by Carl Shuker
Michael looked slowly around.
‘I don’t actually know. Little boy’s room?’ he said. They’d all turned away.
She stood there.
‘Oh,’ he said, after a beat. ‘Right. Budge up, budge up.’ He wobbled side to side and pulled his chair beneath him with both hands. ‘I think there are more chairs in the corner.’ She stood there, the whisky hot in her cheeks. The Chinese woman sat up straighter away from him, smiling with her lips closed. ‘Oh, right, look,’ he said. ‘Right, pass us down a chair please. A chair please.’ It was all ruined already as she stood in the narrow gap between the back of his chair and the wall and the surgeons shuffled their chairs together to make a space and a chair was passed hand to hand over the table and forced into the gap and she had to lift it out to fit in front of it but couldn’t so she had to climb onto it and then sit down and tuck her legs under the table and the surgeons looked at her and then at their companions.
‘How are things?’ she said and reached across the table for a bottle of red wine.
‘Oh fine, fine. I didn’t think you’d make it with all that work on. Look I don’t think we’ve got enough glasses, do we.’
‘Oh, this is fine,’ she said and she poured the wine into a tumbler but it had an inch of water inside already.
‘Oh, a rosé,’ the woman said and they laughed and Elizabeth did too and she drank a sip and then a gulp and she said, ‘Lovely, too, actually,’ and laughed horribly at her and the woman smiled horribly back for her.
‘Are you in plastics as well?’ Elizabeth said brightly. ‘Private I suppose?’
‘That’s right,’ the woman said.
‘Liz is a general surgeon at Wellington,’ Michael said. ‘She’s basically a charitable institution. Mostly public, anyway, isn’t that right, Liz?’ He smiled and drank his wine. ‘Don’t know how she does it. Why, rather, ha ha.’
The woman was thin, rich, perfect. Her smile had gone and she raised her eyebrows. Elizabeth stared at her.
‘I don’t suppose you can be too happy with this big data release, are you?’ the woman smiled as she asked and then stopped.
Elizabeth raised her glass. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well,’ and she drank it down and refilled it and they watched her do it, the glass and the bottle in her hands.
‘What’s that then?’ Michael said.
‘The Ministry of Health is publishing surgical data or something,’ the woman said. ‘Aren’t there privacy issues?’
‘Yes,’ said Michael, laughing. ‘What about our right to privacy?’
‘It’s a lot of fucking bullshit,’ Elizabeth said.
There was a silence and Michael laughed again.
‘Well,’ said the woman.
A waiter came in from the door to the stairs carrying two huge stainless steel sharing platters.
‘Doesn’t affect us and frankly don’t know why you put up with it,’ Michael said, watching the food. ‘Look, Liz, we might be able to sneak you a few bites but I don’t think you’re in on the meal, is that all right?’
She smiled again for him. ‘I’m not a dog, Michael,’ she said and laughed and there were a few of them checking her now. ‘I’ve eaten thanks. Anyway, it doesn’t affect me. I’m on CME sabbatical right now.’
Michael frowned, half-smiled.
‘You’re on sabbatical now are you?’ he said. ‘You seem kind of hungry.’ They moved the glass and the bottle for the waiter to lay the platter out and Elizabeth topped up her glass and then she refilled Michael’s and the woman’s. ‘And angry. Which is good for pace bowlers but I don’t know about surgery,’ he said. ‘Um, actually mine was the Bordeaux but never mind.’
‘Bit of spag bol is this?’ Elizabeth said. ‘Sorry, what was your name?’
‘Oh sorry, this is Hilary,’ Michael said.
‘Oh.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hi.’
‘Okay.’
And then they sat silently looking away from each other at the other surgeons who were talking happily as they served their food to one another and ate their food and Elizabeth filled her glass again and poured the last few drops from the bottle into Michael’s glass and he sighed and watched her as she drank her wine and she reached down the table for a new bottle and then her phone rang.
