31 December 2000
Nowhere throughout the application for medical school did they assess the liver’s ability to process alcohol. Tonight, more than ever, this seems a dangerous omission.
‘Come on, Palmer, get it down you!’
A blue flame dances on top of the sambuca, and even though I’ve seen the others drink it without sustaining burns, my instinct for self-preservation stops me following suit.
‘Oh sod that, if he’s not having it, I will!’ Harry Wilcox snatches the shot glass from me and I am no longer the centre of attention.
I estimate that my liver’s processing power is about average within my cohort. In the fourteen weeks since term began, five people have been incapacitated by booze, in various ways, mostly involving vomit. Perhaps we’re simply acclimatizing to the noxious bodily fluids we’re going to come across in the years to come.
‘Smart move with the sambuca,’ says Laura. ‘I had a friend in sixth form who breathed at the wrong time and ended up with singed nostrils and zero nasal hair.’
‘Now that I would like to see,’ I say, thinking of Wilcox specifically. A moment later, I realize how bad that must have sounded, but she’s laughing.
Laughing at me or with me?
‘Fancy a dance?’ she grins at me.
I try to weigh up whether this is a joke at my expense. ‘I don’t dance.’
‘Everyone can dance. Come on, Palmer! Throw some shapes!’
Is she coming on to me? Laura is clever and pretty, but not too pretty, so perhaps there isn’t a huge mismatch in our relative attractiveness. Statistically, relationships where one partner is far uglier than the other never work.
But a woman who was coming on to me wouldn’t use my surname, would she? Or maybe she would. My mother’s unconditional adoration hasn’t equipped me to comprehend women I am not related to.
Even Kerry, who I’ve known since I was eight, baffles me in countless ways. Since she’s moved into the spare room, I can study her behaviour in even more detail, as a field biologist might, but it makes less sense than ever. She shops, cooks, washes up illogically. And she’s reckless, too. Since she passed her test, she drives everywhere as though she is catastrophically late.
But it’s her kindness and bravery that baffle me more. How she keeps smiling even when Mum’s jibes are so perfectly targeted. Why she gave up on going to uni, took the ambulance job and moved into the bungalow so I could come to med school.
I still can’t understand how she screwed up her exams when she was always so much smarter than me . . .
Laura is pulling me onto the dance floor and I sense the others looking our way.
She grins at me as the next song starts – ‘If This Ain’t Love’, not bad – and I try to forget that anyone is watching. Because if I can get over my self-consciousness, I’m better at dancing than people would expect. Could the same apply to kissing?
‘Bloody hell, Palmer,’ Laura shouts above the music, ‘you’re a dark horse.’
‘What can I say? Hidden talents.’
‘I wonder what else you can do?’ When she smiles wolfishly back, I wonder if this is where the physical side of my life begins? It’s long overdue.
I’m in the gents’ when the clock strikes midnight. New Year is meaningless as far as I am concerned. When I return, the dance floor is sticky and striped with party-popper streamers and Laura looks disappointed that I wasn’t there for Big Ben’s bongs.
When everyone goes back to Wilcox’s flat, I plan to head home, but she drags me with her. Chateau Wilcox – he has a kitsch painted sign on the door – is a big basement flat a couple of minutes’ walk from the hospital, even though it’ll be nearly three years before we really get our hands on patients. Wilcox’s parents bought it for him, and he’s taken on a couple of flatmates who’re already on their clinical years: They’re hardly here, which suits me as I get the place to myself.
We’re only two streets up from the sea, so the patio garden has a smell of ozone and the wind tastes of salt, but at least it’s stopped raining for a bit. We’re warmed by more booze and the temporary bonhomie it’s generated. There’s a big box at the far end of the patio next to the flint wall, and Wilcox strides over to it and claps his hands to make sure he has everyone’s attention.
‘We made it, you guys. Only one term in, but we’re here, the next generation of doctors. Medics for the new millennium. Bone-sawyers, gassers, slashers. Some of us are going to make history, invent cool stuff. Some of us will have to content ourselves with getting filthy rich by removing wrinkles from ladies of a certain age.’
Everyone laughs. I have to admit, he’s pompous, but funny.
‘But I know from my dad, and my uncle, and their dad before them, that the mates we make now will stay with us for decades. The chums forged over our cadavers always last. So drink, be merry and BANG!’
He takes a box of matches from his pocket and lights the edge of the box, then races back to the rest of us on the patio. We wait. Wilcox looks pissed off.
‘That cost over three hundred quid, it’d better—’
The first firework tears out of the box, exploding in the sky like a giant white chrysanthemum, as though it’s testing the air for the others. They follow – three show-off minutes of colour and noise. I wonder if the patients in the hospital are seeing it.
