Second Opinion

by Claire Rayner

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That must mean you like it here. And like us.’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ She couldn’t help being combative. Not with him. ‘It could mean that the days drag like eternity and the people drive me bananas.’

  ‘Do they? And do we?’

  She relaxed and accepted the Irish coffee he’d ordered for her. It tasted remarkably good, if far too rich. ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘So, like I said. Good.’

  They settled into a silence for a while, until he stirred and leaned forward. His voice dropped and he seemed unusually uncomfortable. ‘Dr B. ….’ he said, and then stopped.

  ‘Mmm?’ The coffee, following the drinks she’d had in the pub and the Sancerre that had accompanied the fish, was making her agreeably sleepy.

  ‘I wanted to ask you …’ Again his voice drifted away and she roused herself and peered at him.

  ‘What’s up, Gus? Something bugging you?’

  ‘You could say that. I was just wondering …’

  ‘Well? Spit it out.’

  ‘I like you,’ he said baldly. ‘You know what I mean?’

  ‘As long as you’re not bullshitting, yes. I imagined you didn’t find my company totally repellent. Seeing you asked me out tonight.’

  ‘Oh, I mean more than that! You don’t have to come the silly miss with me, do you? I mean, it’s one of the things I like about you. Saying what you think, and all that. Even if you do sometimes go too far.’

  ‘Oh?’ She began to bristle. ‘How too far?’

  ‘Well, you know — well-brought-up ladies here in England don’t talk the way you do sometimes. Like saying bullshit, just now, and —’

  ‘Like hell they don’t!’ She was quite awake now. ‘I don’t think you listen to the way ladies — Christ, what a word! Ladies! — I don’t think you listen to the way ordinary women talk in this country. You ought to try, instead of just jumping to conclusions about women. You might get a bit of a surprise if you do.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you just know it!’ He sounded disgusted. ‘Here’s me trying to talk sensible and serious to you and what do I get? Another of your naggings about women and the way men like me treat them. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s no one who respects women more than I do! And don’t you go thinking otherwise!’

  ‘Oh, Gus, you’re such a — such —’ She was so incensed that her voice caught in her throat and she started to cough. He pushed a glass of water closer to her, leaned over so that his head was very close to hers and banged her back.

  ‘Yeah, I know, MCP. I swear to you, George, that half the time I don’t know what you women are on about. I try to talk sense to you about something important and before I can get more than a handful of words out, there you are running your mouth off about men and women. I just don’t get it. Are you looking for insults or something?’

  ‘They’re easy to find,’ she retorted. ‘If you insist on talking about women as though we were all the same, all of us, just — just boobs and bottoms on legs designed for you to trick out in tight skirts so you can gawp at them, then you’ll go on not understanding —’

  ‘Tell me what I said!’ He almost wailed it.

  ‘Glad to. You said you respect women as if we’re all the same — like dogs or something. You said that well-brought-up “ladies” don’t talk the way I do, which is a hell of a line. You said that you don’t know what women are on about, which —’

  He shook his head at her. ‘I obviously don’t. What should I have said? No, I mean it. Tell me, I want to learn. I’ve got to learn, for pity’s sake. Go on like this and we’ll never get anywhere, you and me.’

  That stopped her, and she blinked at him. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What did —’

  ‘Oh. I said we’ll never get anywhere, you and me. And I’d like us to.’

  ‘Like us to get — well, where?’

  ‘Oh, somewhere cosy.’ He grinned suddenly, a great white glimmering grin of sheer wickedness. ‘Cosy and quiet and comfortable where we’d have plenty of time to have some fun.’ The grin faded as she sat and stared at him. ‘Have I done it again? Is it an insult to make a pass at a la — a woman you fancy? I mean like? Oh, shit!’

