Carrie slid her tray along the rail and studied the puddings on offer in the staff canteen. ‘Normally,’ she said, ‘I’d have had gooseberries and custard, but I’ve just been examining someone with a productive cough and I can’t quite …’
‘Yeah,’ said Paul, hesitating briefly out of politeness before taking a large bowlful. ‘I know what you mean.’
‘On the other hand,’ she said, ‘the jam roll looks even worse.’
‘Road-traffic accident?’
‘Chainsaw, I was thinking.’ She dithered for a few seconds. ‘If you start really thinking about it, everything looks like something revolting, doesn’t it? There’s no end to it – I’ll never eat again if I don’t nip this in the bud now. I’ll go for the worst one. I’ll have this.’ Shoulders braced, she took a dense, shining slab of chocolate mousse. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she said, moving towards the till.
‘You know what I was thinking?’ asked Paul. ‘It’s OK, it’s not horrible,’ he added quickly, clocking her expression. ‘I was thinking how this mashed potato I’ve got is the exact same colour as a woman’s face I was seeing this morning. I wrote “pallor, probably anaemic” on her notes but really I should’ve put “face same colour as instant mash” and it would’ve given a much better picture.’
‘I know what you mean, there’s a sort of greyish look to instant mash that you get with really cytopenic patients.’
‘In fact you could probably do a whole scale of anaemia based on canteen meals, you know, with full-fat milk at the –’
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Carrie, ‘but shall we sit over there?’ She nodded towards a half-empty table; at one end Armand was spooning soup into his mouth, arm curled protectively round the bowl.
‘No,’ said Paul, urgently, herding her away.
‘Why? What’s the matter?’
‘I can’t tell you. What about the one by the window?’
‘Oh, please, please not next to Wai,’ said Carrie. ‘I spend enough time with her already.’ She flinched as a giggle like the trill of an alarm clock cut through the chatter. ‘All day. That’s what I hear all day. And most evenings.’
‘OK, well there must be somewhere –’ As they stood back to back, surveying the room, there was a massed scraping of chairs and a group of student nurses began to drift towards the exit. Paul wove between them, keen to claim the empty table, and he had almost reached it when he felt a hand insinuate itself under his coat and give his right buttock a hard squeeze. ‘All right, farmboy?’ said a voice by his shoulder, and he crashed the tray onto the table top and looked round to see Lexie giving him a open-mouthed smile before following her colleagues.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said, gazing after her. ‘I think I’m being sexually harassed.’
‘Really?’ said Carrie, following his eyeline. ‘By the one with the mouth?’
‘Yes.’
‘God, she looks terrifying. Does it worry you?’
‘I’m not sure. I think she might be doing it ironically.’ He sat down carefully.
‘Anyway, your anaemia scale …’ said Carrie.
‘Oh yeah, well I haven’t really thought it through, but that cheesecake they do on Tuesdays would be right up there and the –’
Carrie’s bleep went off and she jumped violently. ‘I bet that’s serious,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’m starting to get this feeling, I’m starting to know when it’s going to be something trivial and when it’s going to be another curtains-round-the-bed job and this feels bad, this feels like the lab ringing to tell me that Mrs Kingsley’s white-cell count is in double figures.’ Paul watched idly as she scuttled across the room towards the phone. Since their encounter in the midnight corridor they had shared a few lunches and he had found the intensity of her company strangely calming; it reminded him in a way of the single aeroplane journey he had taken with his grandmother, whose fear of flying had been so great that Paul’s own jitters had faded to nothing. He had become, by comparison, a blasé globetrotter, carelessly dismissing every terrifying clunk and whine, shrugging off each inexplicable lurch. Travelling alone, of course, he was a sweaty wreck.
‘No,’ she said, returning. ‘It’s just a temazepam write-up. I can do it after–’ Her bleep sounded again, and she turned silently and headed back towards the phone.
‘So what’s going on?’ asked a throaty voice very close to Paul’s ear.
