Chapter Seventeen
Kate
Self Control by Laura Branigan
It’s been six days since I kissed Sharon Goldblatt. And it’s been six days of successfully avoiding her during visiting hours.
Sunday was pure chaos with three new patients that needed vitals, notes being taken and extra attention to get them situated. I was aware of Sharon’s Doc Marten’s under the curtain of Danny’s cubicle but I deliberately didn’t go anywhere near either of them.
On Monday it was easy. I had an all-afternoon meeting with the trust’s board about the new ward.
Four hours of paper-pushing and desperate attempts to maximise the limited budget we’ve been allocated, and I left the stuffy and windowless meeting room feeling like we achieved nothing.
In many ways, I would rather have been confronted with Sharon and her delicious lips that I now know taste of strawberries and mint and an early autumn evening.
On Tuesday, I hadn’t intended to hide away but Kelvin Bowles had passed away and I was busy with his family. It was rare to see not only his parents but those of his boyfriend in tears and I wanted to stay and help them all as much as I could.
On Wednesday, I was attending to an emergency as poor, young Deepak Vaneesh went into cardiac arrest and I was the first on the scene.
I managed to get a faint heartbeat back after nearly twenty minutes of resuscitation.
He’s currently in an induced coma up in ICU, although I’m bracing myself for the worst when I go there and check on him at the end of my shift today.
Twenty-two years old. His next of kin – his brother, I believe – refuses to visit him.
And yesterday, I was so exhausted from the last two days that I simply didn’t have energy for facing Sharon so I hid in the back office doing overdue paperwork and checking the coming week’s rota.
Despite being desperately tired when my head has hit the pillow this week, I find myself awake for far too long wondering what she thought about her first kiss.
Is she pleased it happened? Was it good for her?
Did I overstep? Is she angry with me? None of the possible imaginary answers please me because I can’t honestly decide how I want her to feel.
The insomnia has finally become too much, so today, with the ward unusually calm, I’m going to find her and I’m going to get answers to my questions.
Except, when I pull the curtain open to reveal Danny’s bed and space, I see that he is completely alone. He must track my eyes immediately going to the empty chair by his bed because he’s explaining before I even step forward.
“She has a meeting she couldn’t get out of. To be honest, I don’t know how she manages to schlep over here every day from the City without upsetting her boss. Just as well she’s resigned or I think she’d have been fired already.”
Sharon resigned? I bite the question back. It’s none of my business.
“How are you?” I ask, deciding the less I talk about Sharon the better. Looks like I’m not going to see her or get my answers today, and I try to see the bright side of that.
I try, but fail.
Danny links his fingers over his stomach. “I’m twenty-seven, got AIDS and am stuck in a hospital ward full of dying men. Life’s never been better.”
I smile ruefully. I see today’s weapon of choice is sarcasm. I can relate to that.
“Tell me about it.” I sit in the chair that Sharon usually occupies.
It’s a disappointment that the vinyl-covered cushion under my backside feels cold.
“You have no idea how much you sickos inconvenience me. Joanna brought in a Victoria sponge today, you know. You’re really getting in the way of my busy tea-drinking and cake-eating schedule. ”
Danny huffs out a soft laugh, but the smile on his face seems genuine.
I give his appearance a bit more attention.
The lesions on his face have darkened but they don’t appear to have grown any more in the last few days.
His skin tone is sallow but that could be more to do with the fact he hasn’t been outside all week than anything.
There’s no denying he’s underweight but I can’t say if he’s lost a great deal more since he was admitted and we started treatment.
He rolls his head to the side to face me. “What kind of ward would you be working on, if this whole nightmare hadn’t happened?”
“If AIDS didn’t exist?”
“Yeah.”
It’s been a long time since I thought about a world where AIDS didn’t exist. In the beginning I did it all the time. I even did it a year ago when Tao left me. But I haven’t done it since then. I almost don’t want to do it now. I’m not sure I know who I am without AIDS and this job.
“Tropical diseases,” I tell him. “That’s sort of how I got roped into all this.
Some of the first cases in this hospital were treated as an unknown tropical disease.
I had only just started on that ward so I was green and eager.
” I rearrange my skirt, brushing off a piece of dust. “I liked the mystery. The unknown. Trying to solve a puzzle.”
“Hmm, I’m not sure I’m a puzzle that can be solved,” he says and while his smile is still there, it’s the saddest smile I think I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen many, many sad smiles.
I lean forward. “You know, this may not be any help or any kind of reassurance. It may make you want to punch me in the face, but I do believe that one day we will solve this problem. I do believe we’ll find a way to…”
“To stop us dying?” Danny raises his eyebrows. “Yeah, that does make me want to punch you in the face.”
“Told you,” I say petulantly.
“But how can you be so sure? It’s been years. We’re in a new decade now. Modern medicine can do so much – organ transplants, heart bypasses, cancer treatments – and yet nobody knows how to treat this fucking virus. Everyone’s clueless.”
“This fucking virus,” I repeat. “But we’re not clueless.
Not like we used to be. You have to remember it took hundreds of years to get to a place where we could vaccinate against many diseases, or treat infections with antibiotics.
It normally takes five to ten years to test a drug and declare it safe for use, but with AZT, they dove straight in.
It was released quicker than any drug I think before it. ”
“And yet it’s not working,” Danny shifts in his bed uncomfortably. “And it makes me feel awful. Do you know how difficult it is to take a drug every four hours?”
I remember Danny’s weapon of the day. “Yeah, that would also get in the way of my cake-eating schedule.”
