The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 3
Well, I was the first among us to sire; plus I reckoned me and the boy were pals; also that he made me look good. For Cal, though, these occasions were mainly a chance to hang out with his godfather Dr Forrest, to soak up that over-age bad-boy routine of Robert’s. Once Cal started to ‘pop round’ to Rab’s place for mano a mano soirées I somehow persuaded myself it was only a good padrino influence, however many times Cal traipsed home with his breath acrid from the smoky peat of Robert’s malts. God knows what they talked about, if not the ins and outs of the automotive engine, or the ins and outs of young girls. But plenty at any rate.
Today, though, I felt rueful seeing Cal, sufficiently mature to join us ‘properly’, yet no longer wishing to be here. Of course I understand, in his own moody way he’s upset about Robert. But when poor Steven, with avuncular fondness, addressed him as ‘Young Calder’, I thought Cal might punch him in the chops. It’s not the Scot thing – Cal still affects an Edinburgh burr – but I suppose he rates ‘Calder’ a name fit only for a squirt in short trousers, not the gym-enhanced, slightly marked Lothario he now reckons himself – sandy-haired six-foot Flower of Scotland, man-mountain of the rugby pitch and tennis court. (Then again, well he might, based on the longing looks Susan’s girl Jennifer kept shooting his way.)
One other thing riled me: the approach I had from this woman, Gerry McKissock’s latest squeeze. I was taking my turn at the grill, butterflying the organic leg of lamb, and she admired my bold slices and deft editing of fat. Lara was her name, her curves loosely confined by a top one might wear to a dance class, her hair a bit too blonde, as if compensating for her white-wine-drinker’s wrinkles and the tremor of sag at her jaw-line. After some meagre chit-chat she lunged in for the kill. ‘So you’re a friend of the great Robert Forrest? I hear amazing things about his clinic …’
Yes, she was after a referral – one more wretch wanting a little ‘work’ done on herself. Quietly I had to explain the present circumstances. For some moments she swilled Sancerre round her glass as if chastened. Then, stunningly, she brightened, wanted to know if I too practised cosmetics? I told her a little of my expertise in treating anorectal malformation in newborns, and watched her interest wane.
‘No, I never fancied the aesthetic stuff myself. It’s technically easy, but bad for the soul – patient’s and doctor’s.’
That had her wincing into the sun. ‘Gosh. You think?’
Steven was hovering nearby so I called him over, had him explain to this Lara what I meant by ‘psychological dysmorphism’. He obliged gladly.
‘It’s when what a person sees of themselves when they look in the mirror is all hashed. Because they can’t see themselves as they really are, or take any natural pride in it, so what’s normal looks to them like a terrible aberration. That’s a fundamental flaw in a person’s character, no amount of “work” will cure it.’
So crestfallen was this lassie by now, I felt I had to give her some comfort, namely that Robert had always claimed 100 per cent patient satisfaction from one procedure: namely, reduction mammoplasty. ‘A huge relief on the neck and shoulders, especially once you’re past a certain age. No more nasty welts off them bra straps …’ I glanced in the direction of Lara’s bare, blemished shoulder. She pushed off shortly thereafter. I know, I know … Unfriendly of me, and ungallant. There was I, outraged on Robert’s behalf, but as well both Steven and I know, had Rab been present he would have drawn Lara aside to a shady spot – without it seeming predatory in the slightest – taken out his moleskin notebook and jotted a few details, spun her a sugar-web of words, so luring her inexorably toward a pricy reservation at the Forrest Clinic of St John’s Wood.
I drove by the Clinic last week, actually, a small act of homage, recalling that afternoon Robert led me languidly on a tour of the finished conversion, every plane and surface immaculate, fit to be cleaned with a hose: his theatre, with its top-dollar ceiling canopy, then the prep and anaesthesia and treatment rooms, the day-care centre … All that shining white-on-white super-sterility (in such contrast to the rose-and-chartreuse Art Nouveau swank of Robert’s home decor). Even then I was wondering who paid for it all, and this even before Rab’s ‘troubles’.
