In the Light of What We See

by Sarah Painter

  Grace had been looking forward to using it for extra storage. ‘Why can’t I keep it here?’

  The girl swept into the room and began unpinning her cap. ‘I’m Evie. Last girl I roomed with was a terrible drip. You’re not planning on crying yourself to sleep every night, are you?’

  ‘No,’ Grace said. It sounded bald, put like that, and her voice held a note of challenge. The short silence that followed didn’t feel entirely friendly. She added: ‘At least, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Good,’ Evie said. ‘It’s hard enough to kip down in this place as it is.’ She put her cap on top of her nightstand and began struggling out of her long apron and pinstripe dress.

  Grace quickly looked away. She nudged her trunk with her foot, trying not to blush.

  ‘Has anyone showed you around yet?’

  ‘No.’ Grace nudged the trunk a little more, then risked a glance at her room-mate. She was down to her slip and was fussing with her fringe, trying to pin a single roller in it.

  ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

  ‘But—’

  ‘What?’ Evie had pulled on a silk dressing gown and slippers.

  Grace didn’t know how to say ‘You don’t have your clothes on’ without sounding rude, so she closed her mouth.

  Outside the room, doors banged and footsteps echoed. ‘Night shift are having breakfast, then it’s the sisters, and then us sorry lot get our grub.’

  ‘Does Matron Clark eat with us?’ Grace asked.

  ‘No fear.’ Evie shook her head.

  ‘Nurse Jones.’ A square-ish woman wearing sister’s uniform and a thunderous expression bore down upon them. ‘This is not a doss house.

  ‘No, Sister,’ Evie said, sounding contrite. ‘It’s just the new girl was desperate to be shown around and no one had had the time yet and I’d only got a few minutes . . .’

  ‘I don’t care if you had but a single second, you should’ve used it to dress yourself properly. Go back to your room at once.’

  ‘Yes, Sister Bennett.’ Evie rolled her eyes as she turned away, which the sister pretended not to notice.

  She turned to Grace. ‘Follow me,’ she said curtly. ‘I will show you the dining hall.’

  As they walked, Sister Bennett waxed lyrical on the many failings of Evie and how they typified the shoddy calibre of young nurses today. Grace was so busy trying to make polite noises at the appropriate points that she completely forgot to pay attention to the way they were going and the warren of corridors and hallways remained a mystery to her.

  She couldn’t eat at supper and escaped to the relative sanctuary of her room as soon as possible. It was all too much, too strange. Apart from when she’d been in hospital with flu, she’d never stayed away from home before and, much as she didn’t want to disappoint Evie, she felt like howling into her pillow.

  Evie was sitting up in bed, reading a magazine. She looked momentarily shifty when Grace walked in and then relaxed.

  ‘Thank goodness it’s you,’ she said.

  Grace felt a spark of warmth.

  ‘I thought you might’ve been Matron doing a spot check.’

  ‘Does she do that?’ Grace sat on her narrow bed and unlaced her shoes.

  ‘Oh, yes. We’re treated like bloody prisoners here.’ A small hip flask appeared above her bedclothes and Evie took a ladylike sip. ‘We’re grown women, got the power of life or death, and we’re treated like naughty schoolgirls. It’s ridiculous.’

  Grace looked nervously at the door. She felt as if the swear word might’ve travelled, through some miraculous intervention, directly to the ears of her mother. Or the matron.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want any of this?’ Evie screwed the lid back on to the flask and stashed it in the pocket of her dressing gown, which was hanging over the end of her bed. ‘It’d help you sleep.’

  ‘No, thank you.’ Grace began undressing for bed. She suddenly felt too tired even to care that she was doing so in plain view of a stranger.

  ‘Thought not. You’ve got “good girl” stamped all over.’

  Grace felt sick. Not good enough.

  ‘You’ll probably even like it here.’

  MINA

  At work, I peered at the scan images on my monitor, my hair swinging forward and tickling my cheek. I pulled it back into a ponytail using one of the bands I kept around my wrist. The contrast agent had done its job and the images were excellent; the glowing white area in the right hemisphere of the axial MRI was as clear as daylight. Not a good prognosis for the poor owner of the brain, of course, but I was glad to see the new scanning technique I’d pushed through the department was working well. I rubbed the back of my neck and began adding my notes to the patient file.

