A Very Special Proposal

by Josie Metcalfe

  ‘If my parents hear that,’ she groaned, and threw her coffee down the sink, unable to force any more of it into a stomach that was twisted into knots.

  The phone beside her rang.

  ‘A and E staffroom,’ she said, her throat tight with tension, and as if her thoughts had conjured it up, she heard her mother’s voice in her ear.

  ‘Can I speak to Dr Willmott, please?’ she demanded abruptly, the edge to her tone telling Amy that the story had travelled that far…but which version of it? Was it just the one that had her arriving late for her shift, the ‘biker chick’ on Zach’s motorbike, or had things progressed beyond the G-string now?

  Amy closed her eyes and drew in a steadying breath. She had no idea what she could say that would mollify her status-conscious parents. The only thing she did know was that she didn’t want to speak to either of them while she was standing in the A and E staffroom where anyone could walk in at any time.

  ‘I’m sorry, but she’s with a patient,’ she said in a patently false Scottish accent. ‘Can I take a message?’

  ‘No, you can’t,’ snapped her mother, and Amy was able to judge how upset she was when she only just remembered her manners in time to say, ‘Thank you for offering,’ before she rang off.

  ‘I’m a coward,’ she said dismally, when she realised that she was now avoiding speaking to either of her parents.

  Her father had stopped leaving messages, but her caller ID was telling her that he was still ringing her several times a day in the hope of catching her unawares. Her mother was resorting to more direct methods, if this latest call was a sample. How long would it be before she actually turned up in the department and demanded an account of Amy’s shaming behaviour?

  The door swished open and she forced herself to straighten up, determined that no one would see just how much all this was getting her down.

  ‘There you are, Amy!’ exclaimed one of the most junior nurses. ‘Louella sent me to deliver this.’

  This was a small padded envelope bearing the familiar logo of one of the major drug companies.

  ‘Shame it isn’t anything exciting,’ the young woman commiserated as she turned to leave the room. ‘It’s probably nothing more than some free samples of their next wonder drug, to persuade you to prescribe it.’

  Amy would probably have thought the same, if the drug companies were in the habit of targeting the lower orders in the department, and if she hadn’t noticed that the packet had already been opened once, and the replacement label on the front hadn’t been addressed to Dr ABC Willmott.

  ‘Zach,’ she breathed, fighting a smile even as she fought with the tape holding the flap secure, not completely certain whether she should be throwing the thing away unopened or opening it extra-carefully. Would it be something that would cheer her up or something that would depress her still further?

  Gingerly, she peered inside and drew out a folded piece of paper.

  ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have embarrassed you deliberately,’ said the brief note in the unexpectedly flamboyant handwriting that had fascinated her from the first time she’d seen it. ‘I hope the enclosed will help. Zach.’

  She shook the small package to tip out the contents—something tightly folded and made of a slippery pink fabric that immediately began to unfold itself until it was draped in all its glory across her hand. It was a pair of the baggiest, ugliest ‘old lady’ knickers she’d seen in a long time, easily large enough to reach all the way from her waist to her knees.

  ‘Harvest festivals.’ She chortled as she held them up and laughed aloud at the memory of the first time she’d heard the term applied to this particular style of underwear—by Zach, of course. ‘All is safely gathered in,’ she quoted, her heart immeasurably lighter for the teasing gift.

  Not that it had solved the problem with her parents, or would do anything to make the rampant gossip die down, but it had certainly put her in a better frame of mind.

  ‘From now on, it’ll all be like water off a duck’s back,’ she murmured bracingly, as she deposited Zach’s gift in her locker and set off to do battle with the increasing numbers of people waiting for attention.

  To her annoyance, she discovered that her determination was effective only as long as their colleagues would keep their minds on the job.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were into bikes, Amy?’ murmured the radiographer, while they were positioning a patient for the first of a series of X-rays after a spectacular fall off a ladder. ‘I’d have gone out and bought one, specially.’

  ‘Did you buy the underwear locally, or is it one of those specialist catalogues?’ an avid staff nurse asked, her voice just a shade too loud for the question to be confidential. ‘Do they do all those whips and chains and things, too?’ she added into the sudden silence, and Amy had to bite her tongue, hoping that discretion was the better part of valour when she refused to be drawn into replying.

  The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that, whenever someone made such a comment, Zach was always in the vicinity and she only had to look at him to remember how it had felt to be pressed that close against him, every inch of her revelling in the lean muscular warmth wrapped in supple leather.

  And when Louella joined in with an ‘It’s about time, girl!’ and a lascivious wink, she didn’t know where to look, especially when she saw the gleam of laughter in Zach’s dark eyes.

  ‘Don’t let it get to you,’ he murmured, under the cover of a volley of instructions as their next patient was handed over by the paramedics, who’d scooped him out of an excavation at a building site. ‘Keep smiling mysteriously. It’ll drive them all nuts.’

  ‘If I don’t go nuts first!’ she muttered back, as she reached out for the phone, her instincts telling her that it would be a good idea to find out how long it would be before there was a theatre free.

