by Julie Corbin
‘Sir, I—’
‘Sometimes we’re thrown a curved ball,’ he continued. ‘It’s not what we’re expecting, but nevertheless we have to hit it back and run. If you worked in the civil service or as a teacher or a solicitor, you’re never likely to directly kill anyone. But in our profession?’ – he shrugged his shoulders – ‘It’s a possibility. Every day we have the potential to cause harm, but mostly we don’t. The very fact that you’re showing such remorse tells me that you’ll be a better doctor because of this mistake.’ He stood up and saw me to the door. ‘From now on everything you do must be done that little bit better. You can’t give anything back to Mr Stewart, but you can pay it forward. Be exemplary in your care for others.’
I thanked him for his time and his advice and left. I was reassured not to be losing my job, but that did nothing to alleviate the horror that gnawed away at my middle like a cancer. When I arrived back home, Phil grabbed hold of me, walking me towards the kitchen, stroking my distended stomach. ‘And how’s my other girl?’
‘Or boy,’ I said automatically. I threw myself down on a kitchen chair, bumped my ankle on the table leg and focused on the pulse of pain that travelled up to my knee. Phil had made our evening meal and I ate it automatically. It had the appearance of chicken but it tasted of absolutely nothing. He spent the first fifteen minutes talking for both of us and then he said, ‘You okay?’
‘That patient,’ I said, feeling the day’s misery and tension rupture inside me. ‘The one I was telling you about. She died.’ I pushed my plate away, dropped my head in my hands and started to cry. ‘She died, Phil. She bloody died.’
‘Hey, Liv.’ He put his arms tight around me and brought me to my feet. ‘You’re tired, love. Come and sit down in the living room.’
‘I’m not tired. I mean, I am tired but that’s not why I’m crying. I’m crying because I’m not a good doctor.’
‘You’re way too conscientious, that’s your trouble.’
‘I killed her.’
‘Of course you didn’t kill her!’ He eased me down on to the futon and took his place beside me. ‘You’re the most junior of doctors! Nothing that happens on the ward is your responsibility. You have a registrar and a consultant who’re there to make the decisions.’ He wrapped me up in arms that normally comforted me but for now just felt stifling. ‘It wasn’t your fault, love.’
I pulled away. ‘It was!’ I shouted. ‘I was too tired and—’ I gulped in a disbelieving breath. ‘Shit.’
‘You take these things too personally. It’s what makes you a good doctor, but it also makes you too involved. You have to develop more of a filter.’
‘But Phil, I really mean it.’ I grabbed hold of his shirt. ‘Listen to me, please.’
‘Look what I got today!’ he said breezily, taking a catalogue from the magazine rack. ‘I went into John Lewis and had a look at cots.’ He thumbed to a page about halfway through. ‘This is the one I like.’ He rested his finger on it and glanced at me to check that I saw which one he meant. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think you need to listen to me!’ I said loudly, the pictures of cots and happy smiling mums making me think of Sandy’s baby, who – if it went home at all – would return home to a room full of everything except for a mother. ‘She was having a baby too.’
‘We have to buy the mattress separately,’ he said, his voice drowning out mine. ‘And we should try out buggies. You need to think about comfort for the baby, handle height, ease of getting it in and out of the car. That sort of thing.’
I remembered the look on Sandy’s face when she told me about the buggy they’d chosen. ‘She had everything ready for her baby. She had a buggy with—’
‘For heaven’s sake, Liv!’ He was growing exasperated and a vertical frown line formed between his eyes. I’d never noticed it before. It made me think about us growing old together, watching each line and wrinkle take possession of our faces. A privilege that I’d just denied another couple who loved one another, chose one another, made a baby together.
‘Her name was Sandy Stewart. The baby’s in an incubator and his or her mother is dead.’ I rocked back and forwards. ‘If I’d only been more careful. If only I’d stayed in the treatment room until I’d finished labelling the bags.’
