by Sonia Henry
I sit at the desk, writing up Sandra’s notes, and wonder what they think of doctors, to give up these intensely personal things so easily. The stethoscope and the scrubs must give me an invisibility cloak of my own. People come in because they’re seeking someone or something to make them feel better. A doctor in a hospital seems like a good answer.
But where do doctors go when they wake in the early hours and want reassurance and someone to talk to? It isn’t inside a hospital. I suppose we think we know better than that. Or at least know that the answers we want won’t be found in here. All we’ll find are people just like us, who know no more or less than all the things we already know.
Ay, I think as I close Sandra’s chart and click off on the next patient, there’s the rub.
thirty-nine
‘Have you spoken to your old registrar?’
I look up from my glass of prosecco, poured from a bottle that Winnie has gone and bought for me from the bottle shop up the road—kindly refraining from mentioning that it’s only 9 am—and sigh. ‘Mate, I’m really tired,’ I say, trying to avoid the question. ‘Can we talk about this when I finish this week of nights?’
‘I bought you the prosecco so you’d talk to me!’ she says belligerently. It’s been weeks since our argument and we’re yet to have a proper conversation about it. I’ve used the excuse of my weird hours and general fatigue to avoid any deep and meaningful discussions with Winnie, and we’ve kept it to pleasant exchanges.
‘I thought you were just being nice.’ I smile at her.
She shakes her head.
‘You would have been a great surgeon,’ I tell her. ‘You really know how to cut to the chase.’
‘I really think you should speak to her,’ Winnie says, ignoring my remark. ‘You don’t know what could be happening to her now. He might be raping her for all we know.’
‘She is a grown woman,’ I point out, tired of where the conversation is going. ‘She is above the age of consent.’ Even as I say this, I know that, in my heart of hearts, I agree with Winnie. I just don’t know what to do about it. ‘You haven’t said anything to Max, have you?’ I ask.
Winnie shakes her head. ‘God, he’s been as distant as you lately. The night shifts really aren’t great, are they? He’s back at his mum’s this week. Good thing he’s going to Europe soon—the guy needs a happy infusion … Ah, fuck it,’ she says suddenly. ‘I’m going to have a prosecco too. I’m working from home today.’
‘Gastro again?’ I can’t resist teasing.
She smiles. ‘They’re renovating the office,’ she informs me, ‘so we’re not allowed to go in.’
As she pours herself a glass my phone pings with an incoming email. I glance down.
‘It’s from Wolfgang Dietrich!’ I say to Winnie. ‘The German guy living in Sweden. He and his mate Tomas are coming to Australia soon.’
I open the message and read it aloud.
Dear Kitty,
As per my text to you, we are arriving in Australia at the start of September. We are much looking forward to some Sydney sunshine, is very cold here in Lund and we have been working too hard and getting very fat. Tomas and I gratefully accept your dinner invitation … if it still stands? Just checking.
Best regards,
Wolfgang
Suddenly, there’s a bright spot in the mess that is my life.
Winnie is grinning, the Smiling Assassin forgotten. ‘We’ve got to do it! I love dinner parties. If we clean the house a bit, it’ll be great!’ Then she frowns. ‘We don’t have a dining table,’ she points out. ‘Do you reckon we could do a Japanese theme and eat on the floor?’
‘I’ll just buy a table,’ I say. I can’t really imagine Wolfgang appreciating eating on the floor. Surgeons are, after all, notoriously clean. ‘It’s an investment.’
We spend the morning exchanging emails with Wolfgang Dietrich. Dinner is planned for three and a half weeks away.
Will you invite Jack? Wolfgang asks. He loves dinner parties. We can talk about art.
Winnie looks at me. ‘Maybe you should invite him. It’s because of Dr Prince you even met these guys.’
‘Wouldn’t that be weird?’ I feel a bit sick at the thought of asking Dr Prince over to number 19 for dinner, even with the excuse of his European friends.
She shrugs. ‘I don’t think so. It’d be weirder if you didn’t invite him, I reckon. He’ll most likely say no, but at least then you can say you did the right thing.’
