‘His blood pressure’s dropped,’ says Clare. ‘Systolic of 70.’
‘Listen, Sarah.’ Kawther’s voice has taken on an edge. ‘Louis is in a critical condition. Dr Patel is straight down the line, I promise you. Nothing would interfere with his treatment of your son.’
‘I demand someone else!’
‘There is no one else. No one. And there’s no time.’
Sarah sets her jaw. ‘I don’t trust you,’ she tells him, her voice unsteady. ‘This is unethical.’
‘Satish …’
‘Clare?’
‘Systolic’s down to 60.’
‘Charles?’
Charles is bent over Louis. ‘He’s getting harder to oxygenate.’
‘I’ve got a bloody good lawyer!’ Sarah’s saying. Both her hands are fisted, her arms rigid at her sides. ‘He’ll go over everything you do here, every decision. He’ll have you. If anything happens to my boy, he’ll have you.’
‘Sarah, I’m going to ask you to leave.’ Satish reaches over to charge the defibrillator. ‘And I’m going to tell you why. Louis’s BPs have dropped to a dangerous level. He’s about to arrest.’
‘Oh God, oh God …’
‘I’m in a room with two other people, and I couldn’t get anything past them, even if I wanted to.’ He feels the bottle in his pocket, bumping against his hip. ‘You need to trust me. You need to leave.’
‘Do you want an apology? For something that happened thirty years ago? For a mistake made by a kid? Frankly, if that’s what it takes, I’ll do it: I’m sorry. Take care of my boy. Don’t hurt him.’
Her raised voice has brought a nurse: Satish can see her barrelling down the corridor towards them. Then Kawther pulls Sarah from the room. As she disappears from view she looks towards the bed, to Louis, small and exposed, then across at Satish.
‘Tell me I can trust you,’ she says.
Satish meets her gaze, the paddles raised and ready.
‘Of course,’ he replies, and then the door shuts.
Most paediatricians will tell you that their job changes once they have their own children. For Satish, the change happened like this: once Asha was born, he realised he was treating two sets of patients every time he did a consultation. The child had always been there, the kid with a hole in the heart, or narrowed arteries, or the more complex issues: transpositions, tetralogy of Fallot, cardiomyopathy. There were always kids with symptoms to treat, and he’d prided himself on his effectiveness as a practitioner. He’d mitigate the breathlessness, the recurrent chest infections, all the things his patients had to live with. He’d time their interventions just so, seizing the optimum moment.
With his own fatherhood, however, came the shock of discovering what the parents had to endure; not theoretically, every decent medical school taught you that, but viscerally. Asha was a few weeks old, with a fever and a rash which Satish, during the sleepless night of his daughter’s first illness, had become convinced was meningitis. He’d argued with Maya, fiercely and uncharacteristically, that they should rush the baby to the nearest A & E, until Satish’s own mother had woken, and come in, and imposed her good sense on them. The next morning it had felt like a kind of insanity. He’d let himself wonder: what if Asha had really been ill? What if they’d had some other doctor give them bad news about their child, the kind of bad news you cannot negotiate with? All the things you’d fear if they happened to you – breathlessness, chest infections, open heart surgery – they would be nothing compared with watching it happen to your kid.
In the months following this unsettling discovery, Satish’s professionalism was able to reassert itself. His detachment returned as it does to all good doctors, but his perspective changed in the process; all his cases were multiple now, the patient and the patient’s parents, their happiness up for ransom.
So, as the door closes behind Sarah, he knows exactly why she is trying to stop him treating her son, why she rails at him and threatens him and abases herself. She wronged him once, and now her entire happiness, her ability to laugh, to make love with her husband, to sleep, to think of the future with any kind of pleasure, lies with him.
The clock shows 3.18. With Sarah gone, the room is quiet again. Karma, he thinks. Karma is not retribution. It’s the natural outcome of the choices we make. How strange that their lives should have come round to this: this meeting in a hospital in the dead hours of the morning, her son struggling on the bed in front of him. Exactly how wicked would you have to be, at eleven, to bring this upon yourself at forty-one? She was not wicked enough for that; nobody deserved that.
