The Book of Strange New Things(131)

‘Please. My wife needs my support. I’m missing her. And maybe whatever you’d have to build to make the Shoot work would come in useful for some other purpose. Once it was there.’

She narrowed her eyes. He realised belatedly that he hadn’t asked her how she was or made any pleasantries before hitting her with this demand.

‘I’ll see what we can do,’ she said.

Dear Peter, he read as soon as he got back.

I wish you had offered to come home instead of reminding me how much money we stand to make if you stay. Yes, I know that it was tremendously laborious and expensive for USIC to invite you. If you’d offered to leave now I probably would have argued you out of it. But it would have been nice to think that you felt enough concern to consider it as a possibility, which you plainly didn’t. It’s clear you are 100% determined to serve out your time. I understand: it’s a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

Your urgings for us to move to the countryside have stirred up my emotions because it’s only natural for someone in my position to wish desperately that we could just escape all the fiascos and start afresh in idyllic surroundings. But then my common sense kicks in and I’m exasperated with you. Do you have any idea what the countryside is really like? Do you ever read newspapers? (Rhetorical question – I know I’m the one with that sordid habit.) The countryside is a wasteland of decaying factories, bankrupt farms, long-term unemployed, ugly supermarkets and charity shops. (Hey, I wonder if the supermarkets have unsold reserves of chocolate desserts? Now there’s an incentive . . .) The money you’ll be paid for your USIC appointment is substantial but it’s not a fortune and a fortune is what we’d need to set ourselves up. There are still picturesque, safe, middle-class bits of rural Britain where I’m sure our child would have a nicer start than here in the city but they come at a very steep price. If our child was dumped in some godforsaken town where half the population is alcoholic or on drugs, and the schools are full of low achievers and social work cases, we’ll be no better off. You say, leave it in the hands of the Lord, but whose decision would it be to move in the first place? Yours.

In any case, grieved as I am about the way things are done at my hospital, I still have an ongoing commitment to the place and I feel there’s still things I can do to help. I’m also scared that if I quit this job I won’t be able to get another one, because unemployment levels are soaring as the economy implodes.

Speaking of which: It’s only a few days before I’m due to go back to work and hey presto, I got a letter from Goodman. Once again, I must say that nobody in the history of the world ever had a less appropriate name and it’s criminal that a person like this is in charge of deciding how our hospital allocates its resources. Anyway, the letter is basically a threat. He alludes to some of my more conspicuous episodes of patient advocacy and hints that in the ‘current circumstances’, our hospital cannot afford to devote ‘disproportionate’ staff energies & funds to ‘clients who are least likely to respond optimally to our care’. Which is Goodmanspeak for: we shouldn’t waste our time on anyone who’s mentally ill, bolshie, ancient or too badly injured/cancer-ridden to ever shake the doctor’s hand and say Ta Ta & Thanks For Everything. What Goodman wants is more cleft palate repairs, more robust blokes with fractures, kids with 2nd degree burns, youngish women getting lumps excised, etc. And he wants my promise that I won’t cause trouble. And he hints that if I don’t guarantee better behaviour, he may ‘re-evaluate’ whether I’m allowed back at all!

Peter, I’m glad I lifted your spirits by saying I love you, but you’re acting like a little boy who feels the whole universe has collapsed when his mother is angry with him but who then feels everything is all right again when she says she loves him. Of course I love you – we’ve both poured years of commitment and intimacy into our relationship and that’s totally integral to our minds and hearts. Our love can’t be erased by a bit of unhappiness. But that doesn’t mean our love can cure unhappiness, either. It comes down to this – there are frightening, dispiriting things going on in my life right now which I am dealing with on my own, partly because you’re not physically here with me but partly also because you are unable or unwilling to offer me emotional support. I hear what you’re saying about drug abuse, brain damage, etc, and maybe you’re right – in which case it has implications for our relationship that don’t exactly cheer me up – but another possibility is that it’s a convenient excuse for you, isn’t it? You’d like to show an interest in what’s going on in my life – or in the world at large, for that matter – but you can’t because your brain is damaged. So that’s all right then.

I’m sorry if I sound bitter. I’m just very, very overwhelmed. How about we both blame physical factors – you claim brain damage and I claim hormone overload? Ever since I’ve been pregnant, I’ve felt more vulnerable. But of course there are plenty of shocking things happening that have nothing to do with my hormones.

Which brings me to the funeral I just went to. The conclusion you jumped to as ‘obvious’ – that Billy committed suicide – was wrong, but understandable. I concluded the same thing when Sheila phoned me. But the truth is worse. It was Rachel. The child who was supposedly OK. There was no clear warning sign, or if there was, Sheila missed it. Maybe she was too preoccupied with Billy’s depression to notice. Of course, now, she’s tearing herself inside-out about it, trying to remember every tiny thing Rachel did and said. But as far as I can tell, Rachel was behaving pretty much as normal for a teenage girl – going to school, bickering with her brother, listening to bad pop music, fussing over her hair, going on fad diets, declaring she’s vegan one day and scoffing roast chicken the next. Of course Sheila now regards all of these things as distress signals but given how difficult 12-year-old girls can be, I think she’s being too hard on herself. What was really going through Rachel’s head, we’ll never know. All we know is that one morning she just took herself to a car scrap yard near her home, crawled through a gap in the wire mesh (the place was abandoned) and hid inside a big stack of car tyres. She took a lot of pills – her mum’s sleeping pills, painkillers, just household stuff but dozens of them. And she washed them down with flavoured milk and huddled inside those tyres and died and wasn’t found for three days. She left no note.