by Fiona Neill
Then it strikes me as I wait outside the front door. Lisa is like a rip tide. Calm on the surface. But capable of dragging us out into open water and leaving us to struggle against the current until we all sink under. She’s going to die but she wants to take us all down with her. I had always argued with Daisy about Lisa’s true nature but now I realize that I was wrong and Daisy was right. Just as I reach this conclusion I get a message from Connie telling me that Carlo has let her in.
7
Rosie
It’s late when I leave work. I’m based at a different hospital today, trying to finalize the details on a Phase III breast cancer trial that I’ve been involved in for almost a decade and the trial assistant has just noticed that one of the patients on the list has ulcerative colitis, which automatically rules her out of the treatment.
I double-check the notes and see that it is Laura S. My heart sinks. How could I have forgotten her history when I recommended her, especially since her stomach problems made it very difficult to give her the first chemotherapy regime that I prescribed?
I’m not as hard on myself as I used to be when I make mistakes but I feel terrible for offering up hope where there was none. I’ve had my fair share of pipe dreams because when Nick first left me, I truly believed he would wake up one morning and realize he had made a terrible mistake. Mid-life crisis. He’s having a moment. He’ll come to his senses, my friends told me.
I will call up Laura S. to explain tomorrow morning. It’s never a good idea to deliver bad news in the evening. I wonder if I should speak to her husband? He knows full well that immunotherapy was the last weapon in the armoury for her. Their inevitably reasonable reaction will make me feel even worse, especially if I have to deal with one of my less charming patients in clinic tomorrow.
Also, from a completely selfish perspective, this leaves us more than a couple of patients short for the trial and I wanted to have everything in place before my trip to Atlanta next month. Finding women who fit the exact criteria can be very time-consuming. The assistant hears me sigh and offers to go through the file of prospective candidates again in case we have overlooked someone.
‘Thanks so much.’
‘It’s an easy mistake, especially when someone works the hours you do.’
Nevertheless I’m still feeling mightily preoccupied when I leave much later than anticipated. I can’t resist a quick trawl through Tinder on the way down in the lift, even though there’s a risk the wrist flick might betray what I’m doing to the other people in the lift. My reward is immediate distraction.
StanTheMan has messaged to see if we can meet up but I don’t bother responding because Ed Gilmour has come to represent reality rather than escape. Since he insisted on continuing his rotation in my clinic I have attempted to establish some professional distance from him. He says it’s too difficult to find another placement at short notice and that he really likes oncology. His personality fits well with my team but doctors are an observant bunch and, although he’s discreet, he’s too open to be completely reliable. Also when he isn’t out with me I’m now wondering whether he’s with someone else and I don’t want to ever mind about anything like that again. He’s definitely flirting with the insecure junior doctor.
There is pandemonium on the ground floor when I get out of the lift at the back entrance of A&E. Security guards stand at the door. Photographers and television crews are lined up outside; there are nurses wearing full-body plastic protective gear and goggles. I bump into one of my best friends from medical school, a top infectious diseases consultant, who tells me that someone who has contracted Ebola has been transferred to the isolation unit at the hospital.
‘I’d go out through the basement,’ she suggests. ‘It’s a bun fight out there.’
I take her advice and stop in the stairwell on the way down to check my phone again just as MickyJ messages:
I’ll go straight to it: do you want to have sex with me?
He’s a bit young to have memory problems. We already did. Good punctuation, though, I write back.
Rerun out of the question? he responds.
Correct, I say.
I try a couple of right swipes and read some messages from novices who betray themselves by trying to be overly interesting and asking pointless questions like Wot are your life aspirations? or U like it when a guy speaks French to you? and a couple of overtly sexual messages of the I want to come in your face variety that I simply delete. I message less than I used to because I have learnt along the way that no amount of digital chemistry can will physical attraction into being. Anyone who calls me hon, writes a lazy bio, posts only group pics, looks like he spends too much time in the gym or has kids in the picture gets an immediate left swipe. And to save time I have reduced the search distance to one mile.
Half an hour later I’m sitting at my table in the restaurant at the Wellcome Collection with a 33-year-old whose real name matches his profile. I’m fascinated by the way Leo looks like a younger version of Nick, although this isn’t consciously why I chose him over the more age-appropriate advertising executive who also suggested meeting up tonight. I have grown to prefer younger men because they live in the present and generally require less worship. I’m very much not looking for a relationship.
Leo has thick dark hair that flops over his pale face and a long, angular physiognomy that creates interesting shadows in the mottled evening light. He is more worn than his photo suggests. There are dark circles under his eyes and lines that indicate he is quick to smile. In my experience it takes between ninety seconds and four minutes to know if you find someone attractive so I never order anything more than a bottle of beer and packet of peanuts in case I need a quick escape. Also I have discovered the hard way that limiting myself to one Corona is the best antidote to regrettable alcohol-fuelled sex. And there’s none of that embarrassment about who should pick up the tab. Because even though I would define myself as a feminist there’s still something disappointing about a man who lets you pay your way too readily.