And whether Kerry is seeing it, or whether she’s too focused on the flashing lights on her screen, less than a mile away, in ambulance control.
‘Gorgeous, aren’t they?’ Laura says, snuggling up to me, pretending it’s colder than it is.
I can tell she wants me to kiss her. ‘Yes. Not sure they’re worth three hundred quid, though. Excuse me, I need another drink.’ As I walk away, relief is tempered by regret.
Every sofa in the living room is occupied by snogging couples, but the kitchen is quiet. I help myself to a vodka and Coke.
‘All right, Palmer?’ Wilcox stands in the doorway. ‘Has the luscious Laura got her teeth into you yet?’
It’s odd to see him on his own: he’s always surrounded by acolytes. I crave his confidence. Time to leave, before my envy uncoils into something darker. ‘I’m heading off now.’
‘Don’t be a party-pooper!’ He slaps me on the shoulder. ‘Hey, if you’re sleepy, I might have a little something to perk you up.’ He taps the side of his nose.
We all know Wilcox does cocaine. I’ve never done anything, not even the weed and E the cool kids did in sixth form. I never got offered either.
But now I wonder: could coke make me more like Wilcox? ‘All right.’
His bedroom is tidy, his king-size bed neatly made for when he tires of being the host.
Wilcox opens a drawer in an oak desk. The tin box he takes out used to hold toffees but now contains a bag of powder, which he tips onto the inlaid writing surface of the desk and divides into two lines with a credit card.
‘You first?’
‘No, you,’ I say, because I have no idea what to do.
He sits on the leather chair beside the desk and rolls up a small slip of paper he takes from a pile in the drawer and pokes one end into his nostril. He leans down and snorts, sucking up the line of powder like a hoover.
He sits up, sniffs, blinks, smiles. ‘Woah. Never get bored of that.’
When he passes me a new piece of paper, I think of our introductory course in communicable diseases, wonder if that’s why he doesn’t use bank notes. The paper is hard to roll and he takes it from me. ‘First time, Palmer? Watch.’ He positions it by my nostril so I can push it in, guides my face towards the cocaine. There’s a gentleness about him, the bedside manner in his genes.
As I snort, I feel the powder travel up my nasal cavity, the experience faintly medicinal. All gone. I sit up. Where is the coke now? I picture my anatomy book. Perhaps somewhere between my inferior and superior turbinates.
How long will it take to reach my brain? Perhaps I will feel nothing at all.
But now it’s happening, a rush of something I can’t quite describe. I am still myself but unapologetically so. Not the scared schoolboy who froze on the Lawns this time last year, but a man who can act, can take control. I feel my face breaking into a wide grin.
I glance up at Wilcox, who is also grinning. ‘Good, right?’ he says. ‘There’s more where that came from. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’
‘Right.’ I don’t know what he means but I don’t care. For now, I feel like his equal.
I go out into the garden and find Laura, and kiss her full on the lips before either of us has the chance to change our minds.
I walk back home because there are no cabs and I don’t think I have enough cash for the New Year tariff anyway. The last hit of coke has worn off and it’s late. Five a.m. Where did the time go?
A lot of it was spent kissing Laura. It felt better than the cocaine and she wanted to go further but . . . well, I like her, so I didn’t want to rush. I wonder if we could date.
A girlfriend, a vocation, a future.
But as I walk, guilt hardens within me like frost: Mum has been alone for ten hours and Kerry has been working the dreaded New Year shift while I have been partying.
The lights are still on in Kerry’s parents’ house but our bungalow is dark. There’s a note stuck to the front door. DON’T FORGET FIRST FOOTING.
We don’t do much to mark my mother’s Scottish heritage, but this is sacrosanct, to avoid bad luck for the whole of 2001. On the ledge, Mum has laid a lump of coal – always the same one, shrinking over the years – plus a piece of bread, a teaspoon of salt and a crystal sherry glass half-full of whisky. I hold my breath as I put my key in the door, hoping I won’t wake her. But as I carry the items over the threshold, I hear her voice.
‘Tim?’
I go into her bedroom, fearful. Will she be able to sense what I’ve done? Her eyes are bright from the reading lamp. ‘Happy New Year, Mum.’
She reaches out for the gifts and I place them on the table. ‘You never forget. You’re a good boy.’
Relief washes over me. ‘Ah, I don’t know about that.’
‘How was your party?’
‘Brilliant.’ I say no more because I’m too tired to process the difference between the things she’d want to know, and what I should keep to myself.
‘That’s nice, son. I was worried when it got late and you weren’t home but I told myself: he’s with a bunch of doctors, what harm could come to him?’
I lean in to kiss her dry cheek. ‘That’s right, Mum. Everything is fine. 2001 is going to be our year.’