This time the door was closing, as if someone had arrived, or gone back in because they’d forgotten something. Then a large blue and white CarpetClean van parked in front of me, disgorging two matching blue and white men, and I couldn’t see a thing. I stepped out of the way of a couple of miserable women with buggies and a plump girl posting a bundle of letters. I repeated my act – looking at my watch, pretending to make a call and then a text on my mobile, peering along the street. I was going to have to move down a bit to get a view of 214, but not in the direction I was facing because there was another white van manoeuvring into the space next to CarpetClean. So I turned to walk the other way – and whacked my shoulder into an elbow.
‘Ay – perdón,’ I heard him say as he strode on, mobile pressed to his ear and a holdall hanging from his shoulder. And I watched him go down the rest of the road, heard him laughing, chatting in Spanish, even his walk looking like it was set to music, and wondered at how all these people in the street could be so unaware of him, who he was, how he was. I put my hand to my shoulder and smiled. He was worth the wait.
***
I spent some time sorting myself out with the hand dryer in the ladies’ toilets then took myself off to the canteen for some sugared tea. I’d thought myself to be in love several times: precipitously, with a charming but lust-driven Alhambra tour guide; blindly, with the soon-to-come-out sensitive A-level Theatre Studies student playing Lysander; unwisely, with the tall, dark and handsome – albeit greying, stilted and ultimately faithless – Ocular Anatomy and Physiology lecturer. And then with Jez, who captivated me with his creativity, his trueness to himself, his confidence, his funny, affectionate nature and gentle good looks. But these attributes had become rather flipped with time: his creativity as an excuse for avoiding the reality of the family finances; his trueness to himself as a selfish pursuit of his own interests without considering the consequences on others; his confidence as an eroding element on my own; and his charm and good looks, although a little faded now, a source of maddening blindness among family and friends to how bloody difficult he could be. I didn’t know how it had happened, but this captivating free spirit had somehow grown up to be a bit of a bully.
So I’d forgotten what it was like to be in love; circumstances and characteristics fusing to create an unstoppable force. Even after just half an hour on a train.
I put away the papers I’d been pretending to read and went off to my office, wondering what task I would be up to performing in my drained and distracted state. I was relieved to find I had the place to myself. I walked past my colleagues’ desks and retrieved my favourite biro from one and a depleted tube of mints from another. Bloody light-fingered doctors – Moaner Lisa had a point. And sloppy too: almost every available surface had either a stained cup from the canteen, a long-broken printer, dislocated Anglepoise, buckled file divider or pile of dusty, unopened journals. On impulse, I phoned Portering and unbelievably they arrived within ten minutes to relieve me of the lot. I then took armfuls of waste paper to the recycling box – only five steps away down the corridor for heaven’s sake.
The air was thick with dust, making me sneeze and irritating my eyes. I took my contact lens case off to the ladies’ so I could wash my hands and take my lenses out for a rinse. The basin was disgusting – it looked like someone had washed some coffee cups in it – and made me think of the one pictured at the beginning of a presentation of a study about contact lens hygiene given many years earlier by a colleague who now worked down under. And that’s when it came to me.
Jo had done a study in which she’d visited the homes of contact lens wearers and taken water and dust samples from their kitchen and bathroom basins and compared the cultured organisms with those in the patient’s contact lens cases. I remembered her coming back full of tales of dirty bathrooms, unmade beds and flirty men. I opened one of my dusty old box files that had narrowly missed being carried away and found the publication.
I recalled being reprimanded about an over-succinct Methods section I’d written many years ago: remember it must be detailed enough for someone to be able to reproduce your results. Who on earth would be bothered to do that, I’d thought. But now here I was, cursing my old mate for her lack of practical assistance: what kind of a swab, exactly, would you use for inside a plug hole? And what would you place it in afterwards? I’d never done any of this mucky kind of research – the Questionnaire Queen, Jo used to call me.
