AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The ancient professor dragged out of retirement to make up a quorate interview panel informed me I was a very impressive young man. What a joke! Hungover, miserable and nauseous, I was dead inside. But the old git had trained with my grandfather (a retired GP), which helped in my favour. I’d found over the years that was how these things generally worked.
As the only candidate not caring whether I was offered the job or rolled my car into a ditch on the way home, I’d responded to every question with a flippant answer. Could I describe my biggest weakness? Yes. I made incredibly unwise decisions when drunk. What brought me to Bournemouth? My Audi A3. What were my opinions on the encroaching privatisation of British healthcare? Many and varied, and none politically correct. Where did I see my career ten years from now? God knows—at that moment I couldn’t see further than the huge bloody blow-up I’d be having with my wife later that evening. Apparently, my honest and open approach had been refreshing.
Afterwards, too keyed-up to face the long car journey, I took myself for a walk along the beach. Doubtless, I made an incongruous sight in my smart suit, dress shoes in one hand and my jacket in the other. Dog walkers were out in force, the wooden benches surrounding a beach café occupied by happy folk making the most of the fresh early spring day.
On one bench sat three men—a younger, dark-haired guy sandwiched between two older ones, contentedly sharing a bag of chips with grateful seagulls. The old me, even the me from a couple of years ago, would have detoured for a closer inspection. Just to make absolutely sure it wasn’t him. Today, however, with no more than a passing glance, I trudged on. Matt Leeson was my past, not my future. The chances of stumbling across him on Bournemouth beach, three hours from his hometown, were infinitesimal. I needed to let him go. For my own sake, I needed to forge forwards.
Instead of doubling back, I mentally composed the letter I’d write tomorrow, accepting Bournemouth Department of Anaesthesia’s very generous job offer. Later this week, I’d phone a solicitor, work out how someone went about seeking a divorce. Then make an appointment with a financial adviser. Break the news to my parents. Plan my move down south. Find some friends of my own, focus on my next exam, be a good uncle to my sister’s girls. Start afresh. Explore my sexuality. Enter a monastery.
A couple of very odd things happened as I arrived home. Firstly, Samantha opened the front door wide before I’d even switched off the car engine. In the early days of our marriage, she’d greeted me with a kiss at the door every night; these days she barely looked up from the telly. The second, and even odder occurrence, was that she smiled at me, broadly, and practically dancing on the spot. Almost as if she’d received some excellent news that she was bursting to share. And the final odd thing, the absolute bloody icing on the cake, was that in her right hand she brandished a rectangular strip of plastic.
I didn’t need to step any closer to see the thin blue line. Or to know the direction my future pointed.
PARTTHREE
NOW
THESE DAYS
(POWDERFINGER)
“Adolf Hitler is to blame for my bowel problems. And then the Russians.”
Honestly? I didn’t have time to unpick that opening gambit, but my operating theatre schedule was immaterial to Mrs Fortescue.
“Vienna, you see. After the war.”
Seemingly, and I wouldn’t have put it beyond Mrs Fortescue to quiz me afterwards, children who suffered the misfortune of living in District 24 during the immediate aftermath of World War Two were a ragged, half-starved bunch. The Soviets held the keys to the grocery cupboard, and, like spoilt only children, they weren’t keen on sharing. Rations of cold, greasy hotch-potch, she keenly informed me over half-moon spectacles, played life-long havoc with one’s digestive system.
Despite being alive since God was a boy and staring down the barrel of an operation that would slay many a patient thirty years her junior, Mrs Fortescue would walk unaided out of this hospital around a fortnight from now. I’d have bet my house on it. Doughty old women like her were indestructible.
I let her talk a little longer, enjoying her faint Austrian lilt as she listed the unappetising ingredients of her staple childhood diet, even though I ran a few minutes late to take over the afternoon operating list. Mutton neck accompanied by cheese-rind soup; no wonder her bowels played up. As often happened when people reminisced about the war, my mind drifted to bittersweet, blurry memories of Matt Leeson. When seventeen-year-old Matt Leeson took a break from ranting about other people’s poor taste in music, he had been borderline obsessed with history. He’d have hung on Mrs Fortescue’s every word.
Eventually, I peeled myself away and headed to theatre. The emergency operating list ran all day, and I was scheduled to take over the afternoon slot. Peering through the small viewing window, I stifled a groan. Not only would I have to apologise for being a few minutes late, but I’d be apologising to Dr Mike Cousins, who would notch up my tardiness as yet another black mark to be used against me at an inconvenient point sometime in the future.
My nemesis reclined in a swivel chair, one foot hooked over his knee, all the better to balance a newspaper across his lap. I enjoyed a childish moment of satisfaction at the way his theatre pyjamas stretched tight across his paunch. Too busy these days maintaining domestic bliss to get out on his pushbike and exercise. Next to him, the anaesthetic monitors bleeped their familiar monotonous tune. The surgeon, his junior entourage, and the scrub nurse were bent over the operating table, hard at work.
“Hi, Mike. All good?”
As he folded the newspaper into a meticulous square, he made a show of peering at the clock before fixing his contemptuous gaze on me. “Nice of you to join us, Val.”
He gave a semblance of a smile, for the benefit of the anaesthetic nurse hovering a couple of feet away. The importance of maintaining a civilised front remained about the only thing on which Mike and I agreed. Wanker.
“The patient after this one is a bit tricky,” I explained, hating myself for feeling he warranted any explanation. “She’s peritonitic and has a set of medical notes like a doorstop. I had to arrange a high-dependency bed for her afterwards, as I think she’ll be best…”
Mike didn’t care what I thought, as he would be long gone before Mrs Fortescue’s innards became outtards. Most colleagues would be perfectly happy to discuss a challenging patient. Medicine humbled a person like that; there was always something to learn, no matter how many years of toil at the coalface. But not Mike. If he wasn’t anaesthetising them, then he wasn’t interested.
“Let me tell you about this chap we have on the table now, so I can get out of here,” he interrupted, with a further glance at the clock. He jerked his chin in the direction of the patient, all but hidden aside from a pair of worn black socks poking out of the bottom of a sterile surgical drape.
“Man in his early forties. Got beaten up last night walking home from the pub. Not exactlyPLU, if you catch my drift. Bordering onLord of the Ringstoenails territory from the look of him.”
PLU.People Like Us. Most medical professionals refrained from making derogatory comments about patients. Granted, discussing risks of surgery last month with an octogenarian dressed in nothing but a leopard skin thong (the patient, not me) had been tricky, and keeping a straight face when a patient swears blind they are allergic to oxygen will forever pose a challenge. That said, any mature doctor with a shred of decency appreciated that not every member of society had our advantages in life. And a generosity of spirit being the least one should offer. Not always easy, especially when patients were rude or ignorant, and God knows I was far from perfect, but I’d always believed we had a duty to be kind. Mike’s frequent and judgemental comments about patients’ clothing, tattoos, piercings, unkempt toenails, and body odour, pissed me off.
“He’s otherwise fit and well.” He handed me the patient’s obs chart. “Skinny. A couple of tattoos. Denies heavy drinking and drugs, of course, but don’t they all?”
Twelve hours earlier, this unfortunate patient’s face had collided with someone’s unyielding fist. The maxillofacial team were halfway through the delicate task of fixing metal plates across his facial bones, via an incision inside his mouth. The beating had been brutal; the poor sod had also suffered a broken arm, already screwed back together by the orthopaedic surgeons, moderate concussion, and a few fractured ribs.
“Not his fault, allegedly,” Mike observed with a condescending eyebrow raise. “But then they all say that, too, don’t they?”
