Soon (24 page)

And then he was walking fast along the corridor and entering the hot room, the notes pushed into his hands, a woman writhing and moaning on the bed and a man fidgeting and sweating. You could feel the aggression coming off the man, the animal anxiety; he wanted action, he wanted an emergency response
stat
, and looking at the notes Simon saw he had a point.

‘OK, we'll need to perform a caesarean. Just a couple of minutes, we'll have the anaesthetist.'

The man's shoulders slumped. Relief. Then he was furious. ‘That woman,' he pointed at the midwife. ‘We've been here for hours. She's done nothing.'

‘Let's discuss that later. We've got a baby to deliver.'

‘She's a fucking idiot.'

A nurse soothed the man into a chair; the midwife started telling Simon why she wasn't an idiot, he signalled to her to leave it. Examining the woman, he bumped his head against the side of her knee; she apologised politely then went into a contraction. Suppressing a shriek of pain she kneed him hard in the nose. Her eyes were closed, her face was screwed up, her teeth bared. He was blinking away tears, turning to speak to the nurse when the woman grabbed wildly and caught hold of his arm, gouging her nails into his skin. He stood and waited until the contraction had passed and she relaxed and breathed out, sobbing under her breath. She let go and he looked at the red marks on his arm as blood welled up and ran in a thin stream down his wrist.

‘Whoops,' the nurse said, reaching in and pressing a sterile pad on his skin.

The man's voice rose, he was going for the midwife again, the midwife wasn't taking it well and the nurse went to help.

Opening her eyes, the patient saw him holding the reddening pad. ‘Oh God, did I do that?'

‘It's fine.' He dabbed at the blood, chucked the pad in the bin.

‘I'm so sorry.'

‘Don't worry. It's nothing.' He put his hand on her shoulder, held it there. ‘You're going to be fine.'

In theatre he put his hand on her arm again, steadying her as if he was doing it for her benefit alone, and when he'd got the baby out and put the flailing, slippery creature onto her chest he caught sight of the plaster covering the welts where she'd gripped his arm, and he would have liked to lie down beside her, to stretch out his aching limbs and hold her, press himself close to life.

He sat at a desk typing notes. Outside in the corridor the argument with the midwife had started up again, the father of the new baby threatening to make a complaint. Simon had his doubts about that midwife himself, he'd met her before and found her aggressively anti-doctor. She was all about natural birth, even if that meant a near-death experience for mother and child. Only when she'd messed it up and there was foetal distress and all kinds of disaster for the mother would she make the panicked call for the expert. His mind wandering, he fingered the plaster on his forearm. A man's voice repeated, ‘Who's in charge here? Who's in fucking charge?'

A nurse put her head around the door and he sidestepped the argument, now grown louder and involving a security guard, and followed her down the hall to a room in which the female members of a large family had assembled to witness the grand event; he had to angle his way around the aunties and grannies and cousins to get to the labouring patient, and at every fresh development the group burst into prayers and singing. Someone had brought a guitar, and the relatives snacked incessantly, keeping up their strength between songs.

The birth was straightforward despite earlier anticipated com­plications, they didn't have to send the audience out into the hall, and the baby emerged to claps, cheers, whoops and high-fives, Simon
and the midwife and the attendant paediatrician working in an atmosphere of festive chaos, communicating without words, occasionally smiling in spite of themselves at the antics of the aunties. The baby was a handsome brown giant, nearly eleven pounds, as smooth and peaceful as a Buddha. The paediatrician took a phone call in the middle of his examination and Simon held the child briefly, looking down at the glossy dark eyes. The baby was awake and calm and unknowing, unaware of its power. The strong little hands clawed the air, Simon bent his head closer, wrinkled fingers brushed his face. The midwife bustled in to take the bundle. Looking up he saw the mother watching him.

‘Beautiful baby,' he said, embarrassed, and turned away.

He changed and left the building, swigging lukewarm coffee from a takeaway cup. Heat struck up from the asphalt, bright light glanced off the parked cars. His steering wheel was hot to touch, the car seat cooking his legs, burning pleasantly through to his sore knee. He drove out through the dead, sunstruck suburbs, past the park where the grass had turned brown and the hedges looked sparse and dry.