It was Richard. She tapped Ignore with Message and chose I can’t talk right now and then took a long time typing sorry I’m at a dinner everything all right.
‘Here he is,’ Michael said. ‘Peter. Peter, look who came.’ Peter Petrides was at the door. He was wearing a toga and she hadn’t seen him since medical school and he’d gotten fat and creamy and clearly didn’t recognise her.
She stood up quickly with her phone in her hand and her other hand over the mouthpiece and she said, ‘Sorry, I’ve got to take this, see you at the thing after dinner?’ and Michael shrugged and looked confused and laughed and she pushed her chair back crookedly up against the wall and climbed over it and squeezed sideways past all the chairs again and the surgeons looked up at her passing and ooched themselves closer in to the table to let her out and as she passed Peter she held the phone to her ear and she nodded and pointed at it and he just looked bewildered.
She was at the door before he stopped her. She turned with the dead phone to her ear and he stood there smiling, and shrugged and made a sad face for her. Then he mouthed, It’s me birthday.
Elizabeth looked coldly at him. The phone to her ear. She blinked, and then she said, ‘Uh, hold on,’ and it was weird and half to the phone and half to him. She turned away from him and looked at the screen. No bother, Richard had written. She turned it off, turned back.
‘Hi Peter,’ she said.
‘Lizzy,’ he said. ‘Give us a hug then? On me birthday?’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ she said, and then he laughed, and she laughed too, and she hugged him. He held her back and looked at her with faux shock.
‘Are you off? I mean, come on.’
‘Yeah well. Few things to do in town.’
‘You all right? Haven’t seen you in an age.’
‘Yep, I’m pretty good. You?’
‘Oh well,’ he said, and he smiled limply. ‘You look ravishing.’
‘Wish I could say the same,’ she said.
‘This, Liz,’ he gestured at the toga, ‘is bespoke.’
They looked at each other fairly frankly for a long time.
Then he said, ‘Are you really off?’
‘Yep.’
‘No.’
‘Got to.’
‘Come along to the thing after?’
‘Oh, maybe.’
‘Go on. Go on. So much to talk about. How are you?’
‘Oh, you know. Work.’
He nodded then and he was still and watched her and she saw the doctor in him again.
‘You’ve made quite the name for yourself, haven’t you?’ he said. ‘It’s good. Wish I could say I wasn’t envious. It’s ruined me up here.’
She checked his face, how he held his hands. Was he being sarcastic?
‘How do you mean?’ she said, entirely mined of intonation.
‘There were a few bright stars, I mean they were all brilliant, but you were so the best. You just always made it so hard for yourself.’
‘Uh huh? Been doing a bit of analysis have you. You’ve got no idea.’
‘See?’ he said. ‘See?’ He laughed and made himself look hurt. ‘Can’t actually take a compliment. The greatest self-saboteur of them all. Anyway. You look great.’
‘So do you Peter,’ she tried.
‘Oh, I know that,’ he said. ‘God, remember that central line you put in and you refused to do it unless everyone got out of the sterile field and you were like citing all these absurd rules from some CDC warning from the 80s. And 15 years later it’s a bundle and everyone has to do it. God that was good. Well I hope you’ll remember us when you’re head of surgery. Bit late for me now.’
He sighed, did his theatre. They were
doing what they did at university.
‘Oh, poor Peter,’ she said. ‘Poor, poor Peter.’ Some of the other surgeons were watching them now. He laughed, and he said, ‘I just need a nuggle, on me birthday.’
She sighed for him, shook her head. And then she gave him a nuggle, his cuddle and hug, and he sighed and rested on her.
‘Ahhh,’ he said.
‘Mmm hmm.’
‘Signalling it’s over,’ he said.
‘Mm-hm.’
He straightened and smiled. All weak and rich.
‘Seriously, do come. I’d love to hear how things are going. People just say how brilliant you are. How good you are.’
She made a grumpy face, half looked away.
‘Oh well, I’ll see.’