  She couldn’t help it. The laughter came bubbling out of her, and after a moment of incomprehension he realized what he’d said and laughed too, until the pair of them were sitting with tears trickling down their cheeks, incoherent and breathless. Kitty, coming back to see if the Guv needed anything more and to prove to him what an excellent choice he’d made when he’d appointed her as manageress, looked at them indulgently and went away again, and one or two people at adjoining tables looked too, laughing in sympathy.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at length. He took out a massive handkerchief mopped his face and blew his nose loudly. ‘I didn’t mean to go off like that. But it is tricky, George, admit it. There was I trying to chat you up so’s you’d know what I was thinkin’ — what’s the way you’d say it? Yeah, so you’d know where it was comin’ from — and all you can do is nag me about the way I talk about women. I can’t help what I am, you know! I’m the same as most blokes I know. A bit rough round the edges but pretty good news otherwise. If I promise never to say shit again, and never to complain if you do, will you go out with me? On a regular basis, like?’

  She was startled, and couldn’t speak for a moment. She knew he liked her, of course she did. He’d made that pretty clear right from the start, after they’d first met when she’d come to Old East eleven months ago, but she’d not seen his liking as anything more than a sort of possessive friendship. He’d never made any sort of physical pass at her, unlike Toby Bellamy …

  Mind, he’d been very jealous of Bellamy, she remembered now, but that had blown over and they’d got back on to the old easy footing, laughing a lot, sparring most of the time, but in general comfortable with each other. And now here he was asking her … Asking her what?

  ‘What are you asking me, Gus?’ she said. ‘I’m not sure what you mean by “going out on a regular basis”. If you explain a bit more, maybe I —’

  From behind her there was a sudden crash of glass and she almost leapt out of her seat with shock. She whirled to stare at the origin of the noise, which was now continuing as a confused roar of voices as people shouted and milled about in the front part of the shop where customers had been queueing all evening to buy their fish and chips to take away.

  Gus was on his feet and plunging across the restaurant, and George followed him, not sure what else to do. There in the space in front of the fish fryers was a great pile of broken glass, and she could have wept as she realized that one of the beautifully engraved panes had been shattered. But she had no time to regret the loss of beautiful handi-work; in the middle of the wreckage was a heap of bodies, writhing and bawling in a furious fight.

  The next few minutes were bedlam as the people from the restaurant came crowding out to see what was happening and the women added their own shrieks to those of the waitresses, and the men jumped into the fray to pull the combatants apart. George, from her position at the very edge of the mêlée, saw that one man was bleeding heavily from a wound on his arm; she thought she saw it pumping and all her medical instincts shoved her into action. She hadn’t realized she had joined in until she found herself with the injured man’s arm held firmly in one hand as she tried to twist her table napkin — which had still been in her hand when she left the table — into a tourniquet to apply over the blood pumping from his left wrist.

  ‘Hold still,’ she bawled as the man tried to pull away from her. On his other side one of the fish fryers, a bulky young man with thick arms well covered with freckles and sandy hair, held tightly on to him so that he had to stand still, and she managed to get her tourniquet into place and then lifted the injured arm high above the man’s head, almost like a boxer’s victorious salute.

  ‘Keep it up like that till the ambulance gets here,’ she ordered. ‘That’
ll need some careful suturing. Is there anyone else who’s been hurt?’

  By this time the fighting had eased and the heap of bodies had separated into its component parts. Gus was holding a hefty blond boy with a big closely cropped head in a tight one-arm-behind-his-back grip; two of the fish fryers were sitting on another one who looked much the same, dressed, as was Gus’s captive, in jeans and aggressively studded black leather jackets. They seemed almost uniformed and George, looking at them and then round the crowd standing peering down at the miscreants with scared faces, caught sight of another in the same sort of clothes sliding away to the door.

  ‘Hey, stop that one!’ she shouted, and at once a couple of the men customers turned, saw him and grabbed. There was muffled shouting and some very loud swearing as the fish fryer who had been helping George hold her injured man plunged after the escapee.

  They almost got him, but he struggled free just as the police car someone had dialled 999 for arrived, blue lights rotating hysterically and siren whooping, to bring a pair of uniformed policemen into the affray.

