Going Under

by Sonia Henry

  I feel a glow of pleasure at his words.

  Before I can respond, his phone rings. It’s intensive care. Mr Wilde has come out of recovery. He is awake, and doing well.

  ‘He’ll be on the ward in a few days, until I’m sure everything is okay,’ Dr Prince tells me. He looks pleased. ‘But I think it will all turn out quite well. He should make close to a full recovery.’

  ‘To think those horrible people at that meeting didn’t want to let you operate,’ I say with feeling. ‘And now look: he survived the operation and will get better and his wife won’t have to drive in the city by herself ever again.’

  He is surprised into laughter. ‘What?’

  ‘Mrs Wilde was really nervous about driving in the city because, you know, they live out on a farm,’ I explain. ‘And I felt so bad for her. Now they can just live out their days on their farm and never have to come back to battle Sydney traffic.’ My face is burning with embarrassment. ‘It’s the small human things,’ I add, feeling a bit stupid.

  Dr Prince looks over at me and frowns slightly. I have no idea what he is thinking.

  ‘You’re a very interesting young woman, Dr Holliday,’ he says.

  I’m so startled that by the time I open my mouth to respond he’s already walking away. I think I see the other Kitty Holliday, the one standing on the other side of the looking-glass, smiling. I peer at her, hoping to get a better look, but she slips out of my sight, always hovering just in the periphery.

  thirteen

  ‘So then he just said you’re a very interesting woman?’

  I’m standing in the kitchen the morning after Mr Wilde’s operation. Winnie’s looking at me sceptically.

  ‘He said, “You’re a very interesting young woman, Dr Holliday,”’ I correct her.

  ‘Like, he just came out with it? What was the context? Were you saying anything interesting?’

  ‘Not really,’ I admit. ‘I told him Mrs Wilde hated driving in the city. Maybe he thought that was interesting.’

  Winnie doesn’t look convinced. ‘Maybe,’ she says. ‘Do you reckon he was trying it on? Like, did he ask you for a drink after? Or try to get you alone in the change room?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, he just left,’ I say.

  ‘He wants to sleep with you,’ Winnie says knowingly, sipping her coffee. ‘When he says, “Interesting”, he means, “I want to put my penis into your vagina.”’

  We start to laugh.

  ‘It’s really not like that,’ I say, still laughing. ‘I’ve got a massive crush on him and he feels sorry for me. Although he’s also really nice. He’s asked me to help him with this research paper. He reckons if I do an all right job I can go to Sweden in a few months and present it.’

  Winnie looks surprised. ‘Wow! That’d be cool!’

  I agree. It does sound cool.

  ‘You can combine your annual leave with a conference and make it tax deductible,’ she says, suddenly reminding me she is a tax lawyer. ‘Heaps of doctors do that.’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘Anyway, I have to get ready for work,’ she says, jumping up. ‘I like this guy who works on the floor below me and I want to make myself look so attractive he’ll be forced to ask me out for a drink after work.’

  ‘That sounds—’ I stop ‘—almost normal. For you, I mean.’

  Winnie grins. ‘Apparently he’s into weird fetish parties,’ she says casually. ‘Like where people get whipped and shit.’

  ‘Oh, of course. He couldn’t actually just be normal.’

  ‘He told me he’s only into ice cubes and stuff, though,’ she says, her grin widening. ‘He’s not full fet, apparently.’

  ‘So no dungeons, just the freezer?’

  We both collapse into hysterical laughter.

  ‘Sometimes I think we choose our romantic conquests based on how funny the story will be to tell each other,’ I point out, gasping for air. ‘Between my old surgeon and your “it’s just ice cubes” fet guy from work.’

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ she says, draining her coffee down to the dregs. ‘He could be my soulmate.’

  ‘Better get a bigger freezer then!’

  Her laughter floats down the hallway behind her as she leaves for work. I let the lightness swirl around me and recognise it as an unusual sort of feeling these days, when everything is generally stressful. I wish, for a moment, the hospital was less intense and that Dr Prince was young and single and that we could go for a beer together and make a few slightly off-colour jokes, rather than hover over exposed brain tissue.

  I’m pulled from this fantasy by Max emerging from his bedroom.

