‘Well, never mind. We can do it. If you do what I tell you. So say you will, eh? It’ll be the best thing you ever did, honest —’
And she leaned over and kissed Prue’s cheek with a loud smacking sound, sealing the bargain. But Prue just lay there with her oily tears sliding down her face and said nothing.
‘I like it,’ Radlett said. ‘We could call it, The NHS, are we —’
‘I’ve already got a title,’ Oliver said hurriedly. ‘The Unkindest Cuts of All. Hmm? Seeing it’s cuts in the services we’re on about. And the tape the old man made, he talks about Maggie’s cuts all the time, doesn’t he?’
‘We could edit that out —’ Radlett looked sideways at him and then sighed. ‘No, I suppose not. Well, OK for a working title. Unkindest Cuts it is. Though why you should imagine our lot will understand a Shakespeare quotation I’ll never know. They aren’t the brightest, you know. We’re not bloody Radio Four.’
‘They’ll understand,’ Oliver said. ‘If I have to spell it out. OK. I’ll need some back-up here. Editing channels and someone with a bit of common sense who knows how to use a razor blade —’
‘No way,’ Radlett said firmly. ‘This is all yours. You can put in a couple of extra expenses if you like, but extra hands you don’t get. Do your own bloody editing. If the story’s worth doing, it’s worth doing all of it.’
‘You’re a mean bugger,’ Oliver said equably. ‘You’d think you were spending your own money.’
‘The way the bastards upstairs get on my back I might as well be,’ Radlett growled. ‘So are you on or not? No in-house help at all. Just the use of a Uher. You can take one out and keep it — don’t have to hand it in again every day —’
‘Big of you,’ Oliver said sardonically.
‘— but make sure you account for every tape. They cost money, those tapes. And be sure your exes are legitimate, too. I can’t manage that much over the odds, even for a —’
‘Watch it,’ Oliver said ominously and Radlett lifted his brows at him and turned to go.
‘You may not like it, but a star is what you’re supposed to be,’ he said curtly ‘Anyway, just take it easy. I can slot in an hour one-off by the way, or —’
‘I’d rather have a short series. Give me a string of four halves, OK? Then I can spread it a bit further afield than just this business of the one old man losing his operation. There have to be other stories in other hospitals —’
Radlett shook his head decisively. ‘Not this time around. Keep it to Old East. That’s the representative London story — you know the sort of thing. Cover a lot of hospitals and all you get are single whinges that they can explain away. But you uncover a lot of stones in one place and it makes it a lot harder hitting.’
There was a little silence and then Oliver nodded. ‘Fair enough,’ and he grinned as the old man went away. He deserved his job, after all, he thought, watching him go slouching down towards the news desk and its clatter of telephones and computer screens. Still got a nose for the way a feature works best.
He stretched and then went padding over to the coffee machine to fill a plastic beaker with the thick black brew. It was a symbol of what had happened to him, he sometimes thought; he actually liked the disgusting stuff now, though he’d hated it when he’d started here. Twelve years, he thought then. Twelve years ago, before Sonia, before Melissa and Barnaby, before Kate — and he went back to his desk and sat there nursing the plastic beaker as he sipped at it, staring over the rim with blank unseeing eyes.
What on earth was he to do? He wanted Kate, of course he did. There were times when he knew that without her nothing would be worth anything any more, even if Sonia disappeared in a puff of smoke and left him the children without any problems. If Kate weren’t there as well, life would be hell.
And yet, and yet — and he closed his eyes against the image that had risen into his mind, of Sonia, sitting up in bed with just the duvet between them, staring at him in that hard direct way she had always used and daring him to deny that he could still be used by her in any way she wanted. He could have beaten her for the easy way she had made him react to her the last time he had gone to see her, the night he and Kate had gone to dinner with Esther and that boring husband of hers. Had that been why it had happened? Because he was bored by Richard and irritated at Kate for making him spend an evening in his company? Had he let Sonia get him into her bed just because of that? Surely not. Could he be so childish, so feeble, so —
‘Yes, I could,’ he whispered into the plastic beaker and the surface of the coffee stirred beneath the puff of his breath and sent its sickly smell up into his nostrils. ‘Yes, I could.’
