by Jane Shemilt
‘Beth?’
It takes a couple of seconds to place the smiling face bending towards her: the party last night, the tired girl who wanted to plant trees for her baby. Gita.
‘This is so amazing. I’ve just ordered that cherry tree.’ Gita leans forward and kisses her, then straightens, revealing a baby strapped against her chest in a stripy papoose. ‘Meet Billy.’
Beth would have seen something was wrong even if Gita hadn’t mentioned Billy’s hydrocephalus. His large head lolls against the side of the sling; his features crowd together under the swollen dome of his forehead.
‘I might have known you’d be here,’ Gita continues happily. ‘What are you buying?’ She peers into Beth’s bag.
‘Oh, just a few daffodil bulbs for next spring.’
‘Gosh, how organised. I wouldn’t have a clue.’
Beth smiles, calculating how soon she can say goodbye; she wants to plant the daffodils, then sit at the table in her clean kitchen, a list in front of her. Albie will need equipment to take to the lab, an excuse for his presence, an idea of the time it might take.
She walks rapidly to the till. ‘I should pay for these.’
Gita follows, leaning her elbow on the counter to watch as Beth picks up seed packets of carrots, beetroot and lettuce, and as an afterthought, parsley. Gita fingers the little paper envelope. ‘My mum always says that parsley only grows in a house where the woman rules.’
Beth nods, hardly hearing; she pays and turns to go.
‘Come round for coffee,’ Gita proposes suddenly. ‘I’ll take you. The car’s round the corner.’ She touches Beth’s arm. ‘My mum sent some special biscuits.’ Her other hand is cupped over Billy’s head; a pleading note has entered her voice.
Gita’s flat is on the ground floor in a modern block on the main road in Crouch End. She waves her hand airily to the patch of grass in front – ‘For the cherry tree,’ she laughs. Inside, they navigate their way through a room full of toys to the kitchen. The surfaces are littered: glasses with crimson dregs sit alongside bowls containing dried cornflakes beached above puddles of milk. A kitten drowses on a cushion near the sink.
‘The mess!’ Gita exclaims, as if proud of the disorder. ‘We need a bigger place but we can’t afford it; Jake doesn’t have a regular salary. He’s freelance and very picky; he only works on things he thinks are important.’
‘Like that story in the paper?’
‘Exactly. He worked on that case for years. His tenacity is great, but more space would be nice.’ She leans forward to rest the papoose on the counter. Releasing Billy, she holds him high in the air, turning him a little to show him off, like a new kitten or puppy. As Billy smiles, a stream of mucus falls from his mouth to Gita’s cheek. She laughs again, and shifts him to a hip to wipe her face, humming as she walks round her untidy kitchen. The child seems part of her body, as essential and taken for granted as a limb. Beth looks away quickly. A cork board on the wall is covered with photos of every size: a younger Jake and Ed on a painted canal boat, Jake with a guitar and Sophie playing an accordion, another revealing a large family group in a restaurant, Ted and Jenny among them.
‘That was the night Ed proposed to Sophie,’ Gita says, glancing over. ‘His family were thrilled, specially Ted. Sophie marrying Ed completed the family in his eyes; he’d more or less adopted Jake already.
‘Jake? Why?’
‘Jake met Ed in rehab. You may not know that Ed was an addict as a teenager. Jake was too but he was older; he took him under his wing. They went through it together. Ted credits Jake with rescuing Ed, since then he can’t do enough for him. He paid for Jake’s journalism course.’ She glances down at Billy. ‘Daddy’s a lucky boy, isn’t he?’ She grins. ‘You should see Jake and Ted together, like big kids. It’s sweet.’
Jake should take care. Ted’s generous if he wants something, but once he’s taken what he needs everything changes. It happened to his wife and then to her; now it’s Albie’s turn. Last night his eyes were black with pain.
‘You okay?’ Gita puts a hand on her arm.
‘Sure.’ She points quickly to another photo: a beautiful white-haired woman in a dark blue sari next to an older version of Gita in pink carrying a bundle in her arms. ‘Who’s this?’
