Don't I Know You? (18 page)

There were feminine murmurs, too soft to be deciphered.

“Ayers Rock, yes, thank you Cynthia, you are a clever one! Yeah, so my liver in this video looked like that big red fucker.”

The voice, like the music, began to sound familiar to Rose, but the name that went with it kept drifting away from her. Kevin? No. The voice aroused a certain feeling, though, a friendly feeling, as if she were on her way for a drink with a solid old chum who had just turned up, someone fun from her past. But the pawing sensation in her guts continued, and fought against this warmer current.

The stirring became an irritable tugging.

“I keep forgetting how
complicated
it is in here,” said the voice. “It's all higgledy-piggledy, like some sort of bloody casserole my mum would make.”

“There it is, in the lower quadrant,” said a woman. “See? You may need this.” A slapping sound was followed by a new and more terrible pain. Rose's sense of herself shriveled, like an insect that had blundered into a flame.

“I've got you now, you little cunt! Get the fuck out!”

There was a tweezing sensation, then the pain ended abruptly.

“Oh, it's a biggie,” said the voice, sounding pleased, “but the margins look clean. Nothing spreading into the pelvic cavity that I can see. Looks like a hemangioma to me.”

Rose heard a wet plunk. “Take this down to the lab, but bring it back later. I've got plans for it.” Again with the loamy chuckle. The female voices giggled.

“Doctor?” said the gentle voice beside him. “There's still a bit left in the bottle.”

“Pass it here.”

Lengthy gulping sounds ensued.

“Y'know, some pe'le say i'z a bad idea, to drink while you're performin' surgery on other pe'le. But! I pers'nally don't agree with that. I do
not
agree with that! Because, if I'm really in the
groove
, really sort of
feelin'
it, y'knowwhammsayin, another bit of the Jack just puts me even
more
in the groove. Am I right, Cyn?”

“Shall I clean up the cavity for you?” said the gentle voice. “She's bleeding quite a bit.”

I'm bleeding, Rose thought. Pay attention!

“Oh yeah, Christ, that's not good, be my guest. Mop away.” Rose felt herself being massaged from the inside.

“One more clamp … that's got it I think. Good call, ladies.”

A fit of coughing came and then subsided. “Y'know, the sight of blood still puts me off. Guts, bones, crazy shit that glistens, that I can take. But if I have to get a needle, some sort of tetanus thing when I fall and cut myself, I don't even want to see the blood climb up the syringe. Which is pretty funny, right?”

The gentle voices murmured words that Rose couldn't make out.

“Whoa, look at the hemoglobin levels, better top her up. Hand me that bag, Cyn. It's O type, right? What the hell, A's fine. Ahanh! Just kidding. Now where's the portal … annnd in she goes.”

A warm surge came over Rose, as if she were a loaf of bread being baked. It felt sexual.

“That'll get her back out on the dance floor.”

Rose was getting used to having someone else's hands inside her. You just had to relax into it, like a hard yoga pose.

“Bet you a bottle of Macallan it's benign, even though it's an ugly-looking sucker.”

“Doctor, do you want Heather to close for you?”

“No, for chrissake, I can
close up
, you think I can't close up? It's like the intro to
Gimme Shelter
, I can do it in my fuckin' sleep!”

Rose sensed nips, tiny nips. What was the name of that Frida Kahlo painting of herself wild-haired, bleeding in a hospital bed, the red spilling over the frame?
A Few Small Nips
. They didn't so much hurt as tingle. She was floating right under the surface now, but she didn't want to wake up.

Then she recognized the voice and knew why she was horizontal. She was being operated on by a seventy-year-old rock star and there was a bottle of bourbon going round the OR.

Oddly enough, she was okay with this.

*   *   *

“Hey, sweetheart,” said the frayed voice, “how're ya doin'?”

Rose opened her eyes. The moon was gone. She looked down; she was in a hospital gown, under stiff, thin sheets, in a hospital bed. The figure sitting beside her wore green scrubs but his little cap had a skull pattern on it—skulls on skull, as it were. All up one hairy, muscular forearm he wore beaded Rastafarian bracelets. His hair was gray and pubic-kinky, escaping from the cap. His face was like something exhumed from deep in the earth but his brown eyes were warm—surprisingly clear and healthy eyes.