The paddles are ready, their red lights glowing. ‘Clear!’ He leans forward and places them on Louis’s chest, spanning the heart. There’s a click as they discharge their ten joules, and Satish turns to the monitor: nothing. The heart’s still in SVT.
But maybe Sarah has a second chance coming to her. He charges the machine again: ‘Clear!’ Again, the click. Only this time, he sees immediately: he’s done it. The heart’s in sinus rhythm once more, the waves and spikes rising in stately predictability. They all wait, unwilling to rely on it, then Clare says: ‘OK, systolic rising: 80,’ and Satish breathes out. Charles says, ‘Good job,’ and Satish puts the paddles back.
Satish has rules about the stuff he takes. He always gets it straight from the drugs cupboard – a risky process but, he thinks, a more ethical one. Otherwise it’s a case of prescribing it for a patient and then taking it yourself, and you wouldn’t want to do that, not when it’s for anxiety and the kid’s preop and terrified, and won’t get any calmer because the diazepam’s safely tucked away in your case. Satish knows this because he did it once – only once – and it was so terrible that it became his first protocol. There are other rules: never increase the dose. Take it once a day, before bed.
By the time he’s reached his room again he already knows he’ll break this last commandment. He left the lab by a circuitous route, along intricate back corridors, rather than pass through the room in which Sarah was waiting. The benevolent influence of his earlier dose has long receded. He’s shaking, avoiding eye contact with the few people who are up and about, trying to control himself because his breath is juddering out of him. When he gets into his room he leans against the door to close it, then squats down, resting his forehead on his hands.
‘Oooh!’ he’s saying. ‘Oooh!’
He sounds like Maya did in early labour, like someone surprised by pain but breathing through it anyway. Sarah, and Louis, and that appalling, public melodrama. Her shouted apology, his privacy breached. He reaches into his pocket. By now, he can estimate his dose just fine, no need for a spoon, even. He takes a gulp, and then another. The taste of it is a promise: you’ll be OK soon. Wait it out. Her voice comes back to him, sorry. I’m sorry, and then he thinks of that other sorry: the quiet one, from Kawther just after she’d wished him luck.
What did she mean by that? Why should she think he needs luck? Does she doubt his abilities? Do others?
The thought fills him with panic, and then a sudden sadness comes. He wants to go somewhere safe, where he doesn’t need to protect himself all the time. But when did that last happen? When he was a kid, he thinks. In Cherry Gardens, before it all fell apart. With Cai. And Mandy – always with Mandy.
He thinks about Mandy, and he sleeps.
Chapter 19
A few weeks before the Jubilee, Satish was round at Mandy’s house. They were playing Truth or Dare in her bedroom, Satish maintaining a courtly restraint (Dare: stand on your head. Truth: where would you most like to go on holiday?), Mandy being less scrupulous. He chose Truth twice and regretted it. (Which girl from school do you fancy? Have you ever heard your parents Doing It?) When it was his turn again, he risked a dare instead.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Steal one of my mum’s cakes.’
‘What?’
‘Steal a cake for me. Go on.’
‘I can’t. It involves other people. Your mum. You can’t involve other peop
le. It’s a rule.’
She stepped close to him. She smelled of Pears shampoo, the same stuff he and Sima used, but it was sweeter on her somehow, and stronger. When she spoke, quietly, next to his ear, he could feel her breath warm. ‘It isn’t a rule. You asked for a dare. Do it.’
Mandy’s mum was polishing the dining room table. They could see her from the kitchen, through the serving hatch. When she spotted Satish, she waved a can of furniture spray at him.
‘Hi, Satish. You all right?’
‘Yes, Mrs Hobbes. I’m getting a glass of water.’ He reached up to the cupboard, pushing the hatch door closed as he did so. Mandy, crouching below counter level, shot up a hand and re-opened it, wider than before.
The cakes were in front of the serving hatch. She’d made scones, their sides softly concertinaed, pasty-pale and studded with raisins, arranged in serried rows on the cooling rack.