I bite my lip. ‘Should I … call him?’ I immediately reject this idea as soon as I suggest it. I don’t possess that kind of courage.
‘Maybe text,’ Winnie suggests. ‘Just say, Hey, Dr Prince, I’ve invited Wolfgang and Tomas to my house for dinner when they’re in Sydney. You’re very welcome to join us or swing by for a drink. You know—just be cool about it.’
‘I guess I did mention that I was having them over for dinner,’ I agree. ‘Like, this isn’t a big surprise or anything.’
‘You’re work colleagues,’ Winnie says confidently, with the air of someone who doesn’t work inside a hospital. ‘This makes sense.’
‘Well, yes and no …’ I don’t know any other doctors as junior as me who casually invite consultant surgeons over to their crumbling old sharehouses for dinner.
‘Come on, Kitty.’ Winnie looks excited. ‘Since when are you scared of anything? Like are you a man or a mouse?’
‘I’m a mouse,’ I admit freely, ‘and I’m a lot more scared of things since being a doctor initiated the destruction of my personality and self-esteem.’
‘That’s exactly why you need to invite Dr Prince for dinner!’ Winnie sounds more and more enthused by the idea. ‘Get a bit of the old Kitty Holliday back—the one who used to take on double black ski runs without thinking twice!’
‘This is Sydney, not Zermatt,’ I remind her.
‘God, Kitty! Stop thinking so much. Just send a fucking text!’
‘Fine,’ I say. Maybe the old me is lurking underneath the night shifts and the operating theatre and the doctor’s scrubs. Maybe the old Kitty never really left; she was just waiting for the right moment to reappear.
Hi, Dr Prince,
I type, schussing down the proverbial black diamond run in my mind.
Wolfgang and Tomas are coming over to my house for dinner Sat night, in just over three weeks. You’re very welcome to join us or come by for a drink, if you’re free. Would be great if you could make it. Katarina.
I press send and throw the phone at Winnie. ‘I did it,’ I announce. ‘I invited him.’
Winnie’s eyes widen. ‘You didn’t,’ she breathes. ‘You didn’t actually.’
‘What? You’re the one who told me to!’
We both start laughing uncontrollably.
‘Oh my God, what if he doesn’t reply?’ I moan, staring at my phone which has taken on the appearance of a ticking time bomb.
Winnie busies herself with formulating the menu, and valiantly tries to distract me.
My phone sits on the table, taunting me with its silence.
‘Do you think Italian?’ she says. ‘I make a really good lasagne.’
‘Mmm.’ I reach forward and put my phone under a cushion.
‘Maybe turn it off,’ Winnie suggests.
‘But then I’ll just have to turn it on again,’ I point out.
‘I reckon still turn it off.’ She reaches forward, about to press the off button when the phone pings. Winnie starts. ‘God,’ she says, ‘my heart is racing.’
We glance at each other.
‘It’s probably Mum,’ I say, trying to ignore the butterflies boxing in my stomach.
‘I can’t look!’ Winnie is staring at the phone. ‘You look!’
I turn the phone over to see a miracle.
Dr Prince.
‘Is it him?’ Winnie’s eyes are wide.
I nod. ‘He’s probably going to say no.’ I press open.
The phone takes an eternity.
Hi
Katarina, That sounds great. Let me know when and where. Looking forward. Jack.
I look at Winnie. She looks at me.
‘Fuck, mate,’ she says, shaking her head in complete disbelief. ‘We really need to buy a dining table now.’
forty
I’m mercifully rostered on to day shifts for the next month in the emergency department, but that still means 8 am to 6 pm, making it difficult to achieve any decent efforts at life admin—which has never been a strong point even when I’m not working a billion hours a week. I flee the emergency department as soon as possible, after explaining to Mr J why I can’t feed his opioid addiction by giving him the four boxes of Endone he’s requesting for his headache, suggesting that he should be linked in with the chronic pain service instead. He tells me to fuck off, which I agree to do enthusiastically, just so long as he offers me the same courtesy and lets me finish my shift in peace.
