Local Whispers

by C K Williams

  I look at the letter again. “It is interesting, isn’t it,” I say, “that they write ‘your ridiculous scalpel’. Implies that they may be referring to a specific one rather than the generalised scalpel of the medical profession.”

  We both look back at the letters. “So, a patient?” I ask, reaching across the table for the white sheet of paper right in the centre. “Is it a patient we need to add to the list?”

  We inspect the list. Which, at this point, is no more than a row of bullet points with names beside them.

  “I still think Patrick and Megan Walsh should be at the very top of it,” I say. “They kicked you out of a church.”

  “No,” Kate says. “There’s no way. Alice Walsh has been my patient all her life. I’ve been their family doctor ever since she was born.”

  “If your being someone’s family doctor is our criterion for not putting people on this, there will not be a single name on here, Kate.” I sit forward. “They mentioned your scalpel. It might be one of your patients.”

  “We could put abortion trolls on it,” she points out.

  “We’ve got to do something, Kate,” I say. “These people are threatening you. We can’t just sit here. Or did you call me so that I’d just be here and hold your hand?”

  That riles her into action. “That’ll be the day I die when we just sit here holding hands,” she says, reaching for a pen, turning the sheet of paper around and beginning to write down a fresh list. You see, I know her very well.

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay, let’s put them down. They’ll be the first names, very top of the list.”

  She writes down on the first line, “Megan Walsh”, and below it, “Patrick Walsh”.

  “Feminism, or order of likelihood?” I ask.

  “Pat’s so gentle. Even his voice is gentle,” she says. “Order of likelihood.”

  “Men are more likely than women to commit crime,” I point out. My sister is always keen to remind me.

  “Not men like Pat,” she says determinedly. “Who else should go on here, Detective Loser?”

  I’ve already realised that Kate does not think that that joke will ever get old. My last name, I should point out, is Loose. Which in German makes perfect sense and has absolutely nothing to do with the word loser.

  “How long have you been sleeping with Daniel?” I ask her.

  “Dan? He is the gentlest soul I’ve ever met! Sometimes he’s even too…”

  “Kate, stop, the poor bloke.” I can feel my face grow hot once more. I hope she doesn’t notice. I haven’t exactly told her yet. That I fancy blokes, too. “When did you start sleeping with him? Was it before or after you wrote the op-ed?”

  She breathes out. “Before.”

  “Did his behaviour towards you change after it was published?”

  “No!”

  I say nothing. The most effective way to make people cave is to simply let them talk. Give them just enough rope to hang themselves.

  “I don’t know,” she finally admits, wrapping her arms around her legs, her hands around the bare soles of her feet. She is still wearing the chipped remains of her Christmas nail polish on her toes, one nail red, the next white, the next green, and so on. The sight makes my heart seize. She has worn these colours all her life for Christmas, or as long as I have known her. “He’s difficult to read sometimes, Dan is. Sometimes he looks at me in this way that makes me think he wants something from me, something I can’t give him, and that that makes him angry. But he wouldn’t send me death threats.”

  “Do you love him?” I ask.

  She hesitates. “You know, I do not think it is love that he is looking for from me in those moments. It must be difficult for him. He so clearly feels guilty.”

  “But do you?” I ask. “Look for love from him, I mean? Or would it be better to break it off?”

  She puts her forehead to her knee. “I’m giving this a try,” she says. “Forty is no age to be picky.”

  “Jesus, thank you for giving me that outlook,” I say.

  “It’s different for you,” she reassures me. “You have that silver fox thing going for you, the ladies find it very dashing.”

  I shift. The ladies, yes. This would be an opportune moment, wouldn’t it? To tell her.

  “Is that really true?” I ask instead, looking at her chipped nail polish, at the second toe just a little longer than her big one, at her slim strong feet, much like Achilles must have had. “Do men really only want to be with twenty-year-olds?”

  “You tell me,” she says.

