Miss You (21 page)

With the noise of the trickling water, I wasn’t a hundred per cent certain that she’d said ‘porn’, but I couldn’t think of any similar-sounding word I might have
mistaken it for. I wasn’t going to repeat ‘Porn?’ louder.

‘I mean, when you first get together, you want to try everything, don’t you?’ Doll continued. ‘But with Fred it always has to be something new, and now, as often as not,
we have to film it!’

After three years of regular beauty treatments, like full body waxing or facials or having her eyebrows threaded, which for some reason was better than plucking them, Doll had become so used to
people doing stuff for her that she didn’t really notice them any more. She was doing that thing she’d hated her clients for at the salon.

‘They talk to each other like you’re not even there!’ she used to cry, outraged.

I’d always been way behind Doll as far as sex was concerned, but after losing my virginity to Dave, I’d naively imagined that I’d caught up. But it seemed I was still the
innocent one, because porn hadn’t even crossed my mind, let alone the do-it-yourself idea.

‘Not that Fred’s into S and M, or anything,’ Doll carried on. ‘It’s just, well, I’m not a bloody gymnast, know what I’m saying?’

There was a part of me that would have liked to admit that I had no idea, so she’d tell me, because it’s natural to be curious about what other people get up to, isn’t it? But
it’s funny how sex is taboo even with your best friend, so you never talk specifically about what happens ‘down there’ or ‘behind closed doors’ as Mum used to say.

Were Dave and Fred discussing X-rated fantasies on the golf course, I wondered, or worse still, comparing statistics on our performance? I didn’t think so. I trusted Dave completely. He
was always very patient and very gentle with me. After what Doll had just revealed, I felt even luckier to have found a man like him.

‘How’s work?’ Doll asked, as we reclined with some special seaweed-enriched clay plastered all over our faces, and slices of cucumber on our eyelids.

The new school year had just begun. After all Doll’s sex and shopping, our Victorian Day sounded pretty lame. Hope and I had dressed up as chimney sweeps, with daubs of soot on our faces,
and sung ‘Chim Chiminee’ all the way to school, although, strictly speaking, Mary Poppins was Edwardian, but Hope was a bit frightened of
Oliver!

When we arrived there’d been embarrassed glances from the other staff, because I’d misunderstood the instructions. The grown-ups were supposed to dress up as strict Victorian
teachers. Mrs Corcoran, in full black Queen Victoria regalia with a white lace cap on her head, had ordered Hope to go and wash her face, which caused all sorts of problems because Hope
hadn’t understood about her being in role. I’d spent a miserable day wearing a shirt covered in smuts and a pair of Dad’s old trousers held up with string.

Doll laughed so much her face mask cracked all over like a puddle in a drought.

‘I miss all that, you know,’ she said.

‘School?’ I was astonished.

‘I mean work. I really miss working. How stupid is that? I miss the goss. There’s days when Fred’s training when I don’t talk to a soul.’

‘Don’t you go out with the other girls?’

‘They’re not like you, Tess. They’re not like me, really,’ she added, wistfully. ‘I mean, there’s a limit to the number of shoes you can buy. Will you listen
to me! Those are words I never thought I’d say!’

Pores cleansed and skin exfoliated, we sat dangling our feet in a pool, with small fish chewing off the dry bits of skin. It felt slightly tickly, but not exactly unpleasant.

‘What’s to stop you going back to work?’ I asked.

‘It’d be different if I was a model or something, but junior stylist doesn’t really cut it, does it?’

I remembered when almost every girl in our class had wanted to be a hairdresser. It had seemed like the ultimate in glamour back then.

‘Fred says having a baby would give me something to do . . .’

I knew Doll well enough to know that the casual way she let this slip belied a deeper concern.

‘What’s your current thinking on that?’ I asked carefully.

It’s difficult with your best friend’s boyfriend, isn’t it, because you’re never going to think that he’s good enough, but there’s a limit to how critical you
can be in case they stay together?

‘I’m only twenty-one, and Fred’s just a big kid himself,’ Doll replied. ‘Do you think it’s old-fashioned to want to be married first?’

‘Not if that’s what you want,’ I said, thinking boob jobs, porn, baby factory, what’s happening to you?