  From then on it was a matter of moments before it was all over; an ambulance followed the police car within a couple of minutes and George’s man, looking dazed now, and with his hand still held up in the air and the other holding a handkerchief to a nose that appeared to be bleeding as well, was scooped up by the paramedics and taken to it. He was a tall man, well muscled, and George thought, looking at him more closely now, Indian or Pakistani. He was well dressed in a casual sort of way, and clearly bewildered by what was happening — until he got to the ambulance, at which point he suddenly seemed to become more aware of what was going on.

  He whirled, pulling away from the grip of the paramedics. ‘Get their names,’ he bellowed. ‘Make sure you get them — and every witness you can. I’m going to throw the book at them, I swear to you, I’m going to take them to every court in the land. Unprovoked attack like that, it’s disgusting. Unprovoked, no reason at all … Get their names —’

  ‘It’s all right, sir,’ one of the policemen said soothingly. ‘We’ll get all the information there is, you can be sure of that. We’ll see you at the hospital, get your statement there. Just go along now, they’ll fix you up, Mister —?’

  ‘Doctor,’ the man snapped through his handkerchief, and as he pulled it away from his face to speak more clearly, George could see that he had a gap in his teeth. Just knocked out now? Probably. She looked down at the floor to see if she could see it. An absurd idea. The floor was a mess of broken glass, blood and spilled fish and chips. If there was a tooth there it certainly couldn’t be salvaged.

  ‘All right, doctor,’ the policeman said even more soothingly. ‘We’ll see you at the hospital, Dr —?’ And he waited invitingly.

  ‘Choopani. Diljeet Choopani,’ snapped the other, at last climbing into the ambulance to be taken away as the policeman returned gratefully to the cluster of people in the front of the shop.

  Gus had his man handcuffed now, as the other policeman bundled the second one to the back of the police car. Its blue light was still rotating on the roof, lifting the whole scene into a lurid facsimile of a discotheque, since there were traffic lights just outside the shop which added their lollipop colours to the mixture. George began to feel a little shaky at the knees as she watched the rest of the proceedings; the two men, now in the car, were being driven off as yet another police car arrived and disgorged a couple of uniformed men who began to shepherd the spectators into the shop to take notes from witnesses.

  Gus seemed to have noticed how she felt, because suddenly he was beside her, one hand tightly holding her elbow.

  ‘All right, ducks. You did good there. That fella could have been a goner, bleeding like that.’

  ‘Hardly,’ she said a little sardonically, regaining her equilibrium. ‘It takes a bit more than that. I just did a bit of first aid. What the hell was all that about?’

  ‘A good question,’ he said, his voice grim. ‘We’re about to find out. But from all accounts, it was a racist attack. He’s a well-known chap, the one they went for. Local GP.’

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I knew I’d heard his name before.’

  ‘We’ve got two of the blokes who went for him, and there are one or two people here who think they know who the other was. So we’ll get ‘em sorted, you’ll see. God, I hate this racist stuff. We’ve been getting a damned sight too much of it lately. I think —’

  She gave him no chance to say anything more. ‘I think the evening’s over, Gus. You stay here and get to work. I know you’re dying to, and I’d be the last to stop you. I’ll see myself back. See you around.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll see you,’ he said, but he wasn’t listening to her. She knew that. His whole attention was focused on The Job. She went back into the restaurant to collect her bag, picking her way over the beautiful broken glass, and then slipped out to go back to her flat.

  All the way to the bus stop she thought about the way Dr Choopani had blazed his rage at the three men who had attacked him and wondered why they’d chosen so public and dangerous a place to do it. They must have realized they’d be caught, surely? Had he provoked them into action in some way? Whatever he’d said and done they’d had no right to behave so, but it would be interesting to know if he’d contributed in any way to what had happened.

  She paused before she reached the bus stop that would see her on her way back to her little flat and pondered; it was late, but not that late. After a little more thought, she turned and began to walk rapidly towards Old East. She’d call into Accident and Emergency to see how he was, and maybe find out some of the whys and wherefores. It’d be interesting, she decided, to learn a bit more about him anyway, remembering the way the nurse on Paediatrics had spoken of him this morning.

