by Jacob Ross
The heaviness that had been with her all morning lifted when she stepped outside her door. Bright, crisp air, a dormant lawn prettified by snowdrops, early crocuses and winter aconites.
She called a cab and was told to expect a thirty minute wait. She didn’t mind, she would still get in an hour or so before her shift began.
At the bottom of the driveway, her phone buzzed.
‘Where are you, Doctor?’ The voice of Nyla, the ward clerk.
‘Just leaving.’
‘Can you hold on please? I’ve been trying you for an hour.’
‘You were?’
‘Hold on.’ In the background, the calm tones of Mr. Wallace. Nyla spoke again. ‘We’re sending a car. Stay where you are.’
Ennis called back the cab station and cancelled. Already her mind was taking her into a state of taut awareness, of pared down movements, and a focus that blanked out everything outside the shadowless ring of light, and latexed hands that parted skin and tissue.
When the car arrived she climbed in beside the driver.
‘Two in two days,’ he said, his heavy arms curved around the steering. He swung his head in the general direction of Harlesden. ‘Girl again, I heard. Not good, y’know.’
Girl again. When she was heavy with child, she remembered not wanting a daughter – not only because Spooner did not either, but because of the girlhood she had lived before she left the island. They told her it was better here. She’d learned that it was not better – just different.
Mr. Wallace was standing over Nyla’s desk. She was busy clipping papers together.
Mr. Wallace reached out and wrapped long restraining fingers around Ennis’s elbow.
‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t wait. Chest x-ray showed a whiteout.’ He lowered his shoulders and looked into her face. ‘You alright?’
She nodded. Nyla handed her a sheaf of papers. ‘Casenotes. Recovery.’
Ennis scanned the notes, her eyes pausing over the words that mattered: trauma… interstitial… haemotoma. She passed them back.
With his hand still under her elbow, Mr. Wallace urged her away from the desk. ‘Patient will survive. You wanted to see me? I got your message.’
‘Yes, I…’
‘You sure you’re alright?’
She looked up into his face. If there was a man in the world she felt she knew it was this surgeon. She had stood beside him for the best part of her working life, first as a scrub nurse, now as his assistant.
The cafe was quiet. They sat in the far corner, by the window beyond which the huddle of old brick buildings backed into high glass structures that receded into a grey West London skyline.
‘Sorry I rushed you in,’ he said. ‘But you know how these things can go.’
‘That’s fine,’ she said. ‘I wanted to tell you first; I’m taking the redundancy.’
He rubbed his eyes, was silent for a long time. She sat studying his face.
‘What will you do?’ he said finally.
‘I’ll go back home to Grenada. I’ve been thinking about it for some time. There’s a hospital there. Besides, I have enough to live on.’
‘What’s enough to live on?’ He sounded irritated.
It seemed to Ennis that they were talking about something else, even if she wasn’t sure exactly what that other thing was.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘It’s your life. Who can stop you?’
She waited for him to say it first – the thing that she could never bring herself to put in words to him.
He eased aside the half-drunk cup of coffee, rested both elbows on the table, placing his chin on his turned-down hands.
‘You’re a lovely woman, Ennis. I can’t say I haven’t been, well, distracted by that. For a long time. But it’s not about that; we’ve handled it well, haven’t we?’
She nodded and looked away.
‘Remember when you were our scrub nurse? I think “scalpel” and you’re already passing it to me; forceps, curette – whatever; the right shape, size, number…’ He moistened his lips and fixed his gaze above her head. ‘I’m always surer when you’re there. At least I can be honest for once; I’ll call it by its name, Ennis. It’s intimacy. I used to think marriage was supposed to be like that. In my mind, with this job, there’s more at stake. We’re trying to make a stopped heart beat; to hand back life, and when it works, it’s like a delivery.’
He dropped a hand on hers, then quickly lifted it. ‘I’ve said too much, haven’t I?’
‘No,’ she said, rising from the table. ‘I feel the same way too. I – I have to see the girl.’
