Is There Anything You Want? (3 page)

Did she smile? Did she acknowledge his little bit of kindness? Did she say that yes, she would take care? She had no idea. She could hardly see for tears, hardly gather up her strength to leave the room. Her progress from the room was unsteady. She couldn't see the red line to follow. Twice she lost the way to the entrance hall, twice turned corners into corridors unfamiliar to her. Miles of floor stretching in front of her, sign after sign directing her everywhere but to the exit. She had to stop and collect herself, breathe deeply. Then she felt a hand on her arm. ‘Are you all right, dear, can I help you, where are you going?' She tried to say she was fine, but the words wouldn't come. She coughed to cover her confusion. The coughing helped, it cleared her head. She saw it was that woman, that Friend, the one who waited for prey in the entrance hall. She pulled herself away from the
helpful arm and said she was perfectly well, thank you, just a coughing fit, and strode off briskly. She could see the exit sign now. She passed swiftly through the big entrance hall and as soon as she was outside, found a bench and sat down.

She felt better. Tired, but no longer in a panic. Taxis drew up, people got out. An ambulance shrieked past. People milled about, the comings and goings were tremendous. They came from so far away to this hospital, the biggest in the area. She had 30 miles to travel home and couldn't yet face making her way to the bus station. But the terror had finally faded. She'd been in its grip all day. She ought to feel elated, joyous even, the clinic visit over for another year and all well. More than all well. She had the prospect before her of having done with clinic visits for ever. In a year's time, she might never have to follow the yellow line again. It should thrill her, but it didn't. Elation, joy, was not what she felt. It was the fault of that kind man who took her blood. Telling her to take care. Exactly. That was what depressed her, all the care she needed to take, all the time. Taking care meant battling with her fear, grappling with pessimism, blanking out images of cells in her body grouping and splitting and gathering into tumours. They might be anywhere. They might be in her bones already, cosily sleeping, waiting. Waiting for a year, till she was discharged from the clinic and then waking up and getting to work. Nobody would know. It didn't matter how much care she took, she wouldn't know until the pain began. It wouldn't be like last time, the tiny crumb of a hard lump giving the game away. Her own care then had saved her. Mr Wallis had congratulated her on her vigilance. But next time it wouldn't be like that. The secondaries would steal through her bones or creep into her liver or drain into her brain, and no amount of vigilance would prevent them. That was how she reckoned it would be.

The burden of her dread was so heavy. She couldn't sit here all day. She wished she had her car, but she hadn't trusted herself to drive. She got up and trudged along to get the bus home, feeling dragged down by melancholy. It weighed as heavily as a bag of stones. She told herself that tomorrow she would feel relieved. She would, it was true. The glorious relief of the clinic being over would start as pin-pricks of happiness, a physical
thing. She'd feel them in her skin, the skin of her face first. It would relax, the tautness would slacken. Then they would trickle through her whole body, these minuscule jolts of energy, and she'd feel suddenly vibrant. Harry would say she was looking particularly well. He liked saying that. She would hold herself back from any bitter remark about wondering why that was, had he not remembered she'd just been through the ordeal of the clinic. No, she wouldn't say that, or anything like that. He'd only want to know how she'd got on, and when she told him he'd beam and say what brilliant news. Brilliant!

She couldn't cope with his euphoria. Best to keep quiet. Always best.

*

Chrissie dreaded the walk across the clinic floor, though she hoped her dread was not apparent. She tried to look cheerful, smiling, making her walk brisk and bouncy, and forcing herself to look to right and left, nodding a greeting to anyone who looked her way. She knew she didn't look as a doctor was supposed to look, but she couldn't help it if her appearance didn't conform to the stereotype. Mr Wallis looked as people wanted a doctor to look – tall, imposing, serious – and, in different ways, so did Ben Cohen and Andrew Fraser. They didn't have Mr Wallis's dignified bearing, and they were not immaculately dressed as he was, but each in his own fashion inspired confidence. She did not. It wasn't just that she looked schoolgirlish, or that her hair was always coming loose from the combs holding it up and making her look untidy, or even that her clothes (grey skirts, black or grey tops) made her look dowdy, but that her whole demeanour was somehow apologetic. It made her despair. She'd catch sight of herself in mirrors sometimes and think who is that funny little woman scurrying by like a squirrel. So she tried to counteract the impression she knew she made by always smiling; she tried to radiate friendliness.