Heading back from Jon’s I put pedal to the metal, since Livy was keen to get back to that rather luminous landscape she’s been steeped in for weeks. Cal was keener still to do the driving, but I’d seen him neck several beers. Midway through our disputation I had to take a fretful call from young Dr Malik, and so reverted to my professional alter ego: all parties of my household know better than to mess with Him. Cal sank into the leather, muttering that he would never answer a phone at the wheel. Not the point. I have duties. And in thirty years of driving I’ve not had a single accident. In less than twelve months Cal’s had two, yet he acts as though these ‘just happened’, and to someone else, some callow, outmoded model of himself.
For sure, the scares wrought no discernible change in him. Fair enough, like most lads he couldn’t wait to get into the driver’s seat. As his instructor I took my role just as seriously as if he were a new surgical resident under my eye. I forbade distraction, wanted to instil in him the process, the technique, even the fundamentals of the engine. I wanted Cal to understand that learning is incremental, true skill developed and refined by the experience of unforeseen tight corners, from which one learns anticipation and adjustment. In driving, one assumes the danger of destroying life, beginning with one’s own.
Cal, though, just doesn’t get it. Some children inherently fear the unknown, the shadowy threat of a hurt that might prove irreparable. So they’re afraid to ever take that first bold step, put their foot down into murky water. It’s natural, this fear, and it must be shaken out: one cannot be afraid to act unilaterally. But I must have instilled this lesson in Cal too well. He just charges round the blind corners of life as though he were indestructible. He knows full well the sad tale of Olivia’s second ‘pregnancy’ that wasn’t – has known for as long as he could talk that he will be our only child – yet, clearly, believes he will live forever.
‘Needs a new skin, boss.’ So said the chief grease-monkey at Rawlson’s Garage after Cal took my powerful Audi out for a tear, and tore up the left flank. Then, of course, Cal damn near needed a new epidermis of his own after he took that country-lane bend blithely unhindered by a seatbelt. A lucky lad, he, that his godfather is so gifted: bloody hours it was that Rab spent plucking fragments of glass out of Cal’s brow and cheekbone, prior to sewing him up very nearly good as new. ‘A little scar tissue’s desirable in a man, lends character.’ Thus Rab’s tough-eyed verdict on his handiwork. Jesus wept, thought I. But Cal lapped it up. I suppose it was then they became bosom pals.
How Robert loved my son, with what touching fierceness! There was something heartbreaking about the proud, fond look in his eye and the way Cal would return it, their avidity for each other’s company. Cal used to look at me like that – preadolescence at least – the eager boy to whom I taught the finer points of all the sports worth teaching, bright-eyed, treading loyally and trustingly in my wake. But the teenage incarnation of Cal – the rangy, cocky insouciance, the sly smile, the mere nod of greeting – I can see whose spirit he’s channelling. He and Rab were blood brothers, of a sort.
They ‘are’, they ‘are’, goddamn it. Get a grip, Grey.
* * *
Earlier this evening I tidied up the references for my long-delayed paper on the use of Hyalomatrix in deep dermal burns; and in demob spirit I fancied I’d take a stroll out in the last of the light, wondered if my dear ones cared to join me. They were still sat over cold dinner plates, Livy with a novel, though claiming to be returning shortly to her canvas. Young Calder appeared stupefied before his laptop, but to my delight he was navigating round some website devoted to hi-tech renderings of the internal organs. I had thought the internet pandered more to a lower interest in gross anatomy. Do I dare to dream the boy may follow his old man’s footsteps? A prospective surgeon must be p
roud as Lucifer, Cal’s got that going for him at least. (Of course my generation did anatomy the old-school way, round a dun-coloured corpse on a slab, its face shrouded, we all breath-bated and queasy. Cal’s lot, I expect, will do it by computer-sim, free from the butcher’s-shop odour of formalin and rotting tissue, the morphology prof’s gags about ‘cold cuts’.)
At any rate I never got out of the house, because the phone rang, Cal erupted from his chair to get it, and it was Malena. The boy wasted some moments, trying to sound suave. When I finally got on the line, though, my usual pleasure in hearing Malena’s Danish purr was denied me, for tonight she was troubled. I’m sure she’s worried over Robert anyway, but this is fresh bother – some disquieting rift in her relations with Killian. I tried to sympathise, ham-fistedly, for I’m no one’s idea of a marriage counsellor. My sense was she wanted to see me in person, directly, but I couldn’t assent, not with Livy’s eyes on me from over her paperback.