His waiting room was full of women and Clarice was in one of her moods. She swept about, refusing to make eye contact, sunk in a grand gloom. In the chilled air of his office he shivered, something walking over his grave.

Two patients in, he looked down at his notes, pen poised, delivered his next polite question: ‘Have you tried having sex yet?'

Red marks bloomed on the patient's neck, shot into her cheeks. ‘No. Well, not actual sex . . . I mean . . . it's complicated.'

There was a silence, she laughed at the wrongness of ‘it's complicated', the image of not-actual sex hanging in the air. He pressed on, used to this. They often laughed; a minority were extraordinarily frank. At the public hospital recently a heavily tattooed woman with a ring pierced through her lip had snapped at him, ‘Sex? No. Not unless you count blowjobs.'

A few were blunt and candid but many clammed up; a lot of information could be conveyed with a look, a blush or a laugh, with words left unsaid. He thought of Ms Da Silva and her silent companion. How much had he told them without actually speaking? Had he blushed, hesitated, turned pale, left out telling parts of sentences? Police were trained to notice. But perhaps many of the people they dealt with were simpler, more unguarded. No, it was folly to assume so.

The patient was squirming. Embarrassed by her blush she'd gone redder still. (A vicious circle he encountered often.) He could have said, If you knew what I'm thinking you wouldn't blush. (You might turn pale.) If only I could touch you, lay my cold hand on your fiery cheek. You see, my whole life is falling away and when I reach out there's nothing . . .

He laid down his pen, slapped his thighs. ‘Well. You've healed up beautifully. Any problems give me a call, but I don't expect you'll need to for a long time.'

She thanked him, dropped her handbag, bumped into him as he saw her out the door. When she asked about the bill Clarice's icy disdain threw her into further confusion; eventually, puce-faced, she floundered out as Simon was calling the next patient.

Clarice, now on the phone, said no, loudly, six times. No explanation, no pleasantries, just no. He wondered what was being asked by the poor supplicant on the other end. And whether he could persuade Clarice to start taking antidepressants.

‘I'm afraid not,' Clarice said, and slammed down the phone.

His next patient plucked the skin around her hollow middle and whispered, ‘I've put on so much weight.' She had baby-fine hair through which he could see her white scalp, down on her cheeks, red veins on pale eyelids. Her shoulders were sprinkled with dandruff and loose hairs.

He checked the admission notes. Forty-two kilos, and she was not short.

‘You're underweight.'

She looked coy, simpered, picked fluff off her jacket, her expression lit with smiling paranoia: she wasn't fooled. He was part of the regime, the conspiracy to make her fat. Mad, he thought. Anorexia actually makes you mad. The thinner you get the crazier you become. Another vicious circle. What if he leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers and said, ‘Listen, fatso. Listen, you unfuckable lardarse.' Would that be enough to finish her off? It came to him how sane the last patient had been, with her strong body and her fiery blushes, her mortified laughter. This one was what his mother-in-law would quaintly call ‘away with the fairies'. It was usually the parents that started it, wasn't it, forcing girls to finish meals, making food the currency of control. She had an inward look and a faint, bitter smile as he explained he was recommending she see a specialist psychologist, glad there was no immediate need to examine her; she looked so fragile, as if you'd leave bruises all over her, and she was emotionally volatile, the kind of person who generates endless complications. Get it wrong and she'd be screaming, and the state she was in now you'd always get it wrong.

As though about to cry, she squeezed her eyes shut. He looked at the space between her neck and her shirt collar, at her fine, vulnerable bones; he caught a sense of the pity he was trying to keep at bay as he slapped the cardboard file shut, handed her a note, stood up and ushered her to the door.

‘See my secretary.'

His hand looked like a massive paw shaking hers. Her fingers were cold. She stood at the reception desk facing Clarice, who glared over the rims of her reading glasses. Thin, hunched shoulders, child-sized limbs; she looked so lost. He remembered breaking up the DVD of Arthur Weeks's film about a young woman with green eyes.

The sound it made, like the cracking of tiny bones.