I went off to the Path lab and found Malcolm, a waspish little Scotsman who usually had no time for fools, particularly female ones. But I was having a weird day in which everybody seemed to be keen to help me, as if I was unconsciously giving out some kind of alarm pheromones or distress signals. I burbled something about being interested in doing a study like Jo’s, and asked what I would have to do. Ten minutes later I’d been fully informed of the techniques required, or would have been if I’d understood it all, and had managed to slip some swabs and containers into my bag when he was called out of the office. I could do it – well, the sampling anyway. Or well enough.
I needed to call Jessie soon: if she’d got a new contact lens case and thrown her old one away I’d have no reason to visit her. Visit them. She was bound to agree: the consent-to-be-contacted paragraph was ticked as well as signed. But the timing of it was crucial; I wanted to meet her, but I also wanted to see Alejandro. I checked his performing dates on the Opera House website and made a note of them. Google revealed some guest appearances in New York, so I jotted them down too. Then I sat down with my list of dates, my Filo and Jessie’s questionnaire and willed myself to find the courage to ring her.
I stared at the phone. I put my head in my hands and closed my eyes; I really had had enough for one day. But I had the room to myself, which was quite a rarity. Once again, people seemed to be abetting me, in this case by absenting themselves with flu or by covering an extra clinic. There wasn’t going to be a better time. I made calls nearly every day to patients who’d filled in questionnaires. Oh hello, this is Dr Buchanan from the eye department at the hospital (pause for grateful recognition). Thank you so much for doing the questionnaire while you were in Casualty. I was just wondering if I could clarify... I told myself I should be able to go into automatic, come on.
I picked up the phone and dialled the number. After only three rings the voicemail came on. Disappointingly, the BT standard one. I wondered if I should try again, but then I remembered that she was out. I’d seen her leave hadn’t I? Well, possibly. I waited for a few minutes, summoning further courage, and called the mobile number. Four rings. Five.
‘Hello?’ The girl who’d answered earlier.
I went into my patter, a little breathlessly, faltering slightly on the basin sampling bit, and arriving at a rather craven ‘Would that be possible?’
But she was already interrupting me.
‘Of course. I’d do anything to help. You’ve all been so kind to me.’ A sweetly modulated voice. ‘Actually, what about now? I’m not doing anything.’
I imagined her sitting with a tea on a luxurious sofa, the breakfast cleared, a washing load on, pausing before wandering off to the shops for some fresh ingredients for Alejandro’s evening meal. But now was no good: Alejandro was out.
‘Unfortunately, I can’t get away. Would it be okay if I came after work, say about seven-ish one evening?’
‘Tonight?’ She seemed very keen. Perhaps she was bored or lonely. No, that wasn’t possible. And tonight wasn’t possible: I was too frazzled to have my wits about me, wearing an unflattering skirt, and looking crumpled after my earlier drenching.
‘No, there’s something on at my son’s school,’ I improvised.
‘I could do tomorrow or Thursday evening,’ she offered. I glanced at his schedule: stupidly I’d only put dates, not the days of the week. I felt my brain go into a wobble; I had to get this right.
‘Can you hold on a minute? I just need to check something.’
‘Of course,’ she replied.
I put my hand over the receiver and exhaled forcibly, like they show you how to do during childbirth. It was all in front of me - my Filo was open - I just needed to get a grip on myself. Yes, the 9th was a Friday, so that’s why she wasn’t offering that: she must be going to see him looking deliciously distraught in Giselle. I took my hand off the receiver.
‘Either’s fine. Shall we say tomorrow?’
I let her give me the address and a detailed description of the route I’d taken that morning. ‘We’re half way down, on the left-hand side, opposite the post box.’
We.
6.
Moaner Lisa was sitting at her desk, dramatically blowing her nose. I was going to have to hear about her flu symptoms, her valiant, too-soon return to work, the backlog of study patients she’d had to rebook, the fact that in her absence someone had used up her printer cartridge. But for once I was in need of diversion.
