Somebody Loves Us All (24 page)

People got together, declared passions, lusts, moving from the long table in the hostel common room, where they usually drank, to couches, chairs, slipping to the floor in a wrestle, or quietly leaving, perhaps to return later with grins, flushed faces, or pale and shamed or flushed with shame, pale with pleasure. There were various combinations. Some even stayed sober, drinking tea or juice, watching everything closely—these were the strangest among them. A brilliant young Chinese doctor always brought along a textbook and read it, or pretended to. A cheerful teetotal girl off a Southland farm baked cakes for everyone and occasionally handed out bags of frozen meat that her father had sent up. Her cheeks always looked as though
someone had just rubbed them. There was an older man, in his thirties, whose surname was Major. He marched in the Salvation Army Band and sometimes he wore his uniform to the drinks and lugged a tuba case. Everyone called him ‘Major Major’ and saluted him.

Paddy remembered a pair of interns originally from Australia who, once they learned that he was speech therapy, liked to have him on. ‘Hey, Thommo, do you like eating
cun cun cun cun country
cooking?’ They were both blond and blue-eyed, twins almost, creatures from another planet, Brisbane.

A period would usually arrive, towards the middle of the session, when the table broke into Serious Conversation. Politics, music, ethics. For some this spoiled things; they’d move over to the dartboard or start making hoax calls to the nurses’ hostel. Lant and Paddy knew each other a little before this but now they found themselves in a sort of alliance. Many of the junior doctors were, unlike them, conservative, religious. They came from doctoring families, boarding schools. There was an active Catholic wing: bright, well-educated boys who’d gone through school on debating teams and who could knot ties. Two of them knew all the words to ‘American Pie’ and sang it in harmony when they were drunk. Of course they dismissed psychology as a science, and speech therapy rated somewhere down with reflexology as a medical tool. Lant and Paddy were oddities. For their part, they considered these others to be decent, well-meaning, narrow arseholes.

Lant, who felt the Catholics’ kindly contempt more strongly than Paddy, sometimes tried to bait them with hypothetical moral dilemmas. The object was to get the young doctors to make a statement that appeared to cast into doubt major doctrinal matters or simply to upset them enough that they lost for a moment their infuriating calm and superiority and niceness. The treatment of homosexual patients was a favourite, and Paddy recalled one very devout bloke running from the room at some suggestion that in A&E he’d had to remove a rectally inserted object from a Marist Brother.

This was cheap though, and they desired a more forceful and wide-ranging riposte.

Lant had noticed that a surprising number of young Catholic doctors were planning to go into paediatrics. He’d discussed this with Paddy. It wasn’t necessarily, he thought, because they were all still kids themselves. His theory was that they believed children’s medicine offered innocence, whereas most illness was about sin. The smoker with lung cancer, the sunbather with melanoma, the drinker with sclerosis, the junky with hepatitis, the overeater with diabetes and heart disease. There was just punishment in that. Whereas kids, they were plain unlucky. They got what they didn’t deserve: broken legs, dog bites, asthma, a marble lodged somewhere unpleasant. What they forgot, these idealists, these moralists, was the children’s oncology ward, Lant said, where the really unlucky hung out. Hardly any of these young doctors stayed around that field for long.

At the drinking sessions this wasn’t a topic that could be visited often but Lant and Paddy tried it a few times. Some of the Catholics wore crosses tucked into their shirts although this was forbidden by regulations. At the drinks, with their shirts loosened, sometimes these banned crosses could be spied.

What sort of God allowed a girl of six to suffer terribly for months and months and finally die in agony from leukaemia while her parents watched helplessly?

Years of debating had prepared their opponents for this and it wasn’t at all clear whether by the end of the argument much had been won on either side. The Catholics always pretended to be meeting Paddy and Lant halfway, to be acknowledging their feelings. They were clever and the smartest of them seemed capable of drawing on centuries of thinking about these matters. Paddy tended to lose interest.

