The importance of punctuality had been drilled into Ash by his mother, who saw no inconsistency in the fact that her own rule did not apply to her. People knew she was doing them a great favour by agreeing to meet, and would therefore be happy to wait. The only person she was ever on time for was Ash’s father, and solely because he had more than once ordered their driver to leave the house without her, giving her no choice but to call for a taxi and pay for it with her own money.
Ash’s first extended experience of treating patients had occurred in the accident and emergency ward of a large London hospital. He had anguished about the wait times, tried to be as efficient as he could without seeming to be callous or (worse) diagnosing in error. But it was like that sequence in the old Disney movie Fantasia where trainee wizard Mickey Mouse ends up creating an army of water-gathering brooms, who keep coming, keep coming, toting buckets and flooding the castle. For every patient Ash saw, by the time he re-entered the waiting room, four more had appeared. A more experienced physician had a quiet word in his ear about setting realistic goals, although her actual words were, ‘If you continue to give a shit about this, you will be under a bus by the end of the week.’
He’d done his best to heed her, and now, while at work, he no longer felt compelled to rush or apologise. But as if nature had to maintain a balance, in his private life, he’d become even more obsessed with being prompt. Which was why he was currently sitting in Mac and Jacko’s kitchen, sipping nervously on a glass of water and praying that all the other guests would arrive soon.
His discomfort was the more so because Jacko was busy preparing food, and, if you did not count King, the large chocolate Labrador sleeping under his chair, Ash’s only companion at the big wooden table was Mac. He could not think of her as his employee as most of the time it seemed the other way round. And as for considering her to be a friend, that assumed attaining a certain level of intimacy — a prospect that was, quite frankly, terrifying. Having Mac share his workspace was hard enough on his nerves. Just imagine if she gained access to his head?
‘Did you have a girlfriend back home?’
Mac delivered this with a slight frown, as if trying to picture what manner of woman, if any, might be attracted to him.
‘Home, as in Ahmedabad?’
‘Do you consider that home? You’ve been gone over ten years. Do you visit much?’
Ash knew these were fair questions, and that any reproach he sensed was in his imagination. If Mac wanted to criticise, she would do so directly. Why waste time with snide jabs, when you can finish the job with one solid right hook to the jaw?
‘I hardly visit at all,’ he admitted. ‘My study and work commitments have left little time for travel. The last time I was there was two years ago, when I went to my cousin’s wedding.’
‘There was a full on Indian wedding over in Hampton a while back,’ said Mac. ‘Looked like it cost a bomb.’
‘Indian weddings are often extravagant affairs, yes,’ said Ash.
‘And usually arranged, right?’
‘Well, er, it depends …’
Ash was starting to sweat. At his cousin’s wedding, his mother had expressed a wish for all her sons to be married within the next five years. Reading this accurately as less a desire for their individual happiness and more a ploy to control their lives, Ash’s brothers had laughed, and promised that they’d get hitched to a suitable girl by age forty, but right now, they were going to continue shagging around. They’d paraphrased this, of course, but the gist was clear. Ash had muttered some excuse about work, and then spent the next two days hiding behind garlanded sculptures of elephants and a metre-high tiered cake. To Ash’s immense relief, his mother had not re-stated her intention to cement her social status by pairing him off with a complete stranger. But that did not mean she had given it up, and even though there were currently seven-and-a-half thousand miles between him and his mother, Ash was quite convinced that certain subjects sped like homing missiles along the airwaves. He needed to change this one directly.
‘My, er, family are relatively modern,’ he said. ‘And I have two older brothers, who would take precedence.’
Mac gave him the amused, knowing look that Ash always dreaded, as it usually preceded an accurate if rather brutal observation.
‘You can’t stand your family, can you?’ she said.
Filial disloyalty was another subject that most certainly carried on the airwaves. Once, when a little drunk, he’d confessed his true feelings for his family to the group he was with, and the next morning received instructions to return home for said cousin’s wedding. It was clearly a punishment for his loose-tongued treachery, and this time he would choose his words with more care.
‘We have different interests,’ he said. ‘And personalities.’ He tried to make his shrug look nonchalant. ‘That is how it is in some families.’
Mac’s smile suggested she knew exactly how it was, and in his family specifically.
‘Jacko’s one of six,’ she said. ‘They all get on because his dad banged their heads together when they didn’t.’
‘Too right,’ said Jacko, slicing a radish with a speed that made Ash surreptitiously scan the room for a first-aid kit. ‘You grow up rural, everyone needs to pull their weight. No time for squabbling or being precious.’
‘There must have come a time,’ said Ash, ‘when your father could not reach to bang heads?’
‘Yeah, but by then we’d learned respect,’ said Jacko. ‘And we weren’t stupid — we knew what’d happen if we shirked or cut corners.’
