by Sonia Henry
‘Have I done something wrong?’ I ask.
Dr Lawson has a strange expression on her face. ‘No,’ she says, ‘but I’m going to give you something and we are all going to leave the room while you read it.’
She pulls a piece of paper from a file. I notice that written on the front of the file are the words Dr Rachel Copeland.
Dr Lawson hands the paper to me. ‘This was found in Dr Copeland’s locker after she died,’ she says. ‘It’s addressed to you, so we thought it was your right to read it.’
I feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and try to blink them away. It doesn’t work, and I feel one, then two, then more tears begin to slide down my face. They drop onto the table. I worry, absurdly, that they will hit the paper and the ink will be smudged and then I won’t be able to read the words.
Dr Lawson hands me a box of tissues. ‘We’ll give you some time,’ she says. ‘We’ll be next door in the boardroom if you need us.’
One by one, everyone leaves the room.
Max catches my eye. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks quietly. ‘Do you want me to stay?’
‘I’ll be all right,’ I say, and he closes the door and it’s just me and the piece of paper. I look down at the first words, Dear Kitty, and part of me wants to tear the letter into tiny pieces and throw them out the window. I imagine the white bits of paper falling through the air and down onto the grass under the hospital. I see them falling, like snowflakes, the words of a woman who has nothing else to say fluttering in pieces onto the earth, raining down onto the heads of the doctors underneath. The doctors won’t notice. They’ll be too busy rushing to their next ward round.
Dear Kitty,
Can I even call you that? I know it’s what your friends call you, and some of the surgeons whom you seem to know, and like. When I was an intern I was too scared to speak to senior surgeons—you don’t seem to be afraid. I never understood it. Maybe that’s what it’s like when you don’t really want to be a surgeon; you have less fear and more words, and you can see life as an adventure rather than a set of chains. Once, when I was working late, I walked to the train station and saw you having drinks at the pub down the road with some friends. You were all laughing. You looked really happy, totally different from the way you were around me on the ward. Your friends were calling you Kitty, and I didn’t even know that you had a nickname. I think it suits you. I’ve never really had a nickname. My ex-boyfriend called me Rachy and sometimes it annoyed me, but other times I liked it. I never spoke to you about my boyfriend. You probably think that I’m into surgeons and weird sex, and I don’t blame you for thinking that after what you heard that night, but my boyfriend was normal and fun and sometimes we used to waste entire Saturdays watching episodes of The O.C. Not even the latest series, but the really old ones. We’d pretend we were Marisa and Ryan. Sometimes we were Seth and Summer, but the further I got into surgical training the more I started to realise I’d always be Marisa.
The tears are falling freely as I read the words. I see her face, pausing, thinking as she puts her thoughts to paper. I almost laugh at the O.C. comparison; I’d done the same thing with my first boyfriend, years before.
By the time I’d finished my residency all I wanted to be was a surgeon. I gave up so much for it. I moved away from my family, I left my boyfriend, I stopped seeing most of my friends, but I kept telling myself that it was worth it. There were times in the operating theatre when I felt like a superhero. Can you understand that? I think on some level you must. I saw your face, sometimes, while we were in there. You had that look of complete enthrallment. That’s how it made me feel. Everything else became secondary.
She’s right—I know exactly what she means. I’d said as much to myself: the operating theatre is a place where magic happens.
I don’t know when it started to go wrong. It’d be easy to say it was when he became our boss and I started to turn into a nasty bitch, and then the sex stuff started and I didn’t know how to say no—but it was before then. I would never have been honest about this before, but it’s over for me now and I may as well tell the truth. It probably started in medical school, I’d say. I knew straight away that to do surgery you had to be strong and focused, and I saw what happened to students who let their emotions get the better of them and I told myself, over and over, that wasn’t going to be me. They were weak, I was strong, and that was it. That’s what I kept telling myself. I remember once, when I was in my final year, being quizzed on a ward round by some consultant and fucking up the name of the artery and him telling me how stupid I was. And I knew then that I wasn’t good enough, that to get where I wanted I had to work harder, stay later, and be better. Only the strongest and smartest survive, and I didn’t care if it meant I’d be staying back till one o’clock every morning or going in on the weekends—that was just what I had to do.