‘Fred says we should have a kid and see how it goes.’

‘It’s not just up to Fred, though, is it?’

Doll’s face broke into a smile.

‘I’m so relieved you said that, Tess,’ she said. ‘I can pretend to be trying, can’t I?’

That wasn’t really what I’d been suggesting.

I couldn’t help looking at Fred differently when we all got back together for our lunch. Good-looking, yes; not the sharpest knife in the box, but good-humoured enough.
He’d probably make a decent enough dad, if you forgot about the porn, which I couldn’t. But did the house, the cars, the clothes, the jewellery and the glamorous holidays make him the
person Doll should marry? If he’d been on an average income, like Dave, would she still be with him? Who was I to judge, sitting there with my free lunch and my fish pedicure?

‘I went to church with Mrs O’Neill,’ Hope announced, as soon as I got in the door. ‘We sang hymns.’

The warm cloak of well-being the massage had placed around my shoulders slipped straight off.

‘Father Michael says it’s shocking how little she goes!’ said Dad. ‘He says she should join the choir.’

‘You could have asked me,’ I muttered.

Once Hope had got into a routine, it was difficult to wean her off it.

I’d stopped taking Hope to Mass after Mum died. I thought I was doing enough without that. I knew Mum wouldn’t like it, but as she said herself, you don’t have to go to Mass to
believe in God. Not that I was sure I still did, although I quite often found myself praying – that the other kids would pick Hope for their team in games, or that she wouldn’t throw a
wobbler, or even that she
would
throw a wobbler when we were doing the tests at the hospital, because with her being so well-behaved, there was the danger of them thinking I’d made it
all up.

‘She’s my daughter, Tess!’ said my father.

‘Did you go along with her, then?’ I demanded, knowing full well that he hadn’t. He’d gone to the pub. I could see it in his face and smell it on his clothes.

Gallivanting, Mum used to call it. I looked it up. It’s a nineteenth-century word, apparently, from the French, meaning ‘to go about in search of pleasure’.

In the ensuing silence, Hope said, ‘Dad went to pick up Anne.’

‘That’s your karaoke partner, is it?’ I met his glare full on.

That surprised him. The ‘who the hell told you that?’ look on his face gave me a little kick of triumph.

‘What’s Anne like then?’ I asked Hope.

‘Anne likes strawberry cheesecake,’ she said.

To be fair, Anne was a bit of a godsend herself, as I found out the following weekend when she invited us over. She was a widow, her husband having suffered a massive heart
attack at Sandown Park on the final race of a big accumulator. His horse had come in as he was taking his last breath, which meant, Anne said, that he had died happy – ‘We’ve all
got to go sometime, haven’t we?’ – and Anne was enjoying his winnings for both of them. She had a nice new detached house, and a little red Mazda two-seater with an open top,
which she allowed my father to drive quite soon after their relationship went public (it was always a little unclear how long it had been going on beforehand, and I never tried to find out). Best
of all, Anne had a jukebox in her kitchen-diner, which looked exactly like a proper one from the fifties, but played CDs.

‘Hope’s welcome here as often as she likes,’ she said.

Of course she had no idea how literal Hope was at that point; Anne was just keen to be on the right side of my dad. I couldn’t understand it, because I thought she had a lot more going for
her than he did, but Dad scrubbed up well and he could be generous and charming when it suited him.

Living life to the full was Anne’s philosophy, and I suppose that’s exactly what Dad needed. She was certainly a striking woman, with a pile of ash-blonde hair on her head and a
different tight dress every time you saw her. She claimed to be fifty-one, same as Dad. But from the look of her neck, I thought she’d probably been that age for several years, although Doll
said the sun can do that to your skin. Blousy is the word that best conjured up Anne’s bright pink lipstick, her full cleavage and the little roll of fat round the top of her Spanx. With her
full-throttle laugh and the cloud of scent and fags that she carried into a room, she couldn’t have been less like my mother.

I decided Anne was probably a good thing, and tried not to mind her attempts at flattery, placing a be-ringed hand on my arm, and telling me, in a confidential whisper, ‘Your dad says he
doesn’t know what he would have done without you,’ when I’m sure he never said any such thing.

