Green (21 page)

 

She raises her eyebrows, like someone who came out of it wiser for the experience, and she lifts her drink up to her mouth.

‘Boldly going where only World War Two fighter planes had gone before,' I say in my best voiceover voice, though it's probably not a clever move.

Frank is still dancing. We can see him through a glass panel beside the bar, and it's hard not to watch. Like a plastic bag in an updraft, Frank's dancing is unpredictable but hypnotic. I explain to Sophie that his sinuses can affect how he hears things, so he tries not to dwell too much on issues like rhythm. But it frees him up to make other choices. That's how he sees it. Plus, he's very supple, and he uses that to advantage. Frank says no one should be afraid of their limitations. It's what you do with what you've got that counts.

I should stop now. Always leave them wanting more, my mother once said (often says), and it applies to social situations, as well as going out with someone, and public speaking. I should stop dumping on Frank to look smart. But only because it doesn't make me look smart.

‘There was one time tonight,' Sophie says, ‘when you were out at the road and there was a fly in the serving area. It was buzzing his head, so he stood there with his mouth open. For about fifteen minutes. He wondered why it was totally prepared to keep landing on the edge of his mouth, but it never went right in. One of life's mysteries, maybe. They're everywhere, and who can tell when it's a genuine mystery or just stupid?'

‘This might sound harsh, but over time I've found that Frank's mysteries tend to be easier to classify than most. They're usually things like, “Why did Musical Youth never pass the dutchie to the right-hand side?”' No, stop, no more gratuitous dumping on Frank. ‘The big issue for me is failing to work out when it'd be stupid to step in and dispel the mystery. But that's my parents' fault. They used to be proud of me for knowing dumb things from physics. They'd tell people. Any time I start going out with someone and take them home, my mother practically puts on a show. She is so goddamn embarrassing. She's got this thing on the wall that I wrote when I was about six. It's framed. It's a medical report and it says “Phoebe Harris's report: pulse good, knees good, blood warm.” Things like that.'

‘That is so sweet.'

‘It's goddamn embarrassing. And where does
sweet
get you? On the desirability scale, sweet people are even below nice people. And, you know, it meant that there I was, at the age of six, set up to be the family's first doctor. And, having got so excited about it fifteen years ago, I'm pretty much over it now.'

What am I doing? Do I leave anyone wanting more? No boring people. In the world of my mother's good advice, it's the worst thing you can do.

But that's as far as it goes. I don't tell her about all the other notes I wrote to my mother. For the first couple of years after I learned how to write, notes were big for us and they covered everything—demands for particular toys, suggestions about food, questions about her day, comments when things didn't go my way. For example, the note I stuck in her bag that said, ‘I hate you more than a rat. My life is terrible.' I'd never even seen a rat, of course, but it was the principle that counted.

‘Don't be so hard on sweet,' Sophie says, while I'm still fighting off the temptation to go the rat story. ‘It must be working for you at the moment.'

‘Really? Oh, Phoebe, yeah.'

‘So don't go and be “Phil, he's trouble”. Clinton can be trouble, and sometimes trouble can border on too much trouble.'

‘But you still go out with him, which proves my point.'

‘And Phoebe still goes out with you, so there you go. Okay, question. Do you and Phoebe have names for each other? Like, funny little names.'

‘Clinton has a funny little name for you?'

‘Maybe.' Said in a voice that means she's not supposed to tell me, but . . .

‘And does he have funny little words for things?'

She gives an exaggerated sigh, as if I'm stumbling onto it all by myself. ‘Maybe.'

‘Oh no, you might have entered the shmoopy phase.'

‘The
shmoopy
phase?'

‘The phase when suddenly the names the rest of the world gives things aren't enough any more and the shmoopifier's using one crazy made-up word after another and you've got fifty special names you never knew about.'

‘That's a phase?'