It was Crispin at the next table, leaning so far back in his chair that his head was almost resting on Paul’s shoulder.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and Almond not speaking?’
‘Of course we are.’
‘So why did you just practically do the splits to avoid sitting by him?’
‘I didn’t. I …’ as usual his imagination, so tropically fecund in the abstract, deserted him as soon as a direct lie was called for.
‘Ooooh,’ said Crispin, hurling himself upright. ‘I smell beeeeg scandal. Tell Uncle Crispy.’ He dragged his chair across to Paul’s table and reached back for his bowl of crumble. ‘Talk amongst yourselves,’ he said, waving a dismissive hand at his former tablemates.
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ said Paul, unconvincingly.
‘The suspect denied any ill feeling,’ said Crispin, sotto voce, into his spoon. ‘And on the ward round, when Almond wouldn’t stand within ten feet of you?’
‘Look,’ said Paul, trying to sound firm. ‘It’s nothing.’ It would have taken bamboo splinters hammered under his nails to pry this particular secret out of him.
‘Suspect once again –’ Crispin’s bleep went off’ – interview interrupted 1.32 p.m. To be continued. And I’ve got something to tell you,’ he added, laying down the spoon and getting up just as Carrie returned.
‘Admission,’ she said, reseating herself, ‘but she’s coming from Clay Hill, and Mrs Kingsley’s fine, panic over, white count of five, though I have to say that there’s just something about the look of her that I’m not happy with and …’ She stopped, fork in hand. ‘That’s the scale I need,’ she said, with sudden conviction. ‘I need a precise range of descriptions that cover degrees of not looking very well. Because it’s really hard in the middle of the night, isn’t it, when you’re worried about a patient and you want to call up the registrar, and the only concrete thing you’ve got to report is that someone doesn’t look too good and you know he’ll just sneer at you? You should be able to say it – instinct should count for something.’
‘Yeah,’ said Paul, struck by the idea. ‘You could have “really terrible” at the top of the scale; I’m always wanting to put that.’ He opened an imaginary set of notes. ‘On examination the patient looked really terrible. But during the course of the afternoon, she improved slightly until she was looking … er …’
‘A bit under the weather?’ suggested Carrie.
‘Yeah. Or “fairly shitty”, I was thinking.’
She snorted. ‘But it does set the scene, doesn’t it? It makes it all much more immediate, you can really picture the patient. You could have “on the seedy side” next.’
‘Or “none too clever”.’
‘Or-’
‘Interview recommenced at 1.37 p.m.’, said Crispin, sliding into the next seat. ‘PC Terminator has joined us in the interrogation room.’
Carrie reddened, started to say something and then shrugged and picked up her fork.
‘The suspect maintains his right to silence,’ said Paul, hoping that a little nod in the direction of Crispin’s game might deflect further questioning.
‘Oh does he? Well that’s a bit of a bugger, because I was going to ask him all about Marianne Cray.’
Paul inhaled a chip, struggled briefly to avoid barking it across the width of the room, and managed to dispel it discreetly into a napkin. ‘You what?’ he said eventually.
‘She phoned me up. Last night.’ Crispin clasped his hands behind his head and raised his eyebrows. ‘Long talk.’
Paul could do nothing but wait dumbly; he felt as if he’d been turned to stone, a menhir with ears.
‘There I was,’ said Crispin, enjoying himself, ‘lying in front of the telly, wondering why all the girls in British soap operas are such a bunch of lardy dogs – where are you off to, Carrie?’
‘Somewhere else,’ she said, tucking her chair in neatly.
‘Okey dokey, don’t kill anyone – when the phone rang and this voice asked if I was Paul.’
The menhir stirred. ‘She asked for me?’
‘Well, she asked for someone called Paul. And I said if she wanted the Mighty Pudding then she’d got the wrong extension.’
