‘I’m a private type of person.’ I have always been. But now I want to talk.
‘More so recently?’
‘Leading up to that day. Perhaps.’
‘And were you extra tired, finding it hard to concentrate, longing to be by yourself?’
‘The doctor’s condition?’ Can I question him back into letting me speak?
‘Perhaps. And have there been – were there any unusual dreams? Flashbacks to …?’
‘To?’
‘To your abortion work.’
There it is again. This axe of a word. This bomb, cutlass, guillotine. He has to twist his mouth to say it. He wants nothing to do with his own lips and tongue, for contriving to be so obscene. I know this. But I want to start saying the things I never have before. I can’t believe I have missed this chance. I have told a half-story to this man, when I could have—
‘Any dreams?’
‘Yes, you do get dreams. I have had them, I mean. Maybe a few times a week, before. Dead baby dreams. They’re up in trees. They stare at me with yellow eyes. Or carpets of babies’ backs. Or dreams where just one baby looks at me, but its anger is like that of a grown-up.’
‘Okay, I get it.’
We face each other full on and silently. The only power I have left is the power to shock. His voice comes to me softly now, not asking for so much.
‘Still? Since you’ve stopped working?’
‘No. Nothing since that day in theatre.’
No one likes this kind of talk. Not even a psychiatrist, who must have heard all sorts. In any case, he has probably arrived at his destination, his conclusion as to how to name my mental state. Burnout, I wonder? Or something like it. And I have misused my time. Although I have put some things that actually happened in order and have reported these events accurately, I see that this isn’t enough. The psychiatrist is waiting. He is rising to shake my hand, to encourage me to rise too. He is impatient to marry his thoughts to one of the long list of psychiatric diagnoses in his DSM–IV. Before he excuses me, he has a final question, but I sense my answer won’t make a difference.
‘Becoming a gynaecologist. You just liked the work? Or was it anything in particular?’
I pause for a moment before giving an answer commensurate with all the others I have offered during this hour-long session.
‘Nothing in particular, no.’
How long does it take before the other story begins to unfurl? I don’t think I have even left the room. Maybe it is when I cross the threshold from the carpeted area, in which Dr Gilchrist and I have conferred, to the linoleum of the hospital where sounds replace silence. The two floors are part of the same hospital just as my two tales are part of the same few weeks of my life. Is this what it is to be a woman, this divorcing from its untidy twin a neat version fit for public consumption? The version we can live with from the one that unhinges us? It is enough that I am not aware of my journey home, or of walking through the building that I love into the angry streets which harbour it. That my bus trip passes like a dream. That I don’t know how I get from the bus stop to my flat. What I remember takes me all the way back to my desk where I find I have thrown my window open again and am looking back out on the trees, now bare, where this recollection began.
The other story. The B side. The background against which my relationship with Violet glows so brightly. The drama in which my dear Violet must take a bow, white hair billowing, in which she must graciously hand over her script, in which she must accede to being only a player in the drama of the life of Nancy, where she must become a bit-part, where the main role is to be played by someone called Tom.
Julia tells me about a party. Tons of the old crowd will be there. It is a fairy tale, it is the setting in which we will be reunited. Such events have enacted themselves since the beginning of history. I start to think about my appearance for the first time in years. Cinderella in rags, covered in dust but so pretty underneath it, brushing her ashes away, longing for the ball, birds swooping to help her pick up the peas, peck, peck, peck. She must have dreamed too of the finery she would wear to the ball to meet the love who would know her instantly. I don’t own any make-up. I don’t know what fashion is, but what does that matter? There is surely enough beauty in finding the person you have lost.
I go there. I’m not a single bit bothered that I don’t know anyone. I am a virtuoso at being invisible. I am in trousers and trainers. I am quite different from all the others. I am surely not unlike that girl of ten years ago. I am still strong and brave. I am all the things that made him love me. There are people everywhere. They move from room to room. They garland the stairs. A guy I’ve never met hands me a beer and starts to talk to me. He runs through long lists of people he knows, certain we will find someone in common. There is only one person in my canon. His name is a scar in my head. I stand my ground. I am satisfied with my watchpoint. I look, from the corner of my eye, for Tom’s blond head.
