Chapter Two
Kate
She Drives Me Crazy by Fine Young Cannibals
I’m looking at the clock. Again.
Ten more minutes until visiting hours start. Ten more minutes until Sharon Goldblatt marches back into my ward, no doubt demanding answers to her long list of questions.
It’s only because I don’t have time for this that I’m anticipating her arrival and feeling pre-emptively irritated.
But at the same time, I’m a professional, and a diligent and thorough one at that.
I told her I’d get answers to her questions and I’m going to deliver on that promise.
I like to tick boxes, get stuff done – it’s what makes me a good nurse and a decent ward manager – and right now, her list of questions, complete with my handwritten answers, is burning a hole in my pocket.
The sooner I see her and hand over the piece of paper, the sooner I can get on with the rest of my shift.
And the sooner I can finish my shift, the sooner I can go home to… my empty bedsit that I can only just afford thanks to the promotion I got three months after Tao left.
I don’t really have any faith in higher powers – I’ve seen too many bad things happen to too many innocent people for that – but I can’t help but feel like somebody, or something, was watching over me when I got that promotion.
Of course, it’s not like people are queuing up to work on wards like ours. I suppose that’s the most realistic explanation for it all. I have nearly six years’ experience working with this virus now. Not many nurses in London can say the same thing. Not many nurses would want to.
I look up again from my position behind the high desk that curves around the semicircular nurses’ station at the front of the ward. To my right are double doors that lead through to the corridor approaching our ward, and on top of them is the clock.
Seven minutes to go.
“Fuck this,” I hiss to myself and set about tidying up the paperwork that one of my staff nurses should have already done.
I believe I asked Orla, a newly-qualified nurse from Ireland, to do it but I also know she’s been stuck in the printing room doing a small mountain of photocopying for me as preparation for opening the new ward upstairs.
A ward that is long overdue. Because this virus may have a name now, and it may have AZT, but it’s not going anywhere. It’s still claiming more and more people. It’s still killing men before we can even figure out how best to treat them.
It doesn’t take long to organise the papers in front of me, but just as I’m about to move on and start filing, one set of results catches my eye.
Daniel Lewis Morgan.
I scan the rest of the piece of paper, knowing exactly what I’m looking for.
T-cell count: 110.
“Well, there it is,” I say to myself. One of my hands reflexively touches the pocket where Danny’s friend’s list sits, all folded up.
The doctor had told me to record that she wouldn’t confirm it was AIDS until she’d had the blood results back.
I’d had my doubts but I couldn’t help feeling something like relief for Danny and his friend.
Maybe they would get to live in hope a little longer.
But no. That’s not possible now.
Danny has AIDS.
And his friend’s heart is going to be broken.
You don’t see many people visiting patients on this ward. You certainly don’t see many write a list of questions for the doctor. And there are even fewer who promise to come back in the next day expecting answers to their questions.
But I know Sharon Goldblatt will be back today. And something tells me she’ll be back again tomorrow, and the next day and…
I don’t want to think about Danny in here for longer than that. He will get better. He’s responding to antibiotics well and he has his youth and health in his favour.
He also has Sharon.
I don’t know her. She’s a stranger to me.
And yet, what I do know about her, I find…
amusing. She’s spunky. Butch-looking, and grumpy in a way I can relate to.
I’d thought we were enjoying some banter at the beginning of our brief conversation at the vending machine, but somehow we changed direction and almost before I knew it she was giving me the look I get from… well, most people.
I know I can be frosty. I know my briskness unnerves some people. She is not the first to call me bossy or know-it-all. But she is the first, in a long time at least, who makes me want to use it to poke her, to get a reaction from her, to see, maybe, just how far I can push her.
I know why I feel this way. I knew it the moment I saw her full backside in those jeans and the way her shirt buttons strained over her heavy chest. I knew it when I saw her honey-brown eyes, long, straight nose and pouty, pastel-pink lips.
I knew it as I noticed the quirky blonde tips of those gelled spikes in her hair.
I knew it as I stared at the shaved back of her head, wondering if it would feel like velvet on the palm of my hand; rough to stroke one way, smooth the other.
But I don’t have time to be attracted to anybody right now. Least of all the friend of one of my patients.