But it hadn’t been just boredom. Because the evening hadn’t been that bad, after all. There had been Esther and she was fun, a good friend to Kate and therefore to him too. Or at least so he hoped, though sometimes he had caught her looking at him with a considering stare and had wondered just what she said to Kate when the two of them were alone together. Did Esther advise Kate to drop him, to go away from him, to do without him? It would be good advice, for what good was a lover who was still tied up in knots by his bloody ex-wife? Who couldn’t make the courts understand what was happening to his children at her hands? What good was he to anyone?
‘I’m a good reporter,’ he whispered then. ‘A good reporter,’ and then drained his coffee and chucked the beaker into the overflowing waste bin. He had four twenty-five minute programmes to plan out, and the sooner he made a start on it the better. There were people to be called, appointments to be made and ideas to be thrashed out. And he’d better start by getting some hard facts into his head.
And he reached for the phone to call his old mate Jimmy Rhoda on the Globe. It was a bloody nuisance always having to go outside the station to get access to a decent newspaper library. He’d been telling them that here for years, that they ought to keep a decent newspaper-type morgue but they ignored him, of course. Just kept tapes of past programmes, as though they were any use. That was the trouble with a station that worried itself as much about pop music as about its talk output. But Jimmy would help him out. He always did, and why not? Oliver had helped him out a good deal in their early years together at the Beeb. And he sighed and keyed Jimmy’s number on the phone and settled down to some real work.
‘Koestler,’ Jimmy Rhoda said to the chief sub. ‘Thou shouldst be living at this hour. That’s the guy. He said it all.’
The chief sub stared at him owlishly and said nothing, turning back to the console of his computer, hitting the keys with a stub of a forefinger to send columns of words crawling up the screen in front of him.
‘Why do I say that, do I hear you ask?’ Jimmy said and sat on the desk beside him. ‘Yes, I thought I did. Well, I shall tell you. Gladly. There’s this chap Oliver Merrall — Ah! I detect a response from you? The king of the call-in shows, you got it in one. We started at the Beeb together fifteen years ago, straight out of university, damp and pearly about the ears and dripping with integrity we were. Happily I saw the light and jumped into this illustrious pile of shit while he went off to beguile the airwaves even further with a voice he used to practise with every night in bed. A serious chap, old Oliver —’
‘Have you got any copy to put in?’ the chief sub growled. ‘I’m locking up your pages at half past six and —’
‘Listen to me, you old bastard!’ Jimmy said. ‘I’m telling you something sensible if you did but know it. Oliver rings me just now, will I dig around in the morgue for him, get some stuff on NHS troubles and especially Old East, the hospital in Shadwell. Right. And here in my hot little hand, what do I have?’
‘Your chopper most of the time,’ the chief sub muttered and went on stabbing at his console.
‘Vulgarian. Of course. But what else? A letter, no less! Someone has sent the editor a letter. It’s from a patient in — wait for it. Old East.’
‘So?’
‘So this patient has a story to tell! For a consideration.’
‘Oh.’ The chief sub looked bored. ‘Another one of those “I’ll tell all for a million, settle for half if you insist, send a cheque.”’
‘Something like that,’ Jimmy said. ‘Something like that. But it’s a good tale. At least the way it reads in this letter it’s a good tale.’
There was a little silence between them as he sat and reread the letter and the chief sub sighed noisily after a while and said, ‘Are you going to tell me or not? If not, get your arse off my desk and leave me alone. If you are, tell me and then get your arse off my desk and leave me alone.’
‘Mm?’ Jimmy Rhoda said and then grinned and ruffled the chief sub’s thinning hair with one hand. ‘I don’t think I will after all. It’s a nice story and I want to try it on the Ed. If she goes for it, then I’ll follow it up. If she doesn’t then I’ll try it for the Herald diary —’
‘One of these days they’ll catch you at your little games,’ the chief sub said. ‘Selling stuff to the bloody opposition.’