‘I’m going to run you a bath.’ He sighed and stood up. ‘You need to let this go and start thinking about our baby.’
While he was in the bathroom, I slipped out the door and went round to Leila’s flat. I told her what had happened and watched an expression of horror bloom in her eyes, quickly extinguished as she bolstered me up with words of comfort. Like Phil, her impulse was to reassure me, but while he wouldn’t listen to details, Leila sat with me on the sofa and heard me out, convinced that this was management’s mistake, not mine. ‘You shouldn’t have been left running two wards on your own!’ she said, indignant on my behalf. ‘It’s awful!’ She wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. ‘This is their responsibility, not yours.’
When Phil came to collect me, Leila spent time outside the living-room door talking to him, and whatever she said worked. He was sympathetic and caring and took me home to bed where he held me tight as I cried myself empty.
I went into work next day but the weight of my own mistake collapsed my heart and I could barely function. Professor Figgis took me to one side and told me I should take the last couple of weeks of my residency off. ‘Where are you going to next?’ he asked me.
‘To a medical ward in the Northern General,’ I told him.
‘Excellent! You’ll feel much better after a break,’ he assured me. ‘A different hospital. A fresh start. Some time to bring it all into perspective.’
I felt as though he was getting rid of me, but it was no more than I deserved. I spent my first few days off half-heartedly preparing the room for my baby, but my mind was furiously preoccupied. I could see Sandy’s face and hear her words and I knew that I had to go and see Trevor. I had been there when she said her last words and I needed to pass them on to her husband.
My memory was good and I remembered their address from when I booked Sandy in. I turned up at his front door and knocked several times but there was no answer. I realised he was probably at the hospital visiting his baby, and so I sat down on the doorstep and wrote him a letter, telling him how sorry I was that Sandy had died and that she’d asked me to tell him that she loved him. I finished the note by saying that if ever he wanted to chat to me about Sandy then he should call me. I wrote my phone number in large letters at the bottom of the page, folded the paper in two and posted it through his letterbox.
A couple of days passed and I waited for his call but it never came, so I asked Leila to visit the Special Care Baby Unit to find out how the baby was doing. She said she would, and that evening she came round to the flat to tell me that the baby had died.
‘Oh God.’ I doubled up, my guts contracting with a tight, painful spasm. Of all the bad luck – a double tragedy – the baby born too early to thrive, forced from its mother’s womb in circumstances that were stressful to say the least. ‘Was it a boy or a girl?’
‘A boy,’ Leila said.
I thought about Sandy with her ready smile and abundance of love, and hoped that there was an afterlife where she’d been reunited with her baby boy and they could spend eternity together. Leila held my hands as I cried and Phil made us both a hot drink. ‘Don’t you want something stronger?’ I said to Leila, when I’d stopped crying long enough to look around me. ‘I would if I could.’
She put down her mug of tea then reached out and gave my bump a gentle nudge. ‘Can’t. I’m pregnant too.’ She laughed, and the hollows in her cheeks deepened.
‘Really?’ I hugged her hard. ‘Jesus! That’s amazing!’
‘And now we can go through motherhood together.’ She gave me a hopeful smile. ‘You’re a few months ahead of me but, hey! What’s a few months between friends?’
We hugged again and she stayed for an hour planning
our next few afternoons. She’d taken four days of annual leave and we spent time shopping for everything and anything that Leila deemed necessary for our unborn babies: cots and buggies, talcum powder and baby wipes, pastel paint for the walls and fabric for curtains. Leila’s enthusiasm sparked the first inkling of maternal feeling inside me and I began to properly think about the baby I was carrying. If a baby feels his mother’s pain, then my own unborn child had suffered these past few weeks and I wanted that to stop. I knew I’d never forget what I’d done, but I made the effort to shift my focus on to my baby and Phil and the family we would become, determined not to allow Sandy’s death to define me.
And it didn’t.