After an hour, I move to the first floor and I see him. He is talking to a group of girls. They are a different species to me. They gleam with sequins; their faces are like sunsets. I look at the man who is looking at me for a few seconds before I realise it is Tom because, of course, he has changed. He is not blond any more. He is thin now. He is surrounded by girls. I wait for what is meant to happen, for the crowd to part, for Tom to approach me. In an instant this becomes the version that is only in my head. The real situation is different. Tom raises a hand to me in greeting. His hand is at half mast. Then, I see his back again. I am examining it. What muscles are there? Rotator cuff, rhomboids, latissimus dorsi, deltoid. I receive no encouragement: nothing comes to me. This is what I have come all this way for. Not just to this party, you understand, but all the way through my life. And, in fairness, my heart does sink.
The party thins out. I move up a floor and down a floor. Everyone except me is drunk. I am much more wretched than that. I am disappointed. I am crushed that this hasn’t amounted to more. I am actually bereft. When Tom does approach me, eventually, tapping me on the shoulder so that I have to swing around to him, I see that he is drunk too, and hear it in his voice. It is quite natural, I suppose, that he wants to tell me about the last ten years of his life. He has been to university. He has started a trekking company. He has recently climbed Kilimanjaro. He is not the boy he was. But my new impressions are as insubstantial as cobwebs compared to the hours and years of dreaming banked up against my memory of him. He is impressed, in a brittle way, that I have become a doctor. I hope he’ll remember something about the way I was as a child that led me to this point, but he doesn’t seem to. I hope he’ll say anything at all about the time we spent together as kids, so I can see light shining in his face again, so that we can talk about that time as I have been unable to these past ten years with anyone.
Bathed in nostalgia as I am, it takes me some time to realise that Tom is going about the humdrum business of seducing me. I’ve dreamed of this, but not so emptily. I want to pour significance into what is happening. I want to give our conversation the shape and smell of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But I am eclipsed by the momentum of routine. And I don’t want to miss out on what is afoot, however paltry it may be.
At the top of the house, there is a room with coats on the bed and a bolt on the door. Tom’s adult face is soon above mine. But it is his fourteen-year-old face I choose to see, in those Virginia mountains. His hand held out to me offers me something outside of myself, seems to promise me the chance of being a different sort of girl than the one I am becoming. I jump over to him, feel both wild and safe. And in that dingy adult room, I do not get off the bed to find my bag. I do not stop for a conversation. I do not pause to find the condoms I have carried everywhere with me since the first time I had sex. I barely move. I lie beneath Tom and, though I am having sex, sex is not a fraction of what I want. I keep very still because, the truth is, I can’t believe my luck. If I move an inch, say a word, my dream of ten years might end. I might break the spell.
I might make myself concrete and unfriendly precisely when I want this man, above all else, to find me beautiful.
The party slams shut. It doesn’t flower into the night. Sex does not buy me the opportunity to sleep with the man I have loved for years. He leaves the room, and the house, without me. And then come the days in which I have to learn to live with this feeling of slamming shut, repeating itself over and over. Of slamming, and then things being quite shut. Sometimes, I wake in the middle of the night, grateful that I belong to a hospital whose lights are never extinguished. Sometimes, I get up and shower as early as four in the morning. Or sometimes it is five, more civilised and less crazy, if my radio is whispering farming nuggets to me rather than the spaceless World Service. And then I put on something smart enough to wear on the wards but practical enough to cycle in. And I let myself out of the flat, helmet and bicycle clips already on. I march along the path to where my bike is parked just outside, holding its lights already lit, one a white glare, the other strobing redly. And during silent pedalling, the day arrives like a watercolour as I cycle so that by the time I arrive at the hospital the sky is not quite black but bluish at the edges: the concrete morning is nearly here, I have got to at least the threshold of another day.