  ‘We need to sign our timesheets, Kitty. We forgot last week and that’s why our pay was late! Let’s go do it now while we remember.’

  Max grabs his stethoscope and bag, then my coffee.

  ‘Mate!’ I protest, as he downs what was left of my instant cappuccino. ‘I was drinking that!’

  ‘You snooze you lose, Doctor,’ he says as I follow him out of the house. ‘That’s why you never have a boyfriend.’

  We walk up the hill to the hospital together, bickering.

  ‘What happened to the guy you met in Switzerland, anyway?’ Max asks as we pass the homeless man who I see every morning asleep at the bus stop.

  I sigh. ‘You know we don’t talk about Fabien, Max.’

  Max looks sympathetic. ‘You like him, though.’

  It’s true, I think to myself sadly. I do like Fabien. Or I did.

  ‘Well, he’s on a ski field having fun and I’m standing here with you not having fun,’ I point out rather snappily.

  ‘Just skype him,’ Max says. ‘It’s not like you’ve got anything else going on.’

  He’s right: I don’t. The last I heard Fabien was planning to head from Switzerland to South America to work as a scuba dive instructor. He’ll be exploring physical shipwrecks while I’m turning into an emotional wreck.

  Fabien Pho inspires feelings in me that I don’t understand so I pretend they don’t exist, which is a lot easier. We’re so different that we might as well speak different languages. While I struggled through years of university, he was working as a roadie for famous bands and travelling the world. He decided to move to Zermatt, the coolest ski resort in Switzerland, just because he thought it would be fun, and the thought of skiing down Toblerone Mountain (the Matterhorn, which features on the Toblerone chocolate box) appealed to him. (Doing something … just for fun?! I could hardly imagine the idea.) Winnie and I had met him at a pub during après-ski drinks on a holiday to Zermatt we couldn’t really afford. We had got merrily drunk—our inhibitions thrown to the wind—and I woke up the following morning next to the cutest man I’d ever seen in my life, even though I couldn’t remember his name. Winnie woke up next to an eighteen-year-old, a moment that still holds a special place in her heart.

  ‘Will you be my Toblerone Mountain boyfriend?’ I asked the cute man in my bed.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  ‘What about when I go home?’ I demanded, despite the fact I’d just met him and couldn’t remember his name.

  ‘We can Facebook every day,’ he said, smiling. ‘And we can get a house overlooking Bronte Beach and get married and have two kids.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, sitting up in bed. ‘How are we going to afford a house in Bronte?’

  ‘You’re going to be a doctor,’ he said.

  ‘Are you joking?’ I asked indignantly. ‘So I’ll be slaving my arse off in emergency at some stinking hospital and you’re going to be, what, a surf instructor?’

  We both started laughing. Fabien, who has a Vietnamese mother and a German father, was born and raised in Sydney and was from, of all places, Avalon, a beachside suburb on the way to the hospital where I now work. That’d be right, I thought, admiring his lean torso. I’d come all the way to the Swiss Alps only to meet a ski bum from Avalon.

  Fabien did end up becoming my Toblerone Mountain boyfriend. It was the most successful
relationship I’ve ever had. He took me skiing all over the mountain, and even when we went off-piste, and I would start freaking out thinking that my father’s warnings would come true and I would ski into a tree and die, he would just laugh at my worried expression, slap me on the arse and say, ‘Come on, sexy bum! Let’s see where we end up.’ Every day with Fabien was like a fresh adventure, which came with a lot of joy. I didn’t even know I’d lost the ability to feel that kind of joy until I finally let go and went with the flow.

  Fabien’s favourite thing to do after a hard day’s skiing was to lie in bed and watch a clip from the movie Meet Joe Black on YouTube. Before Joe becomes Death, he meets the love of his life, a doctor, in a coffee shop next to the hospital. Joe says to the doctor that meeting her was like ‘lightning striking’.

  ‘That’s like us, sexy bum. You’re going to be a doctor, just like the girl in the movie,’ he would say, grinning at me. ‘This is when lightning strikes.’

  I always had a good laugh whenever he told people how we found each other. Somehow, a drunken one-night stand at the seediest pub in Zermatt was translated into: ‘We met at a coffee shop.’