I’m a woman, I tell myself as I run home, change out of my scrubs, and stare at the to-do list on my phone. How hard can it be? I have less than twenty-fours in which to become a domestic goddess. Despite having had three and a half weeks to prepare for the dinner, my Nigella ways have been stymied by my long shifts in the emergency department, and Winnie has suffered a stress-related bout of tonsillitis. We have left all preparation until the night before.
I am about to run down the stairs to head to the shops when I hear Winnie climbing up to my attic room.
‘I’ve made the list for the entrees,’ she is saying, waving a piece of paper at me. ‘I just need to confirm the numbers.’ She stops talking and stares at my bedroom the evening prior to the most important night of my entire life, and winces. ‘Mate, this is no good,’ she says. ‘This is no good.’
‘I doubt we’ll be coming up to my bedroom,’ I say defensively. ‘Can’t I just shut the door?’
‘What if they want a tour?’ she says. ‘You can’t let them see this. You look like a hoarder. Anyway, back to the numbers: Max is working, so he can’t come, but do you know if Dr Prince is bringing his wife?’
‘That’s a good question,’ I respond. I’ve been wondering the same thing.
‘I mean, I guess you didn’t specify when you texted him whether or not she was invited,’ Winnie points out. ‘So he might bring her. And that means we have a problem: we don’t have enough chairs.’
‘Should I text him to say if he’s bringing his wife he has to, you know …’ I pause, realising how ridiculous this sounds.
‘BYO chair?’
Winnie and I collapse into tears of laughter. Here at 19 North Avenue, we’ll supply the booze and good times, but you have to bring your own chair.
‘Look, he knows it’s just Wolfgang and Tomas and us,’ I reason. ‘He might realise we’re all, you know, going it solo, and do the same.’
Winnie shrugs. ‘Well, either way it doesn’t really matter. I think we should prepare ourselves for the possibility of Mrs Prince and just roll with it regardless.’
With that small hurdle workshopped, we return to the tasks at hand.
My room takes ages to clean. It will be a tight race to get to the shops before closing at this rate. The food is our next challenge. Winnie has wasted her entire day at work poring over every cookbook. She is capable of culinary genius, she assures me, but due to time pressures the only sensible thing to do is go and buy everything preprepared from a gourmet food hall and let the VIP guests think that we’ve made it ourselves.
‘You doing anything fun tonight, Doc?’ my patient asks me the next afternoon as I explain that his fractured scaphoid bone means he needs a cast on his wrist if he’s to avoid avascular necrosis (bone death, in layman’s terms). ‘You look like a girl who knows how to have fun.’
The patient is a young flight attendant who fell over in the middle of a gay orgy while high on MDMA last night. Not only did he sustain a fracture, but I also had to remove a buttplug that had been jammed in a little too high (miraculously I was able to tease it out with forceps and he didn’t need an operation), so I allow the overfamiliarity.
‘Not quite as fun as what you got up to last night,’ I say, grinning and taking him into the plaster room. ‘But now that you ask …’ I explain my plans for the evening.
‘God, so you’re just having all these sexy old surgeons over for dinner,’ he says, looking thrilled. ‘What are you cooking?’
‘I’m not,’ I admit freely. ‘We’ve bought everything from a food hall and I’m pretending we made it.’
His cackles set me off, and we sit in the plaster room giggling as I apply sheet after sheet of plaster of Paris. Vincent is actually pretty helpful, and gives me plenty of advice on serving prawns and transitioning between courses.
‘It’ll be great, gorgeous,’ he says supportively as I farewell him at the doors of the emergency department. ‘They won’t be able to believe how well you’ve catered. I can’t believe you’re having five courses! Don’t let them know the menu in advance, just keep bringing out course after course, and surprising them.’ It’s not till I’m on my way to Coles to purchase some napkins at the end of my shift that I start to feel nervous. I’ve been so excited that I haven’t really paused to consider the enormity of the situation. My boss, to whom I am sexually attracted, is coming over to my place for dinner along with two of the best surgeons in the world.
