Pulse(10)


It was as much as I could do to be naked and visible in the same room as my husband, let alone within his touching distance.

I hated my body and I felt sure he must too, in spite of him continually telling me he loved it. My once firm, fulsome and prominent breasts now sagged alarmingly towards my waist and, in spite of nightly applications of expensive anti-cellulite creams, the skin on my thighs was already giving a good impression of orange peel.

That alone was enough to make me depressed.

‘What do you expect?’ Grant would say. ‘You’re in your forties having had two children. It’s nothing to worry about.’

But, of course, I did worry about it. And I was constantly desperate that he might trade me in for a younger model, just as he did every three or four years with his car.

I had finally made it downstairs just before ten and, of course, the marmalade had been in the right place on the table all the time. If it hadn’t, then I would surely have known about it. The house would have burned down, or the boys infected with some debilitating disease, or we would be involved in a worldwide nuclear Armageddon with only minutes left to live.

It was true, and all because of the position of the marmalade.

Toby returned from his football practice caked in mud and with a bloodied knee after being accidentally kicked by one of the other boys. But he wasn’t about to let his emergency-doctor mother do anything about it.

‘Leave it out, Mum,’ he said sharply when I tried to see exactly how deep was the cut. ‘It’s fine.’

‘It might get infected.’

‘I said it’s fine,’ he insisted.

Fourteen-year-old boys. Not yet men but so eager to be manly. A bleeding knee was a badge of honour, a war wound.

‘Go and have a shower and put some of this on it.’ I tossed him a tube of antiseptic cream from my first-aid cupboard in the kitchen.

He rolled his eyes in irritation but he caught the tube and took it upstairs with him to the bathroom.

Lunch had then come and gone without any great fanfare, Grant and the boys mostly grazing on what leftovers they could find in the back corners of the refrigerator.

Only a year or so previously, I would have eagerly produced a proper Sunday lunch – maybe a roast chicken or a joint of beef with all the trimmings.

I had prided myself on my Sunday lunches, taking great pleasure in having the family sitting down at the dining-room table for one meal in the week with no TV, video games or mobile phones allowed to interrupt the conversation.

Now, I simply didn’t have the energy or the inclination.

Meals in the Rankin household had mostly become either ready or takeaway, with Grant now on first-name terms with the managers at both the local Indian and Chinese restaurants, even if they did rather embarrassingly call him Mr Wankin.

I, meanwhile, had decided to stop eating altogether, existing on a meagre diet of vegetable soup plus the occasional sliver of plain grilled fish. Not that it seemed to be doing much good. Even though our bathroom scales showed that I’d lost another seven pounds in the last month, I was yet to feel any thinner. I regularly spent far too much time looking at myself in a full-length mirror. Not that I liked what I saw. It was far too stressful.

I parked my Mini in a space in the staff car park.

It was ten to six in the evening but it might as well have been the middle of the night. The sun had gone down at quarter past four and it had been pitch-black for over an hour. The intense rain had also cleared the streets of all but the most hardy.

I hated the prospect of the coming winter. The ever-dwindling length of daylight reflected the lowering of my own mood. Just five weeks, I thought, until the winter solstice and then the days would start getting longer again.

Surely I could last out five weeks.

But then it would be Christmas.

The very thought made my toes curl inside my shoes.

How could I get through all that eating, drinking and bonhomie?

I was not ready for any form of socialising. All I really wanted to do was hide myself from everyone except my immediate family. Yet, perversely, here I was about to delve into the darker recesses of humanity, dealing with people at their most vulnerable, when they would be relying on me to make them better.

But they were strangers.

I don’t know why it made a difference, but it did.

I would be more anxious about joining close girlfriends for a drink than of swimming in piranha-infested waters. But I felt able to deal quite easily with a waiting room full of prospective patients.

Not that I found myself dealing with any patients on that particular night.

There were two men and a woman waiting for me when I went in from the car to change. I could tell immediately that it didn’t signify good news.

‘Ah, Chris, there you are,’ one of the men said when he saw me. I knew him well. He was the Medical Director for the Gloucestershire Hospitals. My clinical boss. What was he doing here on a Sunday evening? And in a suit too.

‘Can we have a word?’ He was clearly uncomfortable.

I looked at the three of them.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Here?’

There were other hospital staff milling around, some arriving, some leaving.

‘Let’s go somewhere more private,’ said the woman.

The four of us walked together down a long stark hospital corridor, brightly lit only by the cool glow of overhead fluorescent tubes. ‘On my way to the condemned cell’ was the only thought that floated into my head.

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