‘Yeah, well, one of these days,’ Jimmy said and went back to his own desk, whistling between his teeth. First he had to get the stuff out of the morgue for old Oliver. That would be a pleasure, because he was a good guy, and anyway he was entitled to his payment for the lead he’d dropped in his, Jimmy’s, lap. It might turn out to be nothing or it might turn out to be a real Koestler coincidence of the best kind. There could well be something worth sniffing out at Old East, and I’ve had two prods to send me on my way. Can’t be bad.
It took just ten minutes to sort out with the library what Oliver wanted and then he punched the number nine on his phone for an outside line and keyed another number.
‘Old East?’ he said at length and smiled into the receiver. ‘I’m just checking about visiting times in the ward where a friend of mine is. Kim Hynes. Can you tell me the name of the ward and what time is all right to visit? Hmm? Yes — yes. Ah — thank you so much!’ And he hung up and sat there for a while with a pleased grin on his face.
Chapter Fifteen
The day had started badly on the ward: by the time Esther got on duty they were already at least half an hour behind so she walked into a state of barely controlled uproar that did nothing at all for her already unreliable temper. And when the night staff nurse told her, sweating a little around the ears and with her hair in a tangle on her forehead so that she looked more like an anxious Old English sheepdog than ever, that Jenny Caversham’s fistula had clotted at around six a.m. and that while they were dealing with that, the old man, William Prior, who’d been admitted as an emergency a week ago and who had been nothing but trouble since he got in, had needed a new shunt made during the night because his Silastic tube had displaced and he had started a terrifying arterial bleed, she hit the roof.
‘You idiot,’ she roared. ‘Didn’t I warn you to watch that man like a hawk? The way he behaves it was inevitable he’d shift the bloody thing if he wasn’t supervised. I told them he was a bad candidate for a shunt anyway — should have had a subclavian catheterisation — I suppose he was on his own, hmm? Was that it?’
‘I’m sorry, Sister,’ the staff nurse stammered, almost in tears. ‘So sorry, but it was Jenny, you see. She was very disturbed and woke the others, and then Kim Hynes got agitated too and we were running from one to the other and —’
‘Oh, forget it,’ Esther said savagely, ‘and let me get it all sorted out. Who’s here to deal with Jenny?’
‘Miss Sayers is on her way,’ the staff nurse said. ‘Sister Russell said she’d send for her, and there’s the new houseman — I can’t remember his name —’
‘That’s all I need,’ Esther said and kicked off her shoes to put on her ward pair. ‘A half-witted houseman who doesn’t know one end of a dialysis catheter from another and — oh, go off duty, for heaven’s sake, girl — you look ghastly!’ And she felt a moment of guilt, for the girl did indeed look exhausted, and justifiably so; she knew from her own experience what hell her ward could be when things went wrong. Somehow problems always happened in clusters like this; never one thing at a time that people could cope with.
Just like home, and she scowled as she went hurrying up the ward to check on Jenny Caversham. Richard had been perfectly ridiculous this morning, expecting her to go all that long way round to deliver his bloody sandwiches to the Gants Hill place and being thoroughly impossible when she had of course refused; then the kids had been in a whining mood, losing socks and swimming gear and heaven knows what else besides and on top of all that Richard had started on yet again about it being time for her to stop all this stupid nursing lark and start working for the family business, so inevitably she had lost her temper. And now this. She’d deserved a peaceful happy ward this morning, not this shambles; and her eyes were hot with anger and self-pity as she reached Jenny’s curtained bed in the end section and marched in.
The young doctor standing there looked up anxiously and then his face cleared as he saw her.
‘Thank heavens it’s you,’ he said fervently, and looked down at the patient. ‘We’ll get this sorted out in no time now, Jenny. Sister’s here.’
Jenny, who was lying with her eyes tightly closed the way she always did when she was alarmed, said nothing, but she managed a twist of her mouth that Esther knew was a welcome and for a moment her spirits lifted a little. At least here they were glad to see her, and weren’t always complaining the way they did at home —
‘Kate’s on her way?’ she said as she began to check on the tangle of tubes and connections to the machine that ran into Jenny’s left wrist. ‘How’s it going now?’