  I tilt my head. Look back at the letters.

  “I feel we should put Daniel on the list just to make sure we clear him,” I say. “For women, partners or ex-partners are the most likely culprit, so we should just make sure there aren’t any grievances there that we do not know about.”

  I can feel her looking at me. “Sure, put him down,” she says. “It isn’t like you to avoid a question like that, though.”

  “I thought you were being rhetorical,” I answer. “I have yet to meet a man who would not like to sleep with a twenty-year-old. That doesn’t mean that you want to grow old with them.”

  She lets it go. “What about Sean, then?” she asks.

  “What about Sean?” I ask.

  “Well, we dated.”

  “You dated Sean-the-riot-police-officer?” I ask. “See, I did think that you had a thing for him! Why do I not know about any of this?”

  “It was only for a bit!” Kate defends herself. Yes, she is actually defensive. From what I have seen of Sean, I can’t blame her. He is not likely to cloud my judgement, is all I’m saying. “A couple of years ago. Just thought I should let you know, because you said ex-partners.”

  “Quite right,” I say, scribbling down Daniel’s and Sean’s names. “Why did you date him, though?”

  Kate looks even more embarrassed now. “I wanted sex, and I wanted it regularly, and he can be very sweet when he wants to be.”

  “He’s a chauvinist,” I point out.

  “A pig,” she answers miserably. “Can you believe it, he guilt-tripped me about being a vegetarian? He said it was offensive to him as someone who ate meat?”

  “A chauvinist pig,” I say, adding Sean’s name to the list, which now consists of:

  Megan Walsh

  Patrick Walsh

  Father Daniel

  Sean O’Doherty

  a patient?

  “Anyone else that you can think of?” I ask. “It might be further back than a couple of years. Someone who has always held a grudge against you but needed an occasion to really have a go at you.”

  Kate leans back against the sofa. Her feet stretch out beneath the table. She could have been a dancer. She was quite passionate about it for a while if, by her own account, not very good. It is hard to believe. “I’m just a doctor,” she says, a little helplessly. “I help people.”

  “Any patients who might have had the impression that you did not do right by them? What with the oddly specific scalpel reference?” I ask.

  She stretches her arms, then crosses them behind her head. “I didn’t do right by all of them.”

  I put the pen down. That isn’t how I know Kate at all. She is conscientious. She cares about everyone, always goes the extra mile. Whether a patient, a friend, a date, a neighbour, Kate would drop anything in an instant whenever somebody needs her help. Which is why this is making me so furious. “Anything in particular that comes to mind?”

  From the corner of my eye, I see that she turns her head towards me. I could swear she lets out a relieved breath when she finds that she is not being scrutinised. “You make mistakes. That’s just how it is. Sometimes people get that. Others don’t.”

  I sigh and lean back myself, still looking straight ahead. “Kate, you are being unusually cryptic.”

  “I’ve been shouted at,” she says. She does not sound angry, or like it might be unfair. “I’ve been insulted, I’ve been sued, but whenever I really messed up, when
people actually had something to reproach me with, they didn’t.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Well.” Kate is drawing patterns on the floor. “Elizabeth Adams wasn’t thrilled with me. This was quite a few years back. It’s silly, actually. It wasn’t even about her. Florence had come to me and asked about fertility issues, because she and William never managed to conceive. I referred her to a specialist, but just made sure to tell her it was essential that she took William with her to the appointment, because it was possible that it was him who was the issue.”

  “Elizabeth Adams felt personally insulted?” I ask.

  “She threatened libel,” Kate says, rolling her eyes. “It was a bad time for her. She’d just been diagnosed with senile depression.”

  “And what about William? Did he take it personally?”

  She shrugs. “I never spoke to him about it. I don’t even know if they ever went for any treatment. Nothing came of it, Jan.”

  “Still, just to be sure,” I say, adding William O’Rawe’s name to the list. “And there was nothing else?” I ask.