She went to her room and dressed in her scrubs, then took the lift to the fourth floor. It was always busy up here in ICU: a muted world of junior doctors, nurses and consultants rushing about in soft-soled shoes. The gurgles and ticks and beeps of electrocardiograms, ventilators, IV lines and pumps; of feeding tubes and catheters – all patrolling the thin, smudged line between life and death.
As she entered the ward, she saw the girl – her hair a splash of red against the grey sheets. Lena. She halted. She had not wanted to like this girl. She’d always kept the necessary distance from these young women her son brought home, saw for a couple of weeks before he sloughed them off.
But Lena had wished for conversation; she’d asked her questions about herself; would beg her to speak her ‘island-talk’ – which cracked up both of them with laughter.
There was that night Lena ran into her room and would not leave till morning. She hadn’t asked her what the problem was and Lena never said. Ennis told herself that she must have known all along, but she just didn’t want to accept.
Now there comes the memory of Trevor’s quick sharp words last night, the distinct contours of an argument. Perhaps Lena had told him she was leaving him.
Ennis did not take the elevator back down to the third floor, she wanted to avoid people. She felt exposed. She stopped above the car park, pressed her shoulder against the wide glass walls and let its cold intrusion seep into her skin.
In the courtyard below a child in a red hat, a doll swinging in one hand, was hopping around her mother’s legs. Directly under, in the parking bay, an ambulance had just pulled in, and by the urgency with which the paramedics were wheeling out the trolley, she knew that Mr. Wallace would be wanting her soon. Saving a life, he said, was just as good as bringing one into the world.
What about this, then? This giving up on one? This tearing of yourself away from the awful weight of love?
Ennis took out her phone and dialled in the numbers. She waited until they answered, then asked for David Marne.
A QUIET TIME
Kisha returns to the little farmhouse tired and light-headed with the things she discovered from her walk, especially the small, tree-covered hill at the bottom of the road which stands out, ragged like a Rasta’s head, against the sky. She spotted it the first evening she arrived with Muriel and the boy. An hour ago she climbed its slope and gazed down on the cows, the farms, the small flower-covered cottages just beyond, and the road that loops around it like a noose.
When she enters, they are lying on the large beech-wood table in the kitchen. Her sister has her dress rolled up over her gleaming thighs; the waist of the young man’s trousers forms a bracket beneath the tensed muscles of his buttocks. The boy could have been asleep except for the slow, random shifting of his hips.
Kisha backs into the late Normandy afternoon. Her feet take her past brown, shaven fields, dead bracken and limp, sun-struck flowers. She sits at the side of the road and sucks in air. A diffuse headache is throbbing at the back of her eyes.
She hasn’t eaten anything since morning, but she might as well climb the hill again, sit on the large round stone up there and try to clear her mind. Who knows how long those two are going to be on that table.
With a small eddy of outrage, she rises and brings down her Doc Martens on a snail. She watches the creature squirm and die at the end of its sem
en-like trail. If she’d known that this ‘holiday’ was going to mean witnessing her sister’s goings-on with that kid, she would have stayed in London.
She resents the quiet turbulence in her guts, the deep-down flaring of her nerves which, even here on this footpath, turns her mind to the butterflies copulating on the edge of stalks, the mansmell of dried grass, the rank of bulls in the fields that roll away from her towards that little postcard village.
This is not what her elder sister told her back in London. A quiet time, she promised. Ten restful days in Normandy. It was a present for the favour she had done for her.
It was Muriel’s thirteenth call in two weeks. Before that, Kisha hadn’t heard from her in three years.
She pretended she didn’t recognise her sister’s voice – filed down, buffed and polished until there was no evidence of the real Muriel behind it.
She wanted to say, ‘Hello Muriel Martin. What the fuck you want from me this time?’
Instead she queried quietly, ‘Y’awright, Sis?’
Her sister sounded conspiratorial, as if they’d been girl-talking every day. ‘Girrrrl, I found a man.’
‘Found?’
‘Yep, and I’m going to keep this one.’ Muriel laughed – short, musical, throaty. ‘Want to say hello?’ Her voice hollowed and faded into a string of background chirpings.
