24 July 2013
When the waiter turns up with my thali, I wonder if I have accidentally signed up for an extreme eating challenge.
Kerry laughs. ‘I did warn you about the portion sizes.’
We’re in her local. Decent Indian food is one of the few things I miss in Spain, so it’s top of my list while I’m staying with her in London. But right now I don’t feel hungry.
Before I flew over, I had my speech planned out. This trip is about resolving unfinished business, starting with telling Kerry that I know she got closer to Joel than she’s ever admitted. The counselling I’ve had to prepare for adoption has made me see I prefer everything out in the open. Except right now, I’m less sure if it’s the right thing for her too.
I approach the eight circular pots of curry in a clockwise direction, starting with dal. The taste is so reminiscent of my elective, and I close my eyes to let it overwhelm me. For a few seconds, I’m back there, in that compound in the jungle, losing myself in research, finding Kerry again. Proposing to her . . .
When I open my eyes, she’s looking at me.
‘It’s ten years since we went to India,’ I say.
She nods. ‘I was thinking the same. You haven’t changed a bit.’
But she has. When she picked me up at Heathrow yesterday, I almost didn’t recognize her. Maria teases me about my lack of observational skills, but even I can tell that Kerry’s too thin, and there are grey hairs peppering her parting. Although, I’m exhibiting clear signs of male pattern baldness, so I shouldn’t draw conclusions from our respective scalps alone.
‘Well, you haven’t lost your reckless streak,’ I say. She’s been telling me about the various scrapes she’s got herself into during her F2 year. It’s her usual fools-rush-in tendency, but what’s new is the feverish way she talks, like a comedian trying to squeeze too many jokes into his set.
She’s off again, with a story about a woman with a headache who turned out to have cerebral venous thrombosis. I try to eat but I’ve lost my appetite.
‘What’s the team like?’
‘Really cliquey.’
I wait till there’s a brief pause while she chews on some chapatti. ‘There must be some decent people. You need allies to make the job bearable.’
Kerry sighs. ‘I guess. I’m not the easiest to work with either, to be honest, though I’ve been trying to be less snappy. But sometimes it’s so overwhelming that I struggle to be nice.’
‘You’re always nice.’
‘I don’t know if I am anymore. I feel I’ve hardened. Like . . .’ She looks up. I know that expression of hers, it’s the one she gets when she’s trying to come up with a way to explain deep feelings to someone as emotionally unintelligent as I am. ‘OK. There was this guy in his thirties who came in a couple of weeks ago. Sweaty, skin blue-white with intermittent flank pain.’
I look up from the second pot of curry – a cauliflower and tomato dish. ‘Renal colic?’
She nods. ‘The X-ray, honestly. His kidney looked like a hail storm, with one really big stone blocking the ureter. That’s how I feel. Like I’m calcifying within and all the emotions are blocked up. I don’t feel anything except adrenaline rushes.’
I haven’t seen her this vulnerable since her ectopic pregnancy. ‘I know you’re tough as old boots, but that sounds a lot like burnout.’
‘Burnout? Since when is that a real thing?’
‘Since I had it.’
She shakes her head. ‘That was different.’
‘It looks pretty similar from where I’m sitting, Kerry.’
‘You were in the wrong job.’
‘And this is your dream, I know. But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help. Talk to your mentor. Ask his advice.’
‘Ha. I did already and he told me, there’s no “u” in team . . . Well, there is a “u” in “cunt”.’
It makes me laugh, but upsets me too. This isn’t the Kerry I know. ‘You need to make time to switch off. Have you tried yoga?’
She laughs so hard that curry almost comes out of her nose. ‘No, but I’m starting Anaesthetics in a fortnight, perfect for chillaxing. Unconscious patients, regular theatre hours.’
‘You’ll be bored.’
‘Yeah. I’m actually thinking I might do a sabbatical after this year’s over. Go back to SA, maybe?’
‘Please God, no.’ When Kerry was doing her elective in a trauma department in Johannesburg, I worried about her the entire month, imagining she’d get caught up in one of the incidents that makes the city the ideal place for learning how to handle gunshot wounds. ‘There must be some other way to get your adrenaline fix.’
‘Syria?’
I shake my head. ‘There’s no talking sense to you, is there?
‘You’re the one who had to move countries to find true happiness. Do you miss Blighty? Apart from the curries?’
Arriving into London yesterday was like visiting a foreign country. Newspaper front pages were plastered with pictures of the new royal baby, as though that’s more important than what’s happening in the Middle East. Even if Maria wasn’t Spanish, I don’t know that I’d have wanted to raise a child in England.
‘I miss Marks and Spencer ready meals. And a halfway efficient civil service. Visiting Islington Register Office this morning reminded me what makes Britain the best bureaucracy in the world. Spain’s adoption process is like wading through shark-infested dulce de leche.’
‘I really admire you two for going down this route.’
‘No. Don’t admire us. We’re just . . . stubborn. We like to do things our way.’
It’s taken the two of us a long time to work through our issues, but the decision to adopt was mutual. Neither Maria nor I have any emotional attachment to the idea that blood is thicker than water. We agree: there are children who need parents and we can offer complementary kinds of love. Maria’s version is the more demonstrative kind, while I can offer the dependability I never had, the reassurance that I will be there for a kid, through thick and thin.