  Kate stays silent. For a long while, all I can hear is the music in the background, one of my favourite pieces, a fast beat and a note of melancholy and words that I love the sound of even though I only understand half of them. Much like seeing a Shakespeare show at the Globe. Although I have not been to London for a while. When I come to the UK, it is usually to see Kate.

  It gets to the point that I feel I have to look at her now, just to make sure she hasn’t dozed off or gone away to some place in her mind where I cannot follow.

  It turns out that she is looking straight at me. Her expression is a bit painful. “You’re not going to like this,” she says.

  “I presume that is not because it has peppers in it,” I say with as straight a face as I can. I have an intense dislike of peppers, as she well knows.

  “Jan, wind your neck in.”

  “Just tell me.”

  She bites her lip. She looks flustered. Actually flustered. “So, um, you know how I said that Megan Walsh and Patrick Walsh, I’ve been their family doctor for ever and all that?”

  “You are right,” I say drily, “I am not going to like this.”

  She elbows me again.

  “Ouch, you really have to stop doing that!” I complain.

  “So,” she says, “this must have been a few years ago, because Alice Walsh had only just gotten her period. I think she was twelve. She left school in the middle of the day and came to my practice. Catholic all-girl school, no one you’d want to talk to there.”

  She grins at that, but it is a grim one.

  “Speaking from experience?” I ask carefully. I have always wondered at many things in Northern Ireland. How deeply religious education still is, is one of them. Just the thought of education segregated by gender seems to me to hail from another age, even though it is not as long ago as all that. My parents still went to segregated schools, my mother in Hamburg, my father in Dortmund.

  “You bet your arse I am,” she says, making a gesture which she aborts mid-motion, as if reaching for her breast pocket. This is where she used to keep her cigarettes, I know. The movement pushes me back into the past for just a moment, both of us sitting on the same floor up against the same sofa, wildly drunk and smoking and trying to outshout each other in a karaoke match of John Farnham’s genius power ballad “You’re the Voice”.

  “It’s ludicrous, twenty years on, and Alice Walsh still doesn’t have anyone to talk to at school about her period when it happens,” Kate says, bringing me back to the present. “Anyway, so she came down to the practice and talked to me. I gave her pads and showed her how tampons work. This was before menstruation cups became a thing. Not that they’re everybody’s thing, obviously. There’s a lot of fuss being made about the cups, isn’t there?”

  She looks at me expectantly. All I can do is shrug. Kate rolls her eyes. “Sure, you think this doesn’t concern you. Period, women’s business.”

  “How did I turn into the enemy here?”

  “It’s not you, it’s the patriarchy, so it is. Anyway, I basically told her it was all right, it was a perfectly normal thing to happen, asked her how she was feeling, asked her about any pain, gave her a blister of Buscopan, told her she could come back any time if she had any questions. Turns out she had a lot of questions.”

  She leans towards me. I lean towards her. I cannot fathom what Alice Walsh would have had questions about that Kate needs to whisper about. Kate leans even closer. “About sex.”

  “About sex?” I ask, taken by surprise. “Right, that would be normal, wouldn’t it?”

  “See,” she says, throwing her hand up triumphantly. “That’s what I said! But anyway, so, she had questions about sex. Sex ed at her school had been completely useless. But she’d already started having sexual experiences, according to what she told me, so it was high time someone educated her. So I told her about contraception and about pregnancy risk and STDs and masturbation, that it was good to know what you like, about consent, too, and then I talked about LGBTQ for a bit. And I also mentioned the clitoris.”

  “Outrage,” I say.

  “You should have seen her, Jan,” she says. “I told her that it was all normal, what she was going through. Just gave her some basic information. By the time she left, there was an actual spring in her step. Just the relief of having someone to talk to. Who doesn’t like it when people tell you that you’re normal?”

  “Right,” I say, suddenly uncomfortable. How nice indeed when someone can tell you that what you feel is normal. “I suppose it’s a bit like when you ejaculate for the first time as a boy.”