‘I’m just pouring the water now,’ he shouted through, sloshing it into the glass. He waited until Mrs Hobbes had started on the bookcase, her back to him, and made it fast. It was a smooth operation: grabbing the scone, still warm, the flour gritty against his hand, dropping it to Mandy, who chomped into it straight away.
‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘Nice water. Thanks.’
They left the kitchen, Mandy rising once she was out of her mum’s sight.
‘Great dare,’ she whispered, still processing the last of her mouthful. Then she swallowed and whipped her arm behind her back; Mrs Hobbes was coming.
‘You down here too, Mands? What are you up to, then?’
Through the kitchen door Satish could see what he’d missed before. There had been twelve cakes: three rows of four. But now he’d nicked one, there was a gap; she’d see it immediately. He thought fast.
‘My glass!’ he said, holding it up, and went to put it noisily on the kitchen counter. He heard them talking in the hall.
‘We’re just mucking around,’ said Mandy. ‘Satish needed a drink.’
He tried rearranging the scones, leapfrogging replacements into the gap, shifting them around. Nothing worked.
‘Well, I’m done with the dusting,’ said Mrs Hobbes. ‘Done and dusted! Garden next.’
She’d have to go through the kitchen to get to the garden. She’d see the cooling rack, and then – he looked at Mandy, the remains of her scone behind her back – Mandy’d be for it. He put the scones back where they were, with the gap at the front, then he spread his fingers to widen it. When Mrs Hobbes came into the room, he puffed out his cheeks.
‘I’b horry,’ he told her, as she looked from him to the scones. ‘I drusht couldn’t holp it.’
When her mum had finished with him, Mandy took Satish back upstairs. On the landing she reached out for his hand and pulled it towards her. She gave him little squeezes – at his wrists, on his thumb – then turned it, palm-up. From behind her back she produced the scone and lowered it onto his hand.
‘You can have the rest,’ she said. ‘You’ve earned it.’
He said they should stop the game now, but Mandy told him: ‘No, you have one more go. Truth or Dare me.’
‘No. Let’s do something else.’
‘Just one more. Then we’re evens.’
He sighed. ‘Truth or Dare?’ The scone was good, that slight fizziness coming through.
‘I don’t mind. A big truth or a big dare. You choose. I’ll do anything: trip up Paul Chandler, say Fuck to my dad, run down the street in my nuddie …’
‘Truth.’
‘Right. What truth? I’ll tell you anything.’
He thought of some of the things he could ask. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Tell me … tell me something no one else knows.’
She went quiet, so that the only sound was Satish chewing, the scone rolling stickily in his mouth.
‘OK,’ she said. She pulled him into her room, shutting the door behind her. Then she opened her wardrobe door and hauled out a basket. It was brimful of cuddly toys: penguins and giraffes, teddies and pandas, which she unloaded by the handful. When she had excavated the last one, she took out something else and held it behind her back.
‘I will tell you something no one else knows,’ she said. ‘But this is something properly, properly secret. You cannot. Tell. Anyone. OK?’
‘OK.’
She laid it in front of him: an old toffee tin, navy blue, with silver bits that were flaking off in places. There was a picture on it of a man in knickerbockers and stockings and big-buckled shoes, and there was a dent on the top left of the lid, right next to his hat.
‘If you tell, Mum’ll kill me. If you tell I’ll … honestly, I’ll …’ Her face had taken on the same hard focus that he saw in Cai when his friend was hell-bent on something. It was like a trick of the light: she had caught his look completely. Disconcerted, Satish moved to reassure her.
‘Hang on. I won’t tell anyone. You won’t have to do anything. I promise.’
‘OK.’ She levered up the lid with her thumbnail and pushed the open tin towards him. Inside were girls’ things: a leather pendant on a thong, decorated with a rainbow design; a glass vial of Miners’ lipgloss (peppermint flavour); a pack of hairgrips. Two-and-a-half white chocolate mice nested in the bottom on pale dust from their own eroded edges.
Satish had no idea what he was meant to say. He didn’t know how to connect these very ordinary things – the sort of things you’d see in her room most of the time anyway – to Mandy’s hissed injunctions. He examined each object at length, handling them all except the white mice, looking at them from different angles. He hoped she would say something soon, something he could pick up on so he wouldn’t seem stupid.