He swept the pile of radish slices into the salad bowl. Not one fell on the floor, Ash noted. He wouldn’t dare fall, either, if he were a radish sliced by Jacko.
‘No effort, no reward.’ With one blow, Jacko hacked the hairy white roots off a bunch of spring onions. ‘Don’t care was made to care.’
‘You reap what you sow?’ said Ash.
Ding, ding. Mac chimed a spoon on the side of her water glass.
‘I call time on this round of So You Think You Can Proverb,’ she said. ‘Let’s get back to my earlier question about girlfriends.’
Oh, let’s not, was Ash’s instant, fervent prayer. And, behold, it appeared some deity was actually listening because right then, a smallish boy Ash recognised as Sidney’s youngest burst in through the back door, whereupon the sleeping King leapt up and trod heavily on Ash’s foot as he raced, woofing in full voice, to meet his friend.
‘Shut it!’ bellowed Jacko, a dual-purpose order directed at both dog and boy, who’d left the door wide open.
‘Rory, outside please,’ said Mac, more quietly and therefore much more effectively.
‘Yes, out!’
Sidney ushered them past her. Rory’s older brother, Aidan, was already kicking a ball in the back garden and the trio became boisterously entangled.
‘Hi, gang. Hi Dr G.’
Sidney placed a large bowl of what looked like potato salad on the bench.
Her face was slightly flushed, and the high colour enhanced what Ash had taken time to realise was really a very pretty face. Why he hadn’t noticed earlier Ash put down to the fact he was still, at age twenty-nine, embarrassed to give any woman his age more than a cursory glance, and that Sidney was Kerry’s girlfriend and therefore out of bounds, even if he’d had the courage to stare at her for longer than point-three of a second. She was also a mother and though this did not diminish a woman’s sex appeal, it did affect how much attention she could claim for herself. In Ash’s experience, the majority of children, boys and girls alike, were loud, boisterous and permanently on the edge of physical calamity. Parents and caregivers were reduced to an anxious background burble.
‘The folks are right behind,’ she told Mac and Jacko. ‘Bronagh insisted on seeing the beach.’
‘Not a patch on Cleethorpes?’ said Mac.
‘But at least as bracing as Skegness.’
Voices could be heard outside the back door.
‘God, here they come,’ Sidney murmured. ‘I’m not sure I’m ready.’
‘Don’t sweat it,’ said Mac, rising to greet her visitors. ‘First mention of wedding bells and I’ll set the tablecloth on fire.’
Ash hung back during the introductions, wondering if anyone would notice if he made a break for it. Kerry’s mother was a petite woman in her late fifties, with chestnut hair in what Ash had been informed by old waiting room issues of Grazia was a pixie cut. The magazine had also stated that this style should not suit anyone over thirty-five, but it did suit Bronagh Macfarlane, whose resemblance to a denizen of fairyland did not end with the hairstyle. Her features were elfin, and her smile impish. Ash knew better than to be deceived by her slender proportions. Even the tiniest nurses he knew had grips like iron and were not shy of clamping down on sensitive spots if a patient insisted on being difficult.
Her husband was tall, sandy-haired and with the look of a man who wasn’t entirely sure where he was or how he got there. If Ash hadn’t known that Kerry’s father was a secondary school science teacher, he would not have got it wrong if asked to guess. He also recognised Douglas Macfarlane as an employer of his own favourite tactic in social situations — the old smile, nod and fade into the background ploy.
Unluckily, Ash was unable to fade, owing to both his hands now being in the fine-fingered (but at any moment vice-like) clasp of Nurse Macfarlane.
‘Well, well, look at you,’ she was saying. ‘Even more handsome than your photo.’
‘God, Ma,’ said Kerry. ‘Could you limit the people you embarrass in this room to me? I’m used to it.’
Ash was perturbed. Had he got seriously drunk and posted on a dating site, only to have no memory of it come the morning?
‘When did you see my photo?’
‘I asked her advice when you applied for the job,’ said Mac. ‘She gave you and your cheekbones the tick of approval.’
‘Beer, Doc?’
Jacko, no doubt sensing intervention was required, handed him a cold bottle. Ash resisted the urge to press it against said cheekbones, which must surely be glowing like embers.
‘And how are you liking it so far?’ said Nurse Bronagh, in the same smiling way she’d say, ‘Just a little jab.’
He knew he was too flustered to make a response sound sincere, but pausing any longer would have the same effect. Once again, Jacko saved him, with the simple expedient of shouting out, ‘Lunch!’ — and in the ensuing commotion of people finding seats, boys being summoned and forced to wash their hands, dogs being banished, and drinks being re-filled, the moment to answer was mercifully lost.
Mercifully, too, he had become the least interesting topic of conversation at the table. First, the Macfarlanes were warned that their accommodation might not be up to par.
