by Fiona Neill
‘If you bought a flat with another person you’d get there twice as fast,’ I pointed out.
‘I never want to be dependent on anyone else,’ she shrugged.
‘You sound like my mum,’ I said, instantly regretting this response because it made me sound the age I am. ‘I mean lots of women don’t want to be financially dependent on a man.’
‘I don’t want to be dependent on a woman either,’ she said, adding to my confusion. I think she enjoys it.
We were lying in bed together. She was on her side. She pushed her buttocks into my cock and so it began all over again. ‘I only asked you to take a look because you’re good with numbers.’
‘Tell me you want me,’ I whispered in her ear.
‘I’ll tell you anything you want but that doesn’t mean I mean any of it,’ she whispered back.
We had agreed after the first swipe right came good that each time we met we were allowed to ask one question about each other. There were two additional caveats: it had to be after we had sex, and you could only ask if you made the other person come. The first bit was my idea. I liked the idea of a single line of communication and keeping everything simple. There was a kind of purity to it.
At the beginning she turned me on so much that I didn’t get to ask any questions. I apologized and she teased me about still being a teenager. So while I played catch-up I was a little loose with the truth a couple of times. When she asked me what was the worst thing that had ever happened to me I said it was my parents getting divorced but really it was Daisy getting ill. Even though divorce is terminal and my sister has recovered. But I share a big part of the blame for what happened to Daisy. And I told her I had one sibling and two steps, which strictly speaking isn’t true because Dad isn’t married and we never see Rex and Ava, so they only count intellectually, not emotionally.
I only say this to underline that although there is just a small part for me in all this I am at least a reliable witness.
I increase my pace. If I go back now I’ll be late for my first lecture. Professor Francis is a moody bastard and is quite capable of refusing to let me in if I don’t show up on time. I allow myself to think about Connie one more time and remember how I had lovingly straightened out her jumper, smoothed out the sleeves and pressed my face into it, inhaling her scent like a dog. Fuck, she smelt so good – like roses and lemon grass. Unlike my fellow students. We all have the whiff of formaldehyde about us. If it weren’t so cold I would have stuffed the jumper in my bag so I could sleep with it tonight because I’m missing the scent of her already. If smell is the most powerful human sense then why can’t memory trigger smell rather than the other way round? I wonder. I’ll ask Dad when I see him later. He loves it when I ask him about work. It’s a useful way to plug the gaps in conversation.
To take my mind off her, I start to think about micro-organisms, specifically pathogens, the subject of Professor Francis’s about-to-be-delivered lecture, and an idea starts to evolve in my head. Not the kind of thought that used to take hold in Daisy’s head – although, thank God, even at her worst she had never obsessed about germs and contamination. But a very real and interesting idea about how pathogens are always stereotyped as the bad guys when they are so much more than simple hostile invaders.
‘Hello, mate. Big night?’ It’s Carlo, one of my housemates. He puts his arm around me and ruffles my hair in a way that always feels more patronizing than affectionate. I’d told him about my girl in a moment of weakness when she hadn’t responded to any of my messages for a couple of days.
‘Have you ever considered that there are more bacterial, fungal and protozoan cells in the body than human cells, Carlo?’
‘God, you know how to turn a guy on, Max,’ Carlo groans. ‘So did you get to ask a question this time?’
‘All they want to do is exist and procreate. Live and let live. Like John Lennon.’ Life was so simple.
Carlo laughs. ‘Try telling that to the woman with bedsores that we saw yesterday. That was pure, fucking Breaking Bad. The pus was as thick as custard.’
I can’t understand how someone with such a big empathy deficit has gone into medicine. He’d be far better suited to finance or tech.
We go into the lecture hall together. On the whiteboard Professor Francis has written The Human Body: a complex ecosystem and I feel as though I have arrived home. I told Mum this recently and she said it was exactly how she felt when she was at medical school. Carlo and I head for our usual seats beside the pillar in the fourth row. There’s a very pretty Asian girl who sits at the end of this row. She wears a veil, which in my book puts her off limits, but Carlo sees it as a challenge worth rising to. He has a whole list of gnarly sexual experiences that he wants to tick off. That’s why I haven’t introduced him to Mum.