But Danny doesn’t smile or laugh. He just stares at me blankly for a long time.
When he speaks again, it’s with a lower, softer voice.
“I stopped taking it. When I first tested positive for HIV. I couldn’t cope with the nausea and the headaches.
They were constant. And having to remember to take it.
Waking up in the middle of the night. It made me feel sick, and when I stopped, I felt better. ” He holds my stare. “Until I didn’t.”
As I swallow, I’m aware of all the muscles in my jaw working. This is not the first time somebody has confessed to this, but it is the first time it saddens me so greatly.
“I’m guessing Sharon doesn’t know that part.”
“Of course not. She’d kill me. Which is ironic.” Another huff of forced laughter.
“You’re not the first, by the way. To stop with the AZT.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better, hearing you say that when your job is looking after dying men.”
“Do you blame yourself?” I ask Danny.
He stares at me unblinkingly for a moment and I see the shock of my question melt into something else; relief.
“Of course I do. I wasn’t careful. I didn’t get tested. I took risks. I was stupid.”
“What you’ve just described sounds a lot more like being human than being stupid.”
He cocks an eyebrow at me. “Don’t you blame me?
And all the other men like me who took risks?
And not just because we’re stopping you from eating cake or working on a tropical diseases ward?
Aren’t you angry with us like everyone else is out there?
” He points at a folded-up newspaper that sits on his bed.
I see the red of the tabloid’s name and pick it up.
“Why are you reading this filth?”
“I like the Page 3 girls,” he jokes. Or maybe he doesn’t. I open it up and turn to page 3.
“Too skinny,” I comment. “And her nipples are smaller than I like.”
“You know, my mum was right,” he tells me. I fold the newspaper again and leave it on my lap, ready to throw it in the first bin I see.
“How so?”
“I should have just found a nice girl, gotten married and settled down.”
“I mean, that does sound like a nice plan,” I muse. “If only it was possible for me to do.”
“I don’t need to sleep with men. If I met the right woman. She would be enough, you know?”
“I do know, yes.” We share a small smile of solidarity as a sudden downpour outside begins to rattle against the ward’s windows.
I shift forward, readying myself to stand up. Dr Lakshitha will want to be doing her rounds soon.
“What happened on Saturday with you and Sharon?” Danny asks me and the question feels like a direct attack, pinning me in place.
I don’t look him in the eye. “What has she said?”
“Not much,” he says. “Which is normally a sign something happened.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was so excited to meet your comic book artist person.”
“AJ Ripley.”
“Yeah, them.”
“Him. He is a lesbian who likes to be called he and him.”
Danny frowns at me. “Really?”
“Yeah. Some butch lesbians like that. I think it’s kind of hot too.”
Danny’s expression changes. “Yeah, I guess it is. Anyway, Sharon was talking about it nonstop when she visited on Saturday afternoon, but then when she came in on Sunday, she was completely silent about it. Wouldn’t tell me anything other than ‘it was good’.”
It was good, I think, and I can almost feel Sharon’s soft, warm body pressed up against mine again.
“We had fun,” I tell Danny. “AJ Ripley is a very interesting person and he answered a very important question I had about his characters ending up together. We had our comic books signed and then we both went home on different buses.”
I hadn’t thought much about whether Sharon would tell Danny about our kiss, and I can’t figure out how it makes me feel that she didn’t.
“Shame,” Danny says. “I was half-hoping you’d drag her to a lesbian bar in Soho.”
I choke with shock at this comment, delivered so flippantly.
“You think I have a habit of going to lesbian bars in Soho?”
“I was hoping you do. And Sharon needs somebody to corrupt her. I tried a few times, but failed miserably.”
My body lights up at the idea of corrupting Sharon.
“Sharon is a grown woman. She doesn’t need corrupting.”
“Oh, but she does. Underneath that prickly fa?ade is someone who is terrified of just how good life could be.”
Danny’s words land and lodge somewhere inside me. As does the pointed look he’s giving me.
I finally stand and glance at the watch on my wrist. “I’ll be back with Dr Lakshitha in an hour or so.”
“Before you go…” Danny pushes himself up in bed, but he doesn’t move much. I see then just how much muscle tone he’s lost in his arms, and I quickly pull my eyes back to his face. “I need to ask you something I can’t ask in front of Sharon.”
I brace myself. If he asks me about what really happened, if he can tell there was something we’re not telling him, if he asks me how I feel about his friend, I don’t know how I’m going to answer him.
“I’m not leaving here alive, am I?”
Oh.
Turns out him asking about Sharon would have been easy-fucking-peasy compared to this.
It’s not the first time a patient has asked me about their fate and I’ve answered it honestly, succinctly many times before.
Occasionally, I’ve lied. I’ve told the person what they wanted to hear rather than the truth because that’s what they needed more.
And isn’t that my job? To comfort patients. To alleviate their suffering.
I step closer to Danny’s bed and find his hand with mine.
“Truthfully, I don’t know,” I tell him. “I don’t know if you will die here or at home or somewhere else.
But I do know this much. You’re alive now.
You’re alive now and you are loved. Sharon fucking loves you.
And that counts for something. No, more than something.
It counts for a lot. So if you want to think about something, if you want to spend whatever time you have left feeling good rather than sad or angry or guilty, think about that.
Focus on that, because that as much as any drugs we have will give you relief and hope. ”
He doesn’t look like he believes me, but I’m confident he heard every word. I squeeze his hand with all my might before I let go.
“I’ll be back soon,” I tell him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“I’ll try not to,” he winks and I hate how it looks like that was a great effort.
This fucking virus.