Alice Roberts looks out of the window again. He sees her hand go up to her face.
‘You could go home for a night or two,’ Clare says, moving closer to her. ‘We have some fairly expert babysitters at Central Children’s. Medical degrees and everything.’
‘No,’ Alice says to the window. ‘But thanks anyway. I couldn’t leave her on her own. We’ll be fine.’
Satish leaves, nodding his thanks to Kawther. A few steps away, and Clare is beside him.
‘That Metoclopramide,’ she says. ‘Just wanted to check. You did say 50mg?’
‘Yes. IV.’
‘Fifty?’
He thinks. Fifty?
‘No! Fifty? No. I didn’t say that. Five. I said five.’
‘OK.’
‘I said five.’
‘I’ll give her five.’
‘I said fifty just then because you did. But before, I said five. Definitely.’ Fifty would cause overdose and loss of muscle control, the patient twitching and jerking, her face contorting. He’d never have said fifty.
‘OK. Five.’
‘And get Jane Oshodi to see Mrs Roberts. She needs patient liaison. She’s under a lot of stress.’
At university, Satish had a housemate called Lawrence Potten, an English student for whom Satish’s chosen profession seemed an ideological and pharmacological goldmine. Pharmacologically, he had it all worked out: wait until you’re filling in for a houseman, doing ward rounds with one of the more distractable nurses. (Lawrence was, he assured Satish, an expert in distractable nurses.) Swipe some Co-Proxamol from the drugs trolley, sell it on and receive a nice little supplement to your student grant. Satish had refused, of course, but Lawrence’s plan was so accurate, and so very precise, that he knew it came from insider knowledge. Who were these other medics, he’d wonder, these swipers of drugs, these corrupters of youth? What sort of doctors would they turn out to be?
Lawrence had more luck with the ideological aspect of Satish’s job. In particular, he was obsessed by the cultural significance of the white coat. He considered its semiotics, its effect on interpersonal dynamics. One day, Satish noticed that his coat and stethoscope had gone from their peg on the back of his door. Two hours later, Lawrence returned with them.
‘Bloody unbelievable!’ he told Satish. ‘Incredible!’ Satish caught a waft of Lawrence’s aftershave as he bounced closer. His spiked hair juddered with enthusiasm.
‘Lawrence, what did you do?’
‘I went to the hospital! I walked through the corridors wearing it. Even a couple of wards.’
Satish winced. ‘That’s completely irresponsible.’
‘It was fine. It was a revelation! It’s like being Superman, isn’t it? You walk past a group of people and they turn to you, they lift their faces to you. They’re hopeful. They think you’re going to solve their problems.’
For some reason this threw a switch in Satish. ‘I do solve their problems!’ he remonstrated. ‘That’s the point! What do you think med students do, Lawrence?’
‘I just said—’
‘You did a stupid, irresponsible thing. Stay out of my room. Don’t take my stuff without asking. Don’t do that again.’
Lawrence retreated. ‘I just wanted to see. I thought it was amazing,’ he said. ‘Amazing, walking round like that all day.’
And of course, he was right. It was amazing. Even in those first sweaty weeks on the wards, when he didn’t know his otoscope from his elbow, the white coat was transformative. It was magic, a cloak of visibility, and it didn’t just make people notice you, it made people need you.
A couple of years after he’d started at the hospital the board had looked at ways of making the place less formal. Plenty of paediatric centres had abandoned white coats by then, and there was an enthusiastic lobby for Central to follow suit. Satish remembers his own arguments for retaining them. He’d cited studies and anecdotal evidence, suggesting that they were a comfort to anxious parents. He’d pointed out the practicalities. He lost.
When Satish walks the corridors of his hospital – as he does now, leaving Butterfly ward and heading for the lift – he operates without the benefit of his white coat. He wears a stethoscope and an ID card around his neck and carries a file in his hand, all of them vestigial, all of them what is left after the removal of that comforting, archaic costume. Around him patients, and the parents of patients, look up momentarily as he passes by, scanning him for evidence. He can see them checking his face, his ID, lingering on the folder he carries as if it might pertain to them in some way: contain news that’s been longed-for, or dreaded. He avoids eye contact, always aware of the proximity of the next thing he has to do.
When the lift doors open, Mike Halloran gets out. ‘Satish! Departmental meeting Thursday!’