  She peers at me. “What was that like?”

  “Let’s not get into one of the most embarrassing moments in my life, which sadly involved not a medical professional, but first my eye-rolling mother, and then my flustered father, and then, again, my no-nonsense mother and a very strange homemade picture book,” I say. “What happened next?”

  Kate turns fully towards me, drawing her knees back up to her chest, her eyes wide. “I don’t think anything of it, right? I just watch her go and am happy I could help. But that evening, just as I’m closing up, Megan Walsh comes to my practice.”

  “And I suppose she didn’t come to thank you for what you had done for her daughter?”

  “Fuck no. She was livid, Jan. She wasn’t just shouting. I thought she was inches away from strangling me at one point.”

  I turn towards as her as well. “What was her problem?”

  Kate almost shrugs. She laughs, the laugh of the helpless, the baffled. “God wanted us to be abstinent, I’d turn her daughter into a slut, hell was a real place.”

  “Hell was a real place?” My eyebrows must be somewhere in my hairline at this point.

  “Don’t quote me on this, but I remember there being frequent mentions of hell.”

  “Okay,” I say.

  “They wouldn’t, though,” Kate says. She’s staring off into the distance. “They’ve just lost their daughter. I haven’t even been able to tell them how sorry I am.”

  She presses her lips together. Then she rises to her feet. The threatening letter is still lying on the table between us. “I will write them a card.” She extends her hand and pulls me to my feet.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  “We will just put it through the letter box,” she says. “They won’t even know we were there.”

  11:45

  Patrick and Megan Walsh live in a nice grey stone house which looks to have been recently built or refurbished. Out on Rostrevor Road, their house is surrounded by meadows where sheep are undertaking an unsuccessful attempt at grazing. And always the mountains, grey slopes fading into the fog, and the clouds, ancient stone walls forming black blurry lines, slowly disappearing into the grey mass of heavy snow and the pale sky.

  We park the car and get out. It is cold, the wind biting sharply at our skin, my hair. It is often windy h
ere, but the weather is also bound to change quickly. We are so close to the sea, only a few miles to the south. The Mourne Mountains are beautiful, their slopes and woods reaching right up to the coast. Whenever I come here, they make me think that they are the perfect melange of Scandinavian fjords, pine trees from Southern France, and the epic mountainside. It is both a disgrace and a stroke of luck that no one really seems to have heard of them yet. Unless they watched Game of Thrones. I watch the lonely road vanish into the shreds of clouds climbing across the tops of the mountains, snaking their long pale fingers down the slopes and into the valleys, reaching for the dim grey houses, shivering in the rain.

  A notice catches my eye. Someone has put up a hastily drawn poster of sorts on the mailbox.

  NEIGHBOURHOOD PROTECTION

  * * *

  PROTECT YOUR NEIGHBOURHOOD

  At Neighbourhood Protection we believe in partnership between the local communities and the police (Policing and Community Safety Partnerships (PCSPs)). We help you protect YOURSELF, we help you protect YOUR property, we help reduce YOUR fear of crime in YOUR community.

  * * *

  FIND OUT MORE...

  Sean O’Doherty, Rostrevor Rd

  Sodsodsod67@hotmail.com

  * * *

  Protect our neighbourhood!

  PROTECT OUR WOMEN!!

  I glance at Kate, but she has already walked up to the door. She takes a deep breath. Then she puts her card through the door.

  “All right?” I ask her.

  She nods.

  “Let’s go, then,” I say gently.

  We have not reached the car again when the front door is suddenly opened.

  Patrick Walsh is standing on a doormat spelling out Welcome, holding Kate’s card, looking terribly frail. Even more so in the bright light of an unforgiving day.

  “Patrick,” Kate says. “Sorry, I… I just wanted to…” She peters out. Then, rallying her courage: “I am so sorry for your loss.”