It’s an awkward position for me in multiple ways. I can never speak to Malena too long without feeling I’m being weirdly ‘unfaithful’ to Robert. But then Rab and I are brothers under the skin, and – just to start with the surface – I see in Malena exactly what he saw: those crystalline eyes, that sculpted face, the long dark-auburn locks so uncommon in a Dane. Robert himself couldn’t have improved her. Only age can do that – you just know she’ll look glorious at 40, 50, 60. She has, I concede, a touch of the amoral to her, a discreet loucheness; otherwise she’d never have become Robert’s girl. At times she appears too satisfied by her own world’s wellbeing. But only to a point. And not tonight.
Malena and I have always been able to talk. If unlikely confidants on the surface, we have a robustness in common. She’s of that Nordic female type – maybe it’s the cold that makes them so coolly candid, uninhibited. As a mere girl she was driving a snow plough, ice-fishing, putting cherries in her cheeks, cheerfully tossing back vodka with the boys. Though slender as a wand she has the muscles for winter sports, and several inches in height over Killian, who, for all his roguish good looks, is a squirt. An uncouth squirt to boot: he should cut his fucking hair, for one thing. I doubt he has anything in his wardrobe but tee-shirts and denims, all frayed and stained by repeated wiping of his chisel. And this the guy who cuckolded my pal? But, but … I’ve never had reason to believe he’s anything but hugely enamoured of Malena, as he should be. And she does love him. Hence my surprise to hear of their running into choppy waters now.
Killian’s muse has gone missing, apparently, or else he’s in a blue period. I knew he’d sustained a big work disappointment, the collapse of some commission that looked to have fallen into his lap then was just as swiftly yanked away. Ever since he got the news – a week or so ago, the day before Robert disappeared, in fact – he has, it seems, been comporting himself in a moody-peculiar fashion. As a photographer and veteran of the appalling fashion world, Malena knows all about the flighty types. But the Irishman’s strange change of temper has utterly thrown her. He has complained of a few ailments, some old rugby injury that never fixed, but to her annoyance he won’t see a doctor.
I grunted, rueful, in recognition. ‘Rather like Robert – the physician who refused to heal himself.’
Malena winced. ‘Please Grey, don’t say that.’
I realised I’d been insensitive in the circumstances. Still I wasn’t convinced. All men go through phases of loathing their work. And yet there was Malena talking about booking Killian into Steven’s clinic.
‘For what?’ I asked. ‘“Exhaustion”, like the rock ’n’ rollers? Malena, I wouldn’t advise you pay the Blakedene rate. Sounds to me like all he needs is a rest, maybe a think …’
‘Huh. Maybe it’s me should check into Blakedene Hall. I’ll sit and tell Steven all my troubles …’
It alarmed me that she might be serious. I wanted also to tell her that Steven would be no help, since he takes a disapproving attitude, unconsciously or not, toward any woman who’s gone to bed with Robert. I suppose I also felt a twinge of envy, however puerile – but some part of me has determined to be Malena’s Galahad and admit no challenger, not even the honourable Doc Hartford. Especially so when Killian seems suddenly to have put on the armour of black knight. It does sound like quite a falling-off.
* * *
Was it only ten weeks ago that Livy and I called round and found those two in connubial bliss?
It had been with some unease that I accepted Malena’s invitation. I only got my excuse once Robert admitted to me he was dallying with a new girl, some pampered princess whom he’d gifted a new nose. So I told myself we were all moving on (for all that it seemed Rab was backsliding). Livy needed no pretext, she knew of Killian’s work, where he’d trained and so forth, and was curious. Still, as we clambered into the Audi that morning I couldn’t quite shake the sense that Robert was watching us from the cover of some shady remove, eyes burning …
Theirs is a good honest home, not an aesthete’s showroom like Robert’s. Malena brewed us tea in a cheerful, cluttered kitchen, the walls hung with ill-framed posters of Killian’s exhibitions (Pale Graces, Amaterasu, Red Earth Demeter). I brought a bottle of Powers Irish whiskey in tribute to the man of the house, but I read in Malena’s eyes that this was tantamount to carrying some effigy of Robert over her new threshold. Still, after a bit she duly led us up to Killian’s ‘workshop’.