‘Yes. I got the memo.’ Behind Mike, the lift is emptying. Soon the doors will close again, and Satish will have to wait.
‘It’s a lateish one.’ Mike’s a fly-boy, like all cardiac surgeons: crack one chest and you think you’re God. Talented though. All the women have crushes on him.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll be there.’ He really needs to get upstairs, but Mike’s still in front of him, hands in pockets. The lift doors slide shut. Satish wonders if he’s meant to make small talk at this point, a sort of how’s-the-wife-and-kids, like he hears the other doctors doing.
Mike says: ‘Heard about Bill Mezrich up at St Agnes?’ So: small talk, then.
‘No.’
‘Fired.’ Mike raises his eyebrows knowingly. Satish is meant to ask why.
‘Why?’
Mike grips an imaginary glass and shakes it in front of his face. ‘Booze. On the sauce. Went into theatre pissed.’
‘That’s … that’s terrible.’
‘Anaesthetist halted the op.’
‘Oh, God. Poor Bill.’
Mike frowns. ‘Poor Bill? Satish, he went in there pissed.’
‘I know, but still …’
‘Sat next to him at a conference once. Like being in a bloody brewery. All the stories will come out, now that he’s gone.’
‘Mike, can I …?’ Satish needs – very badly – to get away. He gestures at the lift.
‘No problem. On my way.’ But he hesitates. ‘Some of us will probably be going to the Duke for a drink afterwards. If you wanted to come …’
All the stories will come out. Satish, stripped of his medical props and sitting at a pub table. Satish with all his protection missing, the job, the urgency, exposed amongst them and looking for safe things to say.
‘I don’t know. It depends what time …’
‘Yeah, I know. Well, if you want to. Push the boat out.’ He grins and walks backwards, away from Satish, who reaches out for the lift call button and presses it.
‘All right. I’ll see you at the meeting.’
Mike swivels on his heel and walks away, lifting a hand in valediction.
Satish waits for the empty lift, the private space. Sometimes, simply staying upright feels exhausting. There is a need, now, to comb over the details of that last conversation, to check for the subliminal nod and wink. What does Mike know? What has he guessed? But Satish is denied even these few moments of privacy, because when the doors finally open there’s a woman waiting beside him to get in. She struggles with a buggy, her baby balanced in the crook of her elbow. Satish recognises the awkward stance: this child has had recent heart surgery, and can’t be picked up under the arms. He moves to help her, pulling the buggy into the lift behind them.
‘Thank you so much.’ He presses the button for his floor, asks her for hers. She’s tall and bony, well groomed, a contrast to the frazzled mothers who have to make do with hospital bathrooms for their morning ablutions. For some reason he isn’t predisposed to like her, he finds, and he’s trying to work out why when she frowns at him and glances down at his ID.
‘Satish?’ She says it quietly. And suddenly he’s looking at Sarah again.
The doors haven’t quite shut yet.
There’s still time. He takes a single stride across the floor but as he does they close. There’s a view of the corridor, a shrinking vertical slot, then just metal, and they’re shut in together.
‘I didn’t know you worked here,’ she says.
He doesn’t answer her. His hand moves up to stroke his scalp through his hair and then he stops himself doing it.
‘You’re a doctor here?’ she says, hesitant.
He can hear his breathing coming faster and he wonders whether she can hear it too. He can’t find a comfortable place for his hands: folded across his chest, in his trouser pockets, resting by his side, they migrate away from wherever he puts them. He looks briefly at her and knows from the concern on her face, from her own indrawn breath, that she’s about to say something far more perilous than small-talk.
‘Yes,’ he puts in quickly. ‘I’m a cardiologist.’
‘Oh!’
He’s silenced her. Five floors of this, he tells himself. Just five more floors. He watches the red on the buttons flick upwards as they climb.
‘This is Louis,’ she says. ‘He was born with Fallot’s.’
He looks at the child. At maybe seven months, the boy’s a little too old to be happy on his back and he flails for an upright position.
‘He was fine. Well, we thought he was fine. Then our GP heard a murmur.’
She’d have had an apparently perfect baby. The paediatrician would have done an echo to look inside that perfect chest, not yet assaulted by a sternal saw, no ridge of scarring down its centre, and seen an imperfect heart twitching in the darkness, the misdirected blood flashing Doppler blue amongst the red.