In my mind’s eye, I remember Mr Waters. I see him vomiting up blood and the look of absolute terror in his eyes, reflected in my own. I remember how alone and isolated I felt. I see Estelle, sitting on the floor in Wingabby, tears running down her face. I see the Smiling Assassin, Rachel, sitting in front of me and picture her face after I’d heard the Joker calling her a slut. That is the trajectory. How does it happen? How do any of us let it happen? How do we go from wanting to save the world to this?
It starts the day you begin ignoring situations and your normal responses to them because you exist inside a system which tells you that you have to be tougher. You’re dehumanising yourself and everyone around you to survive it, holding on to the mirage of finishing specialty training, of finally ‘making it’, whatever that even means. Then you meet yourself on the final day, the day you find that you’re waking up, thinking today is the day you’re going to throw yourself in front of a moving bus. We spend all our time trying to avoid death, but in the end for some of us death is the only way we can feel alive. Sex doesn’t work. The only sex Rachel was having was the kind that wasn’t even sex. It was just one step closer to the deafening silence.
When he started having a crack at me I was almost flattered at first. He’s a qualified surgeon, he’d passed his exams and he has a public appointment—he has everything that I wanted, and I thought maybe because of that I wanted him. But I didn’t want him, I’d only wanted what he had. When I realised that I wanted it to stop, by then it was too late. That night when I saw you, I saw myself through your eyes and I was so ashamed that I couldn’t really face you anymore. I hated everything that I had become, but by then I didn’t know what else I could do. I’d spent so many years of my life dedicated to getting this far that I didn’t have anything else. I can barely have a conversation with my parents, let alone try for another career path. Surgery is everything, it is everything, and without it I have nothing. I am nothing.
He wouldn’t leave me alone. If I didn’t sleep with him, he told me, he’d give me a bad reference. And without a good reference from my direct supervisor, you and I both know I’d be screwed. I don’t want to move to the middle of nowhere and be a shithouse surgeon because I couldn’t make it here. In the end, if I had to give him a few blow jobs, so be it, I decided. I’d finish my term and move on and then I wouldn’t have to think about it ever again. I mean, people have done worse things to get to where they want to be.
People have done worse things to get to where they want to be. The truth of the statement makes me wince. The conscious realisation that her experience was probably just the tip of a very large and very well-hidden iceberg shudders through my heart.
But then it got so bad I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I started fucking up in theatre. It wasn’t even just him; the other consultants were always calling me, the hours were horrendous, the hospital telling me off for being ‘uncontactable’ when I was just on the fucking toilet—I just can’t see a way through.
People tell us we have options, but that’s bullshit, Kitty. I can’t quit surgery and I can’t change my job and I’ll never win against them. I’ll never win.
You must know that too. I don’t even know why I’m writing you this letter; it’s all pointless in the end anyway. I think I just wanted to explain why I behaved the way I did, and you were the only person who knew what was happening. And I wanted to say that I’m sorry. Maybe I wish you’d ignored my threat and had reported me to someone, but then I wouldn’t have been able to handle everyone knowing, and whispering, and the nurses looking at me like I was this huge dirty slut who was trying to sleep her way through surgical training, even though it was only because I don’t feel like I had any other choice.
I wish this mess hadn’t happened, I wish it wasn’t like this. I’m in this dark room with no windows and I can’t even see a crack of light, Kitty, not even one crack. The darkness is everywhere and I’m so lost, I’m so lost and I’m so alone. I’m walking around in circles inside a prison cell of black and I just want it to stop. I wish I could make it better and go back and make different choices and do it a second time, but I think I’ve finished my race and I’ve screwed it all up.