Paul closed his eyes briefly. So much, then, for the care with which he had worded the letter; so much for his sneaking pursuit of Marianne along the narrow streets of central Shadley Oak, for his sudden crouched dash behind a row of market stalls when the opportunity to overtake had presented itself, for the rapid dexterity with which he had tucked the folded paper behind the handle of the newspaper office door, making sure that her name was clearly visible before haring off round a convenient corner. For his stratagem had worked – from twenty yards away he had seen Marianne reach for the handle, catch sight of the letter and then hesitantly extract it, her forehead creased in a gentle frown of wonderment. (OK, that last bit was an extrapolation, based on the back of her head, but nevertheless her body language had pointed to a fair degree of confusion.) He had seen her unfold the page and start to read and then he had crept away, knowing that he had done his best. And now, it seemed, he might just as well have stood up in the café and shouted, ‘Oi Blondie, fancy a shag?’
‘You listening?’ asked Crispin.
‘Yes.’ He opened his eyes again. ‘But I wish you hadn’t called me the Mighty Pudding. To her.’
‘Listen, mate, it was lucky I did.’
‘Why?’
‘Because she said, “Oh now I remember who he is.”’
‘Oh fantastic.’ There was no way of examining that statement and coming up with an optimistic interpretation: either his nickname had been common currency in Argyle Road or else it served as an instantly recognizable description of his appearance. ‘We used to live in the same street.’
‘I know, she told me.’
‘She’s just started a job here. At the newspaper.’
‘She told me that as well. She likes a good old chat, doesn’t she? I couldn’t get her off the phone.’
Paul absorbed the blows and soldiered on. ‘So how did she end up ringing you?’
‘Well, you know your letter?’
He could only nod. What else had they discussed – his shirt size? His bowel habits?
‘Well, Marianne said you’d put a line straight through the phone number; she had to guess the last digit and she guessed wrong.’
‘But I didn’t – Oh …’ That horrible small girl. Or rather, he remembered, her mother, bashing against his chair and sending his pen skidding across the paper. ‘So … did you give her my extension?’
‘Goddd,’ Crispin smacked his forehead. ‘Knew there was something I should have done. But listen, I built you up, told her you were my trusty right-hand man.’
‘But did you get her number?’
‘Nope. But you’ll see her anyway, she’s coming to the party.’
Paul blinked a couple of times. ‘She’s not.’
‘Yeah. She’s well up for it, she doesn’t know anyone here. Made a couple of suggestions for my costume.’
‘How long were you talking for?’ His anguished semi-shout turned a couple of heads at the next table.
‘Now Pud,’ said Crispin, seriously, ‘you’re a friend and I would never, ever move in on the girlfriend of a friend. It’s what I call the Finnerty Rule and it’s unbreakable.’
‘She’s not my girlfriend,’ muttered Paul, more in the cause of superstition than honesty.
‘Oh well, in that case, fair game. Is she blonde?’
Paul started gathering his crockery and banging it back onto the tray.
‘Hey Pud, I’m only kidding, I won’t go near her, I’ll be a Bond-shaped smudge on the wall. What are you going as?’
‘I haven’t decided. I’ve got to go, Crispin, I’ve got a routine admission and a whole stack of bloods.’
‘Have you done that potassium yet?’
‘Yes. They’re going to phone me with the result.’
‘Mr Henderson’s chest X-ray?’
‘Yes, I’m waiting for the radiologist to ring me back, she’s in clinic.’
‘Consented the phlebectomy?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Better get your skates on then,’ said Crispin, back in professional mode, a gelid edge to his voice, ‘he’s second on this afternoon’s list.’
In American TV series, Paul had noted, doctors would tend to unwind at the end of a shift by playing basketball, shedding their psychic trauma by shooting a few hoops before tooling off down the highway towards their lakeside condos. He, on the other hand, had only five flights of stairs in which to slough off the daily angst, and the plodded journey only ever seemed long enough to simply inflame the worst memories. The Marianne conversation aside, today had contained the usual collection of minimalistic satisfactions and major failures, the latter centring around his attempt to give a no-nonsense explanation of varicose-vein removal to a middle-aged farmer.
