False Hope

by Lynne Lee

  Astro? she’d asked. Was the very first thing she asked him. Not How long have I got? Or Is there anything else that can be done for me? Or FUCK, which is what I was saying as I sat there next to her, over and over and over, inside my head.

  Astro, he explained, because the glial cells are star-shaped. I rather like that, she said, to his ill-concealed astonishment. That they’re star cells, she qualified. Because we’re all made of stardust. And I’m obviously more starry than most.

  Which fuzzy logic (fuzzy illogic) seemed, weirdly, to sustain her. On the way home (via picking baby Dillon up from his Nanna Norma’s; it was only the second time I’d ever met Aidan’s mother) she even became coolly philosophical about the manner of her impending death. Forget all that nonsense about Jesus wanting kids for sunbeams, she said, wasn’t the business of her star cells wanting her body to return to stardust just, like, so much more rational, so much more apt, so much more pleasing a notion to contemplate? And since the consultant had made it clear that she was going to die anyway, was there really any point in her having radiotherapy or chemotherapy? In going through it all, in not being fully present for her baby, just to gain a scant two or three extra months?

  I told her it was her call. But Mum convinced her. As mums must. Keep the faith. Because you never know – they might find a cure!

  She had both. Both were hell.

  She died anyway.

  And every last horrible, shitty, violent, controlling, evil, evil thing that bastard Aidan ever did to her – every put-down, every slap, every thump he landed on her, every instance of him having sex with some girl who was not her, every day (which was most of them) when he was drunk or high or both, every day, which was all of them, when he utterly failed to cherish her – died, as far as I was concerned, along with her. Only Matt knew the half of it, and that was how it would stay.

  And not just because Aidan could no longer hurt her. Because I truly believed it was the right thing to do. Let it go, let it go, let it go, let it go. Like I was south London’s answer to Princess Elsa.

  But had that been the right thing to do? In running from the Kennedy family fire, saving only Dillon and letting the rest burn to ashes, had I made a colossal mistake? What if Norma, Aidan’s adoring mother, had known the half of it as well? Would things have turned out any differently?

  It was now one minute to visiting time. And walking back to the ward after seeing Neil, I was beginning to wonder. Because, almost as night followed day, the rule generally held: if a person who’d undergone major surgery had family, then that family would come and visit them as soon and as often as they were able.

  So if Norma was able, she would be there today.

  Which was why, when I saw her, it wasn’t a shock. It wasn’t even an unlucky coincidence. Of course she’d be coming. She was walking towards the ward from the opposite end of the hospital, with a magazine in one hand and a brown paper bag in the other – fruit, presumably, from the stall down in the main concourse.

  The last time I saw Aidan’s mother – as opposed to being screamed at down the phone by her, as opposed to being sent sinister ‘gifts’ – was around four months after Hope’s death. So – I did the sums as I walked – around eight and a half years ago. And, unlike her son, she looked remarkably unchanged. In part that was because her hair was still unfeasibly black, but also because of her familiar bearing; she wasn’t so much walking as bulldozing her way down the corridor, slight as she was, as if driving geese, or maybe cattle. As if the very air in front of her was out to get her. Never was a person’s personality so at odds with the soft pastel hues she’d always favoured.

  I checked myself. Reminded myself that life had not been kind to her. In one specific case, by my hand, at least in her view. I didn’t break stride, though, because the slightly surreal High Noon-ish quality of our situation wasn’t lost on me, so reminiscent was it of the circumstances of the last time we spoke. Though being closer, I was going to arrive at the ward before she did, and I couldn’t imagine she’d make any sort of scene there.

  But I underestimated her. She saw me and sped up immediately, the soles of her shoes slapping audibly down on the supposedly noise-dampening vinyl. So I had no choice but to acknowledge her, though, ridiculously, my instinct was to turn around and run the other way. Ridiculous because she must have been, what, seventy-eight now, or something? An elderly lady, I reminded myself, a diminutive elderly lady, who was upset, and very stressed, and in extremis.