Professor Francis starts. He goes straight in with an observation about how microbes are usually limited to certain areas of the human body: the skin, mouth, large intestine and vagina. All the bits you want to lick and touch, I think to myself, although judging by the way Carlo winks at me, he’s cleaving the same groove. I think about the girl in my bed again, imagining her lying on her front and the perfect arc of her buttocks and how it winds me just to look at her. She’s probably got up by now, removed her clothes from my skeleton and drunk the takeaway coffee I’ve left on my desk for her. Skinny latte. One shot. We had agreed that didn’t count as a question.
After half an hour Professor Francis opens the floor for any questions we want to throw at him for ten minutes before he starts the second part of his lecture. He’s a cool guy. And I want to ask whether the purpose of sex might be to allow pathogens to colonize different parts of the human body, thereby increasing immunity. But I’m worried it might reveal too much about where I’m coming from or, worse, encourage Carlo to share his rimjob fantasies with me again. Not something I ever want to repeat.
I slouch in my seat. For much of my adolescence my body was so hard with tension that I assumed it was normal. But the past couple of years so many good things have happened that my muscles, tendons and ligaments are as smooth as honey. Daisy has been well. Mum has turned a corner. And now this girl has come along. Fucking is fucking. But this is something totally different. I’ve actually stopped thinking about anyone else.
I feel my phone vibrate again. I do that one-handed manoeuvre, checking the caller ID without removing the phone from my pocket in case Professor Francis catches me out. I get all excited when I see there’s a photograph attached. I tried sexting her once but she said it’s against the rules, so I think maybe she’s sent a picture of the skeleton wearing her clothes or something she’s seen on her way to work to tantalize me, because although she knows exactly where I spend my days, if she disappeared I would have no idea where to even start looking for her. I’m not even sure she’s using her real name. Lots of people don’t on Tinder. I don’t.
But it’s not from her. It’s from Daisy. Carlo nudges me. I shake my head and try to focus on the teacher.
‘Each individual pathogen causes disease in a different way, which makes it challenging to understand the basic biology of infection …’
The phone vibrates in my pocket. Daisy again. I switch it off.
I go the whole day without hearing from Connie so I’m already seeing a bad moon rising when I arrive at the restaurant to meet Dad and Lisa for dinner that evening. By then Daisy’s messages have slipped off the bottom of my screen. I’ve spent most of the day indoors, including an hour and a half standing in the dissection room in the cloisters in the coldest part of the medical school.
I share my cadaver with four other students, including Carlo. Today we did the head for the first time. By the time it came to me, my hands were so cold that when I tried to make the incision to the supraorbital nerve, my scalpel slipped and I ended up prematurely severing the optic nerve, which will make it almost impossible to dissect the eye properly next week. I apologized to Jean. She’s an old lady and deserves better than me. I looked u
p at the sign above the door for reassurance. ‘Mortui vivos docent,’ it reads. ‘The dead teach the living.’
When I get off the tube at Kentish Town, I try to call Daisy to apologize for my radio silence but it goes to voicemail so I head straight for the Indian restaurant. Usually Daisy and I meet up for a drink at the pub before we see Dad and Lisa. We always order Bloody Marys and place bets about how long it will take for Lisa to introduce yoga into the conversation. She used to be a corporate lawyer but she’s retrained as a yoga teacher and is evangelical about healthy living in that way religious converts are. She’s even learning Sanskrit.
Daisy is already sitting at the table when I arrive, still wearing her jacket – a fake fur, stripy number that I immediately want to buy for Connie – so I know she hasn’t been here long. She stands up when she hears my voice and gets up so abruptly that I have to steady her chair as she turns to face me.
‘Hey, Maxi,’ she says. Daisy is the only person who can get away with calling me this. She hugs me so close the fur from the jacket tickles my nostrils. ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘I spent the afternoon with Jean,’ I say, deadpan.
‘So when do we get to meet her?’ Dad asks eagerly, standing up to give me a hug.