‘Sure it is, Shmoopy. It's not a phase I do, but it's out there. Even Frank does it. He'll go a “cupcake” occasionally if he thinks it'll be the clincher. Me? I don't get it. It's, like, the last people to talk to me that way were my parents, when I was an infant in a high chair with a bowl full of mush in front of me and they were trying to convince me that there'd be an excellent picture of a train to take a look at if I ate it all up. Once people can feed themselves, I've pretty much got a no-shmoopy rule. There are some things you don't want to sexualise. But maybe I'm the one who's got it wrong. Do you think I should be doing that stuff? If I found myself at the beginning phase of something, some time in the future? Is it a problem if I don't do it at all?'

‘A problem, Shmoopy? Are you kidding-widding wid me Shmoopy-woopy? Vomit, vomit. No . . . Not that that's Clinton. Well, not totally. I'm just with you on the no-shmoopy rule, you know?'

‘Yack bloody yack bloody yack,' Frank says, his head suddenly inserted into the middle of the conversation. ‘Don't you get enough of that out the back at work?'

He drinks his second rum and Coke in one go and tells us it's no longer optional. We have to dance now, or what's the point in being here?

The place is starting to fill up, I notice when we get into the corridor. Some more of the overdressed teenagers have made it inside, and now the kind rugby boys are buying them a lot of drinks. The music is suddenly louder when we're through the doorway, too loud to think about talking, then louder still when we turn the corner and head for the dance floor.

There's not much room up there now, but Frank makes space for himself anyway. His limbs demand it and he moves until he finds a girl to dance in front of.

So, Clinton's gone shmoopy. That can't be good. He's got a funny little name for her, and he's working on their own funny little language. She can't find that endearing, surely.

Sophie dances small, moving her arms from her elbows down and her feet hardly at all, staring into the distance as though she's somewhere else. I can relate to that.

There must be other girls like her. Single girls like her.

I could do better than the guy who went the
Star Trek
drinking game. I'm confident that the next time I'm eating Mexican with a girl I won't whip out the complete scripts and try to compromise her judgement using DIY sangria. My mother tells me I'm quite a catch. Compared to that guy, she's right.

 

*

 

‘She's still with Clinton, you know,' Frank says in the car on the way back to my place. ‘I asked her at work.'

‘I know. There's never been any doubt about that. He gets talked about. It's fine.'

‘Yeah, just . . . I know where you're heading, that's all. And don't head there.'

‘I'm not heading there. I'm not heading anywhere. It doesn't hurt to put in some practice sometimes. The
Paradise
is only two days away, remember?'

‘That's more like it,' he says. ‘That's my boy.'

 

 

 

9

 

 

 

N
othing's
close
to happening when I arrive at Labour Ward at 8 a.m. so I go to Antenatal Clinic, as I'm supposed to. A few patients into the morning I'm not sure if I'm fooling myself, but I'm beginning to hear a sound that might be a foetal heart and starting to be able to tell heads from backs and knees and elbows.

The only difference between what Sophie had to say about Sartre and what I had to say was not that she thinks she's seen two of his movies. It's that I'm a better fake. For example, Simone de Beauvoir and her American circumstance. I didn't even know she'd had one until the new Lloyd Cole and the Commotions song, and now I'd fake knowledge of her on the strength of that alone.

‘Yes, but have you read her,' I could say, ‘in her American circumstance?'

I shouldn't get attached to this. This Sophie talk. If it becomes a reason to look forward to work, I'm in trouble. But I usually have to go to Woody Allen films alone, and maybe we could go together some time. That's all I'm thinking. Sophie and me. And Clinton.

Or, alternatively, I could never bring it up. I do have some dignity, and I'm not going to blow it on an ill-conceived move on Sophie Todd. I have learned a thing or two these past few years.

Halfway through the clinic, my new-found examination confidence is tested by a patient whose abdomen baffles me. It turns out she's having twins.

‘That's why it feels like there are bits everywhere,' she says, laughing at the little sense I can make of it all. ‘That's how it's supposed to be.'