  The door to the lab banged open and Mark strode in. He was incapable of walking in any other manner and, once upon a time, I’d found it unbearably attractive. He was so tall and solid that he didn’t really need his exquisitely tailored suit or Italian leather shoes to give out an air of authority and ownership. As always he stood too close to my chair and I shifted a little to increase the distance between us.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Busy.’

  ‘Good, good.’ He rubbed his hands together. Mark Fairchild was head of radiology and medical physics but he’d left behind the practical, scientific milieu long ago for management spreadsheets and finance meetings.

  After a moment, I said: ‘Did you need something?’ I shared an office with two other physicists, Parveen and Paul, and they bent over their work, pretending not to listen.

  Mark shook his head. He looked around the room, as if coming out of a daze. He raised a hand in a half-salute and left. I let out a slow breath.

  ‘You in trouble again?’ Paul said.

  ‘Must be.’ I forced a laugh.

  ‘Checking up on you,’ Parveen said.

  Paul and I looked at her in surprise. Parveen rarely joined in the banter. She was a good British-Bangladeshi girl. Well, that’s what I assumed. She spoke so little, I would have to admit that I had no idea what she was really like. She could’ve been a raving, drug-taking nymphomaniac in her spare time. But she came to the hospital, worked industriously, turned down all invitations to social engagements, and went home at six on the dot every day. I had the vague feeling that she lived with her parents, but if pressed would have to admit that could be a terrible stereotypical assumption.

  Parveen nodded, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of her lips. ‘Yes, you’d better watch out. If you’re in trouble, perhaps he’ll call you into his office and put you over his knee.’ She waggled her eyebrows suggestively and I nearly fell off my chair.

  Paul burst out laughing. ‘Filthy,’ he said, approvingly, and turned back to his work.

  And there you had it: you couldn’t rely on what you thought you knew about people. They were changeable. They refused to follow rules. I looked back at the MRI scan instead, with its area of abnormal white. It was deadly, yes, but reliably so. I had always loved certainty. Right or wrong. Yes or no. Subjects at school that involved ‘discussing’ or ‘interpreting’ were the work of the devil to me, and it was no surprise to my teachers when I took all the sciences. After my PhD I’d been tempted to stay in the department, researching for the rest of my working life, but there had been another impulse. To help. To feel worthwhile in some way.

  No, that was a lie. I clicked the icon to pull up the next patient file. I wanted to be good. To balance the scales. If people asked, ‘What do you do?’ and you replied that you were a doctor, helping to diagnose and treat cancer, then you had to be a good person. Had to be.

  After work I declined a half-hearted invitation to drinks and went straight home. I acted on autopilot, and a casual observer would have had no reason to think that I wasn’t getting ready for my dinner date. Right up until the last moment when I needed to leave. And didn’t. Instead I sat on the sofa and took off my shoes.

  Part of me wanted to switch on the televi
sion and drink wine and just pretend everything wasn’t happening, to split up with Mark by default rather than action, but the other part of me still seemed to retain some shred of moral fibre. I thought about him, sitting alone in the restaurant, and about the time I broke up with someone by leaving town in the middle of the night. I knew I didn’t love the man, but he had been good to me and hadn’t deserved that. Looking at the clock, I knew I’d left it too late and that Mark would probably already be en route. I pressed call on my mobile and crossed my fingers for the answer machine.

  ‘Are you running late? That’s okay, I’ll have a drink in the bar.’

  He sounded so happy, so confident, and I was going to shatter something. I might have known that it was broken but he hadn’t. I hated myself. I hated this.

  ‘I’m not coming.’ The words of a lie, something about feeling unwell or being too tired, sprang forward but I closed my lips against them. I forced myself to be honest. ‘I’m sorry. Things haven’t been right for a while now—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I think we need to take a break.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Mark said, his voice flat. ‘I’ll see you at the restaurant in half an hour.’ And he hung up.

  That was typical Mark, of course. In the early days, his confidence, his utter certainty about us, had drawn me to him. The first time I’d realised I liked him was at a Friday night drinks thing. A group had gone out after work and I’d been swept along. I remember talking to Paul but feeling Mark watching me from the next table. When I’d got up to leave, he’d followed. Outside a light drizzle was falling and he’d opened a golf umbrella. I remember thinking how laughable that was, how boring and grown up, putting him so far away from my type as to belong to another species. I’d always gone for long-haired bad boys with personal hygiene issues and marijuana habits, not a man twelve years older than me, who liked classical music and watching cricket.

  ‘I think we should get to know each other better,’ he’d said, angling the umbrella to shelter me. ‘Let me buy you dinner?’

  ‘When?’ I was playing for time, trying to work out a good way to turn down my boss.

  ‘Now. I get the feeling you’ll talk yourself out of it otherwise.’

  ‘You’d be right,’ I said. ‘You’re my boss. Isn’t there some kind of law against it?’ And, with those words, I’d personally guaranteed I’d be going home with him that night. I was aware that my pathetic rebellious phase should’ve ended before I’d hit twenty-five, but my libido hadn’t received the memo. Looking up at him that night, slightly drunk on gin and tonic, I’d thought, Fuck it. A one-night stand with my boss. Naughty, but fun. What harm could it do? Yes, I was an idiot.

  By nine o’clock I’d ignored seven calls from Mark’s mobile and was sitting on the sofa in a state of agitated paralysis. I knew that the grown-up, humane thing to do would be to go and talk to the man I had been sleeping with for the past eighteen months, but my brain had shut down. I’d always been good at keeping everything separate and tightly controlled and my brain kept helpfully partitioning off this little drama, enabling me to wonder whether there was anything on the telly.

  I hated myself so I did the thing I always did when I felt low and listened to Geraint’s voice. I clicked through to the answer machine on my phone, to the one saved message.

  ‘Mina?’

  That first enunciation always hit my stomach. I swallowed as his voice carried on. I’d listened to the message so many times I could recite it, but it never lost its power for me. Horror mixed with comfort. Guilt mixed with love.

  ‘Mina? You’ve got to call me back. Right now. Or, like, five minutes ago—’

  A hesitation. An audible breath. Then, ‘I’m in trouble.’

  I leaned back on the sofa and pressed my palms against my eyelids.

  I didn’t want to think about the last time I’d seen Ger, so I was glad when a different memory jumped to the forefront. It was from before I’d moved to Brighton. I was still at University College Hospital and living with Alex. She was the perfect flatmate. We shared a predilection for alcohol and had similarly sluttish standards of housekeeping. Alex’s only fault was a preference for Welsh men. She had the idea that they were the sexiest, the most desirable. Men with the brooding looks of Richard Burton and the lilting poetry of Dylan Thomas. Alex wanted one. As soon as I’d moved to London, I’d shrugged off my Welshness like an old cardigan. I avoided the ex-pats and lost my accent. I purged my vocabulary, stripping out the Swansea and replacing it with the flattened vowels of the modern Londoner. Much against my better judgement, I agreed to go with her to a Welsh pub on St David’s Day.

  ‘Prime hunting ground,’ Alex said.

  The place was packed and I stood in a corner to avoid getting lager spilled down my back. I liked leaning against the wall and settled in to watch the crowd. Alex was roving the bar, popping back every so often to gulp down a drink and shout a few words into my ear.

  The pub played Stereophonics, Catatonia and Tom Jones on a loop, pausing only for a round of the National Anthem. The words were printed on some specially produced Happy Hour menus: Mae Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau in bold lettering above a list of cocktails with names like Red Dragon and Leek Breath.

  Alex appeared again. She gestured into the crowd, yelling something. She turned to me and leaned in close. ‘I’m going to talk to him.’ Alex’s breath was a hundred per cent proof and it left dampness on my cheek.

  I couldn’t be bothered to shout above the noise, so I nodded, waving my hands to indicate enthusiasm, permission . . . whatever, in short, she was looking for.

  Alex turned and fought her way through the crush. I drank.

  A stocky man, who looked like a parody of a rugby player – short neck and solid muscles – tried to pick me up. ‘All right, love?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘What?’ he yelled, trying to be heard above ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’.

  I gave up on verbal communication, shook my head.

  ‘Cunt.’ The rugby player enunciated the word so it was clear for me to lip read, and turned to the next nearest female.

  I drank some more.

  Later, after I’d thrown up in a toilet cubicle so dirty vomit almost improved it, my mobile rang. By way of greeting, Geraint sang ‘London Calling’ by the Clash. It was the first time I’d heard his voice in over six months.

  ‘Hello, Ger.’ I tucked the phone under my chin while I washed my hands.

  ‘I’m on the train.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, waiting for the other shoe.

  ‘I’m visiting you. Today. I didn’t know London was so far, though. It’s taking for ever. I should’ve brought another book.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘No idea. There’s a man taking a piss on the platform. Does that help?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Ger had taken his fine brain and gone to crack codes at GCHQ in Cheltenham. If he’d come from his flat, I knew the route he’d have taken. ‘The train terminates at Paddington,’ I said. ‘Call me when you get there.’

  ‘God, I love train terminology. Terminates. Alight. Conductor—’

  ‘Call me,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and meet you.’

  In the end, he’d got himself into a taxi and I met him outside the bar. ‘I’m not going in there,’ he announced, executing a body-swerve and going into a nearby hotel instead.

  I trailed back in to tell Alex I was leaving. She was sandwiched in a group of men, sitting so close that they seemed to form one multi-limbed beast. ‘I’m going home,’ I shouted over the music. ‘Will you be okay?’

  Alex held out her hands and I pulled her upright. ‘I’ll come with,’ she said, leaning close and spraying spittle into my face.

  I didn’t want to introduce her to Geraint, but I was caught. I shrugged and turned away. I left Alex shouting goodbye and letting one of the boyos write his phone number on her arm.

  I waited outside and gulped soupy city air
, shoving the panic down. What did it matter if my flatmate met my brother? It was just one drink.

  The hotel bar was standard issue and filled with suits.

  Geraint sat in one corner. He was wearing a hoodie underneath his coat and I couldn’t tell if he’d lost weight.

  He stood up and gave me a quick hug.

  Alex bounded over like an excited puppy. ‘I’m Mina’s flatmate Alex,’ she said, showing her teeth. Ger smiled in his lazy way and I felt Alex’s attention go up a notch. I turned away, unable to watch, and went to the bar for an overpriced round of drinks. She was in full flow by the time I got to the table. Ger was lolling, one arm stretched along the back of the padded seating, the other hand toying with a lighter. Alex was telling him an involved story about the people at her work. He gave me a quick, private smile, while Alex was rooting in her bag for her mobile, and I felt a rush of love for him.

  ‘What do you do?’ Alex asked, finally finishing the saga of Francis-in-accounting.

  ‘If he told you, he’d have to kill you,’ I said, just to see Ger smile again.

  Alex leaned forwards and I watched my brother check out her breasts. It wasn’t his fault; they were practically resting on the table and I knew full well that Alex was doing it deliberately, but I was still irritated. More so by the end of the next round when I returned from the toilets to find him with his tongue in Alex’s mouth, one hand underneath her top, in a move I’d seen him make many times before.

  Alex was often flirty but not usually the kind to go from ‘hello’ to public snogging in such a short space of time, but Ger had that effect on women. I banged my bag down on the table, instantly soaking the bottom in spilled vodka tonic. Ger pulled back, looking slightly sheepish but mainly pleased with himself. I fought the sudden urge to swing my bag at his head.

  ‘It’s getting late. Shall we call it a night, yeah?’ Alex said. She looked at me but I saw her hand on Ger’s leg and I wasn’t fooled. The question was not for my benefit.

  ‘Fine.’ I rooted in my bag for my Oyster card, just to avoid watching them. Alex’s hand on Ger’s leg, his hand curled around her shoulder.