‘Me as a baby, my mum and grandmother. They adore Billy.’ She puts her lips to the boy’s forehead. ‘They’ll all be here at Christmas.’
Christmas. Families gathering, children celebrated; the bright colours in the photo blur. The shriek of the kettle makes her jump.
‘Oh sorry, it’ll have to be tea; we’ve run out of coffee. Could you take Billy?’
He weighs more than she’d thought – not a kitten or puppy, more like a small sack of damp sand. His mouth is a perfect circle of surprise, the large head smells of warm toast. His heat penetrates to her skin and she is hit by a wave of longing so intense she sways on her feet. Gita doesn’t notice. She is humming again, dropping tea bags into mugs and opening a tin of diamond-shaped biscuits, speckled with sugar. ‘Mum is forever sending food parcels, as if we’re starving. Does yours still do that?’
Beth shakes her head, holding Billy more tightly. The last food from her mother was twenty years ago. Baked beans in front of the television, followed by a kiss on the cheek, wet with alcohol, the door closing, stilettos tapping down the stairs. A car door slamming, the engine revving; her parents had been, the police told her later, precisely five minutes from their deaths.
‘I can’t resist.’ Gita crunches into a biscuit. ‘Breastfeeding makes me ravenous.’
Billy begins to grizzle. Gita holds out her arms and Beth hands him over. The place where he had rested feels cold, a little damp, empty; she smooths her crumpled shirt.
Gita pushes up her jersey and her red lacy bra, Billy pummels her breast and then there is peace. Beth watches his small toes curl. The veins in the stretched skin of his forehead seem to bulge rhythmically, as if filling with liquid at each mouthful. Beth watches the way the small lips close round the nipple, the cheeks hollowing with each suck, and her own nipples begin to ache with memory.
After a few minutes, Billy jerks his head back and he begins to cry. Gita lifts him to her shoulder, patting his back. ‘He has a problem with digesting his feed; there are lots of problems, to be honest.’ She stands to rock him, looking weary. ‘I shouldn’t complain. Ted helps with all the medical stuff. He’s a saint, don’t you think?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ Beth glances to the photo of Ted surrounded by his family. ‘You’ll have to ask Albie.’
Gita looks surprised. ‘So I guess you medics must be too busy to socialise much amongst yourselves.’ She gestures towards the dirty glasses. ‘Jake parties with his mates all the time.’
There would be music, jazz maybe, talking, dancing, the smell of exotic food. It would be warm and crowded. The rooms in their flat are deserted, a little cool. No one comes; she hasn’t wanted friends. Albie is enough. Albie is everything, but slim as a scalpel slipping between her mind and these certainties is the sense of missing something, of being mistaken, of being too late. Too late for laughter and parties, too late for a family. The stilettos tap to silence and the door in her mind slams shut. ‘I should go … the dog.’
As she fumbles by her feet for the bag of bulbs, the front door crashes open.
‘In the kitchen,’ Gita calls.
Jake comes in, a compact shape moving swiftly across the room. He pauses to glance at Beth as he takes Billy from Gita. Billy begins to cry again. Cradling his son, Jake comes close to Beth. ‘Hi there, it’s good to see you again.’ His odd-coloured eyes probe hers as if to find out why she’s in his house. He is bouncing on his feet to soothe the baby but the movements seem faintly aggressive, like the dance of a boxer.
‘You too.’ Beth turns away, unsettled. Why did she come, after all? Gita had been insistent but she could have refused; perhaps she’d simply been following the baby.
‘I’m off now, Gita, thanks for the tea.
’
‘Let me drive you.’ Gita gets up and, pushing her breast back into the bra, starts hunting for shoes.
‘It’s okay, I’ll catch a bus.’
Jake walks to the door and holds it open for her. Billy has stopped crying. He regards her unblinkingly; his eyelashes are clumped together in small, wet points.
‘Bye, Billy.’ She touches his foot quickly.