‘Better?’ I inquired, to set the misery ball rolling. But when she turned and looked up at me I saw puffy, red watery eyes that weren’t viral conjunctivitis. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Damian, that’s what,’ she said through her teeth. Damian. I couldn’t match a face. But this wasn’t unusual: doctors just don’t tend to register with me. Planks, most of them, as if all those years of intense studying and ambition have stunted their overall development as human beings.
Further irritated by my open mouth and blank expression, she gave a shove to a pile of hefty hospital notes on the desk next to hers – the one used by the new doctor in our office – causing them to fan out and knock a half-filled paper cup of coffee over a mobile phone and some printed letters. Letters to GPs from Mr Damian Tyrwhitt-Blake. Good grief, I thought, she’s been having some kind of a thing with this graceless, over-craniumed creep. I had a pang of sympathy; this was a true sign of desperation. He was more insect than man, for heaven’s sake, and it now appeared, a predatory one. Like one of those aggressive grasshoppers in that animated film Seb used to love – A Bug’s Life, that’s it. I grabbed some tissues from my desk, but she put her hand up to stop me wiping up the spreading brown pool.
‘No! Let him fucking clear it up. Nothing compared to the clearing up that prick’s going to be doing later today.’
I was intrigued, and frankly impressed with her passion and adroit use of language. I saw her in a whole new light; she was suddenly my kind of girl.
‘Well let’s leave the scene of the crime then shall we? You need some lunch, so –’
‘I can’t go to the canteen in –’
‘You’re not. We’re going to this café I know that does the most amazing homemade quiches and herbal smoothies. All organic, of course. And not a hospital staff member in sight.’
‘Where?’ she asked with a watery smile.
‘Trust me. We’ll have to cab it, but it’s my treat.’
It had started soon after he’d begun using the office; she was amazed that I hadn’t picked up on it. ‘But then,’ she added resentfully, ‘you’re always plugged into your music thing.’ It’s called an iPod, I wanted to tell her – she really needed to get up to date with life beyond thyroid eye disease and available-for-a-reason doctors. I learnt that he was initially very attentive, romantic even, although I struggled to imagine it.
‘Until he got what he wanted,’ she concluded.
This was an image too far. I saw his bony frame pumping up and down, beads of sweat shining on his prematurely increasing forehead. On top of this wistful, doe-eyed creature – far too beautiful and refined for him – but he’d singled her out as vulnerable and homed in.
‘Suddenly he’s too busy, isn’t he. Says I’m too serious, too dependent.’
He had a point there. But surely he could have foreseen that? Then again, he was a doctor, and unless it’s disease progression, they’re not good at foreseeing anything. The consultant I worked with had failed to foresee that his rock-climbing Welsh wife wouldn’t want to live within ten miles of Islington and would resent it throughout their marriage, that his drummer son wasn’t going to get into medical school. Lisa should have foreseen that a relationship with Damian – a man who makes numbered lists of tasks that are reliably crossed out by 5.30, and views mankind as a pitiful joke for his amusement – was not going to lead to the fulfilment of her romantic dreams. ‘He’s not worth it, Lisa. It’s his loss.’ She looked even more hurt. ‘Or just try to enjoy it for what it is.’
‘What it is, is a dick-share with Isabel Marquez,’ she said, a little too loudly for the ladies enjoying chai lattes at the next table.
‘What? Are you sure?’
‘Well this morning he left his mobile on his desk – it’s as if he wanted me to find out – and he got a text from her: You are star. Thank you. I see you later, kiss.’
‘That could mean anything. Maybe she’d left her 90D lens in the clinic and he’d picked it up for her. Corrected her English in a research application. Any number of things.’
‘Have you seen her?’ she asked.
I wanted to say, what would a Spanish beauty want with a cicada, when she could probably have the pick of the pasty-faced doctors – should she want any of them at all, that is. I thought of Alejandro and the large pool of ladies he must have selected from. They shouldn’t allow Latins into this country: native attraction to them appeared to be causing widespread infidelity – real or imagined.
