Johan’s job was in the North Sea, a six-day gig surveying a potential oil rig site. I missed him from the moment his taxi pulled away.
Twenty-four hours after he left, I messaged to tell him about a woman who’d absconded from the mental health ward and somehow got into the doctors’ mess. She’d been sitting in the mess drinking coffee for days before someone had actually noticed that a woman in pajamas with seemingly no patients was there readingThe Timeswith her feet up and a plate of bourbon creams by her side.
This was the sort of story he loved, but he didn’t reply.
I knew he was quite literally under the sea. I knew he was busy and wouldn’t necessarily have access to a satellite phone in the evenings on the rig; I didn’t dwell on it. But on day two, when I messaged him about a colleague who’d missed the pacemaker from a patient’s crem form and had essentially caused a crematorium to blow up in Kent, and I heard nothing back, the rational structures of my mind began to crumble.
Are you OK?I texted.
Nothing.
I called him. Before bed, I emailed him, but there was nothing in my inbox the next morning.
Despite my better judgment, I began to panic. Surely the rig had satellite phones—internet, even—it was 2010! With great shame, I calledthe marine archaeology company to ask if they’d heard from him. They had, they said. Did I want them to pass on a message?
Eventually, I called Dad. After Dad had met Nicola and returned to his old self, he’d become a remarkable anchor to teenage Maya and Carrie. No matter what problems we brought to the kitchen table, Dad had always managed to apply some immutable law, some algorithm with which even Maya struggled to argue. Best of all, he’d always served his solutions with a hot sweet tea and one biscuit.
“Dad. Can you make phone calls from oil rigs?” I asked. It was a Thursday evening, which meant he was on the train back to Devon from London. “I know you’ve visited a few.”
Dad was quiet for a moment, but I knew that this was his much-vaunted “essential pause” rather than a lapse in the phone signal.
“Is Johan on an oil rig?” he asked.
“Well, yes. But I’m asking in a general sense.”
“Oh, Carrie, love. Of course people can make calls from oil rigs. But if Johan is on an oil rig and he hasn’t called you, it means he can’t.”
He listened patiently as I told him that Johan had been in touch with his office but hadn’t even read my messages.
“And you think this is a sign?”
I flushed. “Maybe.”
“I’ll only say this, my darling: love makes us think and do many strange things. What is presented by our minds as incontrovertible truth is often wildly off the mark. Try to remember that.”
“But how are we supposed to know which voice to trust?”
“We always know the truth, Carrie. Deep down. These things needn’t be complicated.”
“I miss you, Dad,” I sighed.
But his train was now deep in the Wiltshire Downs and he lost signal.
Three days later, still with no word from Johan, I made the firstmajor mistake of my career. I was assessing a patient in Acute Medical when Yanika pulled me out into the ward reception.
“You prescribed Augmentin to a diverticulitis case,” she said in a low voice. “She’s penicillin allergic. If the ward sister hadn’t remembered, we’d have a potential medical negligence case on our hands.”
“Oh God,” I said. “Really? No…Surely I…Oh,shit.”
“I also heard you failed to send my hernia patient to scan yesterday. And that you didn’t turn up for the rota meeting I asked you to attend on my behalf.”
“I don’t know what to say,” I said, after a pause. I couldn’t deny any of it.
“Your mistakes were regrettable, but they were detected in time,” Yanika said. “What I actually want to talk about is why you’re behaving like this. What’s happening?”
The policeman I’d shouted at when I met Johan had not made a complaint about me. But this poor woman could have been a different story if the ward sister hadn’t intervened.
To my horror, my eyes filled with tears.