And, in these mornings after Tom, there is Violet who is always pleased to see me when I approach her through the dark of the ward, where the night-time smells of those sleeping around her still cluster, not yet blown through by the doors that will soon be opening and closing to bring ward rounds, groups of doctors who will swirl this air away, replacing it with their own scent of showers and adrenalin.
After a few weeks, I discover I am pregnant.
As I wait out the long days between one panel session and another, I continue to make early morning visits to the hospital. I suppose it is a sort of superstition that drives me. I hope that my intense sitting will make some sort of difference to my patient, the woman I have been prohibited from looking after in my usual, more rational way.
Although I move slightly further away from the Intensive Care Unit with each of these visits – I don’t want to be noticed – wherever I choose to sit, I notice lowly workers striving in the gloaming. Housekeepers, their job titles branded in white letters on their uniform sweatshirts, are summoned to situations that nurses will no longer involve themselves in. They saunter to wherever blood or shit or ascites or anything else disgusting has been spilt, excreted or expelled. Porters push patients around this miniature city from one test or probing to another, and back to the wards again. And security guards, with big arms and hangdog faces, lope towards knots of strife on this ward or that.
I start to recognise people who work on the unit. I see the same nurses come and go although none recognise me in my civvies. There is a doctor though, who does. He has a red-and-white motorcycle helmet and his boots are always dirty. He looks a bit familiar to me in that way that many doctors do when you have worked the London hospitals for a few years. Sometimes he says hi to me as he passes. I am always too busy wondering about my patient to stop to work out where I’ve seen him before.
Then, one morning, just when I think he is about to pass by, he sits down suddenly beside me on the short bank of moulded hospital chairs. He is huge next to me and, with some irritation, I am unable to keep my thoughts steady with him so near. I had been imagining what my patient’s blood pressure might be, her respiratory rate, other markers of her physiological state, but now my mind is forced into an unwelcome state of expectation.
To add insult to injury, the doctor does not speak straight away; he just fidgets. It is the closest I have been to anyone in a while, and he is the most obtrusive person I have been near for ages. He drums his feet. He clenches and unclenches his fingers, so that I am aware of each and every one of them. He knots his hands together and then lets them fall to his sides, very close to my body. He undoes a button on his white coat and does it up again. He runs his hand through his hair, forcing me to notice the very bounce of it. What finally comes out of his mouth seems casual, indolent even, compared to the frenetic activity of his body. ‘Long shifts you’re doing here on sentry duty. Surgery?’
I am surprised by his voice, which is deeper than I expected. And by his east coast American accent. I am also surprised by myself for sounding almost normal.
‘Gynae.’ I put my hand inside my cardigan, ready to pull out my ID badge if the doctor becomes troublesome. Having exchanged a comment with him, I am now aware of more than his limbs. Big face, wide mouth, heavy eyebrows. Not pretty, but handsome. Hence the imposing nature, no doubt.
‘Right. But you’re considering defecting. You figure, after all those hours going crazy on the labour ward, you’d rather come and join us on the unit?’
I am not sure how to extricate myself. I shouldn’t be here. I wonder if he might tell me something about my patient. Again I am struck by something familiar about him.
‘I’ve a patient with you. But I can’t come in and see her.’ I gesture at my clothes as if this might explain my situation. It would have been better to leave, but I can’t resist the possibility that I might get some information if I stay. I might have to be a little less hostile if I’m to get anything out of him. I turn to him properly for the first time.
‘You’re from the States.’
‘Ah …’ He looks pleased. ‘My mom’s English. She was worried about raising us there. Thought we might turn out too … how do you say it? Squeaky-clean?’
There is another long pause. The doctor is thinking about his past but I don’t want to know about him. I sit very still until he speaks again. I am relieved when he starts to tell me about the only person who matters to me right now.
‘Okay, so, our gynae patient. Corner bed. Let me see …’ He rests his fingers together. He faces me and shuts his eyes. Trusting. Handsome. As I scrutinise him, he looks directly at me.