  And of course, thinking about Dr Choopani was a lot easier than thinking about what Gus had said.

  6

  A & E was surprisingly quiet when George got there. She had expected it to be humming with activity as it dealt with the results of the fracas at Gus’s restaurant, but realized, once she got inside (past the remnants of the anti-NHS Trust picket line, which had hung about the entrance ever since April when the new system had started but which was blessedly undermanned during the evenings) that there had really been only one casualty; the other men involved had been taken to the police station and no doubt would be seen by a police surgeon there if necessary. Dr Choopani had been the most damaged, and he was now sitting bolt upright on a couch in one of the cubicles with the junior casualty officer bending over his wrist.

  ‘Make sure you check the palmar radio-carpal ligament as well as the nerve supply, the branch of the median nerve to the thenar muscles passes just under there,’ he was saying. ‘I want a senior man doing this job. I’m not going to be meddled with by some junior or other. Oh!’ He looked up as George came in through the curtains. ‘Are you the senior consultant tonight? I’d rather be seen by one of the men, if you please.’

  George’s brows snapped together. ‘I am not the consultant here,’ she said as smoothly as her anger would let her. ‘I’m Old East’s consultant pathologist It was I who dealt with you at the restaurant when you were injured. I came back to see how you are. I needn’t have worried, of course. You’re in excellent hands, none better.’

  The houseman who had been gingerly exploring the wound on Dr Choopani’s wrist looked at her gratefully and she smiled at him as he tried to look like the sort of surgeon she’d described, rather than the uneasy young one he actually was. ‘Good evening Dr Barnabas,’ he said.

  George threw a glance at his name badge, grateful for the new rule that said all hospital staff must wear one. She hadn’t the remotest idea who he was, of course; remembering the names of all the junior medical staff was an impossibility. ‘Good evening, Adam,’ she said in a voice that made it clear she’d known him for all his professional life, and for some time before that, too, and then looked at Dr Choopani. ‘As I say, Dr Parotsky here
is one of our most accomplished surgeons. However, since you’re so worried, I’m sure he’ll agree to a second opinion, though for my part I’d as soon have Adam than anyone, especially as he’s here, and the consultant lives some miles away and will have to be called in. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, though. Do arrange it, Adam.’ She looked at the boy who grinned happily. ‘I’ll keep Dr Choopani company while you dig out Maggy Hill-Sykes.’

  ‘Who?’ Dr Choopani said sharply.

  ‘Maggy Hill-Sykes, Dr Choopani,’ George said silkily. ‘Our consultant on Accident and Emergency. I thought you knew all of us by name here! As a local family doctor …’

  He glowered at her and then looked at Adam Parotsky. ‘Can you manage to repair this?’

  Adam looked swiftly at George, who laughed easily. ‘My dear Dr Choopani, he does a dozen of these a day, don’t you, Adam?’

  ‘Er — yes,’ Adam said.

  ‘Then get on with it,’ Dr Choopani snapped. ‘I haven’t all night to sit here, waiting for some woman to — waiting for the consultant to turn out. And make sure someone organizes a skull film.’ He touched his left eye tenderly. ‘I might have a fracture of the orbit here.’

  George leaned over and gently palpated the bony rim of the eye socket. She shook her head. ‘I doubt it, but if you want a skull X-ray, I’m sure Adam’ll fix it Won’t you, Adam?’

  The boy beamed with sudden euphoria. ‘I’ve already ordered it, of course,’ he said. ‘Routine after a history like this.’

  ‘You see?’ George said, nodding at the man on the couch. ‘I told you you were in excellent hands.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Choopani snapped. ‘Let’s just get on with it.’

  Adam disappeared around the curtains to find a nurse to assist him and to get his equipment as George sat down on the end of the couch. ‘A nasty business,’ she said.

  Choopani glared at her from his good eye. The other had almost closed now. ‘A singularly obvious remark, if I may say so,’ he said icily. ‘It certainly wasn’t a nice one.’