Chapter Nineteen
I was still muttering under my breath when I got back to my room, reeking of the artificially sweet fruit scent and boiling over with rage.
How dare Derek talk to me like that? How dare he presume to tell Callum how to live his life?
I was apoplectic, outraged on behalf of both my fake boyfriend and non-existent Caroline.
Flying through the door, I slammed it shut, gratified by the loud bang that echoed through the house. Let Derek explain that to his wife.
‘Hard day at the office, dear?’
‘Is everyone in this family trying to give me a heart attack?’ I gasped, back pressed against the door, when Callum appeared in front of me. ‘What are you doing in my— oh!’
Before I could finish my question, the six-foot fir tree wedged between the fireplace and the window answered it for him.
‘Is that a Christmas tree?’ I asked, drawn across the room by the evergreen beauty.
‘I hope so,’ he replied. ‘Otherwise I don’t know what we’re going to do with all this stuff.’
Scattered on the floor around the tree were boxes and boxes of ornaments, brand new and unopened.
‘I thought we could decorate it together,’ he said, hands in his pockets. ‘The way you used to with your mum.’
All of my rage melted away. I picked up one of the boxes of ornaments, a set of pretty iridescent glass spheres, and saw my surprised face reflected in the shiny plastic cover.
‘Where did you get these?’
‘In town. Mal ran me in while Mum and Dad were at Auntie Jean’s, I didn’t feel like going in for another lecture. Gray brought the tree over, it turns they had one too many at the pub.’
It wasn’t just the tree. There were decorations everywhere, fairy lights wrapped around the curtain rail, a potted poinsettia on my bedside table, a stuffed reindeer sitting on the bed, and two matching red and white stockings hanging from the fireplace, one on either side.
‘It’s amazing,’ I said, so moved I was almost afraid to look at him for fear of bursting into tears. ‘Thank you.’
Callum shrugged as though it was nothing. He was wrong, it was very much something. No one had ever done anything so thoughtful for me.
‘After what you’ve just been through, I wish I could do more,’ he said. ‘How was the massage? Did my dad survive?’
I opened my mouth to tell him everything his father said, to let forth a torrent of rage and frustration.
Then I looked up at the anxious smile on his face and I couldn’t do it.
How would it help? He already knew how his dad felt, there was no point in starting another argument.
Better I took it on the chin and poured all my rage-y energy into Caroline’s performance as promised, even if the suspicion that Callum was destined to end up here, destined to end up with Shiv, hung around my shoulders like the world’s saddest weighted blanket.
‘When I became a doctor, I took an oath to do no harm,’ I said instead. ‘Today I fear I broke that oath.’
‘I can’t apologise enough.’ Callum pulled a penknife from his back pocket and sliced through the tape I was struggling to peel from the box of ornaments.
‘This is a start. If I can get into the kitchen without my parents having a heart attack at the sight of their son and heir in an apron, I owe you a sticky toffee pudding as well.’
‘If I didn’t give your dad a heart attack just now, he’ll survive anything,’ I replied, carefully opening the box and taking out one of the baubles. It was so delicate, something I would never buy for myself. I wouldn’t trust myself with it.
‘I’m surprised he didn’t keel over when you stood up without any trews on. It’s been a tough day for Derek, hasn’t it?’
‘I’m sure he’s had worse,’ I said as I stepped back to consider the tree, placing my ornament right in the centre with surgical precision.
‘I’m going to need a ladder to get to the top,’ I told Callum, admiring my handiwork.
‘No, you’re not.’
He bent down to pick up a sparkling silver star then reached up to place it right on top of the tree. ‘That’s what I’m here for.’
‘Knew you had to be good for something,’ I smiled, the fire from the logs crackling in the fireplace heating my face and something else, something unfamiliar but not at all unpleasant, warming me from within.
‘At the end of the night we had to clean out the fryers.’ With a happy, easy smile, Callum handed me another bauble for the tree. ‘You open the tap, drain out all the grease, close the tap, fill the fryer with baking soda and water then turn the fryer on. Cleans itself, simple.’
‘But?’
He grinned. ‘Remember, I’m exhausted. I’m working a morning shift in the bakery and the night shift in the restaurant, my head’s a shed, I hardly know my own name, let alone how to clean a fryer.’
Hanging the ornament, I winced at what was to come next. ‘Go on, how badly did you mess up?’