“I feel like I've been run over by a garbage truck,” she said.

“Good, good, that's what we like to hear. It means you're alive and your body's pissed off.”

Cautiously she shifted so she could look at him more directly.

Keith Richards, her surgeon.

“I'm sorry, I hope you don't find it rude, but I have to ask…”

“Yeah, don't worry, I'd be asking questions too.”

“Are you … like, trained at this? I mean do you do this often?”

“Depends on whether the band's rehearsing, but lately I've been operating once or twice a week. I did an open heart a couple weeks ago, which turned out pretty well. Not perfect, but the guy survived, more or less. Liver's my specialty, though.”

“Where did you learn how to do this?”

“When I was in Switzerland. I met this cat who was into ‘expressive surgery,' he called it. The jazz version, you know? He was a cardiologist but what he really wanted to do was play in a band.” Keith rolled his eyes.

“I get a lot of those. Anyway, I taught him some chords. He wasn't bad actually, decent sense of time, and then he let me watch him operate.”

“Wow.”

“He told me, just do surgery the way you play guitar, and you won't have a problem. It's all in the hands, right? Which turned out to be true. I mean, you have to have good backup in the OR. It's like bein' in a band that way. But if you kind of
feel
your way through the body, it usually works out.”

Rose's mouth hurt at the corners, where her dry lips had cracked.

“Really? You improvise?”

“Well, I did practice. There was this junkie in the clinic when I was there, who was down to eighty pounds and they let me operate on him.” Keith whistled.

“Oh man, I'll never forget the look of that liver—it was like roadkill. But I kind of chipped away at it, cleaned it up the way you would your rose garden in the fall, and three hours later, the guy's got a hepatic unit like a newborn baby's. He wakes up feeling great, kicks his habit in a week, and now he's this celebrity meditation guru.”

“Who?”

“Sorry, can't say. Anyway, when the operation was over I was standing there with the scalpel thinking, This is my new instrument.”

“But doesn't being a surgeon interfere with the whole music thing?”

“That's kind of seasonal anyway. Bit like being a fisherman. I mean, Mick's always got other stuff going on, he's off getting his brows done or whatever. Buying new leggings. If I put all my eggs in that basket, I'd be fucked. This way, when we tour, I hang up the knife and don't book any OR time. But if the band's between gigs, I can do a little surgery and feel like I'm keeping my chops up, right? It's all about the hands.”

“How does Mick feel? About you doing surgery on the side.”

“He thinks it's a load of crap. He said he wouldn't trust his shih tzu to me. Which is a crap thing to say, because operatin' on animals is no piece of cake. I tried it once on Hooker, my black Lab, and never again!”

An image of Frank, her aging wheaten terrier, came into Rose's thoughts and made her eyes tear up. Her neighbor with the cockapoo was taking care of him. She didn't even tell her ex, and certainly not the kids, that she was going in for surgery.

“But Mick doesn't like me having a life of my own. He just wants me to get out there on stage, stay upright, and be more or less in tune.” His chest rumbled. “I think he's jealous. I think he'd like to do surgery himself.”

“Has he tried? I mean, do you guys all have special permits or something?”

It was one thing for rock stars to snag the best table in a restaurant but she'd never heard of them getting backstage passes for hospitals.

“No, but he'd probably pick it up fast. Mick's a detail guy, very neat. Good motor skills.” Keith made sewing gestures. “But he's got a low fucking boredom threshold, and there's a lot of drudgery involved in operating. Darning socks sort of thing. Mandrax is good for that part.”

A nurse came in, her stockings making a slithery sound, and gave Rose two white pills in a small paper cup. Just holding her head up to swallow them made her ribs ache.

“But I do like the liver,” Keith went on, sitting on the end of the bed as he absentmindedly massaged Rose's feet through the sheets. “I've operated on quite a few close friends, actually.”

“Anita, you mean? Did you do surgery on Anita Pallenberg?”