  But the memory of some confrontations never leaves you. I straightened my back, noted the way she clutched the paper bag against her. Noted the rings she still wore on all eight fingers, like knuckle-dusters. ‘Norma,’ I began. ‘I’m so sorry about—’

  ‘Don’t even speak to me,’ she hissed. ‘You fecking butcher.’

  She marched past me then, on into the ward, and to her son, leaving her long-familiar perfume clinging to the air in her wake. She had obviously already been told I was the surgeon.

  I stood in the corridor for a moment, letting the adrenaline rush subside a bit, clenching and unclenching my tingling fingers, steeling myself to follow. Twice now. Son and mother. I was a bitch and now a butcher. Would the third denouncement of my character come by cockcrow? One thing was certain. However much I believed I’d escaped it, my little sister’s past had chased me down yet again.

  Chapter 5

  Most of the time, give or take, I’d have a dozen or so inpatients spread across the two dedicated orthopaedic wards. But as there were rarely sufficient beds, I would also have outliers, who could be billeted pretty much anywhere.

  Luckily, it having been a busy night, Aidan Kennedy had been an outlier. So via a mixture of good luck and bed-shortage logistics, I had no need to visit the ward he was on for the next couple of days, which made it less likely I’d bump into Norma again. And with Aidan’s amputation having been without complication, by the end of the week he would be gone.

  And would that be the end of it? Now he was no longer my patient, I hoped so. He’d made it clear that he wanted that too. However vengeful his mother might feel, and I didn’t doubt that for a moment, there was no benefit for Aidan in dredging up the past; he was right – he was in enough trouble already. Although to be sure I heard no more from him, I didn’t delete his number. Instead, I kept it and blocked him.

  By Friday – my last day in work before Christmas – I had almost convinced myself it would be the end of it, too. But I was wrong. It was only the beginning.

  One of the big leaps from specialist registrar to consultant is the appointment of a clinical secretary. Mine was called Jenny, and I shared her with two other consultants. She, in turn, shared an office with four other secretaries, a large open-plan space from which our own offices sprouted.

  Bar the cubbyhole that had served me as an A and E senior registrar, it was also the first time in my life that I’d had any sort of office, and though the window, which was draughty, looked out over one of the car parks, and the empty MDF shelves bowed beneath the ghosts of long-redundant medical textbooks, it was such a novelty to have a space that was for my exclusive use that two weekends into my new job I’d declared we were going on a family outing, dragging Matt and both the boys down so we could scrub the pitted lino, and paint the walls a calming shade of pale green.

  As theatre started early, I was in before Jenny most days, and today, being a theatre day, it was lunchtime before I touched base with my desk, to find a poinsettia on it, in a tissue-wrapped pot, with petals almost the same colour as my scrubs.

  ‘Daughter of one of your patients dropped that in earlier,’ Jenny told me, as she came in with an armful of paperwork. ‘The lady whose hip you resurfaced on Friday?’ We were still at the getting-to-know-each-other stage in our relationship, but already I had a sense that we were going to get along. We were around the same age, and, even more importantly, were the same gender. A first, she’d explained on my first day in post, in her entire life as a medical secretary. ‘Oh, an
d Grace, I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to check your diary yet, but Dr Shelley needs to see you, so I’ve put him in for three, right after the clinical audit meeting. Is that okay?’

  I nodded. ‘Fine. What about? Did he say?’

  She shook her head. ‘No. But probably just to talk through the winter pressures plan, I imagine.’

  As well as being a physician, Dr Shelley was the hospital’s medical director, and when he arrived at my office, only moments after I’d returned to it, I was surprised to see that he wasn’t alone. He had a woman with him, who I didn’t recognise. She looked to be in her fifties, was carrying a clear plastic slip folder, and had an NHS lanyard round her neck. Like him, she was smiling, but in a way that unsettled me, because it was the sort of smile you adopted when you were hoping to provide reassurance in the face of being the bearer of bad news.

  I jumped up from my chair to go and grab the spare one for her to sit on – I had two, but only one was on the other side of my desk – but Dr Shelley beat me to it, obviously reading my intention. ‘No worries, stay put,’ he said, as he plucked it from the corner. He placed it beside the other one, but before sitting down on it, the woman turned and closed my office door.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked, looking from one to the other, smiling quizzically. ‘This is beginning to feel a bit like a deputation.’