‘I forgot to close the tap after emptying the grease. Baking soda, water and grease are not a good combination. I dumped the cleaning stuff in the fryer, went off to do something else and when I came back ten minutes later, it looked like the kitchen was having a foam party. There I am, up to my knees in greasy, stinking foam, it’s already midnight and I’m supposed to be back at the bakery by three a.m.’
‘No!’ I cackled with laughter as I stood back to weigh up my placement. Hmm. Needed to go one branch to the left. ‘What did you do?’
‘Spent three hours hosing down the kitchen, mopping up my mess and sobbing to myself. Rolled straight into the bakery, stinking to high heaven and passed out five minutes later. My boss thought I was ill and took pity on me, I never bothered to correct him.’
‘That is brutal,’ I admitted. ‘I would’ve laid down in the middle of the foam and cried.’
‘Oh, I did. Around two a.m. I went delirious and started making foam angels. Still a mystery how I managed to get it all cleaned up.’
He poked around in the last box still full of ornaments, all the others strewn on the floor behind us, empty. Pulling out a small, plastic, glitter-coated cow, he held it up for my approval.
‘Perfect,’ I announced, holding out my hand.
‘I feel like I’m in the operating room with you,’ he said, passing it over. ‘Scalpel, retractor, miniature Highland cow.’
I confirmed with a very serious nod. ‘This is exactly the same. Only we didn’t scrub in so there’s every chance the tree is going to develop septic shock.’
‘What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen in your job?’ Callum plucked the cow from my fingers to assist when I reached for a high branch and missed.
‘Teamwork makes the dream work,’ I said and immediately wished I hadn’t. ‘What’s the coolest thing I’ve seen at work? Hmm. Off the top of my head—’
‘No pun intended.’
I replied to his cheesy smile with an eyeroll.
‘I don’t know, there are so many exciting developments at the minute.
There was this one patient, you might’ve read about it, but they started remembering childhood memories during surgery, things they had totally forgotten.
Now we’re conducting trials on deep brain stimulation, placing electrodes in the hypothalamus with the trajectory intentionally travelling through the fornix to see if it will help patients with Alzheimer’s. ’
‘Wow.’ He stared at me as though I’d just told him I could travel through time. ‘I understood about every fifth word of what you said but it sounds impressive.’
‘It’s pretty incredible,’ I agreed. ‘And I wasn’t there in person, it was before my time, but some of my colleagues were in the room when this incredible doctor removed a tumour from a violinist while she was playing the violin.’
The curiosity in Callum’s eyes shifted into something altogether more alarmed.
‘They were operating on her brain while she was awake?’
‘It’s quite common,’ I confirmed. ‘They wanted to make sure they didn’t cause damage to any of the tissue that controlled her ability to play so what better way than to have her thrash out a bit of Bach while she’s there.
Actually, I think it was Mahler. There’s a video on YouTube, do you want to see? ’
Callum responded with a violent shake of the head. ‘Never ever, not even if I live to be five hundred years old, are you to show me that video. Imagine being awake while they – you – fiddle around inside your brain. Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘There are no nociceptors in the brain. You can poke around in there all day and it won’t hurt the patient.
’ I tipped my head to one side as I considered my answer.
It was nice, talking about my work with someone who was genuinely interested.
‘At least, it wouldn’t cause physical pain.
Ideally you want to be in and out as quickly as possible, same as with any surgery.
Awake craniotomies aren’t new, they actually haven’t changed that much at all over the last few decades, but with all the advances in imaging technology, we know a lot more than we used to prior to the surgery and the more you know the better.
These days we have a much clearer map of the brain before we go in. ’
He stood stock-still, a slight green tinge to his fair complexion.
‘You’re pure giving me the boak. Wish I hadn’t asked.’
‘And you wanted to know why I’m single,’ I reminded him. ‘It takes a strong stomach to date a neurosurgeon.’
‘I still think it’s amazing,’ he said quickly, shaking off his sickly pallor. ‘You save people’s lives, Laura.’
‘Not always.’ The corners of my mouth flickered and the lights on the tree suddenly went out of focus. ‘But that’s part of the job too.’
‘I don’t know how you do it,’ he replied. ‘It must be so hard.’
‘People say you get used to it but you don’t,’ I said. ‘At least, I haven’t. My job is to listen, to deliver information and not get emotionally involved. You have to sort of switch off, stop being a human for a minute.’
‘And that works?’
‘Well enough.’
The truth was it worked too well. Every time I flipped the switch, it became that much harder to go back. Numb was preferable to sad.