I wonder what the hell I’m doing. I can barely check the mail. We have an ironing board I bought at the beginning of the year with great intentions, yet I’ve never opened it. I can’t host a dinner party for the best surgeons in the world! What the fuck was I thinking? I start wishing like mad I had just suggested we go out to a restaurant, like a normal person.
I stand in aisle four, staring at all the napkin options in front of me. Fuck, it’s just the party aisle at Coles and yet there are so many damn napkins. Do I want the white napkins, the blue, the red, the novelty patterns? What does a napkin really say about a person? Will Dr Prince judge me if I lay out the wrong napkins? Should I be using linen napkins, like the ones Mum puts out at Christmas? And the glasses … I cringe. Our glassware is all from Big W. Dr Prince’s crystal ware is probably worth more than my entire year’s salary.
I run home and dump five packets of napkins on the new dining table.
Winnie rushes out from the kitchen, where she is making canapés. ‘Well, we’re well sorted for napkins,’ she says briskly. ‘Probably didn’t need this many, though!’
I check the time: 6.45 pm. The clock is ticking, and I’m starting to feel as if I’m a contestant on the final round of MasterChef.
‘I’ll handle the serving,’ Winnie says, like a true friend. ‘You just keep the conversation rolling.’
I admire how clean number 19 looks. The table is set, the prawns are in a bowl, the canapés are made, and the champagne is chilling on ice. No one would ever guess that we don’t usually live like this.
‘We’d better get ready!’ Winnie says. ‘Don’t worry, Kitty. Everything looks great. It’ll be great. We’ll be great.’
After trialling a variety of outfits I’ve settled on something innocent yet racy, pure yet naughty, decent yet indecent. It’s a high-necked sleeveless white lace dress that’s cut dangerously low at the back. But it’s a cotton blend, so it has a casual summery look to it without being too skimpy.
I never normally bother too much with make-up but tonight’s a special occasion. I even put on eye shadow. I actually use a blow dryer and brush on my hair, like a normal woman.
Winnie and I stand in the kitchen, allowing ourselves a glass of champagne to relax prior to the guests arriving.
‘We can do this,’ I say, breathing out.
Winnie looks less sure. ‘Should we have one of Max’s valiums?’ she suggests.
‘Good thinking!’
But before I can act on the idea we hear a knock at the door.
‘It must be them!’ Winnie half whispers, half shrieks, throwing back her champagne in one gulp. ‘It’s them! Go to the door.’
It’s a perfect night for a dinner party. It’s an early spring evening and the sun is just beginning to creep down, casting a glow over the house. Everything looks warm and welcoming, and the evening takes a magical turn. My shift in emergency is a distant memory. Real life is suspended. That can start again tomorrow, I decide. Everything can wait until tomorrow. The crack in the universe opens, and I let myself fall through it. Into the rose-garden, I hear Mum say. Let yourself walk into the rose-garden.
So glamorously holding my glass of champagne like the hostess with the mostess that I have miraculously become, I walk to the door to greet my guests.
forty-one
‘You girls should definitely come and see my latest acquisition,’ Dr Prince—Jack—is saying. Now that he’s in my home, I have to keep reminding myself to call him Jack. Jack, I practise in my head as I refill his wineglass, trying not to stare at him too creepily.
I can’t remember what bottle we’re up to, but all the food has been served, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. There was just one slightly awkward moment when Winnie and I were carrying the plates to the kitchen. Winnie turned to me and whispered, ‘God, Dr Prince—I mean Jack—can’t stop staring at you! He’s seriously into you, Kitty.’ And before I had a chance to respond we heard a noise and turned around to see the man himself offering to help us wash up.
Any resolutions to drink sensibly and remain sensible have completely gone out the window. Everyone is cracking into the wine as if they are the last bottles on earth. In addition, Tomas has brought two bottles of Scandinavian aquavit, a horrifically strong liquor which apparently has serious effects on one’s ability to think or act clearly.