  Dr Shelley frowned.

  ‘I’m afraid that’s because it is, Grace. This is Carol Lightfoot,’ he went on. ‘Our complaints officer. I’m really sorry,’ he said as he sat down on the other chair, ‘terrible timing, I know, but we’ve had a letter come in this morning.’

  It took a nanosecond for me to put the pieces into place. ‘A complaint letter?’ He nodded. ‘About me?’

  He nodded again. The woman was already pulling something from the slip case. ‘Here,’ she said, passing it across to me. ‘Have a read.’

  It was handwritten, the backwards-sloping writing covering both sides of the paper, and as I read it, I had an increasingly sick feeling in my stomach, because I immediately knew who it was about. Phrases started jumping out at me, like snapping piranhas – known to the surgeon, negligence, highly unprofessional – as whoever wrote it made it clear that, in their ‘firm’ opinion, Aidan Kennedy’s hand and lower arm should never have been amputated, that a second opinion should have immediately been sought, that my decision to remove it without getting one – my professional judgement – was ‘substantially compromised by Mrs Hamilton’s former relationship to Mr Kennedy’ and that ‘given her long-standing personal enmity towards him, she should have immediately understood that it would be highly inappropriate for her to even operate on him in the first place. To have gone ahead with the amputation without declaring her relationship with him was therefore tantamount to gross medical negligence.’

  I expected to see Norma’s name scrawled at the bottom, but the letter was signed Mrs J Kennedy. I turned it back over again. Noted the address, which was in Moulsecoomb, on the north-east edge of Brighton. And the date above ‘to whom it may concern’, which was today’s.

  I felt heat flood my cheeks. It was part embarrassment – I might be the one sitting behind the desk, but it was the opposite to how this felt – but it was also anger and incredulity. Seriously? How did she know I didn’t seek a second opinion? And ‘long-standing personal enmity towards him’ – on what evidence? Did she really think I’d spent the last decade even giving him a second thought?

  Stop it, I told myself. See it for what it is. Spiteful nonsense.

  But spiteful nonsense that had brought these two people to my office; it didn’t matter that it was baseless. It was still humiliating, excruciatingly so. ‘Was this delivered by hand?’ I asked.

  ‘Apparently so,’ Carol Lightfoot confirmed, as I returned the letter into her waiting hand. ‘By the patient’s wife, when she came to collect him this morning. I’ll email you a scanned copy of this, by the way.’

  So he’d been discharged. Which at least meant I was spared the constant anxiety of accidentally bumping into Norma Kennedy again. But also denied the chance – and suddenly it felt scarily compelling – to march straight down to the ward and ask Aidan Kennedy what the hell he thought he was playing at. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d felt compelled to asked him that question, after all.

  I breathed in deeply, then out again, slowly, through my nose. Reassured myself that, actually, this whole thing was risible. That there was absolutely nothing about that surgery I would have changed. ‘This is preposterous,’ I said. ‘The hand and wrist were long beyond saving. There was no question that they could ever have been reconstructed. Absolutely none.’ But even as I said that, I was all too aware that the bigger issue here was not the matter of my competence as a doctor. What they were insinuating – and, given the formal language, I imagined there must have been some outside input in the wording, from a personal injury solicitor’s website – was that I essentially took his arm off out of some sort of sick desire for revenge.

  ‘I don’t doubt your clinical judgement for an instant, Grace,’ Tim Shelley said. He couldn’t know why, but both the immediacy of his response and the firmness of his tone reassured me, at least a little. ‘But I’m sure you know the drill. We will still need to go through the motions, obviously.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  ‘Is it true that you know him?’ Carol Lightfoot asked.

  ‘Knew him,’ I corrected her. ‘But that was nearly ten years ago. And I certainly didn’t recognise him when I examined him in ICU. He was being intubated and his face was swollen and bloody from the collision. I only realised who he was when I saw him on the ward post-op, and once I did, I obviously asked a colleague to take over his care. He’s now Neil Porter’s patient. In fact, I—’

  Dr Shelley raised a hand. ‘Don’t worry, Grace, we don’t need to go through all the whys and wherefores at this point. We just wanted to come up and let you know in person before we put the wheels in motion. I’m guessing you’ve not been in this kind of situation before?’