God knows, these patients needed friendliness. The atmosphere in this waiting-area was always dreadful. She smiled and nodded, but there were never any smiles or nods in return. Faces
were frozen, expressions fixed, and who could blame them. Today, especially, there was an air of settled misery. It had filtered through by now that Mr Wallis was on holiday, and Dr Cohen ill, which left only her and Andrew. Somehow, they were going to have to cope. What was worse was that officially she was in charge, because she'd been in Mr Wallis's team a year longer than Andrew. It didn't make any difference, really, they would both share the load, but she felt apprehensive. She'd never done a clinic without Mr Wallis in the background, always there to be turned to. She should be pushing for promotion herself by now, but she didn't want it. Andrew would make registrar status before her, and she didn't care. He'd probably become a consultant within five more years, at some other hospital if not this one, and she never would. Her mother used to say lack of real ambition was her fatal flaw, but she didn't see it as a flaw. She felt dedicated to her work but not to reaching the top of her profession. Making decisions was always hard for her and if she became a registrar, never mind a consultant, she'd be turned to all the time for advice. She didn't want that.

It was a relief to leave the patients behind and arrive in the other part of the clinic. It was like a maze, this part, the other side of the cubicles. The dividing walls were hardboard, the general impression one of a shanty town, everything waiting to be swept away by a bulldozer. Two little rooms had been created at one end of the corridor, one for Wallis, one for Cohen, and another makeshift area, without even a door on it, acted as a staff-room. It was a very old hospital waiting to be knocked down and rebuilt. Plans were in progress, building rumoured to be starting next year, but meanwhile this shoddy arrangement had to be put up with. There was no proper space for anything. The corridor that ran between the curtains of the cubicles and the outside wall of the building was especially narrow and awkward, with the flimsy shelf that ran along under the windows further reducing what space there was, and making passing backwards and forwards like an endless excuse-me dance. The lighting was ridiculous, so poor that to read notes you had to hold them up high to catch the best illumination. The whole place was a shambles, and yet their work there was a matter of life and death.

Andrew was waiting for her, slouched in the sad, old leather armchair he found so comfortable and which she herself avoided ever sitting in. ‘You've heard Ben's ill?' he said. She nodded. ‘We'll be here all night,' he said. ‘You'd think they'd have arranged an extra pair of hands.' It was a silly thing to say, so she didn't reply. Sister Butler came in with the lists. She extracted folders from the trolley she was pushing and dumped them on the table, almost knocking over Andrew's coffee. ‘Hey, steady on,' he protested. The pile was huge. Andrew stood up, divided it into two, and asked which did she want, the right-hand pile or the left one. She said it didn't matter, so he took the left lot. Sister Butler, in such a bad temper she could barely speak at all, said that the division couldn't be done like that, and they should know that the folders had to be arranged according to the times of the appointments, or there would be a riot. She started shuffling through the folders, checking them against the list in her hand. Chrissie and Andrew watched. When Sister Butler had finished, the table had ten small piles on it. ‘Right,' she said, ‘you'd better get started.' She swept out, and Andrew raised his eyes to the ceiling and shook his head. ‘Who'd believe that woman,' he said.

There were four patients booked in for two o'clock. Andrew took Mrs Green and Mrs Stanley, cubicles three and four, and she took Mrs Yates and Miss Nicholson. Andrew went into cubicle three with barely a look in Mrs Green's folder, but she stood outside cubicle two reading Mrs Yates's notes for a long time. She always read notes carefully before going to examine a patient, needing to concentrate without their presence, whereas Andrew chatted and read at the same time, in front of them. It was important to her that all the details should have been memorised before she was ready, and even then she needed a minute or two to gather her energies to banish the anxiety she still often felt. Mr Wallis told her repeatedly that she worried too much. Let the patients do the worrying, he said, it's your job to be reassuring and you can't reassure if you're allowing yourself to worry on their behalf. All true, she knew that, but what she didn't know was how to detach herself from the patients, to stop herself absorbing and empathising with their worries, for which, in this clinic, there were nearly always valid reasons.

She closed the folder, straightened her shoulders, pulled the curtain back gently – Andrew yanked curtains, it set her teeth on edge – and smiled. ‘Good afternoon, Mrs Yates,' she said. ‘I'm Dr Harrison. How are you?' Some day she imagined a patient would shout back, How do you think I am, lying here waiting to be told the state of my cancer, eh? But Mrs Yates loved the inquiry. ‘Awful,' she said, loudly, closing her eyes and screwing her face up. ‘Awful, I feel terrible, I don't know what you've done to me. I feel worse than I ever did before you lot got your hands on me. I do, really.' Chrissie made a sympathetic noise. She'd read the notes. She knew about Mrs Yates. She'd understood the neat little initials peppering reports about her case. It was important not to get bogged down in all her complaints but, instead, to concentrate on examining her. ‘Let me have a look at you, then,' she said, and she helped Mrs Yates sit up (groaning) and remove her wrap which barely covered her enormous breasts.