  ‘Kitty!’ Max startles me out of my daydreams, and I recalibrate to see that I’m not perched on a snow-covered peak with a gorgeous ski bum but instead standing at the entrance to an old corridor with a stethoscope around my neck, and the only man in sight is my gay best mate.

  ‘Snap out of it!’ he orders. ‘We’re on a mission.’

  We make our way down the dingy corridor towards the admin office where our timesheets are kept. This building used to be the old hospital, which is now decaying; the hospital’s management haven’t decided what to do with it, so they’ve made it a temporary home to administration.

  ‘Fuck, it’s creepy down here,’ Max says, shuddering as we walk past an empty ward filled with old patient beds and random medical equipment from the 1950s. ‘I don’t know why they don’t just knock it down.’

  ‘It’d be asbestos or something,’ I say, trying not to breathe too deeply. Medical admin has taken enough from us; I don’t want their only gift to me to be mesothelioma.

  Medical administration is in a tiny little office deep in the bowels of the old hospital, attached to the new hospital by a long, dimly lit corridor, so nondescript that you could easily forget it exists, except when there’s a mistake with your pay—then you realise that this shitty little office in the basement of the old hospital is actually the controlling force behind everything: who gets hired, who gets fired, and who gets paid. The hospital capitalises on the fact that doctors have way too much other shit to worry about to pay too much attention to discrepancies on our timesheets. Doctors are too busy trying to survive, and ensure their patients survive too, to sit down and properly analyse the world’s most convoluted payslip. This is perfect for medical admin; it means that most people won’t bother trying to fight for the overtime owed.

  Most of the stories that go around about administration aren’t good. The brave junior doctors who speak out and demand they’re paid for the overtime hours they work are treated like political dissidents. There are hair-raising tales of junior doctors who’ve dared to raise an issue about a disparity in hours or pay being taken in for private one-on-ones with the head of training, where it’s suggested they have mental health issues and are ‘harassing’ admin by daring to question them. If you’re marked out as a dissident, it’s only a matter of time before you’re shipped off to the proverbial hospital gulag, never to see the light of day of a specialist training program or a decent reference.

  ‘Hi, Nicole,’ Max says as we walk into the office. ‘I love your shoes.’

  Nicole’s wearing extremely high leopard-print heels that make my ankles scream just from proximity. Her skirt is too short and her top too revealing, her hair too shiny and her lips too plump. Her dress hugs her curves so perfectly I almost have to avert my eyes. She is a Botticelli, a Victoria’s Secret angel. I am in awe. She looks amazing.

  Even Max, who is revolted by vaginas, can’t stop staring. Nicole smiles, and her hair moves, a shimmering chestnut rug of Pantene and regular keratin treatments.

  I suddenly feel self-conscious. My scrubs are so baggy the crotch hangs almost to my knees, making me look like a cross between a gangster from an early nineties MTV music video and an obese man.

  ‘Hi, guys! I had a really fun time at drinks the other night.’

  ‘So did we,’ I say, making a mental note to find some smaller, more flattering scrubs and to book myself an appointment with my hairdresser (who am I kidding? find a hairdresser) as she hands over our timesheets.

  ‘We must do it again,’ Max agrees.

  ‘I ran into Jack this morning,’ Nicole tells me, leaning in conspiratorially.

  ‘Really,’ I say.

  ‘I’m sure he wants to sleep with me,’ she says. ‘You know when you can just tell?’

  Max looks at me but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘He’s asked me to do some research with your German guy,’ I say casually. ‘The one on sabbatical in Sweden.’

  Her eyes widen.

  Instinctively, I regret telling her this, but I don’t exactly know why. It’s not as if I spend much time with Nicole. I also don’t know her European surgeon lover from a bar of soap.

  ‘I don’t think I’ll bother with it, though,’ I say hurriedly.

  ‘Oh my God, Kitty!’ she exclaims. ‘You have to tell me if you speak to him! Tell him you went for a drink with me!’

  ‘Um, sure, definitely.’ I look at Max, silently urging him to put an end to the conversation.