Maybe this isn’t the end, maybe it’s just the start of something else. Maybe the light is waiting for me somewhere else, and I just need to get on with it and go there and leave this all behind.
I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.
Rachel
A line from Tennyson, read to me by my mother long ago, floats through the aching fog in my brain. For some reason, it’s all I can think of.
We die—does it matter when?
Sink me the ship, Master Gunner—sink her, split her in twain
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!
fifty-seven
By the time Dr Lawson and the others come back into the room I’ve composed myself. I know what they’re going to ask about: the event corroborated by Max and now, from the grave, by Dr Rachel Copeland. After warning me that if I told anyone she would ruin me, she’d then killed herself—but not before writing a letter naming me as a witness to her own ruin.
‘When Rachel writes about “what you saw that night”, what exactly is she referring to?’ Dr Lawson asks me straight out, after I’ve reassured her that I am okay to continue with the meeting.
There’s no point prevaricating now. ‘I heard her in the change room with him,’ I say tersely, gesturing at the Joker. ‘And when she came out she looked like she’d been crying. Through the whole thing he was calling her a slut and other gross things.’ I shudder.
‘Exactly what Max heard,’ Dr Lawson says.
Max and I both nod.
‘But neither of you realised that the other was there.’
‘No,’ we both say at the same time.
The Joker immediately starts to bluster. ‘She can’t talk,’ he says, glaring at me. ‘She’s been having an affair with Jack Prince.’
Dr Lawson looks at me with interest.
‘That’s a lie,’ I say.
Dr Lawson catches my eye and I think I see the flicker of a smile hover on her lips before it is replaced with a grimace. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, David,’ she says firmly. ‘I know Dr Prince well. I’m close friends with his wife.’
I vaguely remember a story about Dr Lawson having an affair with her boss when she was his registrar and twenty years his junior, but no one talks about that anymore. They just say that she and her husband met at work and their attraction for each other must have overcome the age gap.
Guess I’m in good company, I think to myself wryly.
The discussion moves on to an internal investigation of the Joker. Realising our presence is no longer required, Max and I both rise and head towards the door.
‘Actually, Katarina,’ Dr Lawson calls after me, ‘there’s one more thing.’
I turn around.
‘Dr Copeland left another note,’ she says. ‘The police have it now—it was in the pocket of her scrubs, which she left in her locker—but I wrote down the words.’ She opens her file and leafs through it, pulling out a slip of paper. ‘Her parents didn’t know what this meant. Does it make any sense to you?’ She reads: ‘Isis Moriendo Renascor.’
In my mind’s eye, I see a phoenix perched on a bone, and a young woman smiling with a glass of wine in her hand in front of sea so blue it looks like something out of a film. A surgeon, but still an actress, bowing out with her final line.
‘I’ve no idea,’ I say, for the first time looking the Joker directly in the eye. ‘I don’t speak Latin.’
Then I walk out the door.
fifty-eight
‘Kitty! Wait!’
I ignore Nicole as we walk down the corridor towards the exit. I stupidly told her something in confidence and she betrayed me to the one person whom she knows I despise.
‘Kitty!’
I turn around.
‘Listen, I’m sorry,’ she says. She sounds upset.
Sorry doesn’t really cut it, but I pause anyway.
‘You don’t understand,’ she pleads. ‘After we had that conversation, and you were so upset, I finally rang Wolfgang—talking about him made me want to make things better between the two of us.’
I wait.
‘And then he told me how well the two of you get along,’ she says, straight out. ‘That you’re so smart and how he wishes when he was in Sydney doing work with Jack that you’d become friends then. And I just felt so jealous—of your friendship, of everything …’ She trails off.
I don’t know how to respond. I just stare at her.
‘I was so angry,’ she says honestly, ‘that when I ran into you know who, and he was mouthing off about you and Rachel, I just blurted out that you were having an affair with the boss.’