7
Robbie and Lauren eat a late breakfast in the room, Robbie coming to join Lauren on her bed so that they’re both directly in front of the television. They have two trays, piled high with food, laid out in front of them. They both ordered orange juice, a cooked breakfast: bacon, egg and sausages, black pudding and tomatoes, followed by toast and jam. Benson is lying on the bed next to Lauren, eyeing every forkful that makes its way into her mouth. As they eat, they watch a film, completely gripped by the action on the screen. I tell them I didn’t sleep too well – the truth – and that I need to rest for a bit longer – a lie. Rest is the last thing I’m capable of. Now that I’ve mined the depths of my past, I’m afraid that what happened back in October ’93 is the reason for Robbie’s drink spiking and for MURDERER on the wall. I didn’t murder Sandy Stewart, but my actions directly led to her death and so, in effect, I killed her. I bitterly regretted my actions, and would change the past if I could, but I’ve not spent my life feeling guilty about it, and if that sounds callous, then I can only defend myself by saying, for my own sake, and the sake of the child I was carrying, I worked hard at letting go.
Looking at Robbie now it’s difficult to believe I would have, could have, aborted him. I don’t recognise the person I was then: a self-absorbed girl who wanted what she wanted and to hell with everyone else. Ambition over family and friends – a mistake I’ve never repeated. If I’d accepted the limitations my pregnancy imposed on me, I would have been off sick instead of struggling against it, knowing it was making me exhausted but at the same time denying it.
And now – could this be Trevor Stewart finally taking revenge? Have the articles in the newspaper sparked off a reminder? Since I was nominated for the award last September, there have been three newspaper articles about the work I do at the centre, as well as weekly reminders to the newspaper-buying public to ‘vote for your favourite charity worker’. All this in-your-face publicity could have brought latent feelings to the surface. Back then, Trevor made no complaints about the care his wife was given, but I know enough about human nature to understand that feelings can lie dormant for years, and the recognition I’m getting now could be a catalyst for him to act against me.
On the one hand it seems far-fetched, and on the other, perfectly logical. I can’t believe that whoever is doing this doesn’t have a bloody good reason for it, and what happened all those years ago could be reason enough. I need to find out – and find out quickly – before anything else happens.
I shuffle over to the edge of the bed and open the drawers in the bedside cabinet. There’s the usual information about the hotel, a bible and the Edinburgh phone book. I flick through the pages and find the letter S, my fingers moving down the pages until I get to Stewart. There are several columns of Stewart, six of them with the first name Trevor. I remember pushing the letter through his letterbox, and can recall the street if not the actual number. When I read through the addresses, I find that one of the phone book Trevor Stewarts lives in that very same street.
My heart is thumping as I close the book. It doesn’t prove anything. It might be another Trevor Stewart . . . unlikely . . . So it probably is him, but chances are he remarried and has a whole new family, his first wife and child’s death a painful and distant memory that only haunts him on those rare nights in the depth of winter when darkness is absolute, and the sky weeps for those long gone.
‘Mum?’ Robbie shouts across to me.
‘What?’ I look up guiltily.
He’s waving his mobile phone towards me. ‘It’s Dad. Should I answer?’
Phil. I should have rung him before now to tell him about last night, but I’ve been too preoccupied with the past. ‘Give it to me, love.’ I slither off the bed and grab it just before the ringing stops.
‘Phil. Hi, it’s me.’ I go into the bathroom and close the door behind me. ‘I was just about to ring you.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
I give him a brief summary of what we came home to last night.
‘Why didn’t you call me immediately?’ He sounds put out.
‘It was past midnight. The children were safe. I felt—’
‘What if whoever did this had come back?’ he cuts in.
‘We’re in a hotel—’
‘Does Robbie have an explanation for what was written?’
‘Of course not! He’s never even hurt anyone, never mi—’
‘And the police? What’s their take on this?’
‘The forensic unit came to take prints and I’m due to meet DI O’Reilly back at the hou—’
‘Where—’
‘Will you stop interrupting me!’ I shout. ‘I’m trying to explain things to you.’