‘We’re going to have to get a doggy bag,’ Kerry says. She can tell I’m already struggling with curry number four, a lurid spinach and beetroot combination. We pay up and they give us foil trays full of leftovers. When I put them in her fridge back at the flat, the shelves are almost empty.
‘You’re not eating enough.’
‘I’m fine. Remember, it’s different when you live on your own. Not that you’d know.’
She’s right: I’ve never been alone, even though I’d see myself as a loner at heart. ‘And there’s no one on the horizon?’
‘Not you as well. I happen to like having a double bed to myself, and not having to pick up someone else’s socks. Naming no names.’
I’ve known her so long, yet I can’t tell what’s truth and what’s bluster. But I do know I want her to be happy.
I say so.
Kerry steps forward and puts her arms around me. ‘Yeah, I’ll get there in the end,’ she says.
She’s my best friend. Which is why I need to tell her I know everything. I disentangle myself and sit on her futon. ‘Listen, I have to talk to you about something.’
‘That sounds ominous.’ When I don’t respond, she sits down next to me, pouring herself a glass of the cava I brought over to celebrate finishing her foundation years.
‘It’s about Joel Greenaway.’
She winces. ‘What about him?’
‘There’s something I never told you that’s been playing on my mind. He came to the house once, to bring you a birthday card.’
‘Huh? When?’ She sounds impatient and I get a sense of what it might be like to work with her now.
‘The year Mum died. Though it was before we knew she was sick.’ I shake my head. ‘Before I knew, anyway.’
She smiles sadly. ‘Eight years ago? Why are you telling me about this now?’
‘We had a bit of a discussion.’
‘What about?’
‘What he was up to, what we were up to. He said he was doing a course to be a personal trainer.’ I picture his triathlon T-shirt and stop talking to give her a chance to tell me the truth.
I know it shouldn’t matter all these years later, but it does. Maybe because there’s always an edge in Kerry’s voice when she talks about Maria, as though she’s somehow to blame for what went wrong. Or my brain needs the exact order of events. I am not comfortable with uncertainty.
Kerry shrugs. ‘Is that all?’
‘No. I never gave you the card, I threw it away, even though I got the sense that it was . . . important.’
She looks away. Eventually, she says, ‘Joel has a son. Did you know that?’
‘I think I saw a photo in a magazine.’ I know I did because I immediately turned the page.
‘He’s eight now,’ she says, and for a second I wonder if it could somehow be her baby, but eight years ago, we were living together and even with the distraction of my finals, I would have noticed if she’d carried a baby to term. ‘What a long time ago it all seems, doesn’t it? We were kids ourselves.’
Were we? I don’t ever remember feeling like a kid. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry.’
Her eyes meet mine. Can she see what I need from her in return?
‘For not giving me a card? Come on. I did my share of crappy things back then. For intelligent people, it took us a bloody long time to work out we were destined to be best friends instead of husband and wife. Right?’
‘I suppose it did.’ But I won’t break eye contact.
When she does speak, it’s a whisper. ‘But, you know, I’m sorry, too.’
I realize I’ve been holding my breath. When I exhale, I feel lighter than I have since I arrived back in England.
Kerry lifts her glass to her lips and finishes her cava and yawns ostentatiously. ‘I need some kip. And so do you, you have to be on your toes tomorrow.’
It’s almost disappointing, how little he’s changed.
Physically, he’s different: he’s lost a couple of inches in height already and is completely bald. My fate too, then. But emotionally . . .
He has booked lunch at his absolute favourite, an oak-lined dining room where even the dessert menu features animal parts. From the moment he shakes hands – no hugs, that’s not the Palmer way – I know this meeting won’t give me what I hoped for.
Which is not the same as thinking it’s a mistake.
My father talks about himself all the way through: his partnership, his sailing club, his new family – two daughters, who have already given him three grandchildren. I’ve never met them, or his second wife, and have no real desire to.
He remembers to add in a few references to how tough it was financially when they were small, perhaps to justify his meanness towards me and Mum, but I see no evidence of struggle. A couple of times, when he’s talking about playing with his grandson, the twinkle in his eyes does remind me of those rare occasions when he was a fun, romp-round-the-back-garden dad.
He brushes over anything awkward – the fact I asked him not to come to Mum’s funeral, my own failure to finish foundation training. He has a house near Kingston-upon-Thames now. So we both live by water, eh, it must be in our DNA.
I realize before they bring the starters that I won’t go through with the showdown I’ve been rehearsing in my head since he left us. He is impermeable; the only person it would damage is me.
‘Keep in touch,’ he says, after paying the bill with a flourish, and leaving no tip. ‘Who knows, one of these days I might even pop over to Barcelona!’
The air outside is charged with the storm due any minute. I watch him hail a cab and decide to walk back to Kerry’s flat, even though it’s over four miles.
When it starts to rain, I begin to laugh. Instead of nipping into a shop, I let it drench me, ruining the suit I only ever wear to funerals or meetings with long-lost and disappointing relatives.
Tomorrow I fly home, to Maria, to the work that makes a difference, and to start creating the family I know we can build together, despite my father, not because of him.