I roll my eyes. ‘It was one bloody kiss, hardly an affair. Exaggeration much?’
‘It was stupid. I’m really sorry.’
I wonder how much of it is a genuine apology and how much is trying to save her own arse, but I’m too tired and too over it to care, so I tell her not to worry about it.
‘Maybe we can have a drink after work some time?’ she suggests.
I nod as we walk away, but I doubt it. There’s one person whom I want to have a drink with, to whom I actually owe a whole lot of drinks, and that’s Max.
‘What I want to know,’ I say as we sit down at the pub on the corner together over two glasses of the house white, ‘is did you realise that I was there too?’
Max shakes his head. ‘As soon as she walked out I couldn’t hear anything else. I had no freaking idea you’d heard him as well! I would have told you ages ago if I’d known that … I can’t believe you didn’t tell me either!’
‘I just can’t believe we didn’t tell each other any of this,’ I repeat, shaking my head in disbelief. ‘Like, we live together. We’re best mates!’
‘Well, I was going to tell you,’ Max says, ‘but then I was on night shift for months, and I was so fucking tired. I wasn’t really coping, so I just moved in with Mum.’ He pauses. ‘And then, to be honest, all I wanted to do was go to Europe and forget about the whole mess. I mean I had some idea she’d taken the valium and stuff, but I was still too scared to say anything.’
It was while he was in Europe, he tells me, that he heard Rachel had killed herself, and he knew he had to speak up, no matter the consequences. Max had done what I wasn’t brave enough to do: he emailed Dr Lawson and told her what he had seen.
‘And there were a few pina coladas involved,’ he adds. ‘Dutch courage and all that.’
I nod empathetically. ‘At least you said something! I was such a fucking coward, Max.’
‘To be fair to you, mate,’ Max says, ‘Rachel didn’t know I’d seen them, so she never threatened me like she did you. Plus I didn’t have to work with them like you did.’
‘So you don’t think I’m pathetic for not reporting it straight away?’ I ask him.
He shakes his head. ‘Nah, I don’t know what I would have done in your situation. Probably just wanted to move hospitals.’
We both laugh. God, it feels good to have a laug
h.
‘There’s only one bit of it that’s not quite true,’ Max says, looking nervous and taking a large gulp of wine.
I look at him. ‘What?’ I say. ‘Which bit?’
‘Well,’ he says, sheepishly, ‘you know how I said that I’d stayed back late to help in the operating theatre?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘but that was true. You were helping Dr Glass.’ I recall talking to Max in the cafeteria the day after I’d overheard Rachel and the Joker in the change rooms. I didn’t get home until pretty late last night, he said. I was helping Dr Glass in theatre. I reckon he’ll give me a good reference.
‘Yeah, that is true,’ Max says. ‘But about Dr Glass …’
Dr Glass is head of one of the surgical departments and, like Dr Prince, a really big deal.
‘So he asked me out for a drink,’ Max says, grinning. ‘And I was rushing to get changed after theatre because he and I were meeting afterwards.’
I start to laugh properly now, so hard I can’t stop. ‘I should have known! What happened?’
Max rolls his eyes. ‘Well, what I was hoping was a rendezvous was actually just him introducing me to some senior surgical trainees he thought might be able to give me some more research—and you know how I am so over doing research. What a letdown!’
‘Disappointing,’ I say, grinning.
‘What about Dr Lang the hot heart surgeon?’ he asks. ‘Have you sent him any more nudies?’
I hit him. ‘I have not sent Dr Lang any more nudes. I think I only fancied him because he looks like an older surgeon version of Fabien anyway,’ I confess.
Max reaches for my phone. ‘I’m sure we can fix this.’
‘Fuck off!’ I yell.
‘Jokes, mate!’ Max yells back, a huge grin cracking his face. ‘Watch out—you’ll give yourself a heart attack and I’ll have to operate on you!’