The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  ‘Yeah, but there’s aspects of the feminine we’re hard-wired to see, right?’ He grinned, glancing back at our girls. ‘Us fellas? There’s a sort of a code we know means “naked girl”. It could be a line in the sand, a piss in the snow, it wouldn’t matter …’

  Malena was certainly smiling as she sallied up to us and slid her arms round his waist. ‘Gimme a kiss,’ he said, and she made a little pantomime of resisting him. Strange to relate, the spectacle didn’t make me want to vomit. They liked each other passing well, that much was clear. No, I found I didn’t mind making Killian’s acquaintance, much as I’d minded the idea. I never confessed my treachery to Rab, though I suspect he guessed. Did it bother him? Was it rank disloyalty? Damn it, knowing Killian was a function of my friendship with Malena, and for sure she became a friend of mine too, whereupon it was impossible not to care for her. I just can’t pretend Killian’s some sort of demon, or anything but personable as far as I’ve seen.

  Malena, though, has clearly now seen a side to him she hadn’t bargained for. So it goes – romance can be a drug for a certain sort of woman, but it’s only the spice of life, not the daily common-clay stuff of it. We have to compromise with our lovers. Moreover, I do suspect – however acrimoniously things finished between Malena and Rab – she must retain some feelings for him, be more worried for him now than she’s letting on. And Killian could hardly be blind to that, could he?

  4

  Malena’s Diary

  His mere possession

  August 26th

  Who is sleeping in my bed? Or in whose bed am I sleeping? And does he want what I want, or something else entirely? I’m no longer sure – nothing feels solid or secure any more. My honest and earnest and light-hearted lover has, quite suddenly, changed into one of those dark men who keep secrets. Perhaps I’m imagining, some paranoid fear, ‘only a phase’, maybe. But all I can see now is difference, someone I don’t understand and yet conceivably – my worst fear – recognise all too well. ‘Rather like Robert …’ Grim, grim, the very last thing I needed to hear!

  Only hours ago our argument was so bitterly intractable that I struggled for breath, and searching in vain for some mercy or concession in his mean, hard face I actually had to ask: ‘Who am I talking to?’ I believe the question struck home, at least, for he paused, then was most subdued as he replied, ‘I’m your lover who loves you, who’s always loved you …’ But his face as he said it – was not a lover’s face, no.

  Such professions of ‘love’. And yet he has forgotten how it’s done. Our ‘romantic’ dinner last week at the St John, his idea – I thought we would talk, he merely drank. Always we’ve talked so easily (as I used to imagine did Robert and I, before I realised he was only extracting data from me, one more proof of his ownership). If Killian wants to revive the first flush of our love he needs to remember how it started. It is as though he wishes to begin our relationship anew but on terms favourable only to him, all the while expecting I will faithfully delight in the new dispensation.

  It’s his humour I’m missing above all, the lightness, the silliness, the true romance of him. Over dinner I wanted us to share again the story of how we met, at Susanne’s party, both of us having gone in search of a moment’s quiet, only to find each other, miraculously, in a darkened, empty room – then, somehow, dancing together, close, to the distant music from the floor below. The mischief of him as he murmured in my ear, ‘I feel a connection …’ I’d come to consider myself a married woman – ‘kept’, certainly – but I fell for him then. That is our story, and I recited it happily, expecting his eyes to shine over the candlelight. He listened, brooded, nodded, as though he’d had no part of it, as though some little Leporello had slipped into his clothes that night and worked all that charm on his behalf.

  Every day now I watch him from the corner of my eye, I sneak peeks into his studio, and all I see is evidence of strange new habits – the undoing of what I took for his habits of a lifetime. That huge hunk of alabaster for which he paid a ransom but professed great plans – yes, I imagined it would sit a little while unattended, not that he would abuse it as he has done. This newfound zeal for the air-chisel … It gathered dust for months, most cumbersome of unwanted gifts, Killian was amused by it but showed no inclination whatever to pick up that pneumatic hammer – swore he hated the noise, the vibration, how the stone chips flew. Well, now it is his favourite toy. And it’s me who loathes the noise of it. For sure I knew the day he attacked the alabaster, and without a facial shield – that much I saw when he slouched downstairs with a fresh cut on his cheekbone, one that could have been immeasurably worse.