‘They’re … they’re going to do what to them?’ Mr Charlton had asked, blood draining from his face.
‘Pull them out from a tiny cut at the top of your leg.’
‘Pull them?’
‘Yes. I know it sounds a bit odd but it’s standard procedure. It’s why they call it str–’
‘Pull out my veins?’
‘Yes. I mean I’ll do you a diagram if you –’
‘Actually pull them, I mean the surgeon actually stands there and drags them out?’
‘Yes, but – look, I’ll do you a diagram.’
‘No, no, no, no, no. No.’ Mr Charlton lay back, his face grey against the pillow. ‘Oh my God, I never imagined how they’d actually do it, I just knew I needed it done, but now …’ He closed his eyes and then quickly reopened them. ‘Oh my God, I keep seeing the vet delivering a calf. Oh my good God.’
Mr Charlton had signed the consent form only after the promise of a huge slug of pre-op sedation, and Paul had slunk away, marvelling at his own seemingly limitless ability to strike the wrong note. It was tempting, sometimes, to emulate Crispin’s approach to doctor-patient communication: ‘We find the hole, we sew it up, bish bosh, couldn’t be easier,’ as Paul had heard him explain to the wife of a man with a perforated ulcer.
‘Bish bosh,’ muttered Paul, reaching the fifth floor, and taking only the briefest of pauses to get his breath back; what he needed this evening, he thought, was an unbroken three hours of horizontal TV-watching followed by a dreamless night, after which he might begin, tentatively, to think about his tactics for the party. What he would actually be getting was presaged by the smell of bleach, discernible in the stairwell, moderately strong in the corridor, and reaching an eye-watering climax as he opened the door of the flat.
‘Do you think we should have a talk?’ said Paul, checking under the grill. The pan of beans already reeked of Domestos and he had no great hopes for the toast. Armand continued wordlessly to scrub the sink. He had acquired a vicious-looking curly wire loop on a long handle and this, combined with large amounts of pink scouring powder, was producing a continuous gritty underscore abrasive to both nerves and stainless steel.
‘You’re just making scratches,’ said Paul.
By way of answer, his flatmate poured another arc of powder into the sink. Paul scraped a little carbon off the toast and tried to think of another way of broaching the topic. In their two and a half weeks together they had developed no routines of friendship, acquired no ease of conversation. On the ward they were like passing ships, semaphoring the odd bit of positional information and chucking the occasional lifebelt when tasks were beginning to swamp the decks. In the flat, on the one evening in three on which neither was on call, Armand would spend much of his time in his room, on the phone, speaking in French, while Paul would lie on the sofa with the remote control, occasionally raising a languid hand to his mouth in order to insert food or beer. In a spirit of détente, he had, on one occasion, tried to have a matey chat in O-level French, but there had been no response beyond a look of faint alarm. Armand’s habitual expression – he was wearing it now as he scoured the sink – resembled that of the unfancied foreigner two sets down at Wimbledon: lips compressed, forehead furrowed, eyes jumping at the unfairness of the crowd. Paul had never seen him smile.
The first mouthful of grilled bleach prompted Paul to action. He scraped the rest of the plateful into the bin with as much noise as possible, and then cleared his throat assertively. ‘Armand, I apologized this morning when you walked in on me, and I’ll apologize again now, but you have to understand that I didn’t have much choice.’
Armand turned on the hot tap and Paul took a step nearer so that he could be heard over the drumming water. ‘I knocked on the bathroom door five times between seven and half past. You must have heard me.’ The amplitude of the scrubbing arm decreased slightly. ‘I was absolutely desperate – you know, there’s a story that a Chinese bloke in the emperor’s court once died because he was too polite to ask to leave the room and eventually his bladder burst. That could have happened to me. And anyway, there couldn’t possibly be any bacterial problems with the sink because you know as well as I do that urine’s sterile. It’s not as if I took a dump. This – this cleaning stuff isn’t logical, it’s just… weird.’