‘Vic’s a decent bloke,’ said Jacko, ‘but you might need to make your own breakfast. And wash your own sheets.’
He paused, perhaps picturing the man, and added, ‘I wouldn’t advise trying to converse, either.’
‘Not a problem,’ said Bronagh. ‘At least we’ll have four walls around us, and not one-and-a-half.’
That signalled the opportunity for all to roundly deride Kerry’s attempt at home renovation. If Ash’s failings had been targeted in that way, he’d now be trying to crawl under his plate, but Kerry laughed right along with everyone else.
‘I did sort out the gas oven,’ was his only defence.
‘The one possessed by the Balrog?’ said his mother. ‘How’d you manage that?’
‘I bought a new one and paid the deliveryman twenty bucks to take the old one away.’
‘I could have fixed it,’ said his father, in a soft, disappointed Scottish accent.
‘No, you couldn’t,’ said Bronagh. ‘I mean, you could have but I wouldn’t have let you. We haven’t come all this way to tinker. We’re here to do new and exciting things!’
‘You were keen on a bit of New Zealand adventure, weren’t you?’
Mac said this to Ash at the exact moment he was forking a piece of curly lettuce into his mouth. Curly lettuce, like spaghetti, was a foodstuff Ash believed should be consumed only in private, owing to its infallible ability to humiliate. Like now, when he had all eyes upon him and the piece halfway in his mouth, leaving him with two choices: fork it out again (disgusting) or attempt to swiftly poke the rest in, knowing that it would be about as effortless as wrestling a king-size duvet into its cover. It took him three tries to get the lettuce in his mouth. Everyone watched, apparently fascinated.
After what felt like eight hours of chewing, Ash managed a reply.
‘Indeed I was keen on experiencing the Kiwi outdoors,’ he said. ‘I brought over my camping equipment, and even my kayak.’
‘And?’ Mac persisted.
‘They are as yet unpacked,’ he admitted. ‘Settling into the job has been more time-consuming than I had anticipated. Although I have managed to make the occasional short exploration of your bush.’
In unison, Sidney and Kerry snorted, the synchronised nature of their response prompting them to chortle more. Sidney covered her mouth with her hand and sent an apologetic glance Ash’s way, while Kerry received an elbow in the ribs from his mother.
‘Why are you laughing?’ said eleven-year-old Aidan, with a frown.
‘Because the pair of us share a pathetically puerile sense of humour,’ said Kerry. He took a deep breath, wiped his eyes. ‘Sorry, Doc. Carry on.’
Ash knew that when he was nervous, his grasp of English suffered, while at the same time, helpfully, he became more voluble. Replaying his statement, he saw now what the joke was. He also saw, with despairing certainty, that it must soon wend its way to the ears of Gene Collins, meaning Ash would be ribbed about it until the day he died. Odds were high that it would be quoted at his funeral service.
‘As I recall,’ said Mac, with the inexorability of a Stasi inquisitor, ‘you expressed an interest in learning to hunt.’
‘That true, Doc?’ said Jacko.
Oh, well, he was neck-deep in the pond of humiliation now. Why not have a little swim?
‘It is,’ Ash replied. ‘I have been shooting, which in England means game birds, but I was not given a chance to go stalking, which is the English word for your hunting.’
‘Which is the English word for posh feckers on horseback with dogs,’ contributed Bronagh.
‘Little pitchers, Ma,’ warned Kerry.
Fruitlessly, as it turned out, because Jacko’s next words were, ‘I’ll take you hunting, Doc. First weekend it stops pissing down.’
‘That sounds like a great gas,’ said Bronagh. ‘Doesn’t it, Douglas?’
Her husband’s startled blink suggested he had given the subject scant consideration.
No matter, because Nurse Bronagh pressed on.
‘And have you found yourself a girlfriend, yet?’ she said to Ash. ‘Handsome fella — the local ladies should be flocking.’
Ash waited, but three times was not the charm. Jacko did nothing to save him.
‘Well, no, I’ve—’ he began.
Immediately (thank you, mystery deity) he was drowned out by an eruption of ecstatic whining and yelping from outside the back door. King had obviously seen someone he knew well.
Jacko rose, anticipating the knock on the door. But there was none — the visitor barged straight in, and shouted ‘Hey!’ There were corresponding shouts of recognition, laughter and hugging, while King bounded in circles, delirious with delight.
The visitor was tall and slender, with long blonde hair and a face of surpassing beauty. Ash had a moment of doubt — he’d made a grievous mistake before …
Pink-cheeked, beaming, Mac put her arm around the visitor’s waist. She had no option — she could not reach the shoulders.
‘Bronagh, Douglas, Kerry, Dr G — I’d like you to meet our daughter, Emma.’
She — Emma — smiled right at him. And Ash forgot how to breathe.