“No. Although we did fantasize about it.” He gave a warm chuckle.

“That woman had the constitution of a Clydesdale. But I did, let's see … Eric Clapton, and Nick Cave, and funnily enough, Pavarotti—he had early stage bile-duct cancer and I managed to nip that in the bud.”

“So if my … tumor turns out to be benign, should I worry about something worse, down the road?”

“Nah, your chances stay the same as anybody else. I think our bodies like to grow stuff, like mushrooms in the forest—it's their artistic side coming out. Cancer is just creativity run amok,” he said, fishing in her bedside drawer for any stray codeine pills.

Rose felt a wave of fatigue. She didn't want to have a creative body. She wanted a dull one that behaved itself.

“I hope you don't mind me saying, but I think you need to use more anesthesia when you operate,” Rose said. “I could sort of feel you inside me when I was on the table.” The phrase made her blush. “And I could hear you kibitzing with the nurses.”

“You're joking! Oh that's not good. I'll speak to the anesthesiologist, or whatever you call him.” He gurgled. “You don't want to be conscious for the sloppy bits.”

“It's okay. It wasn't torture, it was just weird. Especially since your voice sounded so familiar. I'm a big fan, by the way. I play
Main Offender
all the time.”

“Yeah, thanks. Good one, that.”

“So … it was confusing, that's all.”

“Look sweetheart, I've had surgery too. It's no picnic.”

“What happened?”

“It was after I fell out of that fucking palm tree in Fiji. It was only seven feet off the ground but I hit my head, and had an aneurism. Nearly croaked. They flew me to the mainland, operated on my brain, and I was in a coma for weeks.”

“Oh my God.”

“World's worst hangover when I woke up from that. And I've had a few.”

“Did you think you were dying?

“I had the tunnel thing happening. The white light … train come in a station sort of thing.” He laughed. “Yeah, I was jamming with the big boys.”

“How did it feel?”

“Silly. I felt pretty arsed about falling out of a tree, and not a very tall one either. I thought about Patti, how I'd miss her, and the kids. Plus the band, of course. Even Mick. Basically I felt embarrassed to be dying.”

A slithery sound as the nurse came back in. Her name tag read “Shell.” She wore dark lipstick and looked more like someone in costume as a nurse.

“Dr. Richards, the lab reports are in. Do you want to take a look at them now?”

“Yeah, I'll step outside with you.”

Rose reached out for his hand, and he took it in both of his.

“I won't make you wait.”

They left the room and Rose lay there trying not to care too much about her life. She wished she'd said yes more often in the past, yes to risky things that might have taken her down different roads. But she had been brave, more than once. Marrying Eric (a mistake, as it turned out, but the first ten years were good). Having Ceri. Not giving up on the writing.

An image came to her, of her thirty-one-year-old self. Her blond hair was long and she was in a taxi, heading into New York with the manuscript of her first book,
Night Crossing
, beside her. No appointments set up—she literally pushed it through the transom over the door of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. “Your submission created quite a stir in the office,” the letter began, when it arrived weeks later. It was a rejection but an encouraging one.

Rose looked back on her own innocence as if she were out walking a dog that had stopped far behind her to explore the woods until she had lost sight of him. And kept waiting, patiently, for his return.

Keith Richards and Shell came back into the room.

“I knew you were a lucky girl,” he said, his face crinkling. Shell beamed too, as if they were a couple announcing a pregnancy.

“It's negative?”

“Yes. Harmless, but sizable, which explains the pain. You'll be fine now.”

Rose wept a little.

“I was prepared for the worst,” she said, swabbing her cheeks with a tissue. “I always imagine the worst.”

“And now, we're going to toast you.”

Another nurse brought in a trolley, with a silver shaker on it, an ice bucket, martini glasses, a jar of olives, a lemon, and a zester. Plus a glass dish that contained something mottled and oysterlike: Rose's hemangioma.

“Olive, lemon, or…”

Keith pretended to slurp the tumor down, and they all laughed nervously.

“No takers? They say it's like a Malpeque, quite briny.”