On the third floor, the lift bounces to a stop and the doors open. Satish retreats to the opposite corner, waiting for incomers. There’s silence from outside. After a moment Sarah leans out: ‘False alarm,’ she tells him, and just as Satish realises he could nip out himself, the doors close again.
‘Nancy Driscoll operated last month,’ she says. ‘This is our four-week check. Is she good, Nancy Driscoll? We googled her. She seems to be good.’
‘Yes. Nancy’s very good.’
‘They gave us Suraya Ahmed as a cardiologist. We hadn’t even thought about that, about a cardiologist, or about the care he’d need afterwards – honestly, you just hope there will be an afterwards – so we hadn’t looked her up or anything. What’s she like?’
‘Suraya’s excellent.’ He hesitates. ‘Everyone here is excellent.’
The lift has bumped gently to a halt. Finally, it’s her floor. As she rolls out the buggy she asks him, ‘Are you going to do this photograph?’ but he steps back into the lift without answering her. She gives him a tight smile as the doors close, and then she’s gone.
Chapter 15
Her Saturday mornings were usually spent with Mandy. They’d call round for each other about ten: enough time for a lie-in, for Mum to nag her to get up, you’re wasting the day! She’d have a long soak, nick some of her mum’s bubble bath and lie there in the suds reading Jackie or Pink, shouting at her dad when he wanted to come in. Then she’d spend half an hour getting dressed, trying on different things in front of the dressing-table mirror; she liked to wear nice things on Saturdays, even if she and Mandy ended up doing nothing special, just hanging around in each other’s bedrooms.
One Saturday they decided to go down the shops. The Jubilee was a few weeks away and they’d just been told they should wear red, white and blue to the party.
‘My mum’s given me money for something new,’ Mandy told her. ‘D’you fancy a look in Valerie’s?’ Valerie’s was Bourne Heath’s only clothes shop, a boutique next door to Mac Fisheries in the little parade at the centre of the village. Valerie was a real person, the mother of one of the kids in their class.
‘Yeah. Let’s go. I’ll see if Mum will let me have some money, too.’ She did, four pounds; Sarah stuffed it into her purse.
On the way there they played ‘My House, Your House’, a travel game that Sarah’s parents had taught her, adapted by the girls for the short walk into the village. Mandy and Sarah would take it in turns to claim ownership of each house they passed, giving free rein to their disgust or envy at the way the lots fell. After Sarah staked possession of Ragstones, a picturesque Victorian semi, Mandy performed an impromptu impersonation of Gerry Carter, its ancient inhabitant, shambling her way past its dirty windows. Their headmaster Mr McLennan lived a few doors along from Ragstones, and when his house fell to Mandy, Sarah knew her lines: ‘Ooh, you could live with him there! Lenny McLenny, I love you, ooh!’
They stopped off at the Wavy Line before they went to Valerie’s and bought a supply of sweet cigarettes. Sarah had watched her sister Diane smoking for real, her hand stiff, her wrist slightly bent; she replicated this, and Mandy copied her, as they made their way to the boutique, the powdery-sweet taste in their mouths.
Valerie – Mrs Weston – was undressing a window dummy when they came in. As she turned to greet them the figure wobbled and tipped.
‘Whoops!’ She righted it. ‘Hello girls. You doing a bit of shopping? Your mums with you?’
Sarah nodded a yes, Mandy shook her head, no. The dummy stretched a frozen hand towards them. The fingertips had bits chipped off.
‘Lovely! D’you need me for a minute? Or are you happy to browse?’ No, yes. The girls smiled and retreated into the shop.
‘I’ve already got blue,’ Sarah said. ‘Jeans. So I want a top, red or white. What are you looking for?’
Mandy considered. ‘Dunno. Maybe a skirt. I like those tiered ones.’
‘I’ve got one of those,’ Sarah said. ‘My orange one.’
Mandy fiddled with a hanger. ‘Yeah, I know.’
Mrs Weston let them try on lots of things, even things they couldn’t afford to buy. The window kept her busy for a while, and then she came over and asked them, ‘What sort of thing are you looking for?’ Sarah remembered the way her mother talked in shops, and tried to talk like that.