‘No,’ she said. ‘He there?’
‘Mmm…Mmm!’
‘Serious?’
‘Mmmm-hmm!’
‘How old?’
The briefest of silences. ‘Does it matter?’
‘How old, Muriel?’ Kisha smiled into the phone.
‘Well, you know the saying, Keesh: wimmen stay stronger, longer.’
Kisha could hear the metal creeping into her sister’s voice. ‘Uh-huh?’
‘He’s twenty in ten month’s time. Somming wrong with that?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Okay. Friday then. Just the three of us. The Angel? They’ve got a decent café above the cinema. Eight alright with you?’
‘Hang on, Muriel.’
‘Whatsimatter, Sunshine. Don’t you want to see me?’
‘Did I say that? And don’t call me ‘Sunshine’. You…’
‘It’s important, Kisha. Besides, don’t forget you owe me. Eight o’clock then!’
Muriel hung up.
She was there an hour or so before them; spent longer than usual in front of the mirror. She ironed her best top and the Ted Baker jeans she’d spotted in an Oxfam shop. And though partial to silver, she passed half a morning rummaging for the gold chain Toni had bought her for their Valentine. She even swapped her big silver hoops for a borrowed pair of emerald studs.
From her perch on the stool above the square her eyes fell on the youth first. He looked like any other lean-limbed young man on the street, with loose, army-green trousers, and trainers designed to draw attention to his feet. Clean-cropped, as if he’d just come from the barber’s.
Maybe it was the crisp white shirt at a time when creases and hoods were all the rage that drew her eyes to him. Perhaps that easy, loose-limbed stride – his head and shoulders following through with every step he took, almost as if he were drifting. It was all that pulled together that made it clear to her that he was foreign. A West Indian just arrived.
Her sister walked beside him, like someone taking a child to the funfair for the first time. She looked like money: a charcoalgrey, loose-fitting suit that yielded with every swing of her jangling brown arms. She’d swept her hair back from her forehead like a cobra’s cowl and was sashaying across the cobbles with black Gucci shoes so highly polished they appeared silver in the daylight.
Kisha felt her breathing quicken.
‘Hello, girrrl.’ Muriel gurgled, eyes bright, smile tight.
They exchanged frank, assessing gazes. Her sister was at that stage when the struggle with the body really began. Kisha saw it all the time: women who spent half their salaries on oils and creams and gels to smooth out the slackening flesh at the base of their throat; who fought the gradual surrender of their faces to the shape of the bones beneath, and the way the hair at the temples went slightly lighter than the rest. You picked up these things from working for six years in a hairdressing salon on Stoke Newington High Street.
‘Looking good,’ Muriel told her, smiling.
‘You too,’ she nodded. And Kisha meant it. Muriel was still lovely to look at. A person would have to search real hard to see the things she’d just observed. Her sister always made much of her light-brown colour, her long and not-so-very-black hair and eyes, and that nose which, she said, on the authority of her research on the Internet, she traced all the way back to ancient Syria.
It turned out that Muriel had not so much met the youth as saved him.
‘I spent my hols in Jamaica this year. Had to sort out some things over there for Mother.’ Muriel glanced down at her nails and threw a vacant look across the cafeteria. ‘Mother talks about you a lot more these days, y’know.
‘Talk is cheap. To hell with her.’
‘Kisha! She’s our mother.’
‘More yours than mine. Gwone, Muriel, I’m listening.’
‘Anyhow, I saw Rikky from my window. He was up against this hotel fence near the beach, you know, and four big guys were kicking the shite out of him. One of them was trying to slash his face or something. God, those people – they’re so violent!’ Muriel widened disbelieving eyes at her.
‘He gave as good as he got though. I’ve never seen anything like it, Keesh. I made the hotel call the police. He came over to thank me afterwards. That’s how…’ Muriel swivelled her head at Rikky and threw him a girlish grin. The young man smiled back.
Before they sat down, Muriel said, her lashes fluttering like moth-wings, ‘That’s mah maaaaen, Keesh. Say hello, Rikky!’
