The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher(14)

HARLEY STREET





I open the door. It’s my job. I have a hundred administrative tasks, and a job title of course, but in effect I’m the meeter and greeter. I take the appointment cards the patients thrust at me—so many of them never say a word—and usher them to the waiting room. Later I send them along the corridor or up the stairs to meet whatever is in store for them: which is usually nothing pleasant.

Mostly they look right through me. Their eyes and ears are closed to everything except their own predicament, and they might just as well be steered in by a robot. I said that one day to Mrs. Bathurst. She turned her eyes on me, in that half-awake manner she has. A robot, she repeated. Or a zombie, I said brightly. That’s what our doctors should do, make a zombie. That would cut down on their practice expenses, give them less to complain about.

Bettina, who takes blood in the basement, said what do you mean, make a zombie? Child’s play, I said. You need datura, ground puffer fish, then shake up a herbal cocktail to your family recipe. Then you bury them for a bit, dig them up, slap them round the head to stun them: and they’re a zombie. They walk and talk, but their will’s been taken out.

I was talking on airily, but at the same time, I admit, I was frightening myself. Bettina watched me for signs of madness; her pretty mouth parted, like a split strawberry. And Mrs. Bathurst examined me; her lower jaw sagged, so that the light glinted on one of the gold fillings done cheap for her by Snapper, our dentist.

“What’s the matter with you two?” I said. “Don’t you read the New Scientist these days?”

“My eyes are poor,” Mrs. Bathurst said. “I find the TV is company.”

Of course, the only thing Bettina buys is Hello! She is from Melbourne, and has no sense of humor: no sense of anything really. “Zombies?” she said, articulating carefully: “I thought zombies were for cutting cane under a hot sun. I never associated them with Harley Street.”

Mrs. Bathurst shook her head. “Beyond the grave,” she said heavily.

Dr. Shinbone (first floor, second left) was passing. “Come, come, nurse,” he said, startled. “Is that the sort of talk?”

“She was alluding to the mystery of life and death,” I said to Shinbone.

Mrs. Bathurst sighed. “Not such a mystery really.”

* * *

BETTINA WORKS IN the basement, as I’ve said, taking samples for the lab. Patients come from practitioners up and down Harley Street, bringing forms with crosses scrawled on them, indicating what tests their blood must have. Bettina extracts some into a tube and puts a label on it. The customers I send her look ill, very ill. They don’t like what’s coming, but what is it? Just a pinprick. True, we’ve had some vivisectionists down there, in my time; Bettina is scatty, but skilled in her way, and she doesn’t send them out bleeding. Only once, this spring, I remember a young girl stopping by the cubbyhole where I’m housed, and saying oh: staring at a thin trickle of blood, creeping its way from the crook of her elbow toward the swollen blue veins of her wrist. She was seventeen, anorexic, anemic. Her blood should have been as pale as herself, thin and green—but of course it was shockingly fresh and red.

I popped out of my door, and put my hands on her shoulders. I had warm and steady hands, back in May. Down you go, I said to her firmly, run down there to Bettina, and ask her for another plaster. She went. Mrs. Bathurst was crossing the corridor with a kidney bowl in her hand. I saw her gape, and then she put a hand out to the wall, steadying herself. She looked winded, and as pale as the patient. “Dear me!” she said. “Whatever was the matter with that young lass?”

I had to make Mrs. Bathurst a cup of tea. I said, “If blood turns your stomach, why did you go into nursing?”

“Oh no,” she said, “no, it doesn’t usually take me that way at all.” She put her hands around her mug and compressed it. “It was just coming upon her there in the hall,” she said. “It was so unexpected.”

* * *

BETTINA IS RED-HAIRED, freckled, creamy. When she sits down her white coat parts, and her short skirts ride up and show her baby-knees. She’s adequately pneumatic and brain-dead, and yet she complains of lack of success with men. They often ask her out, but then she has a hard time to understand what’s going on. They meet up with other blokes in some noisy pub, and—well, I thought Europe would be different, she says. They talk about motorways. Various junctions, their speed between them, and interesting roadworks they may have met. Toward the end of the evening, a few drinks on board, the men say, we hate Arsenal and we hate Arsenal. The landlord wants people to leave; Bettina leaves too, sliding out by the wall from the Ladies to the nearest exit. “Because not,” she says, “I do NOT, want their dribble and their paws on me.”

Early in summer, she began to say, men aren’t worth it. The television’s better; not so repetitive. Or I curl up with a miniseries.

“All the same, you need a hobby,” Mrs. Bathurst said. “Something to get you out.”

Bettina wears a little silver cross round her neck, on a chain as thin as a thread. “That chain’ll snap,” Mrs. Bathurst said.

“It’s delicate,” Bettina said, touching it. In Melbourne, she was drilled to be delicate and sweet. Sometimes she wails, oh jeepers creepers, I think I’ve mislaid one of my samples, oh, Geronimo H. Jones! Look, calm down, I say, I’m sure you haven’t lost any blood at all. Then she counts up her glass tubes, and checks her forms again and everything’s okay. One of these days, something will go wrong, she’ll mislabel her samples and some great hairy bloke will be told he’s estrogen deficient and be invited to attend our Menopause Clinic. Still, if there were complaints, they’d just get lost in the system. The patients shouldn’t think that just because they pay for treatment they’re due any respect. Sure, it sounds respectful, the way we put it when we send out the bills: