Chapter 7
7
S tanding in front of her three colleagues at Rosehill Heath Centre, Helen felt removed from reality. Firstly, Tina, Daisy and Anne had formed a welcome line-up more suitable for a royal visit, than a co-worker returning from a six-week break. Secondly, absolutely nothing had changed. The poster on the door with ‘new’ opening hours still peeled back from the top-left corner, the same lone Measles Aware! leaflet, still spilled from a plastic holder on the table in reception. And thirdly, Tina had just handed her a Tupperware box containing a huge slab of lemon drizzle cake.
Smiling, Helen looked at the box, the dense round contained within. She was thinking about the women with honey-coloured highlights and matching blouses on Saturday. She was thinking about her Instagram feed. The constant stream of adverts for special diets and special training methods and special coaches, all designed to get rid of that specially problematic midlife belly. Which she did have once but now didn’t. Oh yes, this time last year and the linen trousers she wore would have been slicing her belly in half. By coffee time she’d have given up and undone the button, all the better to enjoy a slab of cake which she would have eaten to stave off boredom. The thing was, she wasn’t bored anymore.
‘I know it’s your favourite!’ Tina giggled.
Helen’s smile faltered.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Anne said. ‘We can have a piece now.’
‘I’ll get some plates.’ Daisy grinned.
Hadn’t they noticed? Caro and Kay had. Didn’t her colleagues also see the difference? Dazed, she watched them scuttle off, full of all the anticipated excitement a tea-break still mustered. The problem was she didn’t feel the same. The problem was, while Daisy and Tina and Anne had been drinking tea and eating cake, she had sat under canopies of stars and lain under skins of canvas, listening to the scratching and snuffling of creatures to whom the darkness belonged. And when the light had come back, she had woken to azure skies, sipping coffee from a tin mug as she watched the sun lay a rosy mantle over mountains that straddled countries. She hadn’t been afraid, and she hadn’t been bored. Not once. She’d trekked empty crevices gouged by glaciers that had melted in her own lifetime, filled with wonder and sadness for the world her children’s children would live in and she hadn’t – not once, not even in her deepest dreams – given a single thought to cake. Couldn’t they see this?
In the back kitchen, she took off her jacket and hung it on the rack. ‘It’s still here then,’ she said, lifting the sleeve of a pale green cardigan.
‘What is?’ Anne didn’t turn from the sink where she was filling the kettle.
‘This.’ Helen held the sleeve high. ‘I think it’s been here as long as I have. So that would be ten years?’
Daisy bustled past, a cup in each hand. ‘I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Really?’ she said, letting the sleeve drop.
‘She doesn’t say anything now.’
‘Who?’
‘Dr Ross.’ Tina peeled the lid from the Tupperware box. ‘We were a bit worried she might start again, what with you not being here to organise us, like last time.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You know.’ Anne grinned.
‘No.’ Helen shook her head. She had no idea what they were talking about.
‘That time she tried to stop us drinking coffee at the desk?’ Tina said. ‘I do it all the time now, and she doesn’t say a word.’
‘Me too,’ Daisy added.
‘Oh.’ And as Helen looked at the expectant faces in front of her, her jaw dropped. Coffee-gate? The rebellion she had led – and won – against Dr Ross’s rule that coffee cups were not to be bought to the front desk was something she had forgotten ever happened. What did they want her to say? It had been a tiny event, in a long-ago day of what now felt like someone else’s life, but her colleagues were looking at her now as if they expected a speech.
She laughed, turning away to busy herself opening her handbag. She’d been back at work for less than fifteen minutes and she had another three hundred to get through, but already the ground beneath her feet felt unstable in a way it never had fourteen thousand feet up the Rocky Mountains. She knew why. Up there, where the sky was close enough to touch, she had felt anchored to a world that was tangibly real. Here, it was going to be a battle to stay standing, to stop herself getting dragged down by the undertow of banality.
‘She’s started something else now.’ Anne groaned.
Helen turned.
‘She wants us all to do something called, Excellence- in-Service training.’
‘At least it’s in working hours,’ Tina muttered.
Helen looked from one to the other. ‘It doesn’t sound that bad.’ She was playing for time. Excellent in Service training didn’t sound like a barrel of laughs to her either, but if Dr Ross, had suggested they all take a course in Modern Nail Art, or How to Go Viral on TikTok, it would, she suspected, have resulted in the same wash of indifference.
‘Actually, I don’t mind doing it,’ Daisy said.
Helen smiled. ‘It might be interesting?’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ Daisy said pulling her mouth down as she handed Helen a cup. ‘But there’s a free lunch. You’re on phones, by the way.’
In the small, windowless phone room Helen logged into the computer, then the phone system, her work email, the filing system, clinic access, patient records and appointments system. As she took a headset from the top drawer of the filing cabinet she glanced at the clock.
07:56.
She had four minutes. At 08:00 the telephone lines would open, and she would spend the next two and a half hours answering non-stop calls from people trying to get an appointment, only a few of whom she would actually be able to help. Her coffee break was at ten-thirty. After that she would swap one windowless room, for another, larger, windowless room, where she would work on the front desk, talking to people trying to get an appointment, or people complaining about the appointment they had just had … only a few of whom she would actually be able to help. She finished at one o’clock, ready to repeat until the end of the week … the end of the month … the end of the year. She took a pen, a notepad and a block of yellow Post-it notes from the drawer, sat down and twirling the pen between her fingers, stared through the open door to the corridor beyond.
Was this someone else’s life? The moment felt surreal enough for her to believe that it was. Someone who would have been delighted by Tina’s thoughtful gift, whose mornings had been consumed by the thought of eating cake, when all the time just outside the door, the world had waited.
The clock was noisy, she could hear the seconds pass … tick, tick, tick … She had years yet. At the very least a decade before retirement, and suddenly she was thinking about Kay and the irony of the fact that Kay was retiring, just as she was just returning. And Caro, with her chipped nails and her new life. It wasn’t jealousy. She didn’t begrudge them the changes they were making, and she didn’t want them for herself. So, what did she want? Looking down, she drew a circle on the top sticky note, and then another and another, smaller and harder until the circle was nothing more than a dot. Caro and Kay had both had fulfilling and demanding careers, while she had simply passed the time waiting for Libby and Jack to grow up. Ten years she’d been at the surgery. A decade in a job she’d never intended to do longer than twelve months. What was that, if not passing time?
07:59.
Slipping the headset over her ears, she clicked a window open on the computer, staring without seeing the grids of typeset. Now Libby and Jack had grown up, and what a shock! What an outrageous, painful shock to lift her head and find that while she had been treading water, they had learned to swim. The minute-hand shifted; she heard it as a crypt door closing, heavy, solid, final. She reached for the mouse and clicked. ‘Rosehill Health Centre,’ she said. ‘How can I help?’