by Tony Parsons
He was a good kisser and that was nice too. Enthusiastic, but not trying to clean your tonsils with his tongue. A really good kisser, Megan thought – just the right amount of give and take. She liked that too. But what she liked best was that he could have probably fucked any girl at that party, but he clearly wanted to fuck her.
And Megan thought, you’re in luck, mate.
So they found themselves in one of the bedrooms, and Megan started to relax a little when she saw there was a lock on the door, and soon she was fulfilling her biological destiny on a stack of coats, while downstairs Edwyn Collins sang, ‘I never met a girl like you before,’ and, yes, somehow it felt like it was just for them.
Megan smiled to herself as her sister came through the turnstile.
Jessica looked gorgeous passing through the crowd, Megan thought, like a woman without a care in the world among a mob of tube-weary commuters. Men of all ages turned for a second look – checking out the slim legs and that effortlessly size 10 frame and the round baby face that often made strangers believe she was the youngest of the sisters.
Looking at Jessica made Megan feel shabby and fat. That was the trouble with curves. You had to watch them or they got out of control. Megan was suddenly aware that she had only fingercombed her hair that morning, and that she had to stop keeping Mars bars in her desk.
They hugged each other at the ticket barrier.
‘Look at us,’ Megan said, linking arms with her sister. ‘Grace Kelly and a crack whore.’
Jessica sized up her sister.
‘You look exhausted, Dr Jewell. Doesn’t that sound great? Dr Jewell, Dr Jewell.’
‘I’ve been pretty busy. It feels like every woman in the East End wants me to look up her fanny.’
‘Oh, I know the feeling. Are you still okay for lunch? We could have done it some other time.’
‘We’re fine, Jess.’
‘And they do give you a four-hour lunch break, don’t they?’ Jessica said.
She was wide-eyed with concern. There was an innocence about her that both her siblings lacked, as though she had been spared most of life’s sharp edges. The middle child, buffered by the presence of the big sister and the baby.
Megan just smiled. It was true that her morning surgery ended at twelve, and her afternoon surgery didn’t begin until four. But her morning surgery usually overran by almost an hour – she just couldn’t seem to get her consultations down to the required time – and before afternoon surgery began, she was expected to make her round of house visits.
‘I’ve got us a table in J. Sheekey’s,’ Jessica said. ‘Is fish all right for you?’
Fish and a few glasses of something white would have been fine with Megan. But she really didn’t have time for an elaborate lunch in the West End. In truth, she just about had time to grab a sandwich at the nearest Prêt à Manger, but she didn’t want to cancel lunch with one of her big sisters.
‘It’s not really all lunch break, Jess,’ Megan said gently. ‘I have to see someone in their home before surgery starts again.’
‘You mean sick people?’
‘Sick people, yeah. I’ve got to see a woman this afternoon. Well, her little girl.’
‘You visit sick people in their homes? Wow, that’s terrific service, Meg. I thought they only did that on Harley Street.’
Megan explained that the sick people with a doctor on Harley Street didn’t need someone to come round to see them. Those people had cars, taxis, spouses who drove, even chauffeurs. Her patients in Hackney were often afflicted by what was known as no means. No cars, no money for cabs. Many of them were stuck at the top of a tower block with a bunch of screaming kids, and all this stuff in their heads about it getting worse if they sat in a doctor’s waiting room. So house calls were actually far more common at the bottom end of the market.
Megan didn’t tell Jessica that the older, male doctors at the surgery all hated making house visits, and so farmed the majority of them out to her. Despite being four years younger, Megan had always felt the need to protect Jessica from the horrible truth about the world.
‘Somewhere closer then,’ said Jessica, trying not to sound disappointed.
‘Somewhere closer would be good.’
They bagged the last table in Patisserie Valerie, and after they had ordered, the sisters smiled at each other. Because of Megan’s new job, it had been a while since they had seen each other. They both realised that it didn’t matter where they had lunch.
‘How’s Paulo and his business?’
‘Good – business is up eighty per cent on last year. Or is it eight per cent?’ Jessica bit her bottom lip, staring thoughtfully at the mural on the Pat Val wall. ‘I can’t remember. But they’re importing a lot of new stock from Italy. Maseratis, Ferraris, Lamborghinis, all that. People here order them. Then Paulo and Mike go and get them. How’s Will?’
‘Will’s sort of out of the picture.’
Jessica flinched. ‘Oh, I liked Will. He was really good-looking. For a short guy.’
‘He wasn’t so short!’
‘Kind of short. I suppose it’s hard to keep a relationship going when you’re both working so hard.’
‘Will’s never done a day’s work in his life. It’s actually hard to keep a relationship together when one of you is a slut hound.’
‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. Best to find out these things before – you know. Before it’s too late. Before you go and do something stupid.’
‘But you loved Will, didn’t you?’
‘I think I was grateful that somebody seemed so interested in me,’ Megan said. ‘Especially such a good-looking short guy.’ They laughed. ‘Don’t worry about it. Really. It was never one of the great love matches. Not like you and Paulo.’
‘Still – it’s sad when people break up. I hate it. Why can’t things just stay the same?’