  And not just how he works, but what he works on – chiselling away like a jeweller at some small piece, ‘small’ in every sense. The Killian I thought I knew has always sculpted in order to explore, to excavate the material. He’s never made endless sketches or fussy little maquettes. And he would never EVER do a portrait bust – nothing so ‘pretty’, so banal as that. His women have been bigger, more mysterious, but more generous too – yes, I am so vain as to glimpse myself within their abstraction. Was I flattered, then, that day I sneaked up to his shoulder and saw his desk strewn with precise pencil sketches of my face? A little, yes. But if I expressed scepticism about his intentions it was only that I’ve never had the slightest wish to be his model – have only wanted him to be the artist I’d admired from afar. So maybe I stung him, perhaps he felt slighted. If so, he wasted no time in selecting another model. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, not pleasantly, as he tore up those pages in front of me. ‘I’ll not make that mistake again …’ This new face he’s making is ‘beautiful’, yes, but a typical man’s fantasy of pristine female beauty, and in virgin white. If he hopes to make me jealous I will not take that bait. I saw enough of that from Robert, albeit late, and after so long taking me for granted, his mere possession, his clockwork doll.

  I do not believe Killian has anyone else. For one thing he has become so confined to his quarters. And he is drinking while he works. No appetite was ever improved by such a mix. So, after all his recent and quite insatiable amorousness, he is now failing us in bed. Only a fortnight ago he wanted to make love daily, and in the middle of the day too. I wasn’t always so ready, but he wasn’t taking ‘No’ – was at least endearing in his insistence – and I went with the flow, my only surprise that he was not more gentle – the natural psychology, I would have thought, when lovers are waiting to learn if they have been ‘blessed’. But tenderness has gone astray in him – so far removed from when we first slept together, and I was so clumsy, all fingers and thumbs, not even sure I knew what to do, whether I could please him, having been for so long and so thoroughly – professionally – used, manipulated, by Robert, my body surrendering inevitably to his attentions.

  Killian’s drinking, I think, is in part an anaesthetic, for this stupid injury he never got fixed from some stupid game of rugby. Three years ago and now he tells me about it, NOW he says he’s in constant pain from it. He has muttered complaints of headaches, too, albeit with less drama. But I see it – I see him wince when he thinks I’m not looking. He’ll clap his hand to his eye, or to the wall, or sink his head into his hands. And I ask him to take something or see someone but he won’t.

  No, instead he closes the door in my face. Am I supposed to do likewise to him? Am I meant to become one of those women who seek a refuge from their partners in work? I have no stomach for that. My whole wish was to step off that conveyor, put my camera bag down, bury my passport, let myself be changed by this love – not that we live in compartment worlds, the way that Robert always wanted. Where we ceased to see anyone, and if I tried I felt invigilated. Where he knew me inside and out, supplanted my gynaecologist, sought to supervise my hair and make-up and wardrobe – his power over me a delusion from which I awoke, my Big Love only a false idol, a god of clay, the brazen serpent.

  No, I thought I had left all that behind. The things I let him do, the torpor into which we degenerated
. And now it seems like a pit into which I could slide once again. Impossible but true.

  Perhaps I am a bad penny, a magnet, do I carry a curse? Since it seems I now give Killian no pleasure, then surely Robert has found a way to curse me. Or am I being punished because I thought ill of Robert, and then something very bad happened to him …? I must not think of such superstition. Robert has no control any more. Robert is in some hole of his own making. It is Killian and I who are together now, we must weather the storm, I must find a way to crack through the glacier that’s formed between us.

  Or could it be that we need ‘a break from each other’? Oh please God, no, that was not ever the plan. This is not the time. Tomorrow I believe I will know for sure.

  5

  Dr Lochran’s Journal

  The cure for what ails

  August 27th

  This morning’s Times brought an unwelcome shiver, Robert’s disappearance a small diary item – only a few snide lines, not a shred of concern, mere innuendo glamorised by a checklist of his fancier clients.