The scrubbing ceased abruptly and Armand dropped the scourer and turned to face Paul; in the split second since the last word had been spoken his face appeared to have lengthened and sagged, as if drooping from the bone. ‘Don’t call me weird,’ he said, and Paul saw with shock that his eyes were welling. ‘I’m not weird.’ The water hammered against the sink bottom and without looking Armand reached out a hand and turned off the tap; a little wisp of steam curled across the kitchen. ‘OK,’ he continued, swallowing, steadying his voice, ‘OK, I know I have a hygiene thing, but it’s well compensated for, and it doesn’t interfere in any way with my work in the hospital, in fact it probably makes me a better, more empathic doctor, as does my diabetes, which is, of course, related to the hygiene thing since it’s especially important for me to avoid minor skin infections, which brings me onto my foot thing, which incidentally it was incredibly unpleasant of you to have mentioned in front of that nurse –’
‘What foot thing?’
‘– but frankly if you had more of a foot thing yourself then maybe the physical atmosphere in this flat would be a little more pleasant, and I know that I –’
‘I wash my socks,’ said Paul, indignantly, catching up.
‘– and I know I don’t always chime in with the light-hearted banter over meals but I think that you underestimate, firstly, the fact that I’m trying to deal not only with a demanding job but also, secondly, with an entirely different culture, and you know that I actually have no idea what you’re talking about most of the time and it doesn’t help at all when you start speaking to me in Welsh –’
‘What? When?’
‘– last Thursday evening in the flat –’
‘That wasn’t Welsh, that was French.’
‘Oh.’ There was a pause. Armand’s eyes widened. ‘Jeez.’
‘I got a B,’ said Paul, almost to himself …
‘Well … anyway, I think in total I’m coping pretty well with a potentially disorienting situation and I don’t think I deserve to have insults flung at me just because I have different and higher standards from my roommate. And I know that you think I also have a food thing but in fact I haven’t, I just don’t consider it polite to ignore carefully written notices and anyway the reason I became a little tense was because it was my mother who especially sent me that packet of sugar-free pop …’ His voice quavered and with a visible effort he clamped his mouth into a manly straight line. ‘Tarts,’ he added, after a few seconds. He folded his arms, unfolded them again, and then, with an awkward attempt at looking casual, rested an elbow on the draining board. ‘So I’m not weird,’ he said, his voice firm.
Paul groped for an appropriate response. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Right. Well … I think I’ll have one.’ He found himself whistling nervously as he filled the kettle and it took him a moment to identify the tune; it was the theme from The Addams Family. He stopped whistling, and instead leafed through a few mental questions. Did his own feet really smell? Had anything actually been resolved by this evening’s cathartic explosion or would he be reduced to pissing in the sink again tomorrow morning? And did his own feet really smell? ‘So, er …’ he tried to inject a note of jocularity into his voice. ‘What can we do about this, then? This … situation.’
Armand appeared to ponder for a moment. ‘Well, I think if I put the plug into the sink and leave it filled with bleach overnight, then –’
‘No, I mean are you going to let me in the bathroom occasionally?’
‘Oh.’ He shook his head dismissively. ‘Sure. I know I tend to get … er … very intense in the mornings, very focused. I think you probably need to knock harder, I’m just not hearing you.’
Paul had a vision of a medieval battering ram smashing through the MDF panelling, revealing a naked Armand and a bathroom rank with foaming peroxide. ‘OK,’ he said, reluctantly; it was – he supposed – by Armand’s standards a major concession. ‘And if you, er, need any cultural translations, just ask away.’
‘Seriously?’ A look of startled eagerness appeared on his flatmate’s face.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Well … thanks.’ With the look of someone about to plunge their arm into a vat of pig slurry, for charity, he held out a hand and Paul shook it firmly. ‘Good,’ said Armand, nodding pleasantly. ‘Fine.’ He stuck his hand in his pocket and edged towards the door. ‘Excuse me a moment. I … uh … have to go to the bathroom.’