A body was a body, but this one was memorable. It wasn't just the size of Mrs Yates's breasts which made them extraordinary but the shape of them – they stretched wide across her chest, as full at the sides as underneath so that there was this temptation to adjust them, to push them back towards the centre. And then there were the veins in them, which stood out more like the veins in a leg. Mr Wallis, during Mrs Yates's lumpectomy, had given them all a little lecture on the unique appearance of her mammary glands while he was operating. She thought he'd rather enjoyed digging through the blubber to find and extract the tumour, which was in one of the milk ducts. Good news for Mrs Yates. Three years on and no recurrence. Carefully, Chrissie felt round the scar. It was still very visible on the dull, pale flesh, but it had mended beautifully. There was a patch of reddened skin left from the radiotherapy but no irritation present. About a quarter of the breast had been removed, all the tissue around the tumour, which Mrs Yates had complained ruined her appearance and upset her husband. Chrissie palpated the reduced breast gently, then moved on to the other. She could feel lump after lump, the whole breast was a mass of lumps, but the notes had told her these were common in this patient's case and that they were benign cysts. She went on feeling them, searching for any with a bullet-like
centre, like a ball-bearing, but found none. All the time she did this she scrutinised the nipples. Mrs Yates's nipples were dark brown, with black hairs sprouting from the areola. Chrissie had a sudden image of a cowpat, crusted on the top, and said hastily that everything seemed fine and would Mrs Yates raise her arms slightly, but was told this was impossible, her shoulders were too sore, she could hardly move her arms at all. Chrissie said just the slightest movement would do, and this was grudgingly managed.

She wished she were wearing gloves. Mrs Yates's armpits were hot, sweaty caverns, thick with strong hairs. Her fingers slipped about and she felt as though they were being sucked in and trapped, never to be released. Mrs Yates, apart from not removing underarm hair, didn't use deodorant, and she was perspiring freely. Surreptitiously, Chrissie wiped her fingers on her own sleeve before putting her hands on Mrs Yates's neck. All the lymph glands seemed normal. Only the ovaries to check, in so far as they could be checked, but probably she'd be unable to feel much in this case. She tried, all the same, thinking as she pressed Mrs Yates's stomach that though the image was unoriginal it reminded her of kneading dough. The colour of the skin, never mind the texture, was like the bread dough they used to play with in cookery lessons at school, punching and pulling it and fooling around until it was grey in colour and revolting to touch. She was aware suddenly that Mrs Yates, who had been talking throughout the entire examination, though Chrissie had taken little in, had stopped. She was staring at Chrissie with a strange expression on her face. ‘Is Mr Wallis away?' she asked. Chrissie said yes, he was on holiday. ‘Who's in charge, then?' Mrs Yates said. ‘Well,' said Chrissie, hesitating, ‘I suppose I am.' Mrs Yates snorted. ‘You are? How old are you?'

Chrissie knew she didn't have to answer that. She didn't have to answer any personal questions. All she needed to do now was tell Mrs Yates that all seemed well, see you in a year, must get on to the next patient, and whisk out, Andrew-style. But she answered. She said she was 30. ‘Married?' asked Mrs Yates. Chrissie smiled and shook her head. (The smile had never left her face, just faded slightly now and again.) Mrs Yates, if she had been harbouring any contemptuous thoughts, seemed to
relent. She sighed. She said she felt sick, and couldn't she be given something for this nausea, which was constant, and that her back ached, and she was tired and would like a tonic. Chrissie said she should visit her GP, that that would be the best thing, and backed out of the cubicle. She felt exhausted. She leaned against the shelf along the back wall, holding the next patient's notes and closed her eyes for a minute. She heard Andrew coming out of cubicle four – he'd finished two patients in the time it had taken her to do one – and coming along the passage. He patted her on the shoulder as he passed. ‘In a trance, Chrissie?' he said. She didn't reply. Yes, she was in a trance. Had to be. Andrew was whistling as he went in to the next patient. Nothing got him down. If he was tired, it was always just physical, the result of being on his feet all day, or some other simple cause. He was never tired to his soul, thought Chrissie. I am tired to my very soul. Tired of bodies, tired of their workings, tired of their malfunctions. Sometimes, in spite of all her training – and oh, how brilliant she had been at exams! – she didn't understand the body at all. Mr Wallis, to whom she had confessed this in an outburst she'd then been horribly embarrassed by, had said that this was nothing to be ashamed of. He said it was a good thing to feel humble (though humble was not precisely what Chrissie had indeed felt). ‘Don't get too clever,' he said, ‘it doesn't do in our work. We're not God, though the patients would like us to be, they'd like miracles.'