Megan smiled at her sister. Jessica – last of the great romantics. She was exactly the same when they were growing up. Jessie always had Andrew Ridgeley on her wall, and some unreachable boy she had a hopeless crush on.
‘You look good, Jess.’
‘And you look worn out. Nobody would guess that I’m the ill one.’
‘You’re not ill!’
‘Got this bloody test coming up. Where they drill a hole through your belly button, for God’s sake.’
‘The laparoscopy. Who’s doing it?’
Jessica named an obstetrician and an address on Wimpole Street.
‘He’s good,’ Megan said. ‘You’ll be fine. Everything okay with Paulo’s sperm?’
A businessman at the next table turned to look at them. Megan stared back at him until he looked away.
‘There’s a slight mobility problem.’
‘Motility problem. That’s not the end of the world. It just means some of them are lazy little buggers. You would be amazed what they can do with lazy sperm these days.’
The businessman stared at them, shook his head, and signalled for his bill.
‘I’m not so worried about Paulo.’ Jessica idly ran her fingers through some spilled sugar on the table in front of her. ‘What I’m worried about is me, and what they are going to find when they cut me open.’
Megan had her own ideas about what they might find when they looked inside her sister. But she smiled, taking her sister’s sugar-coated hands in her own, saying nothing.
‘I feel like I’ve got something wrong with me, Meg.’
‘You’re lovely. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Megan shook her head. Nobody who looked like her sister should ever feel this sad. ‘Look at you, Jess.’
‘I feel defective.’ Jessica gently released herself from Megan’s grip, and considered the small crystals of sugar stuck to her fingertips. ‘That I don’t work the way I should work.’ She carefully placed her fingers in her mouth, and grimaced, as if the taste wasn’t sweet at all.
‘You and Paulo are going to have a beautiful baby, and you’re going to
be the best mother in the world.’
The waitress arrived with Jessica’s pasta and Megan’s salad, and that’s when the wave of nausea struck. Megan pushed back her chair, shoved her way through the crowded café, knocking aside an authentically French waiter, and just about made it to the toilet before she threw up.
Back at the table, Jessica hadn’t touched her lunch.
‘What’s wrong with you, Megan?’
‘Nothing.’
Jessica stared at her with a sullen stubbornness that Megan knew from their childhood.
‘What is it?’
‘Just really tired, that’s all. Working too hard, I guess. It’s nothing. Eat your pasta.’
Megan couldn’t tell her sister.
Jessica had to be protected from this secret, more than she had ever needed to be protected from anything.
How could she ever tell Jessica? Megan’s baby would only break her heart.
It wasn’t as though she was planning to keep it.
‘I tell you, doctor – I’m so knackered today I ain’t hardly got the energy to light up.’
Megan soon understood why the other doctors were reluctant to make house visits.
It was hardly ever the truly sick and infirm that demanded a doctor come to their door. The pensioner crippled with arthritis, the single mum with a disabled child, the middle-aged woman who had just been told that there were cancer cells throughout her body – these people somehow struggled to the overcrowded waiting room of the surgery.
The ones who called you out were invariably the loud ones who talked a lot about their rights, the ones who managed to be both self-pitying and egocentric. Like Mrs Marley.
She was a large woman in a small council flat in the bleak heart of Sunny View, one of the most notorious estates in London. If you didn’t live among these concrete warrens, then you didn’t venture into the Sunny View Estate unless you were buying drugs, selling drugs or making a concerned documentary. Apart from summer, when the annual riots came round, even the police gave the Sunny View Estate a wide berth. Megan didn’t have that option.
She had been frightened before. During her year as a hospital house officer she had spent six months attached to a consultant at the Royal Free, and then six months working in casualty at the Homerton.
The Royal Free was a breeze – her consultant, a paediatrician, was a kind and generous man, and the children of Highgate and Hampstead and Belsize Park were mostly beautifully behaved little children who wanted Megan to read them Harry Potter. But casualty at the Homerton was another world.
After the first shift Megan felt that she had seen more of the world than she ever wanted – stabbed teenagers, beaten wives, mangled bodies pulled from car wrecks. Meat porters with hooks in their heads, pub drinkers who had been glassed at closing time, drug entrepreneurs who had been shot in the face by a business rival.
It was Megan’s responsibility to assess the level of injury when the patients crawled, hobbled or were carried in. Seeing those wounds and that misery, and having to make an instant judgement about what needed to be done – that was as scared as she had ever been. Somehow walking through the Sunny View Estate to see Mrs Marley and her sick child was worse. How could that be? Hormones, Megan thought. It’s just your hormones going barmy.
At the foot of the stairwell to Mrs Marley’s flat, a group of teenagers were loitering. With their unearthly white skin and hooded tops, they looked like something out of a Tolkien nightmare. They didn’t say anything when Megan passed through them, just smirked and leered with their generic contempt and loathing. They stank of fast food and dope – a sweet, rotting smell coming from under those hoods.
‘You look a bit young to me, darling,’ Mrs Marley said suspiciously. ‘Are you sure you’re a proper doctor?’
Megan was impressed. Most people never questioned her authority. ‘I’m a GP registrar.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘I have to do a year under supervision before I become fully registered.’