She bought a halter-top in the end, a white one, and you could really see her boobs in it. So now she had blue and white. At the counter there was a little stand with pendants on it. She liked the leather ones, tooled with suns or rainbows or birds, but they weren’t the right colour. There were some hearts on silver chains though, a brilliant, deep red and really pretty. Mrs Weston was wrapping the top.
‘How much are these necklaces?’
Mrs Weston squinted at the tag. ‘One pound twenty,’ she told her. ‘How much have you got?’
‘Three pounds ninety-eight.’
‘Sorry, love. The top’s three ninety. The necklace will still be here on Monday. Go home and ask your mum if you can have it as a treat.’
‘OK.’ Sarah looked longingly at the pendant, imagined it dropping down towards the V of her new top, the perfect finishing touch. She paid and left the counter while Mandy bought the skirt she’d chosen. Next to a display of belts and hats were some bras: Triumph. She knew these from the TV advert – Triumph has the bra for the way you are. It showed all the different kinds of girls who might wear Triumph bras and when she watched it, Sarah tried to pick out the type she was: sophisticated, cheery, romantic. As she and Mandy left the shop they sang the jingle:
‘Whether you’re ooh-ee
Or whether you’re doo-wop-wop-wop
Triumph has the bra for the way you are!’
They didn’t see Lee Davis coming towards them until it was too late; he must have heard them singing that stupid song. But it was only Lee after all. Sarah had seen him at playtimes, hanging around the infants’ area with his little brother: a real no-no. Cai never played with him and he was generally considered a bit of a spaz. He smiled at them and, as she kept walking, Sarah realised that Mandy wasn’t with her any more. She’d stopped to talk to Lee. Sarah turned back immediately.
‘… some clothes for our Jubilee party,’ she caught her friend saying.
Sarah intervened quickly. ‘You coming, Mandy?’
; Mandy looked at her for just a second, then dropped the smile from her face. ‘Yeah, of course,’ she said, and swung away from Lee.
As they waited to cross the road Sarah pushed out her lower lip with her tongue and asked: ‘Were you habing a mice time with Lee ben, Manby?’ – and Mandy laughed and said, ‘God, he’s such a spaz,’ and then it was clear and they crossed.
As they turned into Cherry Gardens Mandy stuck her hand into the back pocket of her jeans. ‘I’m glad you didn’t buy that necklace at Valerie’s. I’ve been meaning to give you this.’
On her palm, tangled up in a lump, was a red heart on a chain. Sarah looked at it.
‘It’s the same as Mrs Weston’s.’
‘Yeah, I know. My mum bought it for me, but it doesn’t suit me. It’ll look better on you. Go on, have it,’ and she pushed her hand towards her friend.
Sarah reached out for it. She undid the knotted chain, easing it apart gently. ‘It’s just the same,’ she said again, when she’d finished and was holding it up between them.
‘Yeah. She probably got it from there. Don’t tell her I gave it you. She’ll be upset.’
‘OK. Thanks.’
‘You’ve got the whole thing now – red, white and blue.’
‘I have. Maybe I’ll get my mum to buy me red shoes, too.’
It was lunchtime. Both girls would be wanted back at home. Sarah walked to her house alone, thinking about the Jubilee party and how great she’d look in her red, white and blue.
On Jubilee Day she did look good, she knew it. As predicted, her mum had bought her some red sandals, grown-up wedgies she’d had to practise walking in before the day. They were the same colour as the pendant Mandy had given her; she looked like a fashion picture in one of her own magazines. Colette, yapping beside her as she got ready, had said as much, and then she’d said, cutting straight across the warm feel-good of the morning, that she had something else to tell her, ‘something about Mandy’.
Sarah knew it couldn’t be true. Mandy had told her, swearing her to secrecy, that she fancied Cai, and that he fancied her back. The two girls had planned the first kiss together; Sarah made Mandy practise on the back of her hand. She’d taught her about Frenchies: he should do it first, then you know it’s OK for you to do it. Not too much tongue. Even if he’s a sloppy kisser, never, ever wipe your mouth afterwards – it makes you look like a kid. Close your eyes. When it had happened (Jennings Field after school one day) Mandy had come straight to Sarah afterwards, and they’d gone over it together. Scale of one to ten? (Seven, said Mandy.) Length? (Dunno. It felt like a long time.) What did he do with his hands? (He put one on my shoulder. He held his bike with the other.)
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