  I shook my head miserably. ‘You guess right, Dr Shelley.’

  ‘It’s Tim. And, please, Grace, try not to worry too much. I know it’s upsetting to have something like this happen, but it comes to us all sooner or later. And please be reassured that you will have our full support. Anyway, what happens now is that we have fourteen days to respond, so Carol will send out an initial holding letter, acknowledging the patient’s distress, though obviously not admitting any liability. It’ll also confirm that we’ll be conducting an independent investigation. Then at some point, once we’ve gathered what we need from the notes – we’ve already requested them, yes, Carol?’ She nodded. ‘We’ll interview you formally, and, based on the outcome of all of that, we’ll all get together again so we can discuss the contents of our reply, let’s hope not too long into the new year.’

  ‘And what do I do in the meantime?’ I asked. ‘Anything? I’m thinking I should contact my medical defence union, shouldn’t I?’ And how, I thought, because I knew the sort of people I was dealing with, and, given the way she’d spoken to me, or, rather, hadn’t, I didn’t doubt for a moment that Norma was involved. And it grieved me to realise that now this had happened, my colleagues would have to know at least some of the whys and wherefores. Anger welled in me. Distressingly, because I couldn’t bear to have it happen in front of them, I felt as if I might burst into tears.

  ‘You might want to, yes,’ Dr Shelley said. ‘Though as I say, Grace, please try not to stress. I have absolutely no doubt that you made the right call. You wait – chances are it’ll be over before it’s started. Try not to let it spoil your Christmas, okay?’

  I nodded, rather than answered, determined not to cry. I saw them out then, and catching Jenny’s quizzical gaze over her monitor, raised a thumb to reassure her before returning to my desk, leaving the office door open wide, so I couldn’t.

  Grace, I thought. At all times, maintain a state of grace. A mant
ra I adopted at fourteen (a silly one, an affectation; I’m not at all religious), because if you have been given a name that demands you live up to it, it’s natural, at least for the sort of child I was, to try. Grace, from the Latin, meaning pleasing.

  Listen, your name’s Grace because they knew you were always going to have it. I’m Hope because they took one look at me and it struck them immediately – they could only hope against all hope that I turned out like you. Ha – that worked out well for them, didn’t it?

  Hope’s words had always stayed with me – mostly because of the way she’d said them. Not in anger, exactly, more defeated resignation. She hadn’t been dying then, just indulging herself in one of her periodic bouts of self-flagellation. It wasn’t out of the blue either; we were tentatively reopening communications, some time after she and Aidan had both got comprehensively trashed at my wedding, and she’d thrown a glass of champagne all over Dad’s second wife.

  To make matters worse, my mother, who was also drunk (stressed about being ‘forced’ to be in the same room as my father, she’d apparently started early), had applauded this and cheered, causing a silence so thick and heavy you could have cut it with the cake knife. Matt – who’d shown such incredible forbearance up to that point – lost it then and told all three of them to sling their hooks. And as I watched this excruciating exchange (and that really was the only word for it), I realised it was time to make the same choice. I was done with trying to stitch together the tattered remnants of my family. And as neither got in touch, which added sadness to my anger, it was months before we spoke to any of them again.

  Lost months, in Hope’s case, which I would never have again. And which I now had a lifetime to regret.

  Grace, I thought, as I returned to the paperwork in front of me. I must live up to my name. I must quell the panic, the fury, the still-rising nausea, and remember that I had done nothing wrong. That I hadn’t a shred of concern about my clinical judgement. That the photographs alone would be sufficient to confirm it was sound. But how ironic that it should be something like this – a complaint that was so obviously without merit or foundation – when there had been so many occasions when I really had had to make a judgement, and with only a fraction of the confidence I’d had about that arm. When I’d had to make a call, knowing another surgeon might call it differently, knowing full well that I might need to defend it.