Now that I’m taller than him he does that backslapping thing a bit too energetically. One of the biggest changes in him since he got together with Lisa is that he sounds so enthusiastic about everything all the time. Like he’s joined a cult or something. But he’s also always primed for the disappointment of knowing that, whatever our news, he believes Mum got there first. So I assume he assumes that Jean has already been to Mum’s house to eat burnt rice and dry chicken and feels hurt even though he gets he has no right. Or some such head fuckery.
‘You should have brought her with you, Max. We’d be on our best behaviour.’
‘Maybe in the afterlife,’ I say, feeling sorry for him. ‘She’s my cadaver, Dad. And after today I can’t take her anywhere because I severed her optic nerve, so she’s got one eye hanging out. It’s not a good look.’
Dad laughs a bit too loudly, and I feel guilty for Jean because we have real respect for her. Before the first shoulder-to-shoulder incision last year we all stood around with our arms folded and thanked her. Even Carlo. No one told us to do this. It just felt right. I can tell from the way Lisa puts a reassuring hand on top of his that Dad considers this further evidence of his distance from our lives. Get over it. I have, I want to say. It’s probably true that I’ve spent more time with Jean than I have with Dad over the past eighteen months. But what does he expect? Who hangs out with their parents at my age? And when he could have been in our lives, he wasn’t. He was with Lisa. This isn’t judgement. It’s fact.
‘Don’t I get a kiss?’ Lisa asks huskily.
Recently Daisy has accused me of being susceptible to Lisa’s attempts to flirt me into submission. It’s just her manner, I tell Daisy. She’s been like that since I can remember. I should introduce her to Carlo. She’d definitely tick his MILF box.
‘Namaste,’ I say instead, giving Lisa a low bow. I try to catch Daisy’s eye but she’s looking down at the menu, except I know she isn’t really reading it because we always order the same thing.
‘Namaste,’ Lisa responds. ‘I always say this at the end of my yoga classes.’ I wait for Daisy’s smirk but she doesn’t react.
‘We’ll have our usual,’ Dad says to the waiter when he comes over, as though we are a proper family unit with our own ancient rituals and habits and this waiter was present at my birth.
‘Perfect, Mr Foss.’
I wince on Dad’s behalf. The wrinkles on his face concertina as it dawns on him that we must come here with Mum too.
‘Rankin,’ Dad says. ‘My surname is Rankin. My wife is Foss.’
‘Ex-wife,’ Lisa reminds him. There’s no edge to her tone. She has never shown any insecurity about Mum.
‘And please can we have one naan each –’ Daisy says.
‘Three will do,’ Lisa interjects in a sing-song voice.
‘Let’s stick with four,’ Dad insists because he is more afraid of antagonizing Daisy than Lisa. Sensible strategy.
Dad doesn’t realize that Daisy orders as many carbohydrates as possible because she knows Lisa’s life revolves around avoiding them. Samosas, pakora, biryani, egg-fried rice. I love the way Daisy’s repressed fury is so wittily channelled. I was never very good at sustaining anger but Daisy’s illness meant hers was dormant for a good few years and she has had to play catch-up.
Lisa squeezes some drops from a small brown glass bottle into her glass of water and tries to do the same to Dad’s glass but he puts his hand over the top.
‘Come on, Niko,’ she urges him.
I can tell he wants her to stop. Daisy maintains they’re trapped in contradictory urges: Lisa wants to show off about how much she influences Dad and Dad wants to demonstrate his independence from her. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. In many ways they make a good couple, not that I would ever admit that to anyone, although it echoes something Mum said recently. I try to imagine Mum and Dad being as besotted with each other as I am with Connie and then feel distraught that another guy could come close to making her feel the same way. I need to see her so badly that my body starts to ache.
‘No thanks,’ Dad says. ‘I’ll start again tomorrow morning.’
‘There’s only one week left,’ Lisa insists. She turns to us. ‘We’re detoxing for a month. Maybe you should try it, Max? To purge your liver.’
Lisa seems to have this idea that I’m a big drinker. It’s because of something that happened years ago, just after she and Dad got together. But the truth is I’m mostly too knackered to be a lush. I have eight hours of lectures almost every day.