‘See, go on.’
‘I’ll see.’
‘Go on.’
She walked barefoot down K Road with the shoes dangling from one hand. She crossed to a pub called the Thirsty Dog and inside they were playing ‘Crimson and Clover’ by Tommy James and the Shondells and the Shondells sang,
Now I don’t hardly know her,
but I think I could love her
She stood at the bar and ordered a single malt no ice no water and she downloaded Excel from the App Store and tried to get it to work on her iPhone but it had limited functionality unless you logged in with Office 365 and it only loaded the worksheet but not the graph and it was just cells and cells of her data and didn’t look like anything much damning.
Yeah, my mind’s such a sweet thing
I wanna do everything
And the song played the chorus over and over and then it changed key and did it again and she stared at herself in the mirror behind the bar and almost cried and smirked bravely and drank her whisky and ordered another and the soft warm Auckland breezes washed in the open doors to the bar and there was cricket on the TV.
Crimson and clover, over and over . . .
And then she remembered Atticus.
Cumulative sum of failure
Lying in the hallway was one of her surgeon’s caps, the one with the print of a brain on it. Some of her clothes were strewn down the hall, and there was a fine white residue over everything. A dusty, ammoniac smell. The door made a hush sound as she opened it because behind the door were more of her clothes, all ripped up. The white paint on the inside of the door up to the latch was clawed through to the timber. It was incredibly quiet. There were paw prints in the dust in a path up and down the hallway, thousands of paw prints, and they circled the blackened tin in the middle of the hall by the bathroom and went into the living room.
In the living room everything was coated in white. The couch cushions were pulled awry and the path of prints went through the room in a semi-circle around the bomb by the stripped wall. The paw prints led through the kitchen to the French doors. The glass was grey and streaked with dried spittle and claw marks as high as the latch and the wood was torn at the lower sill and there was some blood and scuffmarks in a patch on the tile.
In the bathroom the floor was covered in toiletries. The white dust coated everything but the bottom of the stained glass window over the vanity. It was smeared grey with dried spittle and in the sink there were claw marks and hairs on the porcelain where he had climbed up to get to the window and fallen down.
Her bedroom door was open and the wardrobe doors had been opened too. There were claw marks on the wood. The ceramics from the window sill were smashed on the ground and there were books and papers strewn everywhere and there was spit and smeared dust on the window. Paw prints in the pale dust led in a path through the door and around the tin to Robin’s side of the bed and back around to her side of the bed and back out through the door and there were ripped pieces of her clothes strewn everywhere and in the centre of the bed was his shape under the duvet.
Cumulative sum of failure 2
She carried him to the car wrapped in the duvet and laid him in the back seat and drove him to the SPCA in the old fever hospital in Alexandra Park and they told her it was the wrong place and told her where to go. She carried him back out and put him back in the car and drove to the after-hours clinic in Ngauranga Gorge and carried the heavy dog into reception and a young vet led her into a surgery. She explained what she’d done and how she’d found him and showed him the borer bomb tin she’d brought. The vet looked at her and listened carefully and then carefully unwrapped him. His fur was matted with the grey dust and there was foam and black blood on his muzzle and the pads of his paws were ripped and his eyes swollen closed.
The vet hardly spoke to her and examined the body briefly and then asked if she would like him cremated and she cried and cried and then pulled herself together and explained that the dog wasn’t hers and after a while the vet put his arm around her and then he took it away again.
‘He would’ve gone there to die because it smelled like you, though,’ the vet said into the silence. ‘It’s why they rip up the stuff and spread it round them? So they feel surrounded by you.’
Cumulative sum of failure 3
Who was watching, in that silence?
Crowds in Florida from the grandstands at Kennedy Space Center, a few miles from Pad B, Launch Complex 39, where Challenger is to rise. Space shuttle launches in 1986 were routine and Challenger is not broadcast live on the big TV channels. The crowds are mostly enthusiasts, family. Many are older. Wearing sunglasses and scarves, holding binoculars and cameras with telephoto lenses. Peering up. Astronaut Christa McAuliffe’s parents are there, and students from the school where she taught. The first teacher in space. They go quiet, and they look around at others about them.