  Max, being the good doctor that he is, picks up on my nonverbal cues. ‘Anyway, Nicole, thanks,’ he says cheerfully. ‘Maybe we can go for a drink next week or something.’

  We walk up the dim corridor towards the light of the main hospital, breathing shallowly to avoid inhaling too many asbestos particles.

  ‘There’s something a bit off about Nicole,’ Max muses. ‘Like, she’s sexy and has great clothes, but don’t you reckon she really thinks she’s something special?’

  ‘She’s pretty hot,’ I say. ‘She’s got that presence about her. There are plenty of women who are thinner and prettier than her who don’t have that. I don’t know. If I was a man I’d probably be into it … It sounds like Prince is,’ I add dolefully.

  ‘That’s just what she’s telling you,’ Max points out as we reach the main foyer near the cafeteria. ‘Who knows? He probably said hi to her once and now she’s deluding herself he wants to get in her pants.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I’m not convinced.

  ‘You should do the research with the Europeans,’ Max encourages me, eyeing the coffee line. ‘You never know where it might lead.’

  Max is right. Just because the mysterious Dr Dietrich had sex with Nicole from admin doesn’t make him a bad surgeon. Plus, whatever happened between them is none of my business.

  ‘I have to go to the M&M meeting,’ I tell Max, looking at my watch and realising I’m running late. ‘See you later.’

  ‘God, I hate those meetings,’ he says with feeling. ‘Enjoy.’

  fourteen

  Normal people think M&Ms are an appealing chocolate treat, designed to make your day more enjoyable. For doctors, M&M means ‘morbidity and mortality’. So the Wednesday M&M meetings are a benign way of describing a horrible process—it’s when some poor sucker of a junior doctor has to stand up in front of the senior surgeons and present all the patient cases where somebody has fucked something up and the patient got sick and died. It’s always a bloodbath. The only bright spot is that Dr Prince will be there.

  I rush into the room, ignoring the Joker’s glare and obvious glance at his watch, and see the only seat left is next to the Smiling Assassin. I accidentally grimace too obviously, which she notices.

  ‘You’re late again,’ she whispers forcefully in retaliation, as I sit down. ‘You and I are going to have a talk after this.’

  ‘I was si
gning my timesheet!’ I try to explain, but she purses her lips. ‘Shhh.’

  I can’t help but smile when, five minutes on, someone arrives even later than me. There are no seats left, so Dr Prince stands up the back in a dark corner. The Shark’s eyes follow him closely. The temperature in the room immediately goes up by about a hundred degrees.

  ‘Glad you could make it, Jack,’ the Shark says, looking anything but. ‘Here’s a question to start the meeting off. Do you think it is acceptable when senior staff don’t answer their mobile phones when they’re on call?’

  Dr Prince doesn’t respond, even though the question is clearly directed at him. I’d heard the Joker telling the Smiling Assassin on the round on Monday that Dr Prince hadn’t answered his phone quickly enough on Friday night and the Shark had been forced to go into the hospital instead. I suspect Dr Prince failed to answer his phone because he spends his Friday nights having fun on his yacht or attending glamorous art functions with billionaire buyers of Greek antiquities, probably looking at exhibits painted by his wife.

  ‘I seem to remember, Richard, a patient of yours who died a few months ago,’ Dr Prince replies from the back corner, ‘and you never really took any responsibility for it but blamed your registrar.’ ‘Is that an accusation?’ The Shark’s face has gone so red his head looks like it’s about to blow off.

  ‘Just pointing out we shouldn’t throw stones from glass houses,’ Dr Prince says in his usual mild tone.

  ‘You’re standing in a glass house, Jack,’ is the retort, as murmurs from the other surgeons begin to grow louder. ‘But you know that already.’

  As Dr Prince starts to raise his voice, Dr Johnson, one of the neurologists, calls for order. ‘I don’t think this is the time or place to be having this conversation,’ she says, looking deeply unimpressed. ‘There are junior staff present, let me remind you.’

  Dr Johnson takes over and starts asking the registrars questions about the first case. The Shark says nothing, but his face looks like a thunderstorm. I want to sneak a glance at Dr Prince, but he’s behind me and I don’t want him to catch me staring. I feel bad for him.