One time, however, after Paddy had made a version of the now-familiar plea, one of the Catholics said straight off that it wasn’t a very subtle question. Lant immediately took the subject off Paddy, launching into an eloquent and stirring speech, lasting for several minutes, about the unfortunate lack of subtlety when
it came to the pain a body experienced when facing extinction through disease. He stood up as he spoke. He’d counselled these dying children, he told them, and when he came to do his end-of-month notes, he had to fill in a box that said ‘Result’. ‘Result? What was the result? Oh, that’s right. Death. Which wasn’t very subtle either, was it?’

Lant paused and looked around the room.

For a moment it seemed he wasn’t going to be able to carry on—his own statement had caught him out, he was choked up—and this had an amazing effect. Previously it had all been about ideas. Everyone stopped and watched him. Then he resumed speaking. He said he’d been trying to think of a less obvious word than death but it hadn’t come. Lant said the emotions people felt tended not to be very subtle either. ‘Grief-stricken, we say. Grief-struck, like lightning struck. And that’s what it feels like, to lose someone. You’re struck down. To lose your own child. These people sit across from me most days and it’s very hard to know what to say, believe me. I mean, I’ve read all the textbooks, all the grief literature, I’ve been trained and trained for this but I’m sorry, I haven’t thought of an argument yet, a nice, subtle piece of thinking that helps with this sort of pain. Frankly, in these circumstances, I find subtlety out of place. I think it’s offensive. I think it reveals a shallow understanding of what it means to be human.’

By the time he’d finished Lant had tears in his eyes, for which he apologised. He sat down. The tears fell from his face onto the table and Lant wiped at them quickly. The Catholics were silent. They stared at the table. One of them, Paddy noticed, tucked his silver cross back in his shirt and kept his fingers here. Another of them went to speak but trailed off quickly, mumbling a sort of irritated apology. Finally, someone who might have been a member of their group, a newcomer, turned to Lant and said in a conciliatory but firm way, ‘I don’t believe my faith allows me to escape from any of the questions you raise. My faith was raised out of these very questions.’

‘That’s circular, what are you saying?’ said Lant. He rubbed
at his eyes. ‘And why do you always say faith? Say religion. You say faith and it sounds as though you own it, you have it, and everyone else is lacking it. I have faith too. I redeem the word for humanism. I have faith minus the other stuff.’

‘The other stuff is my way of examining these questions, of suffering and pain. It’s a help to me. I find what’s human is the desire to understand and one approach is to use these tools.’ The speaker was not one of their usual opponents. He was a recent arrival at the hospital and had, up to this point, never said a word. He spoke with his head slightly averted and only looked up when he’d finished, at which point there was a slightly unnerving and unabashed stare. He had a large forehead and a purple birthmark down one side of his neck.

Lant was momentarily knocked off course. ‘Tools! Like it’s a kitset. Put part A with part B and you shall get, what, the meaning of life, I suppose.’

‘No,’ said the new arrival, smiling slightly, ‘probably you’ll still be left with parts C, D and E.’

‘Right! Listen, I’m in awe of your composure. Really. I envy you that. But I’ve done my share of examining these questions too, my friend. End of the day, I have a box to tick. Result, she died. Age, six years. Enter mother and father. At that moment, the abstract contemplation of these questions becomes a little trickier, I think.’ He held up his hands as if offering the table something, moving his hands forward as if bearing an object. ‘Here is the body of your child.’ Several at the table swayed back slightly, to put themselves out of reach. There was something blasphemous in Lant’s gesture, priestly. He was compelling. ‘We’re all too young to know what that means. We’re all still children.’

Afterwards as they walked back to their respective flats in the early morning, Paddy asked Lant about the box on his notes. What box? he said. Paddy reminded him of his speech to the Catholics, the result box where he had to fill in the word ‘Death’.

‘But Card,’ he said, ‘dear Card, there isn’t any box.’

‘No box?’

‘No, I made it up.’ He was grinning at him. ‘What kind of form would have a box like that? Come on. It was a rhetorical device. I wasn’t going to let those smug bastards off this time.’

They walked a bit further. It was raining lightly. A few cars passed with their headlights on. They’d only get a couple of hours sleep before they needed to be back at work and they’d have to walk back the same way in the rain. Sometimes they could find a place to sleep at the hospital but not that night. They’d had more drinks after the doctors had all gone to bed.

