The Night Tiger(38)
“This is Ren,” he says. “The person who treated you at my house.”
Ren notices that he doesn’t say “my houseboy” or “my servant” and feels obscurely proud.
“So young!” she says. Her name, according to the patient manifest, is Nandani Wijedasa, and she’s eighteen years old, unmarried. Her father is a clerk at the rubber estate near their house, and she was readmitted this morning for fever and pain in the leg.
William gently pulls up the loose hospital-issue pajamas with a reassuring smile. The wound is smaller than Ren remembered, though still a shocking gash on the back of her smooth calf. Sutured with black thread, it looks tender and puffy.
“We’ll need to open it up again and irrigate it, maybe debride the tissue and then reclose it. When you go home, keep a gauze pad soaked in carbolic on it to prevent infection. You must keep the wound clean, otherwise you might get blood poisoning. Do you understand?”
He looks directly at her and a spark jumps between them. Ren’s cat sense hasn’t been this strong since Yi’s death. What’s the meaning of this? But he knows, without even raising his head, that something is happening between William and the young woman Nandani. Some kind of attraction that makes the doctor linger as Nandani bats her long curling eyelashes.
Ren isn’t the only person to think so. A foreign lady has come in, pushing a trolley with novels and back issues of Punch and The Lady for patients to read. Her eyes, an astonishing electric blue, fix on William’s back.
“William—what brings you in today?”
Turning, William says, “Hello, Lydia.”
Sunlight streaming into the ward picks out the gold in her pretty curls, and Ren wonders whether her hair is fluffy all the time or if it has to be steamed and pressed, like a sponge cake.
“One of your patients?” Lydia gives the Sinhalese girl on the bed a quick stare.
“Not mine.” He glances at Ren, who gazes shyly at the crack in the floorboards next to Nandani’s bed.
Drawing William aside, Lydia threads her arm through his. “Leslie said you’re hosting the next get-together for the younger doctors.”
“It’s just a group of bachelors talking shop. Not very interesting, I’m afraid.” He turns up the charm.
Lydia looks both hopeful and plaintive. “Can I come?”
“Only if you don’t mind hearing about tropical diseases.”
“Not at all! I want to help as much as possible—sometimes people don’t know what’s best for them.”
While they talk, Nandani touches Ren’s sleeve. “Thank you.” Her smile is warm and Ren is very glad that she’s alive and not lying dead in a wheelbarrow full of blood. “Are you studying to be a doctor?”
“I’d like to.”
“You will be a good doctor.” Her eyes drift to William. “Is your master kind to you?”
Ren realizes, with a feeling of surprise, that yes, William has been good to him.
“He’s nice,” she says. There it is again, that invisible spark between her and William. It flies out with a tiny sizzle, so that Ren half expects to see it flare in the air.
William turns round to Nandani again. “Where do you live?” he asks.
Shyly, she tells him her address.
He writes it down in the little notebook he carries in his breast pocket. “You’re quite close to my place. If you stop by, I’ll look at your leg again next week. No need to come to the hospital.”
Behind William, Lydia sorts her book trolley industriously.
Ren can’t sense anything from her at all. Perhaps because she’s an unknown quantity—a foreigner and a lady—and he has almost no experience with this combination. She and William make a well-matched pair. They’re both so tall, with light eyes and skin mottled from the fierce sun, not smooth and evenly colored like Nandani’s. Ren feels sorry for the foreign lady; she’s trying so hard. Why doesn’t William like her?
* * *
Done with the wards, Ren trots along next to William. He’s giddy with his cat sense, that long-lost sensation of feeling the invisible, as though he’s regained a limb or an extra set of eyes and ears. What is it about the hospital that’s so special? William says he’ll stop by pathology to see his colleague Dr. Rawlings. He has a question for him about an autopsy report. Ren knows that pathology means organs and bits of dead people and animals, a good sign that it’s where the finger is. Buzzing with excitement, he’s confident that even with his eyes closed, he’ll finally be able to locate it.
As they navigate the covered walkways, lined with beds of day lilies on one side, Ren discovers he can read William now in a way he never could before. William’s interest is like a taut string. It snaps around, but mostly it’s drawn to women. Nurses passing, a lady visitor bending over a bed. Certainly, William doesn’t pay attention to the things that Ren notices, like the spider behind the door, or the perfectly round pebble under the lilies that Ren would like to put in his pocket but doesn’t dare to because it’s probably hospital property.
As they draw nearer the pathology department, the twitch of invisible filaments grows so strong that Ren is tense with excitement. It’s never been like this before, not even with Yi. They turn a corner. William pats his breast pocket, then rummages in his trousers with annoyance. “Ren, go back and fetch my fountain pen. The ward sister will have it.”