‘She’s coming,’ the houseman said. ‘I’m afraid I woke her when I phoned, but I thought — anyway, she’s on her way. It seems to be running though it’s a bit slow. I’ve heparinised her and —’
‘Did you get the thrombus out?’
He flushed. ‘I tried, but —’
She nodded. ‘OK. It’s not the easiest of things to do. Just let me get there, will you?’
For the next little while there was silence as she worked her way through the various steps needed to get out the thick stringy clot that had stopped the easy flow of blood, and all the time Jenny lay with her eyes tightly closed, and the houseman watched, and when at last she had finished and the system was working properly again, Esther felt a moment of glow; for Jenny opened her eyes at last and looked at her and the houseman said softly, ‘Oh, neat. Very neat.’ It helped a lot to have that sort of approval.
The next half-hour was even busier as she harried her staff to catch up with the morning’s routine, and when one of the orderlies serving breakfast burst into tears in the kitchen because ‘Sister shouted at me for nothing’, and she had to send for the domestic supervisor to get rid of the woman who couldn’t be trusted to obey instructions and had been discovered giving a bacon and egg breakfast to one of the low-protein diet patients, all Esther’s bad temper came flooding back. It shouldn’t be like this. She should have enough nurses to do all that had to be done, and properly trained orderlies too. She shouldn’t have to be such a slave driver to make sure the patients were properly looked after, and when Kate arrived, looking a little ruffled by her early call, Esther almost snapped at her instead of being glad to see her. Which made Kate, who had had a difficult morning on her own account with Oliver being somewhat distant, very snappy too. Altogether a bad start to the day.
And it got no easier. Kim Hynes, now allowed out of bed for a little while, flatly refused to cooperate with the nurses sent to get her on her feet, and burst into floods of hysterical tears when Esther tried to find out why she was being so obstructive. The noise she made and her copious tears — which though genuine enough as far as Esther could tell, were very obvious and indeed theatrical — upset all the other patients at that end of the ward, including Jenny, who began to thrash about and so threaten to dislodge her tubes yet again.
‘Kim, for heaven’s sake, be quiet!’ Esther snapped at the heap of quivering pink silk that had t
hrown itself face down on its pillows and refused to be comforted. ‘If you want to stay in bed and rot, then stay there. Just don’t blame me if you get all sorts of complications from lack of exercise and the wrong breathing, that’s all. I’m more than happy to let you make your own decisions — but for the love of heaven shut up and stop upsetting all my other patients. There’s Jenny in a lather over you and if that leads to trouble with her dialysis again, I swear to you I’ll be here to scrag you!’
Kim’s shoulders heaved convulsively and the red-gold hair trembled as she banged her face into the pillow even harder, but she did lessen her noise a little and that gave Esther time to sort out Jenny yet again. She hated using tranquillisers more than she had to, but sometimes they were inevitable. And this was one of them.
By the time Jenny had settled to lie staring vaguely at the machine beside her Kim was sitting up in bed again, and as Esther passed on her way back to her desk she called in a weak voice, ‘Sister — oh, please, Sister, do let me talk to you.’
Esther glared at her for a moment, irritated beyond measure by the way Kim looked at her with heavy pathetic eyes and a tremulous mouth. That the poor devil had problems and needed help was undoubted; right from the start Esther had been truly sympathetic to her unusual patient’s needs, but the last few days, in which Kim had given in with luxurious abandon to a tendency to histrionics, had tried her patience sorely. It would have been much easier to snap at her now and march away but there was something about Kim’s stare that was more than display. And she sighed and came to stand at the side of the bed.
‘Well, Kim. Do you want to apologise for making such a drama?’
Mutely Kim nodded, gazing up at her with big appealing eyes. And Esther patted her hand and turned to go.
‘Well, well. All forgotten then. Just try to be a little more aware of other people in future, that’s all. And do as the nurses tell you. They’re here for your health, you know, not their own —’
Clinical Judgements Page 17