Frankly I was ready to give ‘the work’ a cool appraisal but I must say I found the studio greatly to my taste. Occupying all of an upper floor, exposed brick and floorboards under high skylights, it had the good dusty odour of a masculine den, the sense of being home to a proper industrial/artisanal process. Strewn across the surfaces were masses of pencil sketches, clusters of tools and chisels upright in old fifteen-litre paint cans, rows of pieces shrouded in sackcloth and lined up on metal bracket shelves. The sheer number and variety of tools and accoutrements I found deeply appealing: goggles, gloves, earmuffs, respirator, polisher, hammer drill and grinder, whole sheaves of diamond blades. In one corner some kind of life-size wire maquette reclined blankly in a tall-backed wooden rocking chair. Neglected in the other corner was a sixty-gallon air-tank, some pneumatic tool trailing from it by a hose, begging to be picked up and blasted.
And there, planted thoughtfully amid it all, the Great Killian MacCabe, clad like a plasterer’s mate, nursing in one fist a three-pound hammer and in the other a chipped enamel teamug bearing the badge of some rugger side from Dun Laoghaire. He peered most intently at a great lump of alabaster that must have been winched up onto the reinforced bench where it sat formidably on a sandbag. Livy apologised for our disturbance. He grinned, waved a hand. ‘Nah, yousens relax. Honestly, Livy, I’ve no intention of touching this boy, not today. It’s just been giving me the eye, y’know? Throwing down the gauntlet.’
I gave him a querying look that he was good enough to address. ‘A block of this size, Grey, it’s got a world of possibles in it. And it came from somewhere, y’know? It’s got its own story. You have to respect that, it asks something of you.’
I could see he had that Irish way of looking at one, as if already amused by the quick-witted thing he was about to say, also by the sadly slug-witted manner of your comeback, since ‘you’, by definition, take life too seriously. ‘Never worry about me,’ his eyes seemed to say, ‘I do my real stuff while yousens are in bed.’ But he disarmed us, young MacCabe, and not just by his unshaven charm but by the selection of pieces he casually unveiled.
He works mainly in stone or wood, sometimes stuff he’s bought or salvaged, but more often he prefers a commissioner to provide their own raw material. He ‘likes to be surprised’ – chooses to believe that in the course of the graft he will somehow ‘fuse’ himself with the temperament of the donor – likes to feel, furthermore, that the wood or the stone will, by its intrinsic strangeness, ‘open his eyes’ and teach him something.
‘The raw state of a stone has its own perfection,’ he went on. ‘You could persuad
e yourself to leave well alone. Respect to “the better craftsman”, y’know? But, you’ve only got one life, so you crack on. Then once you split it – see, it’s really the flaws of the innards that get your juices going? The flaws suggest new things.’
It was high-flown yet I found it made sense. Whereupon we had a nice little chat about our shared interest in cutting: cutting tools, cutting things, people. He had more than the layman’s curiosity about the surgical. ‘When you’ve someone lying there before you with their guts laid open,’ he marvelled, ‘there’s power in that, isn’t there? You must feel like a warlock with that scalpel …’
I had to tell him that on some level I fight with indecision every time I pick up the blade – even if only for a fractional second, but it’s there the devil awaits you. At worst you can see yourself from out of body, poised over a child, blade in hand like Father Abraham. For me it’s the special onus of operating on infants and children – flawless pink flesh, my cut the first violation. Of course, very often the life is at stake, no one else can stand in my shoes at that moment, so unless I hurry up then things will get immeasurably worse. But every time I cut I’m trying, for a moment, not to think of the patient as a human being: trying to put from my mind the precious detail of skin surface, fine hair, complexion, minor blemish – all those things that Robert was required to obsess over, all of the time.
‘It’s somewhat Zen,’ I offered (imagining Robert’s wince), ‘knowing the “rightness” of your aim. Then once you’re in, it’s like the tissue falls away from the blade, and it hardly seems to bleed, funnily enough – as if the body were actively assisting the procedure.’
I had joined him on the highfaluting theoretical plane, and his smile was broad. We stood over one piece of his that had a pleasing finality, an abstracted female nude, some big stone lump he’d somehow managed to endow with a fecund, even carnal aspect. I tried a few clumsy words of appreciation: ‘It’s amazing, how you’ve suggested so much of a woman just by the flow of that curve.’