by Tony Parsons
Jessica was relaxed and loving with the baby. Megan was permanently edgy and tense, not the mother she had planned to be at all, and she could not attribute everything to a lack of sleep.
Megan was forever waiting for something terrible to happen. Sometimes, when the baby had exhausted herself with crying and finally fallen asleep, Megan would lie beside her cot, straining to hear her daughter breathe, desperate for the assurance that she was still alive. For hours Megan wanted the baby to sleep more than anything in the world, but then the baby slept as if she was dead, and it terrified Megan.
She had been enslaved by her love for her daughter, and she knew that she would never be free. It was the first love of her life that she couldn’t walk away from, the one love she would never get over, the one love that was endless. The thought both exhilarated and depressed her.
She knocked on a scarred door.
There was no reply, although she could hear music inside – Justin Timberlake promising to funk you all night long. She knocked again, louder and longer. Finally the door was opened and Megan stepped into a scene of unremitting squalor.
Stacks of unwashed clothes adorned the furniture. The air was rank with the smoke of cigarettes and hashish. A scrawny dog was ravaging through the remains of a dozen takeaways.
‘I want a real doctor! Fully qualified! I know me rights!’
‘I’m fully qualified now, Mrs Marley.’
Mrs Marley’s face twisted with suspicion. ‘When did that happen?’
‘Last week.’
Somehow she had got through her summative assessment. There had been late nights spent writing her submissions of practical work while Kirk cradled their howling daughter, and exhausted mornings in the surgery video-taping her consulting skills – not easy getting the camera to focus when you were examining some pensioner’s dodgy prostate gland – while Lawford sat close by, making notes for his trainer’s report.
There had also been the exam, the multiple choice question paper, and Lawford was right – Megan, the exam princess, could have passed it in her sleep. Which she almost did, her eyes closing and head drooping over the paper, the yellowed milk stains on her jumper.
‘Congratulations, doctor,’ sneered Mrs Marley.
‘Thank you.’
‘Let’s hope you don’t make any more mistakes now you’re a proper doctor.’
Megan didn’t tell Mrs Marley that ultimately all she had really done was struggle through her year as a GP registrar, demonstrating what they called ‘minimum competence’. All those years of med school and the horrors of Accident and Emergency, then those twelve months as a GP registrar, getting the sick and dying in and out, the Ronald McDonald of the medical profession, and in the end they said you were the proud possessor of minimum competence.
That’s me all right, thought Megan. Little Miss Minimum Competence.
‘What’s the problem, Mrs Marley?’
‘It’s me nerves.’ She reared up defensively, arms folded across her expansive bosom. ‘It’s not mental. I’m not a loony. Just can’t get up in the morning. Can’t get out of the house.’
‘You feel agoraphobic?’
Mrs Marley looked blank. ‘Afraid of spiders?’
‘You dislike leaving the house?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve been taking the pills. But they’re all gone.’
Megan consulted her notes. ‘That prescription should have lasted another two weeks.’
‘Yeah, well, it didn’t, did it?’
‘Were you taking them as directed?’
‘They weren’t fucking working, were they? So I doubled me dose.’
‘Mrs Marley,’ Megan sighed, ‘Dr Lawford prescribed a powerful tricyclic antidepressant for you. It controls the serotonin in your central nervous system. You can’t just–’
‘I know me rights,’ insisted Mrs Marley.
Daisy wandered into the room and began listlessly patting the scavenging dog. Megan went across to her, and knelt down. The child was wearing only a soiled T-shirt. She didn’t appear to have been washed for days.
‘Daisy, darling, shouldn’t you be in school?’
‘Mum said I didn’t have to, miss.’
Mrs Marley exploded.
‘How can she go to school if I can’t leave the house? Daft cow.’
Megan straightened up. ‘I am really sorry. I don’t want to do it. But I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask social services to call round.’
Mrs Marley’s face darkened. ‘Social workers? I don’t want no crappy little do-gooders around here.’
‘This child is being neglected. Now I know you’re not well–’
Daisy began to cry quietly to herself.
Megan placed a hand on the child’s shoulder, and turned to her mother.
‘Nobody wants to take Daisy away from you. Not if we can avoid it.’
‘If we can avoid it? My brother did you before and he’ll do you again!’
Mrs Marley took a step towards Megan, and Megan backed away from the woman and her child. There was a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, and it was a different kind of fear to anything she had known before.
Because if something happened to her, then what would become of her baby?
Jessica and Naoko wheeled their pushchairs through the late afternoon crowds.
Poppy was sleeping in a three-wheel pram, while Chloe sat upright in her pushchair, her eyes bright as buttons, a grinning penguin in her arms. Chloe never went anywhere without her penguin.
When the women stopped for coffee, Chloe placed the penguin on the floor and pressed a button on one of its stubby wings. It immediately sprang into life, and began singing in its mechanical voice.
‘Bounce, bounce – everybody bounce!
Bounce to the ocean and dive right in.
Bounce, bounce – everybody bounce!
Don’t you want to be a bouncy penguin?’
As the penguin leapt up and down, Chloe shook her head, smiling to herself.
‘That’s new,’ Jessica said. ‘The head thing.’