Mrs Marley narrowed her eyes. ‘Next time I want a proper quack. I know my rights.’
‘What appears to be the problem?’ said Megan.
The problem was the woman’s daughter. An impossibly cute three-year-old – how do such repulsive adults produce such gorgeous children? – who lay listlessly on the sofa, staring at a Mister Man DVD. Mr Happy was having the smile wiped off his yellow face by all the other inhabitants of Mister Town. Megan knew the feeling.
She examined the child. Her temperature was high, but everything else seemed to be normal. Megan saw she was wearing small diamond studs in her ears. They couldn’t wait for their children to grow up on the Sunny View Estate, although with their casual clothes and recreational drugs and loud music, the Sunny View adults seemed to stew in a state of perpetual adolescence.
‘What’s your name?’ Megan said, pushing the child’s hair from her moist forehead.
‘Daisy, miss.’
‘I think you’ve got a bit of a fever, Daisy.’
‘I’ve got a kitty-cat.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘I’ve got a puppy.’
‘Lovely!’
‘I’ve got a dinosaur.’
‘I just want you to take it easy for a couple of days. Will you do that for me, Daisy?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Are her bowel movements normal, Mrs Marley?’
‘Shits like a carthorse, that one,’ said the mother, running her fat pink tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper. Megan stood up and faced the woman. When she spoke she was surprised to find her voice shaking with emotion.
‘You’re not smoking drugs in the presence of this child, are you?’
Mrs Marley shrugged. ‘Free country, innit?’
‘That’s a common misconception. If I discover you are taking drugs in front of this child, you will find out exactly how free it is.’
‘You threatening me with the socially serviced?’
‘I’m telling you not to do it.’
The woman’s natural belligerence was suddenly cowed. She put down the cigarette papers and began fussing over Daisy as though she was up for mother of the year.
‘You hungry, gorgeous? Want Mummy to defrost you summink?’
Megan let herself out. That woman, she thought. If Daisy were mine I would feed her good nutritious food and read her Harry Potter and never pierce her little ears and never let her wear cheap jewellery and –
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Daisy was not her child. She was just her patient, and she had three more to see on the Sunny View Estate before the start of afternoon surgery.
Megan pushed through the hooded youths at the foot of the stairwell. They didn’t laugh at her this time, even though their ranks had been swollen by a number of smaller hooded creatures, who looked like elves on mountain bikes.
These people, thought Megan. The way they breed. Like rabbits.
It was lucky she was here to save them.
Cat’s boss was the woman with everything.
Brigitte Wolfe had a business she had built from nothing, a boyfriend she had met in one of the more exclusive resorts in Kenya and, above all, independence.
If Cat’s dream on leaving home was pure, unencumbered liberation, then surely Brigitte was closer to achieving that dream than anyone she had ever known. There was no husband to answer to, no children to prevent her jumping on a plane to anywhere she felt like going. Nobody owned Brigitte. Unlike most people on the planet, Brigitte wasn’t trapped by her past.
So Cat was surprised to walk into Brigitte’s office at Mamma-san on Saturday night and find her boss feeding a shoebox full of photographs to a shredding machine.
Brigitte held up her hand, requesting silence. Cat stood there and watched her deleting a box full of memories.
Brigitte would select a photograph from the shoebox, give it a cold smile, and then feed it to the growling shredder. A wastepaper basket overflowing with coloured streamers indi
cated Brigitte had been at her work for some time. Cat noticed that the photographs were all of Brigitte and her boyfriend. If a forty-five-year-old property developer called Digby could reasonably be called a boyfriend.
There had been a string of men in the past, all that bit older and bit richer than Brigitte, and she tended to stick with them for two or three years, and then trade them in. ‘Like cars,’ she told Cat. ‘You get a new one before the old one fails its MOT.’
Digby had been around for longer than most. Brigitte always said that he could stay until she found a vibrator that liked going to galleries. Now Digby was clearly out, but it didn’t look as though it had ended the way these things had for Brigitte in the past.
Brigitte had taught Cat everything she knew about the restaurant business, and a lot of what she knew about life.
So while Brigitte fed her relationship to the shredding machine, Cat stood there in patient silence, as if she might learn something.
Cat owed her career to this woman.
When she had first met Brigitte Wolfe, Cat was a twenty-five-year-old freelance journalist eking out a minimum wage by knocking out restaurant reviews for a trendy little listings magazine. Write about what you know, they all told her, and after feeding her younger sisters thousands of meals when they were growing up, what Cat knew about was food.
And by now she also knew about restaurants, because the well-brought-up public school boys she met at university had all wined and dined her before attempting to take her to bed. It was a different world from the one she knew – the restaurants she had occasionally glimpsed with her father and his actor friends had seemed more concerned with drinking than eating – but she took to it immediately. Usually the food was better than the sex. What she liked most of all was that you didn’t have to cook it yourself.
When she met Cat, Brigitte Wolfe was nearly thirty, and was the owner, accountant and head cook of Mamma-san, a tiny noodle joint on Brewer Street where young people queued out on the narrow pavement for a bowl of Brigitte’s soba and udon noodles.