The young man took her hand and said hello in a voice that caught Kisha by surprise. It was too deep to belong to him, too rich and ripe for a youth as baby-faced as he. It was as if he’d borrowed an older man’s throat.
Muriel dropped her voice almost to a whisper, ‘Rikky’s here on holiday and he’s not going back.’
Kisha nodded neutrally.
Now her sister was leaning into her face ‘I, I’m asking you a favour, Keesh.’
‘Go on, den.’
Muriel sat back, tried to hold her eyes, gave up and focused on her chin.
‘Well – I’m asking you to marry him. For me.’
Muriel had dropped the Loans Manager intonations. She was now Muriel of the loose, uncertain mouth and the nervous hand that wandered to her throat and stayed there.
‘Sorry?’
‘I’ll, I’ll uhm – pay you, if that’s…’
Kisha placed the cup of coffee down so gently she scarcely heard it touch the table. ‘That’s what you asked me here for? Uh? Three years – and you haven’t even bothered to find out if I’m dead or living in shit. Then you call me outta the blue to meet you here. To ask me this?’
‘I’m offering to…’
‘Hold it right there! Don’t go no further.’ She’d levelled a finger at Muriel’s face.
A thin film of sweat had forced its way through Muriel’s makeup. ‘You haven’t changed, Kisha. That temper of yours still sooo nasty. I thought time might’ve, well – made things a bit better, y’know. Look, you’re thinking it’s because of my job. It’s not. It’s… it’s a couple of other things…’
‘Like?’
‘It’s not a favour I’m asking, y’know. I’m offering to…’
‘Like what, Muriel?’
Muriel would not look at her. She threw a quick, furtive glance over at the youth. Now she looked slightly afraid. ‘Shane,’ she muttered, ‘Remember Shane?’
Kisha did remember him – too much chat, too much curlyperm and so much gold around his wrists and neck; he was like a walking pawnshop. ‘Flash Pants?’
‘You never liked him. After you, well… left home.’
‘Well, you weren’t around anymore. A few things happened. Me and Shane, we sort of decided to, y’know…’
Kisha narrowed her eyes and leaned forwards. ‘You married that, that bloke? Christ! How long did it last – coupla weeks? Did it? And now you’re in a twist coz…’
‘It wasn’t like that. Jeezus, Kisha, you make it sound so crude!’
Kisha laughed. The boy lifted his head and stared at them.
‘Sort it out yourself, Muriel.’
‘I can’t. I really wish… It’s only for a year, you know. He’ll stay with me. I’ll sort myself out, you divorce him and then…’
‘No.’
‘For God’s sake! We’re supposed to be sisters.’ Muriel dragged her handbag off the table onto her lap. Her fingers hovered above the clasp. ‘How much is it worth to you, Kisha? Tell me. A coupla grand? Three? Just tell me.’ Muriel’s stare was hard and accusing.
‘No way!’
Muriel got up, creating a small eddy of perfumed air around her. ‘You got a short memory,’ she breathed. ‘That’s all I can say.’
‘Quite the opposite, actually. Reminding me again of the time you saved my arse?’
‘I’ll phone,’ Muriel muttered, barely turning to glance at Kisha. ‘You still owe me, y’know. Come on, Rikky.’
She gave them half an hour, got to her feet, pulled out some coins and walked out onto the High Street. She stared at the entrance to the busy shopping centre and decided to do some window-gazing.
You still owe me… Muriel kept saying that. A time had to come when she would set her sister straight.
Over the years, she’d managed to stuff that night before the Carnival in the back drawer of her mind. Now here was Muriel dragging it out and shaking it in her face.
An all-night rave in Camden. They’d decided to burn out the hours in the party there and carry the mood with them to Notting Hill – she, Muriel and her friends. Muriel was misbehaving like a drunk on steroids, although she never drank.
She, Kisha, had spliffed out long before entering the blackwalled building, drifting in her own little purple haze and shifting on the rhythm whenever she felt like it.