How should I look at last night and our time at the Underground? I wrap the cuff around the patient's arm to take her blood pressure. I was probably supposed to do that before the rest of the examination. Between the systolic and diastolic, there's the thump of moving blood:

 

It's a beat you're familiar with, a room you know well. You are at the scene of several of your previous triumphs, particularly the one with the foreign girl in the alcove. Tonight, you're swapping stories. You could turn on the charm now, and perhaps you should, just for the sport of it. But, no, that wouldn't be fair. Not to her, not to him. He's not even here, and it'd all be too easy. And you agreed with yourself to be a better man than that, some time ago.

 

Her blood pressure is fine, about the same as it was on her last visit.

Around lunchtime I have a false alarm in Labour Ward, an apparent labour that doesn't progress. By early evening I feel like I'm jinxing every uterus on the floor, switching off labours and only hanging round to get whipped at Scrabble by the charge sister. She sends me to dinner and, while I'm away, one labour in my bit of the ward takes them by surprise. A student midwife is delivering the baby when I walk back in.

I pick a new patient and sit with her until, around ten o'clock, she says, ‘I'm starting to think it's a false alarm,' and the objective evidence agrees.

By midnight I'm discovering that the charge sister is very good at Scrabble. I haven't won once, but she's kept me playing somehow. I'm not sure if it's because of her convincing compliments when I score more than ten or her well-feigned surprise each time she scores more than twenty, or if I can't say no simply because she's in charge of the ward and I've never been good at challenging authority figures.

‘So, who have we had the last few nights?' she says, as if conversation needs to be made to keep us both going. ‘We had Vince last night, and he seemed very keen. We had Frank the night before—the one with the interest in older women. That was entertaining. And we had Therese on Tuesday night. She got a couple of deliveries and then assisted on a caesar at about three in the morning. A busy night for her. So, you'd all know each other pretty well by now?'

‘Yeah. Some better than others. I know Frank best, probably. We were out at the Underground last night, actually. After work. We've got part-time jobs at the same place.'

‘At a chicken place, isn't it?'

‘Yeah. So what happened that was entertaining? What did he tell you about him and older women?'

‘Nothing, really,' she says, as I'm wondering if this might be a mistake. ‘He was a funny guy, and maybe it was one of the things he talked about. What's there to know about him and older women?'

‘With Frank it's hard to tell sometimes. He keeps a lot in.'

He keeps a lot in . . . He keeps nothing in, but the charge sister's in her early thirties, certainly not unattractive and Frank's an acknowledged sucker for a uniform. I have no idea what he's been trying up here, and it's definitely best to keep it that way.

She dumps XYLONITE on a triple-word score, and the game is over.

‘Not your night,' she says, ‘from the look of it. We can call you if anything's likely to happen. It's just another word for celluloid, by the way. In case you were wondering.'

‘Thanks. I'm sure that'll be useful.'

I never was a Scrabble player, never will be. If I ever had the letters for xylonite on my letter rack, I'd never notice they spell xylonite.

I retire to one of the on-call rooms. The whole corridor is silent. So much for the cheap formula fantasy that says it should be one big romp up here. Or maybe that's an idea Frank's put in my head—an idea that makes far more than it should of brown rooms that smell inoffensively sterile and have harshly starched sheets on the beds. Friction from these sheets could cause abrasions and, everywhere you turn, you have either Jesus looking down at you from the cross in one of his more foresaken moments or Mary looking up from prayer. You don't rest easy here.

We ran through a list of favourites at the Underground last night. Sophie had read an article in a magazine that said you could tell a lot about people based on their favourites in particular categories. She couldn't remember what the categories were, so we made them up.

She suggested book first, for which she said I'd pick
Bright Lights, Big City
and she'd pick a good thesaurus any day. Not a bad start. We made it through the first few unscathed, then I said band and she said, ‘Huey Lewis and the News'. I said drink, she said, ‘Cooler'. And she thought they were two great answers. She had me even more concerned when I went for ideal job and she said, ‘Copperart. Sales assistant, Copperart. I mean, the combination of copper and art—how could you not want it?'