So, I’ll kill this attraction with my ‘bossy’ and ‘know-it-all’ character and have her bring out the worst in me so I see the same in her and I’m turned off completely.
It’s what’s happened before with other fleeting attractions or temporary partners.
It’s what happened with Tao, after all. The fact that this will provide me with considerable entertainment is just a nice bonus.
My eyes are on the clock again. Damn it.
“I know I’m early.” A voice pulls my gaze down. It’s her, standing opposite the counter, all spiky hair and pink lips and fuck, another shirt stretched across a bosom I absolutely will not stare at. “But I wanted to get the answers to my questions.”
I look down to compose myself. How dare she rock up like this when I’m lost in my thoughts about…
Danny’s blood test results are still in my hand.
Fuck.
I can’t tell her. Not without him. She’s not family. And even if she were, it’s not ethical to tell her before sharing it with him.
“I will have them ready for you shortly,” I say as I fold the test results in my hand and put them in my pocket with her questions. “You can sit and wait over there for visiting hours to start.”
Sharon turns to look at the chair I am gesturing towards. When she looks back at me, her disdain for that suggestion is clear.
“How are they not ready?” she says, and I swear she just mimicked my clipped tone. “The doctor’s rounds were yesterday. You said you’d ask her then.”
“And I did,” I bite back. “But I’m too busy to go through them with you now.”
She looks up and down my body and it’s not in a good way, at all. “You’re literally tidying up paperwork.”
“Are you trying to tell me how to do my job?” My jaw tightens to the point where it hurts. I didn’t think she’d be quite this good at bringing out my bitchy side. Looks like I’m well on my way to ridding myself of the problem that is my attraction to her.
“God forbid,” Sharon holds her hands up. “I’ll just go see Danny now and you can come and give me my answers when you’re finished being busy tidying up papers.”
“Er, no!” I call out as she starts to walk towards the beds. “Visiting hours haven’t started yet.”
She turns and looks at the clock on the wall. “It’s three o’clock.”
“No, it’s two minutes to three. Please take a seat and wait the two minutes there.” I point to the chair again.
For a second I think she’s going to shout at me. Or throw the heavy-looking bag she’s carrying in my direction. But instead, she closes her eyes, sucks in a breath that lifts her whole body, and moves to the chair I indicated.
She sits down with a thump, like gravity's force has quadrupled, and she pins her eyes on me. The longer they look at me the narrower they seem to get. I’m so aware of the folded papers in my pocket, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was smoke coming out of it.
*****
In the end, I make her wait just over an hour for the answers to her questions.
It’s not intentional. But Mr Watkins passed away somewhat unexpectedly, and that always derails things.
We’re not sure how it happened. He was asleep, so I suspect it was a cardiac arrest or stroke, but we’ll not know for sure until the postmortem is conducted.
But he was asleep, I tell myself over and over, as I hold his cooling hand and call time of death. He was asleep.
After I hand over to my colleague Carmelita, an older nurse who moved to London from the Philippines twenty years ago, to go through the necessary next steps, I allow myself thirty seconds in the staff toilets, like I always do.
Thirty seconds in a closed cubicle, just me, a closed toilet lid and the sign about safely disposing of needles on the back of the door.
This is what I give myself to say goodbye, to grieve, and then to get on with whatever needs to happen next.
And today, right now, that’s delivering terrible news to Daniel Morgan and his annoying friend Sharon.
When I pull back the curtain, I find them playing cards.
“Good afternoon, Danny,” I say, before adding in a quieter voice, “Hello, Sharon.”
“Hi,” she says and somehow she seems to add a hard consonant to the end of the word. I have to bite back my smile. That is until I pull the papers out of my pocket and I remember with a sinking feeling in my stomach exactly why I’m here.
“Danny, are you happy for me to discuss your health with Sharon still present?” I don’t say it to have a dig at Sharon although I’m almost certain from her slack jaw that she takes it as such.
“Yes, of course,” he says and he pushes up on his hands to sit a little straighter. Sharon gathers up the cards and puts them back in a box. “She’s basically the fussy Jewish mother I never had. And she cares a lot more than the Catholic mother I do have.”
Sharon’s smile is soft and wistful, but her hand jumps out to swipe at him after she’s collected all the cards. I give Danny a tight smile and step closer to both of them.