  ‘Here, will you check off the calculations for the dosages?’ he said, holding out the clipboard.

  ‘I was just going to phone up to Theatre to find out how soon we can send him up,’ she explained.

  ‘I’ll do that,’ he offered, taking the phone out of her hand, his eyes focused on the team’s progress as they hooked the patient up to all their high-tech monitoring equipment.

  Amy didn’t think much of it at the time, but later, when she was sitting in front of a pile of paperwork, checking laboriously that the written records were clear and that they accurately documented exactly what had gone on according to her own notepad full of jottings, she realised that it was something that had happened several times recently.

  Was it just a coincidence, or was it a crafty way for Zach to avoid doing his share of the paperwork?

  She didn’t honestly believe that the conscientious doctor she’d come to know over the last few weeks would really be shirking, but the thought niggled at her at intervals throughout the rest of her shift. It brought to mind the memory of their days as lab partners in school when he’d done almost exactly the same thing—he’d always been the one who’d performed the experiments they’d been set while she’d been the one who’d acted as scribe, taking down the results.

  Not that she’d minded at the time. She’d been so delighted to be his lab partner that she’d have been quite happy to do all the work, as long as she’d been able to be with him.

  Well, she might be rapidly falling head over heels in love with him all over again, but she wasn’t that naïve teenager any more and she had more than enough paperwork of her own to do.

  It was Zach’s misfortune to walk in to the room while the thought was fresh in her mind.

  ‘Coffee?’ he offered breezily, his own hands remarkably free of any piles of files.

  ‘Coffee and conversation,’ she agreed, and there must have been something in her tone to put that suddenly wary expression on his face.

  ‘Any particular topic?’ he prompted, as he doctored the steaming brew just the way she liked it, with a hefty dash of milk and the tiniest bit of sugar.

  ‘P
aperwork,’ she said pointedly, as she closed the manila cover of one file and moved it to the completed pile before opening the next. ‘Have you got much to do, or does your clever ploy shift it all on to everyone else?’

  The wary look was gone instantly, hidden behind the blank wall he’d worn every time one of their teachers had started berating him.

  He carried the two mugs over and set one down in front of her, then paused infinitesimally before he sat himself down in the chair beside her. He was silent for several long seconds then sighed heavily, his shoulders hunched defensively, just as the younger Zach’s had.

  ‘I’m dyslexic,’ he said quietly, and disbelief took her breath away, leaving her speechless. ‘I do my share of paperwork, but I have to take my time over it without any interruptions to make sure I don’t make any mistakes.’

  ‘But…’ She shook her head. ‘You never said anything at school.’

  ‘I didn’t know when I was at school,’ he said simply. ‘The teachers labelled me as a trouble-maker and washed their hands of me, and I didn’t know why things didn’t make sense, so I didn’t know how to ask for help.’

  ‘But…you passed all your exams. You even got high enough grades to get into medical school…and all the way through.’ She still couldn’t take in the enormity of it. It was almost too fantastic to be true, but if so, it made so many of the pieces to the puzzle called Zach Bowman make sense.

  ‘I passed my exams at school because you helped me,’ he said simply.

  ‘Me?’ She was stunned. ‘What did I do when I didn’t even know you had a problem?’

  ‘You were my lab partner for all the science subjects—the ones I needed the highest grades on to get my place at med school. It was because you were willing to be the scribe for all the lab work, giving me your neatly written account of all the experiments so that I could copy them out, that I was able to keep up. The rest of it was just endless hours of study, going over and over everything until I could make sense of it to put some sort of answers together for the final exams.’

  ‘That’s incredible,’ she breathed, hardly able to comprehend the level of dedication it had taken for him to have done the same thing all the way through medical school. Her admiration for him was growing by leaps and bounds.

  ‘My marks were never brilliant on the written exams, but once one of my tutors spotted several tell-tale mistakes in them she was able to get me sent for assessment and I was given a little extra time in the exam room. But I absolutely aced the vivas!’ He chuckled. ‘I had to study so hard for the written exams that there was no way they could trip me up in an oral one. That brought my marks up every time.’

  ‘So you try to get someone else to do the writing for you—’

  ‘Usually only in high-pressure situations when there isn’t time for me to double-check myself,’ he interjected quickly.

  ‘And then you catch up with the rest of the paperwork when you have got time.’ She shook her head. ‘You’re an amazing man, Zach Bowman. When I think of the number of people I’ve met who’ve used a diagnosis of dyslexia as an excuse for failure or for not even bothering to try…’

  ‘The person who did my assessment in my first year at med school was a fellow sufferer who’d ended up with a PhD and specialised in treating learning difficulties. He told me that there’s nothing wrong with my brain or my intelligence. It’s just wired up to perform differently to other people, and once I worked out the best way to manage my idiosyncrasies there should be no stopping me.’

  ‘I never dreamed…’ She shook her head again, still unable to believe it. ‘I knew just how bright you were, in spite of Mr Venning calling you thick and stupid. It just never would have occurred to me to think that you were dyslexic.’