  At this time of such unease I’m nearly consoled by the routine of a working day spent in urgent relief of the newly/lately born – all yearning for their mothers’ arms, no doubt, but needing first to be stabbed and sliced with razor-edged carbon steel by the ‘Great’ Dr Lochran. Some day in the none-too-distant future a finical robot may replace me, but until that cold day in hell the onus falls on me. However preoccupied I am – and at scrubs I do detect the Team moving about me with more than usual wariness – it’s a fact that I can carry off any piece of business in life so long as the needful rituals are observed. There must be structure: order is the mother of assurance. For me, it’s four white walls, hard light from nine angle-poise bulbs, and if the Team are on the pitch and I’ve moved smoothly into gown and gloves then the aura of ‘show-time’ commands me to step up.

  Today’s main business was bloody sticky, though: Mr and Mrs Whitaker’s newborn Daisy. All their joys had crashed from the day of ultrasound when they’d gone expecting to have the sex determined, learning instead that the baby’s liver seemed to lie in her chest, her stomach on a level with her heart – the entire viscera migrated through one hole into the thorax, leaving the heart fighting for space and the poor left lung terribly strangulated. They are Christians, I think, and termination was never an option. Thus they soldiered on, but they have been through seven shades of hell ever since, and from the moment Daisy first swallowed air she had respiratory distress. ECMO gave her forty-eight hours of stabilisation whereupon she could conceivably tolerate the procedure, and the buck passed to me.

  The Whitakers needed no lectures in the gravity of the matter, nor did I spare them the bitter stuff: that Daisy might either fail to tolerate the surgery or else all that would follow. I was asking them, though, to endorse me on a further risk. I am opposed to vinyl patch repair. Pain is coming in any case, but the patch option is liable to separation and repeat procedure: a whole vortex of attendant risk. I approve the wager on native vascularised tissue, I assume the responsibility, and in this the Whitakers trusted me. Under the circumstances they were probably far more stoical than I could have been. But what choice did they have?

  As usual I permitted Mrs Whitaker to scrub in and be with Daisy until she was under. The comfort, really, is for the mother, but I believe it’s the right course. Then she retreated back into the blue of the sterile field, left me in my blood-red world, in charge of a patient I could hold entirely between my two hands.

  I worked without music, in deference to the high stakes for Daisy. Babies often serve to silence the chatter in theatre, and apart from my succinct commands we heard only the familiar ambient noise – the clicking of clamps, the suction’s low hum, the machine-breath of the respirator. I went in just below the rib cage of her little scaphoid chest, lifted skin, made my window of opportunity, smelt the same humid musk that comes off an opened chest cavity whatever the patient’s age – inspected her unspoiled and birdlike innards, sad to be seeing them so soon. With all the finesse we possess we retrieved tissue and organs, spleen last, released them into the sterile bag – not a butcher’s binload, rather fruit-like. The hole exposed, I measured the amount of diaphragm tissue available, cut the peritoneum to tease out the posterior leaf and see what we had to play with. Inadequate, sadly. So, Plan B: assistance from the neighbourhood … I dissected the ipsilateral latissimus dorsi off the chest wall, divided the thoracodorsal neurovascular bundle, went through the bed of the tenth rib to place the muscle flap on the hemithorax, sutured it safely in place. Even old George Garrison would have nodded his approval. Still, we had booked for the full four hours, and I used them all. Thank God I’ve always worn sensible shoes.

  Stepping into the waiting area one always meets with a plaintive sight: disparate little family units, each wrestling with their individual share of air-conditioned fear, clutching their forlorn bags and big bottles of Evian, all torn between boredom-relief and bracing themselves for the sky to fall in. Whenever I come through the door a sea of faces rises to greet me, but only one group ever gets to their feet. I can only carry one message at a time, sad to say, and it’s the law of these things that on certain days I come to bring the sky down with me.