‘It was good to meet your husband the other night.’ Jake jogs from side to side, his body blocking her from leaving. ‘You know, Ted put the drainage system in Billy’s head. He lets us phone him if there are problems and sometimes he meets us on the ward at Great Ormond Street Hospital.’ He sighs. ‘But he’s mostly in the States now, so we were wondering, as Albie’s doing his locum …’
‘I’ll ask him.’
Jake steps away from the door, nodding his thanks. So that was why Gita was so friendly and why she’d invited her round. It wasn’t about making friends at all. Beth understands, though. She would have done anything to have helped her daughter to survive, anything. She walks swiftly past Jake without saying goodbye.
Her aunt would have said to plant the daffodils neatly, two bulb-widths apart, but she wants a random blaze of colour and throws handfuls of bulbs on the lawn. She digs out cones of grass-topped earth where they fall, drops in a bulb and replaces the turf, pressing it flat. A robin flutters to the fence in the dusk, attracted by the smell of earth, watching for worms. She sits quite still but he flicks away into the trees next door. Wet from the grass seeps through her trousers; it’s too dark for more planting now. She is tapping compost into a plug tray on the draining board in the kitchen when Albie returns. He watches as she scatters the ridged brown parsley seeds over the soil, and then he sits down, whisky in hand.
‘Hungry?’
He shakes his head.
‘How was your day?’
He shrugs. There are dark lines under his eyes, his days are relentless. ‘How was yours?’
‘An orthopaedic list, then I cleaned, planted daffodils, that sort of day. I met Gita at the flower shop.’
He looks through the window then away again, as if disappointed not to see yellow flowers blooming in the dark autumn garden. ‘Gita?’ he echoes absently.
‘From last night, Jake’s partner.’
He doesn’t respond; he must have forgotten. She won’t pass on their request to help with Billy just yet, he seems tired. She covers the little seeds with brown granules of vermiculite and pours water over them.
‘Did you notice if there were CCTV cameras in the lab?’
‘There were none the last time I looked; I didn’t have time to go today.’ He closes his eyes.
She pulls cling film from the roll, stretching it tightly over the tray; he’s still undecided. ‘I was thinking you might need some equipment, syringes, needles, a sharps box.’ She drops these ideas lightly, seeds scattered on to compost. ‘Gloves, maybe, things like that.’
Albie says nothing but pushes himself out of the chair, pours himself another drink and hands one to her.
‘Just what I needed, thank you.’ She smiles up at him and carries the tray to the window sill then washes her hands.
He sits down again and drains his glass. ‘Criminals wear gloves,’ he says at last.
‘They’re the criminals, Albie.’ She walks over, kneels by his chair and speaks softly. ‘Ted is a thief. He has stolen everything he possibly could from you, but this trial is yours by right; yours and the children’s. You need to make sure the outcome is positive or your work will stall before it’s had a chance to reach them. You have to, Albie, for the sake of those children. You know there’s a safety net in place.’
He seems to be listening, but as she leans to kiss him, his eyes are full of struggle. ‘I’m here to help whenever you need me,’ she whispers. ‘I’ll do anything you want.’
He looks at her as if seeing her for the first time that evening, then stands and lifts her against him. She slips her hand between the belt of his trousers and the warm skin behind. His response is immediate, a match to kindling. He pushes up her skirt, unbelts his trousers and treads them down. She steps out of her pants and he lifts her, carries her a few steps to the wall, holds her as she curls her legs around him, the weight of his chest pressing against hers. Then he is inside her, she stifles a cry, his face is buried in her neck, he is absorbed, panting, quick as an animal. He comes in shuddering gasps. She clings to him, stroking his hair. Tears of pain are wet on her cheeks but she doesn’t care. It seems to her that she’s signed her name to a pact.
In bed that night they make love again. He is tender this time and very careful; he strokes her hair, murmuring to her, watching her face as he waits for her to climax first. Afterwards, lying side by side, they hear the fox, a high-pitched, unearthly sound. She pushes herself up.