‘Your liver clears itself of toxins,’ I point out. ‘That’s its purpose in life.’
‘But it’s good to detox to get rid of all those free radicals,’ she persists.
‘It’ll take more than that to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn,’ Dad jokes. He’s trying to steer the conversation away from homeopathic remedies but for all Lisa’s mindfulness, she doesn’t pick up the hint.
‘You must be an expert on free radicals,’ she says, leaning in towards me.
She’s wearing a floaty cream silk top. I lean towards her. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve spent the afternoon with Jean, but I notice her collarbone, sternum and a few ribs perfectly outlined beneath. She looks almost as cadaverous as my cadaver.
‘Detoxing is a pseudo-medical concept to sell you stuff. But it’s harmless, and if it encourages you to eat healthily and makes you feel good then that’s great. Just don’t stick anything up your arse. We saw a very interesting patient recently who got campylobacter sepsis from a coffee enema.’
Daisy looks up from her phone and giggles for the first time. It’s a good sound.
‘Max,’ Dad warns. ‘We’re about to eat.’
We are halfway through the meal when I first notice. I stare at Daisy’s plate. There are three small, neat piles of food. Rice, samosa and saag gosht. None of them touch each other. If you didn’t know you would assume she was someone who had an artistic sensibility about how food should be presented. Except I know she doesn’t because after Dad left I became the family cook, and she never complained about how my meals looked. Even when we were short on ingredients and I did things like mashed potato with gherkins.
I have just asked Dad the question about why memory can’t induce smell. He has digressed into a long explanation about how an impaired sense of smell can be one of the earliest symptoms of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
‘It’s the first sense to go in cognitive decline,’ he says. ‘And it’s worse in the left nostril.’
Usually this is the kind of thing that would really interest me but I am too busy staring at the small corner missing from each mound on Daisy’s plate. For a long while I was utterly vigilant, even after the doctors gave Daisy a clean bill of h
ealth. How can you tell exactly what’s going on inside someone’s head? But over the past couple of years I have completely relaxed. So at first I think I’m being paranoid.
I try to remember whether she always does this. Daisy still is, if nothing else, a creature of habit. And Lisa has eaten even less, although she has chosen a different method for avoiding detection by hiding food beneath crumbled pieces of poppadom. I look at Dad’s carelessly loaded plate and realize that I am the only one at the table eating anything. Dad tries to persuade Lisa to try a few mouthfuls of tandoori chicken.
‘There’s no sauce on it, darling,’ he says, spearing a chunk on to his fork and trying to feed her like he used to feed us when we were little children.
She shakes her head. ‘Please, Niko.’
I glance over at Daisy, waiting for her to mock-vomit at this display of intimacy between them. Because one of the new family rituals Dad is unaware of is our hyper-awareness of any physical affection between him and Lisa and our hyper-inability to tolerate it. In fact, Daisy still regularly refers to Lisa as Dad’s ‘fuck buddy’. It’s an old joke but it can raise a cheap laugh. At the beginning it helped us to see it that way, especially since Dad kept insisting he still loved Mum but wasn’t in love with her. ‘He loves Mum but wants to fuck Lisa,’ Daisy had impatiently revealed to me when I was eleven.
Dad gently takes Lisa’s hand and presses the other tenderly against her cheek. ‘You have to eat. It’s so important to keep your strength up.’
Lisa’s sleeve rides up and I see bruises and tiny puncture marks on the inside of her elbow. So far I’ve only been allowed to use a grapefruit to practise taking bloods but I recognize the signs instantly. Fuck, she’s pregnant, I realize, trying to work out how old Dad will be when the baby is my age. Sixty-five. Must be IVF. Or a donor. And that’s assuming Dad isn’t firing blanks. I start to panic that if I take the baby out for a walk people will assume that I’m the father. And if I have a baby with Connie then it will be an uncle before it’s even seen daylight. Good detective work, Dr Rankin, I congratulate myself. Then I berate myself for only thinking of me, because it’s Mum who has most to lose in this scenario. I wonder if Daisy realizes. Maybe that’s why she was trying to get in touch. To warn me. Daisy always looks out for me.