest, the hint of a silver filling in the upper left. Grace is a truly gorgeous girl. She mostly looks like a mini version of her mother, though she has many of her dad’s mannerisms. But it’s her confidence, not normally seen in girls her age, that is no small part of her allure. At one point, as she’s firing off a reply, she looks up and catches me watching her. I’m given the WTF? face again, then she slides off her stool and relocates to the sofa – tossing a cushion out of her way.

  Okay. I’m going to cook my meal, and everyone can just dig in without me trying to turn us into an episode of The Durrells.

  I start up Billie Jo Spears again, and sing along. Joe told me I don’t need to prove I’m an amazing chef jus
t because Grace informed me her mother is. Then he added, ‘It’s actually a load of crap. Meredith had never so much as roasted a chicken until we got our new Wolf stove. And then she stuck her head in there and nearly blasted her eyebrows off.’

  In no time, Joe walks in with the dog, Toby hoisted high on his shoulder. ‘Well, hello!’ His smile is refreshingly saucy and lights me up. Toby is wearing his cute little burgundy blazer, his bare legs dangling from his grey shorts, the evidence of an old scrape on his knee. I go over to them.

  ‘Hello,’ I say to Joe, aware that Grace is watching us. I turn my cheek when he aims for my lips, and he seems a little puzzled by the gentle rebuff. Mozart runs to his water bowl. I rub Toby’s head and crouch to help him off with his coat and mittens. ‘Hi there, little fellow. How was school today? Did you have a good time?’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘It was a rubbish-ish time, and now I want to play on my iPad!’

  He bullets towards the sofa, but Joe calls him back. ‘Hey, Tobes. Can you please give Lauren a hug first?’

  I’m about to say, Oh, that’s all right! but to my delight, Toby does a U-turn, runs back and rugby tackles me. ‘No running inside the flat!’ Joe calls, but it’s too late. Toby glues himself to my lower body, his arms tight around my hips, which makes me smile.

  ‘School was awesome! I can count to twenty and I know what a noun is!’

  Joe catches my eye again and mouths, ‘Bullshit.’

  I chuckle.

  ‘Would you like some tortilla chips and dip?’ I ask him.

  ‘Chips and dip? Wow! Yes please, and thank you!’ You would think I’d offered him a trip to the moon on a rocket. He stands to attention like a keen little toy soldier.

  I’m about to pass him the bowl but Joe intercepts it. ‘How about some apple and cottage cheese instead?’

  When I must look confused, he says in a hushed tone, ‘Toby got a pharyngeal abrasion with one of these things not so long ago, because he doesn’t always chew properly. They can be sharp for a kid.’