‘Foxes,’ he tells her.
‘But this sounds noisier than normal.’
‘A vixen on the prowl. Lie flat, sweetheart, don’t move.’ He puts a pillow under her knees; he is thinking this will make the sperm’s journey easier.
‘How do you know it’s a vixen?’
‘The females always scream.’ His voice slurs, he is sliding into sleep. ‘If it worries you I’ll get rid of it. Foxes are shot as vermin in Jura.’
‘Don’t do anything, Albie. What if she has cubs?’ Albie doesn’t answer. His face is turned into the pillow. He is asleep.
14
London. Autumn 2017
The glass doors of the private hospital slide back soundlessly. Albie enters, leaving behind the damp world of wet leaves and grey skies as he walks through the luxuriously furnished spaces of the reception area to the untidy changing room, transforming from man in the street to doctor as he goes. As he puts on the blue cotton theatre clothes and slides his feet into a pair of bloodstained plastic clogs, the metamorphosis completes. With the clothes he becomes the surgeon, life simplifies.
He scrubs up with Betadine, the tarry scent recalling the pines in summer behind the house in Jura, though at this time of year the trees will be tossing in autumn storms. As the season deepens, life on the island strips back to weather and food; the struggle for survival becomes elemental. The deer come off the hill and group in the conifers. He’d give a lot to be there now.
He glances at Sabat, his theatre nurse, scrubbing up alongside. His wife had a baby last week, he looks half asleep. A young nurse steps forward with his gloves, her fair hair plaited and pinned like a milkmaid. She opens the paper envelope containing his gloves so that once scrubbed, he doesn’t need to touch the paper which would desterilise him. He slips his hands into the gloves, working the fingers to fit, and then the automatic doors swing open into the theatre and he steps into the innermost circle, the bright heart of the building, of his work, of who he is. He stands a little apart. Owen is talking to the patient while slowly depressing a white-filled syringe connected to the cannula in the old man’s arm; the replies mumble to silence and his eyelids flicker shut. He is swiftly intubated.
Albie checks the scans. The degenerate discs are obvious; one block of bone rests directly on another below, which has thickened to take the weight, trapping the emerging nerve. In front of him is no longer a man’s neck, stretched out for a knife, but an operating field, to be cleansed and made ready. He swabs the neck with a sponge on a stick dipped into prep fluid and lays out the green wraps as simply as if organising the repair of a broken machine. Sabat hands him the scalpel and in less than a second he has incised the skin of the neck. In this opened flap lie the carotid artery, the recurrent laryngeal nerve and the brachial plexus. Injury to any one of these would be catastrophic; moving the structures aside with his fingers, he dissects to the spine. The remnants of the disc are removed piecemeal like so many fragments of crabmeat; then he drills the bony spurs away from the surrounding bone, freeing the trapped nerve now glistening in the widened canal. He inserts an artificial joint between the vertebrae, forcefully pressing it in place.
Checking the clock, he is surprised to see almost two hours have passed.
He closes up the wound then strips off the tight gloves, his hands damp with sweat. He writes up his operation in the patient’s notes, then walks into the coffee room, circling his head and shrugging to ease the stiff muscles. His shoulders burn. His own discomfort is irrelevant: in a short while the patient will turn his neck cautiously from side to side, open and close his hand, realising his movements are free of pain.
Sabat has made coffee for him and fills a glass of water for himself. They sit next to each other, both sighing with relief. He takes in his friend’s contented smile.
‘How’s life with the baby, Sabat?’ he asks, ignoring a lightning stab of jealousy.
‘Fine, thanks. My parents are with us; my father says prayers of thankfulness every day. It is the first grandchild.’
‘Prayers,’ Albie repeats. The word seems as incongruous as ‘evil’ did at the lecture; it has been years since he prayed. He wouldn’t remember the words.
‘He is a priest, so is my brother,’ Sabat continues. ‘That’s what I was supposed to become, but I chose this work instead. My other brother is a social worker.’