11
T hey both set out with such good intentions. They really do.
Janey wants to wrap her baby girl up in a blanket of love; protect her from the world until she’s ready to take it on again. She buys her favourite foods (‘full of additives’ apparently), digs out their old favourite Meg Ryan films – problematic now – and is as soft and gentle as she can be.
But there is a fundamental misunderstanding between them: Gen X Janey has always worked in an environment where they are short-staffed and desperately in need of more people, terribly overstretched.
She can’t really envisage what it’s like to not be able to get a job, not really.
She doesn’t understand why Essie can’t just apply for a few things or do something else for a bit.
She doesn’t understand about internships and who you know, and Essie has given up trying to explain.
Essie is still begging Connor to help her, but his firm is very hush-hush high net worth and she just doesn’t have the experience – or, she suspects Tris thinks, the background to work there.
Also Essie is trying to keep from her mum how little money she has, which was to say, negative money: huge credit card debts.
She is completely and utterly skint, despite having been making double her mum’s salary plus bonus.
Janey tries not to ask why Essie appears to be so skint, in case it elicits a huff, which it will.
She isn’t sure what else to do, and feels as though she’s panicking as Essie sinks from view into her phone and her laptop, an endless black hole that never ends, scrolling and typing; every time Janey asks if she wants to go out/take a walk/go for a drink she is greeted with ‘I’m BUSY’ and some noisy typing in a way that is impossible for her to refute.
Meanwhile, all the towels have vanished.
Also Essie has messaged her dad on the off-chance that he’d say, Don’t worry, darling, come over whenever you like, I’ve got a room for you and here’s the deposit for a new flat in Edinburgh for you to get back on your feet.
But he hasn’t. He’s muttered about things being very busy and Lori’s mum (who isn’t much older than Colin) wanting to move in, and Logan going through ‘a bit of a stage’.
It’s tough on Essie to not be able to think of her dad being the good guy all the time.
The idea that her mum might have been right has exactly the opposite effect than it might have; it makes her even more trapped and resentful.
‘I am doing my best ,’ Janey says at lunch, as everyone eyes her up expectantly for a mother–daughter update.
She pokes depressingly at the salad bowl she has chosen.
It’s too cold outside for salad. Salad is for being drenched in lemon juice sitting outside under an umbrella somewhere.
She hasn’t been overseas since the pandemic; she doesn’t know anyone living in a one-salary household who has. What she really wants is a pie.
Lish, who is having a pie, can think of nothing nicer than having her kids round all the time; they only live half a step away.
Janey sometimes thinks if Lish could tuck her kids back inside her womb, she would be okay with that too.
Milton’s children are mostly in London, and one back in DCR doing wonderful work as a doctor, something which makes him incredibly proud.
Few are the hospital doctors who don’t stop, every so often, to pass on some new research or ask the quiet porter how his daughter is doing, and whether there is anything she needs.
Much of the NHS is famously wasteful: at the T it’s delicious.
Which should have been an obvious clue in the first place, Janey likes to point out, but doesn’t, after the whole ‘Let’s Have a WeightWatchers in the Hospital It’ll Be Fun’ débacle of 2019.
‘It’s just . . . moving paper about?’
‘I think so,’ says Janey. ‘Only the pieces of paper they move are somehow worth millions, and, if they don’t move them right, the country can’t afford hospitals.’
‘They can’t afford them now,’ observes Lish, to a few hearty nods.
‘Well, surely there are lots of paper-pushing jobs?’ says Amsan. ‘There seem to be a million people who do it here.’
‘I know that,’ says Janey. ‘But somehow you get paid ten times more for looking at computer screens in Edinburgh.’
‘Inside in the warm,’ grumbles Milton, who has to circumnavigate the hospital buildings all day in all sorts of weather and does not always like it.
‘We definitely got something wrong,’ says Janey, smiling, but then she glances at her phone.
She has an afternoon of community rounds, which means driving up into beautiful farmland to check up on how people are doing with their hearing, seeing so many whose quality of life it has massively improved or helped them work for longer, on a gorgeous chilly spring day, with the farms all grinding into life with the new buds on the trees and the daffs flourishing in every single part of sunshine they can find.
She can see if old Fraser Ardmillan will be able to hear the tractor coming, and the birds singing in the trees, and which of his cows are lowing to him, and she can visit wee Abdul in Caithness, whose parents live in the loveliest house and always press on her food and treats to take away and she can’t really say no, and he is so cute and has learned her name and is very proud of himself, in the way a four-year-old can be, at how brilliant he is at passing the audiology tests.
She has absolutely learned to take along extra stickers for his twin sisters, who are six, and have truly earned them from long, long years of waiting on Abdul’s appointments, his hospital stays; tolerating the fuss that was always made of their little brother while they just had to grow up and get on with things.
Janey sees this a lot. She makes a special effort with the siblings.
Then she has to pop into a GP clinic to schedule a late-night surgery of tests.
It suits the poor overworked GPs, who work long days twice a week: it is knackering, but it’s convenient for other people not having to take a full day off work, so she does it with a will.
No, she wouldn’t swap it for moving paper about. Her poor girl.
*
Four long hours later, though, Janey’s tolerance for her ‘poor girl’ is dropping significantly.
She’s exhausted from a hectic afternoon, despite Abdul’s charms. She also had to manage an upset young man who constantly wears extremely loud headphones, leading to hearing loss.
He’s very distressed about having to wear hearing aids before turning thirty, and Janey tries to balance being firm and being empathetic.
However, he keeps making things worse by turning the volume up, which becomes more evident through the damage to his ear follicles.
The young man ends up in tears, which is unusual in Janey’s job, where she generally helps people feel better. Janey feels stressed and upset.
It’s dark when she gets home, starving, hoping Essie has prepared dinner, considering they discussed having lamb chops, which are in the fridge.
When Janey enters the house, she’s hit by the heat – it’s on full blast. Janey usually keeps it low to save on heating bills, but now all the doors are wide open, and one window is slightly ajar.
The kitchen is a mess, with teabags on the counter, and, in the sink, dirty plates piled up, a ketchup bottle lying on its side; laundry is dumped on the sideboard.
The lamb chops are gone. Janey takes a deep breath, clenches then releases her fists, and wishes she hadn’t been quite so dismissive of yoga.
*