The session had been a strange one, not quite the vindication they’d hoped for and Paddy felt it now in the joyless tramp through the rain. Lant had derailed it with his speech. People had drifted off earlier than usual, leaving only a few at the table and things had continued with an odd sort of willed enthusiasm. Then there’d been the matter of the guy who’d challenged Lant. Forehead, they’d called him. Birthmark. He’d not recoiled when Lant had held up the phantom body of the dead child. In fact he’d folded his arms and looked out the window, in the pose of someone thinking of something important that could not be mentioned just then. What was his story? Not knowing gave him a troubling power. He was a far more serious adversary than the boy-doctor who’d once told them all to keep talking because hell wasn’t full yet.

‘Lant,’ said Paddy, ‘do you even counsel dying children?’

‘Do you think they’d let me? It’s a specialist area, Card. Besides, I couldn’t handle it, could you?’

Lant turned off at his street, lifting a hand behind him in farewell. Three trolley buses went past, heading into town, going at great speed. The sound of them gave Paddy a fright. The first one had its cloth blind pulled down: ‘Sorry not in service’, and the other two were following so closely behind that he couldn’t read them. There was only a foot or two between each bus. It was like one long demonic vehicle. The drivers, sharply illuminated in their stations, were laughing—he could
see that. They were playing some game, racing each other home. Maniacs.

They left the upstairs bar just after 3am. Paddy had been talking about Jimmy Gorzo and his father, the bowling lanes. Earlier he’d told Lant about Iyob and the whole deal with Dora, then the scene at the school. Lant had listened very carefully and then he’d asked Paddy whether he thought Dora and Medbh had got any film of the band playing, which had then started him on a long riff about plans to go on tour with the band. The problem was the other guys were all fairly housebound types with kids and wives. They’d all done their wild on-the-road stuff years before whereas Lant was just starting out and he had a hunger for it. He thought about it all the time, about playing, about turning up somewhere, no one knows you and an hour later, you’ve made a connection. Even more than the bike now, he said, he thought about music, playing the violin in this little okayish band. This
nice
band. He knew it wasn’t respectable. It was crazy. He was fifty years old. Of course all the punks were fifty years old now, older. Joe Strummer had died of a heart attack, yes, yes, and the Rolling Stones could get into the movies for half-price. But they’d been into it from a young age whereas he, Lant, had been doing music exams and playing in cold halls in front of his parents and a row of hatchet-faced judges accumulating his third places, his runner-up medals. Then he’d thrown it all in because no one was going to keep that up. Now he had a decent adult profession. His daughter hadn’t wanted him to play at the school, nor had Melinda, well, that wasn’t a surprise. Had Card seen how she’d tried to get at him about the soccer thing with Crystal, which was clearly nothing, the girl got right back up and started playing again. But they had a point. Jesus, he wouldn’t have liked to see his father play in a band in front of people. He didn’t even like it when his father walked down a street with him. It was against the natural order of things, he understood that. He’d stopped talking then and he
looked at Paddy, who asked him what was wrong and he said, ‘Your mother, Card. Your poor mother.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why do you think she’s done this to you?’

‘Eh?’

The Chinese lantern above them swayed a little. Paddy heard someone nice talking to him. The barman had appeared as if summoned by some inaudible but massively effective bell. Your thought rang it and he came. The human brain was an extraordinary thing. The barman was about twenty-five. He wore a black waistcoat and his sideburns were shaped into a fine point that went just under his cheekbones. He was the polite face of the underworld. He bent down to talk confidentially about their requirements.

‘Two for the road,’ said Lant.

The devil disappeared.

‘What did you say about my mother?’ said Paddy.

But Lant said he’d forgotten already. Paddy repeated what he’d heard. Interesting, Lant said. What was interesting, Paddy asked, that he was claiming agency in this case? That his mother was authoring her own affliction? What, she was
putting it on
? She was aiming this at them in some psychic war? If so, she was probably overdoing her own trauma, didn’t he think. If so, Lant should take a ticket behind poor paranoid Margie, his sister. No, no, Lant told him. What was interesting was that Paddy had heard him say something he hadn’t.