The reason I want to explain this is that although my private life might appear chaotic and random, it is in fact as well worked out as the mathematical formula that brought me face to face with Leo in the first place. In my experience, married life is far dirtier and unpredictable.
Anyway, Leo is definitely a yes. I know this within the first two minutes when he mentions Richard Dawkins and vaginal steaming in the same sentence.
‘Vaginal steaming?’ I ask him, wondering if I’ve landed a fetishist. They tend to reveal their hand pretty quickly.
‘One of my matches had read about it on Gwyneth Paltrow’s website and ended up with a mugwort-flavoured second-degree burn on her fanny in the shape of a teacup,’ he explains. ‘Someone like Richard Dawkins should take on the pseudo scientists, but maybe even he lacks the cojones.’
I laugh so much that I forget Laura S. and the letter from Lisa. Leo tells me that he is a Dawkins fan and that the fact The God Delusion has been unofficially translated into Arabic and downloaded ten million times, mostly in Saudi Arabia, is one of the things in life that make him truly happy.
‘What are the others?’
He raises one eyebrow and I break eye contact. I rest the bottle of beer on the table. He rips open the bag of peanuts and tips them on to the packaging. We lurch towards the pile at the same time, his hand brushes mine and neither of us pulls away. There is a familiar jolt of connection.
‘So what’s your motivation?’ he asks.
I can tell he’s got form by the questions he doesn’t ask. He’s not interested in the process, how many dates have worked out or how long I’ve been doing this. Best of all, he doesn’t want to hear what it’s like to walk in my shoes.
‘I guess I like that sensation of feeling without talking,’ I say. ‘Like a conversation without words.’ It’s more complicated than that but I know from experience the worst dates are when people talk about their divorce, and it sounds too bleak to explain that having se
x with strangers was the only thing that made me feel alive again after I thought I had died. ‘You?’
‘I work long hours. When I get home I have to study so I don’t have time to meet anyone or the energy to keep a relationship going. The usual London thing.’
As he talks I notice he massages the inside muscle on his right forearm, a displacement activity that I at first mistake for nervousness or boredom. He has long fine fingers and badly bitten nails. There are white chalky callouses on the fingertips of his left hand, which makes me wonder if he plays a stringed instrument. He catches me staring.
‘I’ve got a problem with my arm,’ he explains, pressing the offending muscle. ‘It’s so sore I think I’m losing sensation in my hand.’ He tells me how he wakes up in the night unable to feel his thumb and index finger. I wait for him to say that he has googled the symptoms and thinks he has multiple sclerosis but he doesn’t, which suggests a level of self-restraint that I like.
Brachioradialis muscle, I think to myself. Textbook. The good thing about learning anatomy in your early twenties is that it stays with you forever. He’s almost inevitably suffering from repetitive strain injury. Possibly but not definitely caused by playing the guitar or violin, over and over again. I don’t ask him what he does because if he’s a halfway decent human being he will feel obliged to ask about my job and I don’t want to think about work.
Also I learnt from early forays into digital dating that revealing you are a doctor can quickly transform a date into a medical consultation. There are a lot of hypochondriacs out there. Although I did once correctly diagnose a guy with atrial fibrillation. He turned out to be a freelance journalist who subsequently wrote a piece for The Times with the title ‘How Tinder Saved My Life’. He wanted me to appear on one of those crappy daytime TV programmes with him but I refused. It was at these moments ironically that I most missed my friendship with Lisa, because she would have loved this story and probably encouraged me to do the interview. She always made me leave my comfort zone. When she joined my school in sixth form, she was the person who got angry with me when I said I wanted to be a nurse rather than a doctor and encouraged me to ditch my first boyfriend because he was boring and in her book boredom was the worst fate of all. Whatever you say about Lisa, she was a lot of fun, the kind of person you want to have in your life forever. I used to imagine us in our old age, drinking and smoking too much, sitting in the pub by the beach in Cromer after a swim in the sea, her still wondering if she and Barney really were compatible while she eulogized my perfect relationship with Nick.
Back then I was the one blessed with certainty. Sometimes, when I compare the life I thought I was going to have with the life I now live, I feel like I might be swallowed up by the gulf between the two. I should have learnt from my patients that assuming you have control over your destiny is a delusion. The ones I know best tell me it’s the worst part of the illness.
‘Try stretching it out and pointing your hand towards the floor,’ I suggest. I lengthen his arm into the correct position and place the palm of my hand over his. His hand encircles my wrist, and his fingers weave their way through mine.
‘Shall we go?’ he suggests.
We get up. He slips an arm around me, I check to see if there is anyone I recognize but it’s late and the restaurant is quiet. His arm slides down my back and pushes me towards him so our faces are almost touching. There is always something breathtaking about having a totally unrecognizable face so close. His sore hand touches the side of my face. He kisses me and I respond and there is that first hot jolt of flesh-on-flesh pleasure. He loops one arm around my neck and the other finds its way inside my T-shirt where it presses in the small of my back.
‘Hey,’ I say softly as we disentangle and appraise each other.