‘Do you know why they’re secret?’ she asked.
‘Umm …’
‘It’s not because of what they are. It’s because of how I got them.’ Mandy looked at the door and leaned in closer, beckoning him nearer in turn so that they were face to face. ‘I got them because I stole them.’
‘You – ?’ He drew back to look at her. She was biting her lip.
‘All of them. I stole them.’ And when he frowned in disbelief, she said a bit louder: ‘I did! I took them from the shops up the road. Wavy Line, the chemist, Valerie’s.’
‘Mrs Weston’s?’
Mandy paused. ‘Yeah,’ she told him. ‘Yeah, I did.’
Mandy going into a shop, saying hi to the shopkeeper because she knew each one by name, they all did. Mandy pretending to look for something while she slipped something else into her pocket, something small she hid all the way home. The shopkeepers of Bourne Heath puzzled by the absence of that small something the next time they checked. Mandy keeping it in the bottom of her wardrobe.
‘You steal them? Then you put them in there?’ He pointed at the tin, which lay between them. ‘Is that what you do?’
‘Mostly.’ Mandy replaced the items and pushed the lid back on. ‘Sometimes I give people things. I’ve given Sarah a few things. She doesn’t know I took them.’
He watched Mandy covering her tracks, piling the soft toys back into the basket, moving the basket into the wardrobe. After she’d shut the door she turned to him.
‘I’ve never given you anything I’ve taken. Never. And I won’t, OK?’
‘OK. Great.’ He sensed this was a compliment of some kind, but he was floundering badly. Did all girls do stuff like this? Was this normal?
‘Do you … Why do you do it, Mandy?’
She considered. ‘Well, it’s exciting. It is – you should do it, just once!’ He started to decline, muttering, but she talked over him. ‘You go in, and they chat with you about school or something, and you dare yourself to do it, and you can do it in different ways, depending on how brave you feel. When they can’t see you at all, or when they’re just turning away. Or, one time, I did it when the Wavy Line woman was actually next to me, putting more Black Jacks in the box!’
‘Why do you keep everything in the tin?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know.’ There wa
s a pause. ‘I look at them again and I think about when I took them. I remember what it felt like.’
Satish nodded sagely although he was none the wiser.
‘OK. So, why do you give them to people, then?’
Mandy looked straight at him. She was biting back a grin. ‘Honestly, Satish, it’s funny. Sarah, especially. I give her stuff and she sort of likes me more! It’s just stuff, but if she’s being a bit funny, it works on her. It’s so easy. You just give her things.’
Satish thought of Sarah, and he knew that what Mandy was saying was nasty, really nasty. But she was right: it was funny, too. He thought of Mandy feeding Sarah stolen goods like she fed her cat, to keep him close by, and he sniggered, then Mandy did, too. They both put their hands over their mouths to hide the naughty laughter, but they laughed anyway, guilty and delighted.
Chapter 20
There’s nothing else she wants to keep hold of from that day. It can all go to hell. She holds a memory of Satish, and one of her mum, and that’s all she wants.
She’d fancied Satish for ages. Everything else – Cai, the mucking around with Sarah – it was just a bit of fun, practice. Satish she really liked. There was something held-back about him. None of the other boys held back. It was all action, talk, showing off. Satish watched, and he listened. She knew she could say anything to him: he’d never tell. Satish kept his cool: about her dad’s bedroom, about the stuff she took. He never corrected her when she said the wrong thing. He never laughed at her.
She was pretty sure he didn’t fancy her, though. Certain of it, until Jubilee Day, up in his room. That morning, things felt different. He stood close to her a lot, touched her. He was even quieter than usual. Then, very suddenly, he was looking at her in a different way and stepping towards her, holding her arm and coming close to kiss her. She’d imagined it often, but not like this. In her daydreams he would burst into her classroom, public and unashamed, and they’d run away together, or they’d meet by coincidence on holiday and sneak away from their parents and kiss on a beach. Instead here they were, in his room, and it was really happening.
Jubilee Page 17