‘And I’m angry with you for not telling me immediately,’ he barks back.
‘Obviously,’ I say, matching his tone. ‘But you’re not helping by firing questions at me as if I’m on trial.’
He doesn’t reply to that. I sit down on the edge of the bath and wait, determined not to be the one who breaks the silence. Divorce turns adults into spiteful ten-year-olds – there’s the constant, overwhelming need to get one over on each other. It’s a game with no winners but still I seem to end up playing it.
‘I’m sorry for interrupting you,’ he says at last, his tone calmer now. ‘I find the whole business shocking and, frankly, difficult to handle.’
‘This isn’t easy for any of us.’
‘I’m worried about the children and anxious that we get this right.’
Phil has a veneer of being able to talk about his feelings. It took me years to work out that it’s not real. I’m not saying that he isn’t worried and anxious, but there will be a layer of feelings underneath this that he’s not admitting to. He knows the vocabulary of openness and he uses it to manipulate situations and get his own way. He would deny that, but I’ve watched him do it countless times and I suspect that now he’s feigning honesty because he’s sweetening me up for a request.
‘I know the children aren’t due to come out with me until tomorrow, but would you mind if I came for them now?’ he says. ‘I can take them out for tea. Have a walk up the Braid Hills afterwards. It’s set to be another sunny day.’
So there it is. The request. And it highlights another by-product of divorce – children are used as prize or punishment. I’ve seen friends and patients do it – refusing their ex-partners access if they’re not in their good books.
That’s a game I won’t play.
‘I’ll ask them,’ I say. ‘Hang on a minute.’ I leave the phone in the bathroom and go back through to the bedroom. The film is coming to an end and the breakfast trays have been massacred. Benson is lying with his nose touching the edge of one of the trays, waiting for permission to scavenge the last crust of toast. ‘Dad’s suggesting he takes you both out for tea and then you can all walk up the Braid Hills, feed the ducks, give Benson a run-around.’
‘Whoopee do!’ Robbie says. ‘Just the way I want to spend my Saturday.’
‘But we’ve just eaten,’ Lauren says, her expression glum.
‘You could walk first,’ I say. ‘And eat afterwards.’
‘Does that mean we’ll have to go tomorrow as well?’ she says, inspecting her fingernails.
‘I’m not sure.’ I sit down on the bed. ‘He’s
very keen to see you both. He’s worried about everything that’s happened.’
‘Will Erika be there?’ She finds a hangnail and picks at it.
‘I expect so.’ I take her hands in mine. ‘But that’s not so bad, is it?’
‘Dad’s always different when she’s there,’ Lauren says, pulling her hands away and collapsing on to the pillow. ‘He’s all weird and he hangs around her like she can’t manage to do anything on her own and he was never like that with you.’
That’s because he loves her. He can’t help but want to be near her.
I take a big breath. ‘I can talk to him about it, if you like?’
She shakes her head. ‘Then he’ll think it’s coming from you.’
She’s right about that, and I hate that we’ve put her in this position where she has to be aware of the discord in her parents’ relationship. ‘He’s still your dad, Lauren.’ I tickle her toes. ‘Erika might not always live in his heart but you, my dear, you will.’
She draws her feet away and gives me a tentative smile. ‘Do you think so?’
‘I know so. Love for children endures through all the ups and downs.’
She glances round at Robbie to see what he’s thinking. He’s staring at the screen as if he’s not listening but I can see that his jaw is already tense.
‘Shall I say yes?’ I brighten my face. ‘You could persuade him to take you to that restaurant you really like, the one that’s close to your school.’
‘Robbie?’ Lauren shakes his knee. ‘Should we?’
‘Only if we get out of tomorrow,’ he says, his expression deadpan. ‘And only if he doesn’t go on about counselling.’ He gives me a pointed look. ‘Now that he can see I wasn’t lying about taking drugs.’
‘That’s a good point,’ I say. ‘I’m sure he’ll drop the counselling idea now.’