‘She’s just realised that her head moves from side to side,’ Naoko said.
When they came out of the coffee shop, they started to say goodbye. Naoko stroked Poppy’s sleeping face, Jessica stooped to kiss Chloe and – upon the child’s insistence – her penguin.
That is when they saw them.
Michael and the woman were saying their own goodbyes outside the local Hilton, their serious kissing out of place surrounded by all the businessmen and women in their drab corporate grey. Michael and Ginger, the receptionist who wasn’t saving it for anything.
Jessica looked at Naoko. Ginger was ten years older than her friend, and nowhere near as pretty. So – why? Why would a man risk losing his wife and child for an old boot like that?
Chloe took advantage of the pause in proceedings to turn on her penguin.
‘Bounce, bounce – everybody bounce!’
Naoko bent down and turned off the penguin, saying just one word to her daughter.
‘Enough.’
When the baby finally slept, they made love – nothing like the fierce coupling of their first night, on the coats at the party, but sex that seemed to Megan like it belonged in a library -muffled and hushed, watched by signs saying Silence Please.
But she liked this man who had given her a child, and crossed the world to find them, she liked him more and more.
She knew all about the second job delivering sandwiches, although she never let on, and this menial job didn’t make him seem pathetic to her. It touched her heart. It didn’t make him look like a loser in her eyes, it made him seem like a real man. He would do anything for them. So she trusted him now.
‘I thought I could make a difference around here,’ she whispered. ‘I really believed that. And look at me. Just like everybody else. Dishing out the antidepressants and calling the social services.’
‘You can’t help these people,’ he whispered back. ‘They’re too poor
, too sick, too far gone on junk food and drugs, fags and booze. Too stupid.’
‘No, there are good people around here.’ She thought of Mrs Summer and the boxer and Daisy. She thought of all the good and decency that managed to exist in these mean estates. ‘They’re not all the same.’
‘You’ve got to think about Poppy now. About us. I mean it, Megan. We should get out.’
She smiled at that. It seemed to her that he had spent his life dreaming of going to some new place. Somewhere the sea was bluer, the beaches whiter, and the water cleaner. How the hell did he end up in Hackney?
‘Where do you have in mind?’
‘I’m serious, Megan.’
‘I’m not laughing at you. Honest. I love it. I love the idea of getting away from all this.’
He grabbed her excitedly.
‘Somewhere with decent diving. Somewhere I can teach. These are the best places on the planet. Any major diving centre will have me. The Indian Ocean. The Caribbean. Even back home – Australia.’
Suddenly she wasn’t smiling.
‘You think I want to lie on a beach all my life? You think I’d give up my job?’
‘They need doctors everywhere. Why do you have to practise in a place where they don’t respect you – or anything else? Where it’s filthy, and full of drunks, and ignorant bastards?’
‘You hate it here.’
‘That’s right. But I’m not here for the place. I am here for you. And our baby.’
‘This is where I can do the most good. It’s not true what you say – and even if it was, what do you think a doctor does? You think 1 should only treat rich people? Nice people? It doesn’t work like that. That’s not what I trained for.’
‘What did you train for? Not this life. Surely not this life.’
Megan searched her memory. During all those years of study, she had certainly had a vision of herself as a doctor.
In the vision she was calm, kind and endlessly capable. Bringing hope to those in despair. That sort of thing. She had never imagined that she would ever be physically threatened by her patients. She thought that they would be grateful, that they would love her even, or at least respect her. She had never imagined that some of them would see her as a middle-class cow depriving them of the pills they craved, and blighting their lives by calling in the dreaded social workers. And Megan had never guessed that she would ever feel so tired.
‘I guess I wanted to make a difference. Yes, that’s it. I wanted to make things a little bit better. What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing. But you can’t save the world, Megan. Look at us. I mean, just look at the pair of us struggling with the baby every night. This tiny little thing doesn’t stop crying and we feel like the sky is falling down.’
The baby stirred in the cot beside their bed.
‘Keep your voice down,’ Megan whispered.
‘How are you going to save the world?’ Kirk whispered back. ‘We can’t even take care of ourselves.’
Twenty-two
From their window at the Ritz-Carlton, Jessica could look out on the timeless bustle of Hong Kong harbour.
There was something magical about this place, but what it was felt just beyond her reach. It was a city that was constantly being reinvented, where new dreams pushed aside the old dreams, and everywhere you looked there was land being reclaimed from the harbour, and shining skyscrapers being raised upon it while the soil was still wet.
Out in the harbour there were vessels of every kind and every century. Hydrofoils taking the gamblers to Macao, puffing tugs accompanying giant cruise ships, ancient wooden junks with their orange sails and, always, the green-and-white Star Ferries, shuttling between Central and Wanchai and Tsim Sha Tsui. There was an old film that Jessica had glimpsed late at night, where a man had fallen in love with a girl he first saw on the Star Ferry. Jessica thought it looked like a good place to fall in love.
Framing the chaotic pageant of the harbour were the two shining skylines, the corporate towers of Hong Kong island staring across at the forest of apartment blocks Kowloon side, and beyond them the green hills of the New Territories.