‘But does that make you the doctor who …? The doctor?’
I wish I could disappear. ‘Yes. Me. Which is why …’ I look down at my clothes again. I really want to leave now, but he was just about to tell me something. I’m sure of it. I should have stayed away. My heart starts to beat too fast. I pick up my bag, but then stop because I feel the man’s hand on my arm. I am amazed by the weight of it. I am stilled by it completely.
‘No, please don’t scurry off.’ He smiles with that broad mouth of his. ‘Hey, I’m David, and I’ve fucked up multiple times.’ He raises a hand. We used to pledge allegiance like that at school in America. ‘Look, your patient is stable. At least, she was last night. We’re looking after her.’
‘But how is she actually doing? I want details. I mean, all I can do is wonder and wonder. And, if only I knew a bit more, I—’
‘You could what? Sit here freaking out even more? Wouldn’t you be better off doing something else? It’s not like she’s on her own.’
Seconds pass but the doctor doesn’t say any more. He has found me out. He’s disturbed my concentration but that’s all. Suddenly I feel hopeless.
‘Okay, so you’re obviously not going to tell me anything. Why are you still sitting here, then? I mean, what’s the point in sitting here if you have nothing to say?’
‘Well, you know, it really isn’t that I haven’t got anything to say,’ he tells me. ‘A person can just sit quietly.’
I’ve had enough, though. I get up to leave. I look at the doctor head-on for the first time, at his broad face, at the whole of him. Where do I know him from?
‘And now you’re going to tell me I can’t come here again?’
He thrusts his hands deep into the pockets of his white coat. I envy him. I wish I were back at work. I feel so small.
‘No, Nancy, I am definitely not going to do that. You care about your patient. That’s why you’re here, right? Well, good for you. You come and hang out as much as you like.’
He doesn’t get up and walk away as he should, so I have to. I stand up and head down the hospital corridor. It’s a long walk befo
re there is a corner which I can turn, to get my privacy back. The whole way down the corridor, I wonder if he is still looking at me. And even then, I don’t go back to thinking about my patient. I wonder how the doctor knew my name.
‘Nancy, it’s not necessary to be such a complete freak, you know. I’m asking you to do the cress, not put your name down for an allotment.’
My nephew’s face is solemn. He puts his hand on my arm to compensate for his mother’s harshness, and says, ‘It’s not hard to do. D’you want me to show you?’
‘I want to! I want to!’ My niece joins in, jumping up and down, maddened by her brother who, having discovered the sudden preciousness of the seeds, is waving them above his sister’s head, just out of her three-year-old reach.
Julia just crosses her arms and looks at me. It’s not rocket science, says her face. You’re meant to be giving me a break. I take a child’s neck in each hand, sachet now in teeth. I can’t believe this is enough to make them laugh. I motion with my eyes to my sister that she should leave the room, free herself. I marvel at how noisy her life is compared to my own.
Then we have the upturned lid of an egg box. My niece has filled an old Avent baby bottle, with the top of the teat chopped off. The children tear paper towels from the roll, and fold them and lay them, ever so carefully, in the lid, then make them sodden from the bottle.
Through the kitchen hatch, I see the sitting room full of the wide silver light of winter, and feel the allure of this place which is empty of children. There is the lime-green sofa and, past that, the sea, its short waves showing their olive underbellies. The spiff of foam blown sideways off them as they break.
‘Aunty Nance!’ calls me back to two right hands cupped for seeds. It is for me to fill these hands, a job they don’t doubt I’m up to. He must be tired of female emotion, my straight-faced nephew, what with Julia and myself in the same house all weekend; impatient with the welling of tears in a grown woman’s eyes. ‘Do you want to try?’ he says, taking the seeds from me and pouring a pile in my palm. I think of the grain holder in Virginia that we tried to climb into and how angry our parents were because you could die doing that. My niece has left some space for me in their wadding bed. I find it is not quite enough for me to scatter the sharp-smelling seeds. I press them gently where they land, into the softness there.
Dirty Work Page 8