We stood watching each other, a gap of just two feet between us. “Carrie Cole…” he said softly.
My bleeper went off again.
Robotically, I turned and walked away toward the stairwell. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew that I couldn’t stand there a moment longer.
He didn’t call my name or follow me, because he knew it too.
Eight.
Johan never came back.
Deniz got through three surgeries, six weeks of physio, and an eventual discharge, but I saw nothing of him, and when I asked one of the ward nurses they said the only visitors she’d had lately had been a niece and, occasionally, an Orthodox minister.
“Not the guy who was there at the collision?” I asked casually.
The nurse smiled knowingly. “Sadly not! I think we were all hoping he’d come back, but he only came the once.”
—
Soon after Johan disappeared off the face of the earth, I found out I’d ranked eleventh nationally after my registrar interviews. My friends had all got training numbers too and the mood was high; there were several boozy nights out. But all I really wanted to do was find Johan and tell him, which left me feeling confused and ashamed. I barely knew the man.
“This too shall pass,” Dad said to me, often, during that time; but I didn’t want it to pass. I didn’twantto move on.
I had no idea why he’d been in Limehouse the day Deniz was hit by a motorcycle, but I went there, one gray Sunday in early March. I wandered around some empty streets under a steely sky, then had a panini in a deserted cafe. I walked all the way home, even though it took four hours and my feet were frozen. But I had nowhere else to be, nobody else to see.
A solitary bird was singing as I crossed Clapham Common. There were daffodils under the trees, and for a short while the sky brightened. I tilted my face up to the diluted sun and stopped for a few moments, smelling the sodden, overused earth beneath my feet, traffic droning down toward Balham and Wandsworth.
From nowhere, tears came. They came and they wouldn’t stop, no matter how hard I pressed my eyes. The harder I tried to stop, the harder I cried. Thick clouds rolled back over the sun and I realized I’d trodden in dog shit.
“Why are you crying?”
I looked down. There was a boy of maybe four, five—I’d only spent a few months in paeds during my foundation training; it was hard to tell kids’ ages—with dinosaur wellies and thick glasses. He was peering up at me, curious rather than concerned.
“Oh. Ah—sorry.”
“Why are you saying sorry?”
“I don’t know.”
He stared at me a while longer. Somewhere behind him, a middle-class man was making one of those laughing pseudo-apologies that parents make.
“Adults don’t cry much,” the boy said. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “Did somebody make you feel sad?”
“I…well…yes, actually. Although he didn’t mean to. I think my real problem is…” I trailed off.Is that I’m lonely.
The boy stared at me again. “I need to go for a nature wee,” he told me, and with that he was off.
—
I was in Sainsbury’s, the big one near work. It was May now, and spring had finally settled itself into London; the parks full of joggers, blossom blowing in gusts, transient showers like a child’s tantrums from the sky.
I was halfway through my final rotation in core surgical training, and tomorrow would be my twenty-seventh birthday. I was buying cake to share with the upper GI team, although I’d likely end up eating it on my own and throwing the rest in the bin. Four of the team were off with D&V; the rest of us were working at full throttle.
I’d just chosen a checkout when I saw him, three tills down from mine.
I stopped dead. He had a basket already on the conveyor belt and he was waiting, drumming his fingers on the chrome edge, waiting for the customer before him to finish packing her bags. He was wearing work trousers again. Work boots, a faded sweatshirt.
I stared. The man behind me asked if I was in the queue and it took me several seconds to hear what he was saying.