Jessica knew what was on the other side of those hills, and suddenly she realised she wanted to go there, she wanted to see it while she had the chance. Who knew if she would ever be back in this part of the world?
‘I would like to see China,’ she said.
Paulo didn’t reply.
He was lying on their bed, still jet-lagged after five days, listlessly thumbing through a sheaf of glossy brochures from the Hong Kong Motor Show. On the cover of the one he was holding, two smiling Chinese girls in cheongsams were sitting on the roof of some expensive car.
‘Paulo? I want to see China.’
‘China? Darling, you’re looking at it.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘Who do you think Hong Kong belongs to now? Not us, Jess. The British went home. End of empire and all that.’
‘I mean the mainland. Across the border. You know. The People’s Republic of China.’
He grimaced.
‘We can do that, if you want. But I don’t think it’s as nice as here. I bet those Communists can’t make a decent cappuccino. Why can’t we just stay in Hong Kong?’
‘I’d like to see it anyway. While we’re here. Who knows if we’ll ever come back?’
He stretched out and smiled, feeling that strangely soporific sensation of being in a five-star hotel room on the far side of the world. He loved the way she looked standing by the window, half turned towards him, the late afternoon light on her beautiful face. He could never refuse her anything.
‘Come over here, you little minx, and we’ll talk about it.’
‘What for?’ she laughed. ‘You’re too tired.’
‘Okay, okay, we’ll take a look at China.’ He yawned and tossed the brochure to one side. ‘A day should be enough, shouldn’t it? I mean, how long does it take to see China?’
Paulo closed his eyes and Jessica turned back to the view just in time to see a Star Ferry mooring below her. Crowds of sleek, black-haired businessmen and women disembarked, pouring into Statue Square and their working lives in Central.
Most of them probably lived in those endless skyscrapers she could see Kowloon side, sprouting like a forest on the tip of the Chinese peninsula. That’s where their families would be waiting when they caught the Star Ferry back home. The husbands and wives. A couple of those beautiful, bell-haired children you saw on the MTR, smart in their old-fashioned school uniforms, looking forward to their future, and the future of this wonderful place.
And suddenly, all at once, Jessica understood the source of Hong Kong’s magic.
‘You know what it is?’ she said out loud, although she knew her husband was sleeping. ‘I have never seen anywhere so full of life.’
‘Anybody here ever changed a baby’s nappy before? Mummies? Daddies? Come on, don’t be shy.’
Cat looked at Rory.
‘Go on,’ she hissed. ‘You told me you changed Jake all the time.’
‘But that was years ago.’
‘You told me your ex-wife was a lazy bitch who wouldn’t get up at night.’
‘Leave me alone.’
‘Put your hand up!’
‘No!’
The teacher of their antenatal class smiled at her students. They stared back at her, or at the pink doll flat on its back on the mat between them. The doll was wearing a sodden nappy. It was one of those dolls that sold itself on the fact that it could cry and pee its pants. Just like the real thing. Just add water.
The teacher was one of those earth mother types that always made Rory feel uncomfortable. A big body in a floaty dress. Long, flowing hair that was probably meant to signify her belief in personal freedom, but just looked unkempt and dirty. Ethnic earrings and a beatific smile, as if she knew the secrets of the universe.
‘Changing baby’s nappy when she has done a wee or a poo is one of our most fundamental par
enting skills.’
‘I watched me sister change her baby,’ said one of the expectant mothers. She was typical of the class. Hardly out of her teens, bedecked with tattoos and pieces of metal that suddenly peeked out at you from ankle, breast and buttock. She was accompanied by a surly-looking young man with bad skin.
Babies making babies, thought Rory, thinking of an ancient Sly and the Family Stone song that must be – my God! Almost forty years old! Your granny might know it, he thought. These kids. They don’t know what they’re letting themselves in for.
‘Anyone?’
Cat elbowed him in the ribs.
‘Ah!’ he said.
The teacher turned her smile on him. The expectant mothers and their blank-faced men all noticed him for the first time.
‘Ah, ah, ah did it once, years back. My son.’
‘Real hands-on experience,’ the teacher said, all mock-impressed. ‘Let’s see what you remember.’
Rory joined the teacher on the mat. Smiling still, she gave him a new nappy, a box of baby wipes and a jar of cream.
‘Most newborn babies have erythema toxicum,’ she said.
Rory must have looked alarmed.
‘Nappy rash. Crucial to keep baby clean.’ She nodded briskly. ‘Off you go.’
Rory thought back. It wasn’t so difficult. It was true he had been the one to get up in the middle of the night while Ali slept off a few glasses, or perhaps a bottle, of something white and fruity. Feeling a surge of confidence, he tried to straighten the pretend baby, ready for changing.
Suddenly the doll’s head came off in his hands.
‘Bugger.’
The class roared with laughter.
‘Never lift baby by her head,’ the teacher said sternly, her smile finally vanished.
‘I was just straightening it,’ Rory said, desperately trying to put the head back on. ‘Obviously in real life I wouldn’t–’
He had managed to get the head back on but as he fumbled with the wet nappy he realised it was the wrong way round. The class laughed again. The teacher looked disappointed.
