Raffy goes around to look at the broken teacup, with the fascination all children have for sharp and dangerous things, and I yell at him to stop. Maeve is still yelling, as am I, and Robin is suddenly fucking nowhere to be seen, and my rug is clearly stained, and it’s too big to put in the washing machine, and that’s money literally down the drain, and Raffy manages to step on a piece of broken cup even though I toldhim to stay away, and he starts crying again. I am nearly crying, too, as I pull the shard of cup out of my child’s foot and try to blot tea and blood from my rug while holding his foot with a paper towel, because this is not a disaster at all, this is daily life. This kind of thing happens every single fucking day, and I haven’t had a break from it foryears. Not one night, nothing.
“Let me sort this out,” Robin says. He’s just arrived back with the mop and bucket, which makes me even more angry because a mop and bucket is of no use whatsoever for a stained rug and a child with a bleeding foot.
“Can you take them to bed,” I ask. “I’m…I just can’t.”
To his credit, he takes them away without a word, even though I’m sure he’d much rather do whatever it is he was planning to do with the mop and bucket.
I clear up as best I can, which takes a while, then go up to the kids’ room. Robin is reading to them. I give everyone a kiss, manage to say nothing when Raffy tells me it’s my fault he’s got a cut foot, and come back downstairs to load the dishwasher. But then I detour to the sitting room, because I really need a rest first. I take off my shoes and climb onto the sofa, only to impale my heel on a giant shard of teacup that one of the kids must have picked up and left there.
Blood runs quickly from the wound, too quickly for the remaining clean corner of Maeve’s dirty school jumper, and I bleed all over the hallway rug as I limp out to the downstairs loo for the first aid kit.
But of course the first aid kit is missing, because Maeve has probably found it and taken it off somewhere to disembowel, and I end up having to secure a sanitary towel to my sole with parcel tape that will rip all the hairs from my foot when I have to remove it.
I go to the fridge for wine, but Robin must have finished it at dinner, so—unusually for me, but with great speed and ferocity—I end upeating most of a box of cheap chocolates left by our most recent Pig Shed guests.
Sick and bloated, my stomach unused to being full, I sit at the kitchen table and check the emails from Roof to see if there’s a delegate list for the conference. There is, of course, because the organizers are organized. Why didn’t I think of this before? I read the entire delegate list and then enter Johan’s name as a search term, but he’s not on it. Registration closed two weeks ago. He’s not coming.
Within minutes, I’m rebooking my flights, insurance, the same hotel Robin booked for me before. I even go as far as booking parking at Heathrow. And then I sit, quietly, eyes shut. Just breathing in and out.
I’m going to Stockholm.
I find my mother disappointing on many levels, but I’ve never felt the rage Maya’s still working through about Mum prioritizing her career over her children. To me, our mother is courageous, a testament to the human capacity to force change. She loved her children but she needed, on a very foundational level, to do other things, too.
And I’ve come to understand that need very well in recent months. I need to go on this trip.
I reconfirm with Yanika’s secretary and write a quick note to Yanika saying I’m very much on for the placement, I just had a logistical issue that I’ve now ironed out.
I’m going to Sweden. To hell with Johan.
Six.
London, January 2010
I met Johan on an iron-cold day in January, the city around me braced under an empty sky. Back then, young and resilient, I used to leave forty minutes early so I could walk to the hospital from London Bridge. I remember a short, blazing sunrise as I crossed the Thames, orange ripening to pink in minutes, then thin blue. But by the time I reached the Tower of London grayness had already sunk, plague-like, and the sky remained vacant and freezing for the rest of the day.
I knew nothing of him that morning. Aged twenty-six and nearing the end of my core training, I’d taken my second MRCS exam a few days before and my thoughts were still consumed by my performance: whether or not I’d said too little at the anatomy station, whether I’d said too much at critical care. I would not be called for a registrar interview unless I’d passed.
Of course you’ll pass!Yanika had texted the previous night.Don’t be ridiculous. You’re worrying because you’re not a white middle-class man. I’ve been there, Carrie, and I can only say, to hell with all that old thinking. Enough!
Maybe she had a point. Compared to Maya, who looks a lot morelike our half-Malaysian mother, I take after our British father. But I’d still had unwelcome comments growing up in rural Devon, and even now I’d have older patients ask things like,So where are you from?It happened only occasionally, but it was enough for me to feel like I was on the back foot.
The cold wind flamed my face as I marched on. Yanika was right: enough. I’d graduated from medical school with a distinction, had already presented at a national conference, and had been awarded the Foundational Trainee of the Year before getting my first choice core training post. I would of course get a registrar number, and if I didn’t rank highly enough to choose the London Deanery there were many other excellent hospitals to choose from around the country. There was even the possibility of a year abroad. The world was my oyster.
—
Four hours into my on-call shift, somewhere in Limehouse, an elderly Turkish woman named Deniz was hit by a motorcycle traveling beyond the speed limit, and a young man called Johan witnessed the entire thing. He tried to look away, he later told me, when Deniz’s tiny body was thrown grotesquely high into the air before crashing down on the freezing tarmac, but he couldn’t—he was already running toward her.
I remember everything that happened.
Deniz was still conscious when the paramedics brought her in, but the primary exam was so bleak the A&E consultant had put her into an induced coma almost straight away. She had rib and neck of femur fractures, bruising to the spleen, and a massive haemothorax. She needed a chest drain urgently.
I asked if I could do the chest drain, of course, but the A&E registrar needed the procedure for his own log book. As I prepped Deniz for the CT afterward, I could see that her chest drain only had around twohundred fifty milliliters of blood in it, even though there must have been at least a liter in her chest. I queried this with the A&E consultant.
“I think it’s good enough,” the consultant told me, peering at her registrar’s work. “We need to get her down to scan now, anyway.”
I let it go. I was a core trainee; this woman was not interested in my opinion.
As we wheeled Deniz’s trolley down toward the lifts, a police officer came through from A&E. “Lose the police officer” was a common pastime in Emergency Medicine, and I purposefully kept my eyes down. But—and I would later put this down to my Johan sixth sense—I found myself turning back to look at the policeman as we passed. Seconds later, my eyes were drawn to the man he was talking to.