‘Your place?’ Leo suggests.
‘That won’t work. Too many people around,’ I reply, deliberately vague even though he probably assumes I’m married. The truth is that Daisy and Kit seem to have moved in with me. Daisy explained that one month in four Kit has to sleep on the sofa at his flat because it’s the only way he and his three flatmates can afford the rent. But that was weeks ago.
‘There’s a hotel off Gray’s Inn Road,’ I suggest.
He runs a finger down the inside of my arm from the elbow to the wrist and at that exact instant I notice a puncture wound on the fleshy part of the inside of his palm. It bears all the hallmarks of a needlestick injury from a syringe or something similar.
‘How did you do that?’ I ask suspiciously, unfurling his fingers.
‘Work-related injury,’ he says.
I run my hand along the callouses on his fingertips. I can read the human body like a blind man reads Braille. Then it dawns on me: he’s a trainee surgeon. That explains the repetitive strain injury from performing the same movement over and over again. The Tinder algorithm for matching up people with shared interests has got too sophisticated and the chances are, given that my settings allow me to connect with men in a one-mile radius, he probably works in the hospital where I just came from. I suggest we have a quick look around the permanent collection and manage to lose him somewhere in the first room. It’s a big shame because we probably would have had great sex. He messages me and I press delete.
On my way home in the tube I run through my usual routine. Checking emails, deleting the obsolete, prioritizing responses, skim-reading a couple of articles in the International Journal of Breast Cancer and making a list of what I need for my trip. Activity is always the best antidote to regret. At Hammersmith I glance around the men in the carriage and catch myself doing a quick mental left or right swipe. I clear out the pockets of my handbag, scrunching up old receipts and chewing-gum wrappers, and even make a makeshift hook for the broken zip with a paperclip. I discover a fluorescent pen without a lid that was responsible for the vivid green stain that soaked through the leather from the inside out.
I love this bag even though it was the last present Nick bought me. I found it wrapped up without a card at the back of his chest of drawers on my birthday on ground zero plus two. I threw it away and it spent three days in the bin before I decided that even if the marriage was irretrievable the bag wasn’t. There’s still a small brown bloodstain on the side that dates from this period. And three scratches on the side that Daisy gouged out when she was ill. They’re a good reminder of my shortcomings. My fury over what I had assumed was an act of sabotage turned out to be hieroglyphics created by Daisy to protect me. And the person who had innocently told me that Daisy had invented ‘magic rituals’ to protect us was Max, then just eleven years old. That’s why I have a Walt Whitman poster with the quote ‘Be curious, not judgemental’ on the wall in my office. To avoid making assumptions about anything.
When I can find nothing else to usefully do with my time I pull out Lisa’s letter from the bottom of the bag. The envelope is crumpled and torn and the address label is missing. It’s a week since I first opened it. This time I’m hoping for clarity on how to respond. Time isn’t on her side. Cancer is an expansionist enemy with its own temperament and personality. I read slowly, trying to remember the sound of Lisa’s voice, the sing-song lilt and how everything she said, even the most mundane remarks, required an exclamation mark, but I can’t because it’s years since I last saw her. For a long time the only way I could deal with what happened was to pretend she had never existed, and everyone around me was more than happy to collude in that delusion.
I close my eyes for a moment and see her face clearly: the slightly upturned eyes, inherited from her mother, her long dark hair and the overgrown fringe to hide the chickenpox scar on her left eyebrow, her perfectly drawn lips. And then I suddenly remember the last time we were all on holiday together, how we played a game where you pull a name out of a hat and describe someone’s characteristics without giving away their identity. We were hunched around the wooden coffee table in the sitting room in Norfolk. For some reason Ava had written down Lisa’s name, Nick pulled it out and s
pontaneously said, ‘Cupid’s bow lips,’ and Barney immediately responded, ‘Lisa.’ I had never noticed Lisa’s lips before. Daisy was studying Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis at the time and after Nick moved in with Lisa, she thereafter sarcastically referred to them as Venus and Adonis. Thinking about this again, I feel like one of those patients who ignored a whole raft of symptoms until it was too late.
Sometimes I blame myself for bringing Lisa into Max and Daisy’s lives. But Lisa had been a part of my life for even longer than Nick and the children. I have known her for almost thirty years, since she arrived at my secondary school in the lower sixth after her father, an RAF pilot, was posted to a base in Norfolk. She had spent the previous three years at a base in Germany and was way more self-contained and sophisticated than the rest of us. She introduced us to the music of Kraftwerk, claimed to have seen David Bowie live in Berlin and immediately got asked out by the coolest boy in the year. I couldn’t believe she wanted to be my friend. I met Nick through her when he and Barney were cast in the same play at university.
We lost contact for a while after we graduated, when Barney was at the peak of his career as a rock critic and they spent all their time at glamorous parties, then seamlessly picked up again when we were pregnant with Daisy and Ava at the same time. When it looked as though Nick might be at a conference for a week over my due date, she offered to be my birth partner, even though she had only had Ava four months earlier.