Silent home video emerges years later, filmed from Florida suburbs. The distorted VHS shows only a line of roofs, a near-perpendicular line of white in an empty sky on some ultimate incidence, bursting, splaying into two, going out.
At 76.4 seconds into flight the wild right solid rocket booster automatically releases its drogue and parachute which is immediately consumed by its own fire. At 110 seconds the range master fires the self-destruct charges on both SRBs as they roam freely through the Atlantic sky. The small explosions clearly visible on camera later. Blackfaced poppies fringed in white, blooming briefly off the side of the white light and smoke of the wake of the SRBs viewed from Earth. Both rockets go out instantly.
Publication day
She tied her hair back hard in a bun and took her time over it, then she did her make-up. Then she walked to the hospital in the dawn, clear and cool, and nothing but the cafés were open and she crossed the road by Newtown School.
On the third floor in the nurses’ booth were only Mei-Lynn and a Filipina locum nurse Elizabeth didn’t know.
‘Good morning,’ Elizabeth said brightly at the door and looked around, actorly, for a computer. ‘I’m going to work in here for a bit if that’s all right.’
Mei-Lynn didn’t say anything. The Filipina woman said, ‘Good morning, Doctor,’ and was oblivious. Mei-Lynn quickly gathered some papers and left straight away. There was a moment’s quiet and then Elizabeth sat down at the PC in the corner.
‘Where’s Richard today?’ she asked.
The Filipina nurse looked up. ‘I think he is off sick again. He wasn’t in yesterday.’
‘Oh?’
She got down to work. Among dozens of emails unanswered for days now was a recent one from a D. Cohen with the subject ‘Your submission’.
They had rejected the manuscript in that gruff way they did.
Dear Drs Taylor and McGrath.
We are sorry but we cannot accept your manuscript in its present form. The Royal London Journal of Medicine publishes only 3% of the papers submitted each year and we regret that we cannot give a personalised response to each submission.
Etc. and etc.
And then after the boilerplate was a message from an actual person.
Hi, though not keen on the actual paper we enjoyed the response to the peer reviewers. Timely and a good tone.
Cheers, Denise.
Denise Cohen, fellow in surgery at Cambridge then Royal London views editor for 20 years, 50,000 followers on Twitter and she’d written a book. Written as if everyone knew who she was and everyone did.
The hospital hummed around her, and people passed behind the glass. She got to work. This close to publication she could change it now or never. Keep what worked. Perform the least manoeuvre. Polish and publish and perish and be damned. She edited and annotated and rewrote. It was easy to be uncertain and it was good to work.
At the top of the proof it read TITLE TK and a bubbled comment read Suggestions? Underneath it: Elizabeth Taylor. Surgeon? Wellington Hospital, Wellington, New Zealand. Andrew McGrath. Head of surgery? Wellington as well?
Nurses came and went. A locum surgeon she didn’t know looked in, around, and left again. Alastair passed down the hallway looking straight ahead. He clearly saw her, clearly looked away again down the corridor and was suddenly gone. She wrote, she edited, she added bubbled comments. The hospital hummed, it persisted. Around 8 a.m. the ward was alive and the anaesthesiologist and theatre coordinator for the day was standing half in and half out of the door with a clipboard. Susan Jones, the registrar from Auckland, approached him. A smile all ready. Elizabeth watched her. Susan made a nuzzling gesture with her head, smiling. Sidled up to him. He was a 30-year-old man with a fixed grin and a tattooed arm and sensing her he made a serious face without looking up, and he said, ‘Heeeere’s trouble.’
Susan mimed a shocked face and put her hands to her breast and made wide eyes for him and said, ‘No.’ She looked from side to side. ‘Me? I’m not trouble.’