There were empty Coke cans nestled amongst the debris on the desk, and sweet wrappers, and it seemed that all this technology was wasted on a kid.
There were bills stuck up above the desk, too, and I couldn’t help but see them. I guess I wasn’t really intruding since Andrew had specifically told me I could use his study.
He didn’t owe anything on his credit cards; they were all in positive balances. I’d never imagined a life without debt.
Presumably he owed money on the house, but it had never occurred to me that Andrew might actually earn enough to not be in debt like everyone else.
Not that I had a credit card, of course, but I owed my mum several hundred pounds, and my student loan debt was staggering. I’d be paying that one off for the rest of my working life.
There was a bookshelf behind me and I swiveled around to check it out. Underneath the piles of photocopied journal articles stuffed randomly onto the shelving there were textbooks. Microbiol, communicable dieases, cardiology, haemotology, orthopedics. No ob-gyn and no paediatrics, though.
There were novels, too, hardback editions with sumptuous covers, from small press companies I’d never heard of. Books of poetry, including a leather-bound Emily Dickenson.
Thoreau. Walt Whitman.
The art was gorgeous. There were canvases on the wall, like the rest of the house. I’d never paid any attention to them even though I had harboured secret thoughts of being an artist myself once. The less than secret desire to have a real career that would challenge me and make me feel like my life was not a total waste, while earning me a good income, had won. I stood up, ran a finger over the canvas over the desk. Blue ridges of oil paint, an impasto explosion in aquamarine and cerulean and cobalt blue. When I peered at the painting I could see there was scrawl underneath the paint, random pieces of handwriting.
I took the note out of my robe and chose a bit of the canvas where the scrawl was the right way up and held the note up to it.
There was no signature on the canvas to confirm it, but I was sure that the handwriting was Andrew’s. He must have made coarse papier-mache out of his own handwritten material, coated a canvas in it, and painted over it.
There was a pattern to the paintings once I had gone carefully around the upper floor of the house, peering at the art. In all of them, the two blue canvases in the study, the green and yellow in the bedroom, and the smaller mixed palette paintings in the hallway, Andrew had painted over handwritten material.
The painting in the bedroom was the most intriguing.
Nothing showed through the thick spread of forest and moss greens, but the yellow was translucent enough to make out that the handwritten material was sheets of scribbled music, written on plain paper, not musical score.
I wasn’t sure how to interpret this. He’d said his ex was a musician, a violinist. I couldn’t read music at all, so couldn’t tell whether it was music for a violin, or for a slide trombone for that matter. It wasn’t torn up or shredded, unlike the painting in the study. The sheets were carefully laid out, lines of musical notes matching up, and I wondered why it was what Andrew chose to keep in his bedroom. Was it a secret message, a memento of a marriage? Or did he just like it?
There were no painting supplies of any kind in sight, no stacked canvases, no easel, no sketchpads, and I wondered why Andrew had stopped painting.
It made me kind of ashamed of my grotty room, too.
There was nothing artistic in my room; the only thing I had that played music was my laptop; there wasn’t a shred of creativity to be found there.
I had a couple of books on piercing, a pile of porn magazines, and not quite enough textbooks. The walls were covered in revision sheets, and the only reason the walls of the upstairs toilet weren’t covered, too, was that Geoff number two had beaten me to it, and now we all crapped while staring at physics equations.
No poetry, no art, anyone would think that my degree had subsumed my life. Oh, yeah, that was right, it had.
I went back downstairs and heated up leftover curry for breakfast, and made myself curry sandwiches to take with me that day.
Chapter Twenty Eight
My pager woke me.
I fished it out of my pocket, blinked, and peered at the screen. Someone had turned the light on in the house physicians’ common room and people were milling around, talking quietly so as not to disturb the people who were still asleep on the couches.
It was Clarissa, who’d seconded the motion to stop work at the meeting, and before I could get my cell phone out to call her back, she pushed the door to the common room open.
The cracked vinyl of the couch creaked as I sat up. She walked over and sat down beside me, inspecting my cup of cooling black coffee hopefully.
“Damn,” she said. “I was hoping you had something decent there. I thought Americans were coffee aficionados.”
“I’d like to be,” I said, rubbing my face sleepily and then checking the temperature of my coffee, too. It wasn’t stone cold, so I drank what was left. It was twenty to eight when I checked my watch, which explained why Clarissa had paged me. She was wearing scrubs and rubber clogs and smelled of the lingering stench of diathermy.
“Been working?” I asked.
She nodded. “Open reductions, two of them. Two theatres will be running through the day, there’re enough surgeons and anesthetists working for that, but we started at five this morning to try and get through the night’s Casualty intake.”
She looked awful, nervous and close to tears, and I squeezed her hand reassuringly. “If you’re needed, you can always go back inside,” I said. “Just make sure that the surgical coordinator knows to send someone to get you.”
She blinked and nodded. “Have you done this before?” she asked. “Gone on strike?”
I shook my head. “Unless you count quitting a job flipping burgers at sixteen because the unnamed mega- corporation I worked for sacked someone for joining a union, no, I’ve never gone on strike.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Clarissa, we’re doctors. The administration is telling us how to practice medicine, what we can and can’t do for our patients. I worked in an Episcopalian community hospital in the US because I couldn’t stand an HMO telling me what I could and couldn’t do, and when I had to leave someone untreated. I didn’t expect to come here and work in a socialised national health service, and have the hospital tell me the same things.”
She hugged me quickly and I could feel how tense she was. “I’m going to go check my patients in post-op, I’ll see you outside.”
Ghastly George came over and took Clarissa’s place beside me. She didn’t say anything, just took hold of my hand and held it tightly. She was presumably off-duty, having been on the wards all night, and was also presumably working tonight, too, and I wondered if she was insane enough to join us on the picket line instead of sleeping.
We walked out just before eight, a solid elevator of doctors. Clarissa was crying beside me so I wrapped one arm around her shoulders and Ghastly George kept hold of my other hand.
I hadn’t thought what this moment might feel like, hadn’t tried to imagine it, and I wished I had.
I was deeply moved. People slapped my back in the elevator, and when we stepped out into the main hallway through to the hospital’s front entrance, orderlies and nurses and the women in striped aprons who worked in the candy store in the lobby all started clapping. There were doctors coming out of the main stairwell, too, and from the side hallway down to the orthopedics outpatient clinic and Casualty.
I could still hear Clarissa sobbing beside me, and I understood why.
We walked out the main entrance and onto the paved courtyard in front of the hospital, into blinding sunshine