In the mall he found books for Karen and Claire and magazines for Elke who didn't like reading, and then spent twenty minutes being shown expensive tennis racquets in a sports shop. He wasn't quite sure what he was doing. Told it would be better if Karen and Marcus tried the racquets themselves, he bought a T-shirt for Marcus and headed for the car park. He drove to the house, calling out to Claire as he unlocked the door but already sensing she wasn't home. The hall was full of afternoon sunlight, dust revolving in the air.

He looked around, snooped a bit. The kitchen was tidy, even the food in the fridge was neatly arranged, her sensible veges and soups and low-fat dairy stacked in tidy piles, labels all up the right way. Unlike the eternally skinny and graceful Elke who lived on lollies and junk food, Claire dieted and jogged and survived half the time on carrots but with little effect; she was always cursing her figure, had spent her life at war with her own body. She felt she was too tall, her legs and bum were too fat; she was always hiding parts of herself under loose clothing. It was no use his telling her she had beautiful eyes and a terrific mind and a strong body she should be happy with, he could only hope she would work that out.

He sensed that Karen's dislike of Claire was partly aesthetic: her daughter wasn't pretty or chic enough. Claire's look of Ford was enough to put Karen off; she had Ford's brains and stubbornness and big, clear blue-grey eyes, and she shared her uncle's lack of sartorial sense. Karen swore by retail therapy, but shopping was Claire's idea of hell. Simon had heard Karen pointedly praising Elke's outfits in front of Claire. Divide and rule. If Karen had been confident she wouldn't have resorted to it, but she had to put Claire in her place. It was a pity. Karen went off like a banshee if he got in on the act; she insisted their elder daughter was impossible, she made herself unlovable and the friction was all her fault.

Claire would be out for a run. He went upstairs and looked in her room. The bed was made, the desk covered in paper held down with coffee cups and textbooks. He left the book he'd bought on her pillow, a note inside the cover. How to tell her he loved her? He settled for cheery and short, xxx at the end.

Hoping she might pound up the path in her running gear he sat on the garden wall and listened to his phone messages, the hot bricks burning the back of his legs. He called, but her cell phone went to voicemail.

They would be all right, Elke and Claire, and Marcus too. They were pretty much grown up, they had a conscientious mother and a family trust full of money, and all three knew their father loved them. It was a private compulsion of his, making sure they knew he loved them. He remembered the loneliness of childhood.

Time was an arrow and this was the point of it, he was adding up the score. He didn't think he could get away with his half-truths to David. He needed to make sure his affairs were in order, as much as a person's affairs could be said to be in order when he was about to lose everything and go to jail.

Karen, the children, his patients. Was this where he would leave them? It was time to start driving but he went on waiting for Claire, sweating in his suit, the afternoon sun sending down a relentless glare. What would he find when he got to Rotokauri? A little reception: Ray, Shaun, Jon, Ed Miles smiling thinly in the background? And perhaps Ms Da Silva herself, jinking a pair of handcuffs . . .

What do you care about
? He thought about Ford's nagging, his insistence that ‘apolitical isn't good enough'. Ford had wound up his last censorious harangue with, ‘Admit it, Simon. Under your friend's government the gap between rich and poor has got so wide it's a scandal.'

It now occurred to Simon that every time Ford told him the gap between rich and poor had got wider, something in him thought: good. He'd left his poor past, made it to the right side of the gap, and if there was a distance between himself and the past, so much the better. David must feel like this too. This was why his most consistent message was that he stood for ‘aspiration'. He was aiming at people like himself and Simon. The ones who'd succeeded through their own efforts were the ones who cared most about keeping the gap wide. Simon's own lack of politics was really politics of a basic kind: I am one of those who want poverty to exist so we can affirm our own sense of well-being.

He recognised the force of the feeling, saw it was morally wrong, and also saw that Ford didn't understand it. Like Claire, Ford assumed that if you made people aware of inequality they would naturally want to remedy it. It hadn't occurred to him that the ‘haves' would reject the idea of levelling society, even if you could show them a way to make everyone better off. For all Ford's talk of people being animals he hadn't grasped this aspect of the animal kingdom; for all his and Claire's intellectual toughness there was an innocence about them. They believed in the goodness of people.