It was Anne who found an article about Asperger syndrome in one of her magazines, which said that people thought Albert Einstein had suffered from it, and that was clever of her because it gave
Dad a way of talking about it, boasting almost. Dad always liked to bring something to the party.

It began like any other morning, or perhaps with a little more attention to the clock, because it was at the beginning of the Integrated Clinical Care courses which we spent in
hospital, behaving more like real doctors. I was pleased to be in at the deep end in A&E, seeing it as a life-or-death test for me as much as the patients. If I couldn’t handle mangled
people, then it was probably better to find out sooner rather than later. I’d discovered that I wasn’t squeamish as I examined the crushed hand of a construction worker, and some
suppurating lesions on the bottom of an old man who had been found in a dressing gown tied with string in a council flat full of newspapers and pigeons.

What neither Lucy nor I had fully anticipated was the pressure of being in the public gaze, acting like we knew what we were doing without the safety valve of black humour in coffee-bar
post-mortems with our peers. That first evening we’d both arrived home exhausted and would have got a takeaway from our local Indian had Lucy not thought about our breath the following
morning for our already suffering patients. So I’d made cheese on toast.

‘How was it?’ Lucy asked me, as we both slumped onto the sofa.

‘No one died,’ I told her. The cliché has a grim resonance for medical students. I was too tired to go into any detail.

To my surprise, Lucy had found Paediatric Outpatients unexpectedly challenging.

‘The thing they don’t teach you is it’s not just about dealing with the children, it’s about dealing with the parents. There was this father who threw a real wobbler at
the consultant, and I’m sitting in the corridor outside with the child pretending not to hear the shouting . . . I just had no idea how to handle it. I was completely useless at
it!’

‘You’re not useless. You’re going to be a brilliant doctor.’ I tried to boost her. ‘Honestly, I’d put money on it.’

‘Really?’

‘Only a fiver, obviously.’

It was easy to make her laugh, but the next morning, I think I was the one who felt more up for work than she did.

At the junction with Euston Road, we kissed quickly, then our paths divided. As I stood waiting for the lights to change, I watched Lucy walking away, half-expecting her to swivel and wave to me
before disappearing from my line of sight. But I could see from the stiffness of her gait that she was preoccupied. She didn’t turn, and my arm, halfway to raised, returned quickly to my
side.

It’s funny how an image can stick in your mind. Now, the memory of standing there in the incessant noise of London traffic, with a slightly crisp September breeze blowing through my hair,
watching my girlfriend walk away from me, seems like a turning point in my life.

A&E was constantly busy: a Japanese girl had fainted on the Tube, but there was no indication of anything more serious than her not having eaten breakfast; a toddler stung by a bee at the
zoo, whose ear had swollen up alarmingly, was given anti-histamine and observed, his mother instructed to go to her GP for an EpiPen in case of future stings; a courier who’d come off his
bike was diagnosed with concussion, X-rayed and admitted. On my break, I was on my way to get a breath of fresh air when I noticed an old lady sitting alone in a wheelchair near the entrance where
the ambulances came in.

‘I’m just waiting for the ambulance men,’ she told me.

Once I’d made the mistake of asking, I found it hard to get away because she was garrulous and, like a lot of old people, eager to apologize for causing a fuss. She explained that
she’d called her daughter, at work, who’d told her to dial 999. It wasn’t something she’d have done herself, because it probably wasn’t anything, just her arm feeling
a bit funny.

‘How do you mean, funny?’ I asked. Was that a doctorly sort of question?

‘Well, my hand’s all cold. And it’s not exactly freezing out, is it?’

Once you’re inside a hospital, you lose all sense of time and weather, but I recalled that the sun had been shining as Lucy and I walked to work.

‘When did you first notice this?’ I asked.

‘Must have been a couple of hours ago now? It suddenly didn’t feel right. And then it went all cold. Couldn’t seem to warm it up. It was my daughter who told me to call an
ambulance. I felt a bit daft, you know, telling them, “Well, I’ve got a cold arm.”’

‘You did the right thing.’

‘So you do think it’s serious?’

My naive attempt to reassure had only alarmed her. To my relief, two ambulance men appeared. ‘OK there, Mrs Collins?’

‘I was just talking to this nice doctor. He thinks it might be serious.’