Lisa had started to sob into her broccoli wholemeal quiche. I rubbed her shoulder vigorously, trying to nudge her into seeing sense.
‘Ask him. Ask her. But whatever they say, promise me something. Get out more. Do things. There’s a whole world outside the hospital, you know.’ And then I had an idea. ‘Have you ever been to Sadler’s Wells?’
‘Once. Ages ago – my sister’s birthday outing when she was over from the States.’ She blew her nose. ‘It was Sleeping Beauty and I loved it. But I’ve got nobody to go with.’
‘You have now.’
As usual, I had the season’s little red book in my bag, and before we’d finished our lunch we’d phoned and got tickets for Northern Ballet’s Romeo and Juliet.
‘I’m not sure that ballet’s a good idea,’ she said. ‘Believe me, watching finely-tuned artistic, athletic men in tights and open shirts cavorting around with swords is always a good idea.’
***
Six o’clock. I’d somehow passed the afternoon pushing notes and questionnaires around my desk, palpitations and nausea increasing by the hour. According to the day-in-the-life interview, Alejandro would come home from the Opera House between six thirty and seven on a non-performing day. I wondered, for the umpteenth time, if he would recognise me from the train. In some ways it would be easier if he didn’t. But that would mean that the connection I’d felt was not even slightly mutual, and although I told myself this was likely I couldn’t bear to believe it.
A last trip to the ladies’: teeth, hair, mascara, remove small green spot of spirulina smoothie from my blouse. I checked my bag: questionnaire, sampling kit, map book – I wasn’t supposed to be quite sure where they were – careful, where she was.
I ran through the things I had to remember, or rather, the things I had to remember not to know. I didn’t know that she lived with Alejandro Cortés, a dancer, or anyone in fact; didn’t know that she’d been there for about six months; didn’t know that she’d been a nurse and now, inexplicably, wasn’t; didn’t know that she’d once attended a Covent Garden function wearing a dainty pair of pink glasses.
It was still sunny and surprisingly warm. An evening where the workforce of London look like they haven’t a care in the world, strolling arm-in-arm or laughing, spilling out onto the pavement from flower-adorned pubs. How London could always be if the weather was always this balmy and sensual. How it must be in Spain. In Cuba. Bring on global warming, I thought – the English are in need of mass thawing.
I’d arrived. I felt faint with nerves but managed to press the doorbell below the sticker marked ‘A’. She mu
st have been looking out for me: the door opened almost immediately. She greeted me like an old friend and I made my wobbly legs follow her through the hall and their door into a sparse sitting room. A large leather sofa and enormous TV screen, an ethnic-looking rug on the polished floor boards, a long line of CDs. Interestingly, an electric piano. But no Alejandro. She was wearing those pink glasses: perhaps her eye hadn’t fully settled enough to wear contact lenses again. Her soft blonde hair, shorter than in the Covent Garden picture, was girlishly swept up into little grips either side of her freckled face. She was wearing one of those smocked tops that Seb’s teenage girl friends wore – unflattering and completely unnecessary for a flat teenage tummy – and a cutely pleated short denim skirt. Like her questionnaire suggested, the perfect school girl.
She launched into an appreciation of the care she’d received at the hospital: the friendly nursing staff, the short waiting times, the kindness of the charming young Irish doctor she’d seen on two of her visits. She was lucky there, I thought, but then luck probably followed her around like a lamb wherever she went.
‘Would you like some tea? Coffee? A cold drink?’
I was playing for time so I set her to making some tea. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to follow her into the kitchen, but I didn’t want to be standing there on my own when Alejandro came in.
‘How’s the eye?’ I asked.
‘Oh not too bad now, but the doctor said to leave my contacts out for two weeks.’
The kitchen was sleek and spotless; you couldn’t imagine any self-respecting bacterium or amoeba being seen dead in there. She was filling a kettle, getting out skimmed milk. There was a minutes-eating deliberation over the type of tea I’d like.
MEN DANCING Page 4