  For the Whitakers, of course, I played no game of suspense, just gave them the big beam and the thumbs-up. Mrs Whitaker’s face crumpled in joy. I drank that in. I made her joy happen, and without such satisfactions I wouldn’t go on. ‘Daisy won’t be happy,’ I warned them. ‘Don’t take that personally. And there’s a way to go yet. I’m not taking leave of her, but the main burden moves to Intensive Care …’ Already, though, they were trying to see past me, the day’s labourer – aching to see and touch their child. Such deeply human moments are a necessary corrective to my very occasional godlike delusions.

  * * *

  Strange, but as the day neared its end I found myself replaying the last of Robert’s and Steven’s epic disagreements – at least, the last one I witnessed, at that dinner of ours just a few nights after we’d visited Malena and Killian. This daily-mounting concern for Robert has made me hope all the harder that my two oldest friends hadn’t become entirely estranged. Back when we were boys at Kilmuir Steven was Robert’s pal before mine: at first their tempers were better matched, they had a discerning cleverness, a cultivation in common. But, somehow, down the years the bantering manners of school turned into a tendency to judge each other incredibly harshly. Their quarrels got so routinely incensed that everyone round the table passed from bemusement to seat-squirming well before entrées were served. If they weren’t ‘in the club’ then they couldn’t see the tension for what it was: that quintessential non-meeting of minds between surgeon and physician.

  I think back to Kilmuir, when the three of us, ‘the triumvirate’, first began to gad about – supplemented by whichever girl Robert was stringing along, plus her most suggestible mate(s). With the school so temptingly perched on the outskirts of Edinburgh, the city lay open to us, beyond the high walls of the compound. We drank, by God we all drank, as if drink were brewed by and for the angels. But for sure we were sober on the afternoon we decided to call into the Royal College of Surgeons, blundered into the pathology museum – then wandered about in great wonder, past the skeletons in glass cabinets, the gangrenous feet in jars, the array of old amputation knives and saws. Amusing to think of it now, how clear that some life-changing spirit must have suffused each of us that day.

  By the time we were junior residents we’d found our vocations. I suppose we began to reveal ourselves the minute we stepped inside Anatomy Lab, that Victorian basement room, that ‘rite of passage’. The prospective surgeons declared themselves, for sure – visibly eager to get the saw, separate legs from torsos, crack a sternum in two. That was me, that was Robert. Steven was always passionate about the idea of a career in reconstructive surgery: it would have suited his care for the relief of human misery. But when one got down to the mechanics, even simple dissection was nev
er Steven’s forte – much less the infernal tricksiness of knotting two-millimetre blood vessels with tweezers.

  No one’s ever pretended that psychiatry enjoys the lustre of surgery, even emergency medicine. But there was always a maximum lack of glamour in the conscientious way Steven went about his calling, staunchly resolved to be a therapeutic clinician for people in states of mental torment. He is one of life’s instinctive socialists: the world isn’t good enough for him, and he’s always argued for the grandest, most holistic approach to its ills – if only ‘the fabric of society’ were more tightly woven, if parents were helped more, teachers better paid … This, even after his own career choices put him in the pocket of that ravenous capitalist, Big Pharmaceutical.

  For all his training Steven has heard symphonies of condescension from fellow medics, and I know he’s a frustrated man, forever managing conditions that, frankly, don’t much improve. ‘You’re always fighting the end results,’ he used to lament to me. ‘Never confronting the causes.’ And yet I know that to this day he remains conflicted about what precisely are those causes: essentially biochemical, or brought on by the big, bad world? It’s all so much simpler if you can take a blade to the patient, locate the root cause by way of a scalpel’s edge.

  Robert never used to go any tougher on psychiatry than all the rest of us who cure by cutting flesh. For sure, he could be withering about the calibre of patient Steven saw – ‘head-cases, heroin fiends and hysterical girls’ was his favoured formulation – and he liked to tut about ‘all care and no cure’ as if ‘care’ were a dirty word. But that was only locker-room talk. ‘Psychiatry’s just a desperately sad profession,’ he told me once, albeit sounding genuinely sorry for Steven. ‘And we’re medical men, you and me, not social workers.’