  ‘Some people still won’t accept that there is such a condition, putting the problem down to bad teaching at a critical stage, or missing something important through illness, or moving from one school to another, or just a pseudo-scientific excuse for badly behaved children, but there are so many who don’t fall into any of those categories and have a distinct set of anomalies, some correctable and some that you just have to develop coping strategies to stop them messing up your life.’

  ‘Such as getting a colleague to check your written work, or getting them to do the writing when it needs to be done quickly,’ Amy finished for him, the explanation so obvious now that she knew the situation. She gazed at him in awe, still hardly able to comprehend the level of dedication it had taken for him to achieve all that he had. A crazy sort of pride filled her heart to overflowing. She’d respected him before, but now her admiration knew no bounds.

  ‘Are you going to say anything?’ he asked, with a strangely tentative edge to the question.

  ‘About what? To whom?’ she countered with a shrug. ‘You’re a fully qualified doctor. What more does anyone need to know?’ They certainly don’t need to know that I’ve probably fallen even deeper in love with you, now that I know just what you’re capable of, she added in the secrecy of her head, sorry that she hadn’t attended the same medical school so that she could have made the mammoth task of so much study a little easier.

  The envelope was just one of the handful Amy received at home each day, and she opened it quite cheerfully between mouthfuls of warm buttered toast topped with the bitter sweetness of Seville orange marmalade.

  Her smile disappeared entirely when she read the contents, advising her to phone the above number for an appointment to have a second Pap smear done as the results of the first had been inconclusive.

  ‘Inconclusive?’A black cloud of dread descended over her. This was definitely one of those times when a medical education wasn’t the best thing. She knew only too well exactly what those careful words concealed—the fact that they’d seen some abnormal cells among those taken from her cervix, and needed another sample to determine whether she had cancer.

  ‘Cancer!’ she whispered through a throat grown tight with fear, instantly convinced that the cells had already progressed through the pre-cancerous stage to the fullblown disease.

  Would it be in the early stages, where the growth could be removed without leaving her unable to carry a child, or was it already too late for that, with a radical hysterectomy her only option if she was to live?

  Her fearful mood wasn’t improved when her first patient of the morning was a woman in her late thirties who had collapsed in the bathroom that morning and had been brought in by her husband—much against her wishes.

  ‘We only got married a month ago,’ Francis Paxman said, clearly beside himself with worry but trying to make light-hearted conversation. ‘I’ve been trying to persuade her to make an honest man of me for nearly fifteen years, and as soon as we get back from our honeymoon, this happens.’

  Jane Paxman looked positively grey as she lay back against the pillow and when she opened her eyes to meet Amy’s, there was such a strange expression in them. She’d seen something like it before, in the eyes of a trapped animal who had lost all hope.

  But that couldn’t be true, surely? Not in someone who’d finally married the man she’d known for over fifteen years.

  Anyway, even if the woman was regretting her decision, that shouldn’t be enough to cause such a collapse. There was something more going on here.

  ‘Mr Paxman, if you would wait outside for a few minutes…while we do a few tests,’ she suggested, needing to ask a few questions that couldn’t be asked while he was sitting there, clinging to his wife’s hand. ‘The nurse will show you to the relatives’ room and get you something to drink.’

  ‘A double brandy would go down well,’ he joked, as he reluctantly released his hold. At the last moment he bent forward and pressed a swift kiss to his wife’s cheek, his own growing red at the fact he’d done it in front of an audience. ‘I love you, Janey,’ he whispered, and hurried out of the room, redder than ever.

  ‘Mrs Paxman,’ Amy began, then paused to take his place in the seat beside her and took the slender blood
less hand between her own. ‘Janey,’ she began again gently. ‘I get the feeling that you know exactly why you collapsed this morning. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?’

  For a long time there was no reply but then slow tears began to trickle from the corners of her eyes. Amy waited, somehow knowing that this time it was important to be patient even as she was supplying the paper hankies to the silent woman.

  Finally, Jane drew in a shuddering breath and opened her eyes and that awful expression was clearer than ever.

  ‘I’m dying,’ she whispered.

  Amy wished she had a coin for every time a patient had said that to her, but this time she believed it without question.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked, but with a deep shiver of dread she suddenly knew even before the deathly pale lips formed the word.

  ‘Cancer.’

  ‘Where, and when were you diagnosed?’ She didn’t bother with the usual hearty disclaimers, knowing they were worthless. This woman knew what was killing her.

  ‘Ovarian. It had metastasised before I even went for tests. It had already spread so far that there was nothing they could do.’

  ‘Not even chemo or…?’

  Jane Paxman shook her head wearily. ‘Nothing. They couldn’t even tell me that the treatment would give me any extra time, so there wasn’t any point in making a misery out of whatever time I had left.’

  ‘And your husband doesn’t know?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell him,’ she breathed, her eyes screwed tight as she fought the tears. ‘We’ve loved each other for ever and it was almost a joke between us that he kept proposing and I kept putting him off. Then…this…’ A sob escaped her control and it took a minute or two for her to regain it.

  ‘So the next time he asked, you accepted,’ Amy guessed.