Chapter Seven
Seven.
When my parents fought, which was often, Maya used to run out into the garden and bounce on the trampoline, a focused dot of energy pinging up and down under the toppling shadow of Bonehill Rocks.
I used to go and read in my bed, covers over my head.
Dad had given me a reading torch for my sixth birthday, after my teacher told him I was an uncommonly advanced reader for my age.
One of the books I loved most was a biography of a man who’d worked for Médecins Sans Frontières.
He’d performed operations in all sorts of dangerous places, but my teacher said the content was too graphic for a child my age.
Mum wrote the teacher an unnecessarily aggressive (in Dad’s opinion) letter to say that she wasn’t willing to censor my sociocultural development, and could the teacher please refrain from commenting on my reading choices.
By the age of eight, I was certain that it was my destiny to be a flying doctor. Mum loved going off and saving people who needed help; it made her much happier than being stuck at home. I would be like Mum, only I’d be happy all of the time, not just some of the time.
A few years later, after my parents had split up and Mum had moved to London, Maya had to have an emergency appendicectomy.
“How did it feel to save my sister’s life?” I asked the surgeon, when he came to brief us after the op. I was sitting between my parents, who hadn’t been in the same room in months. Dad was seething that Mum hadn’t arrived until near the end of Maya’s operation.
“I don’t have the right words to answer that,” the surgeon said. He sat down next to me. I remember the vinyl seats squelching under my hot legs as I shifted over. His name was Mr. Yo, which I liked. “All I can say is that there’s no feeling quite like it. It’s the only job I’ve ever wanted.”
“I understand,” I told him. “I’m going to be a surgeon, too.”
When we were finally allowed to see Maya, I took my notebook in and recorded observations of the equipment I could see, the noises I could hear and the strange medical smell of my little sister, who mostly just grunted and was not open to my assessment of her pulse and breathing rate.
It helped me ignore the terse whispered words between my parents, but really, I just wanted to understand all of it: every digital display, metal trolley, mysterious wall-mounted tech installation.
The surgeon popped in to speak to us. He told me this was the sort of proactive behavior that would take me far on my training journey.
I didn’t forget that, and eight years later I was congratulated on my unusually comprehensive application and offered a place to study medicine at St. George’s in south London.
—
I was thriving at the Royal London when I met Johan.
I loved the hospital, the staff, the sheer giddiness of Whitechapel in the morning: the sunrise call to prayer tumbling down from the East London Mosque; the market already doing brisk business in durian fruit, hijabs, giant sacks of rice; hospital workers migrating across Whitechapel Road in scrub-colored droves.
The famed Yanika Hatziz was my educational supervisor. My best friend, Dell, worked here, too. I was high on life.
But the pressure was on, now and always. Which made it all the more absurd that I spent the three days after Deniz’s accident doing no extra study or paperwork at all. I was mostly just dreaming about Johan.
—
I was in the theater coffee room between cases, on a very rare break with Dell.
We were updating our log books next to a giant urn full of disgusting coffee. A box of beige tea bags sat next to it. The room stank of the theater technician’s lunch, heated up in the spattered microwave in the corner.
“I’m going to email my cousin,” Dell was saying as I got up to make tea. “He’s a paralegal at the GMC. If anyone can find out if it’s acceptable for you to have a Thing with that man, it’s him.”
“You absolutely will not,” I told her. “I am not going after him. Even if he turned up here and asked me out, I’d have to say no.”
“Oh lookit, will you give yourself a break for a minute? I know you love a rule, but there is no rule here.”
“But he—”
“He’s not the patient’s relative. Or even her friend. He’s just a random guy, and your meeting was pure coincidence. There’s no line of medical responsibility.”
“But it wasn’t a coincidence! I was on duty!”
“Irrelevant! Carrie, he was on fire for you. I won’t email my cousin if you don’t want me to, but I will say that you are cutting your nerdy little nose off to spite your face. He—you—the chemistry, it was raging.”
In Dell’s Derry accent, the word raging was velvety and potent. For a moment I allowed myself to dip back into the memory of Johan’s eyes smiling at me, knowing things they couldn’t possibly know.
I opened the disgusting fridge under the disgusting microwave. There was no milk, apart from one bottle of skimmed with a Post-it saying “UMAR’S MILK PLEASE DO NOT HELP YOURSELF.”
“Umar won’t mind,” Dell said breezily. “I’ll run and get him some more in a bit.”
“But he’s left a note stating that he very definitely does mind,” I said.
Dell started laughing. “Listen, Mrs. Rulebook. That man of yours. You can lose him forever worrying about rules that don’t even apply to this situation, or you can just send him a text and see what happens. What’s it going to be?”
I looked at Dell, at her little pixieish face, those trendy thick glasses she always wore, the short red hair that always made her look more like a thespian than a trainee surgeon.
I looked at my friend and willed myself to be More Dell, or More Maya—to take a risk and just follow my heart.
But how? I was nothing like either of these women.
I would never do something that could compromise my job.
“Take the risk,” she urged. “I don’t know how many chances we get in life, but Carrie, there won’t be many.”
—
He appeared again the next day.
I’d been on ward rounds but had taken fifteen minutes outside to get some fresh air before heading back into the stale oven of the post-op ward.
And there he was. Sitting on a concrete plinth to the side of the main hospital building because there weren’t any benches, drinking a coffee in the lemon light of a winter morning.
He had a book in his hands, something in a foreign language.
He was wearing an orange beanie hat and a thick lumberjack coat. He was divine.
“Doctor Carrie,” he said easily, as if he’d bumped into an old friend, and I found myself smiling in a way I never did at work. When I stopped smiling I just looked at him, uncertain as to what to do or say.
“Swedish fairy tales,” he said, holding up the book. The sun caught the cover for a second, dazzling me. Behind him, steam rose from a grille in the wall. “My mother used to read them when I was ill. I kept thinking about Deniz and wondering if anyone was visiting her.”
He was Swedish, then. Johan. It should probably have been obvious.
He looked right at me with those eyes. A neonatal ambulance swung in behind him, a sight that normally filled me with apprehension, but—shamefully—I barely noticed.
“Turns out she hasn’t had any visitors at all. She had one of the nurses phone me yesterday.”
“So nice that she had your number. And now she’s got a visitor.
You’re very kind!” I cursed myself for sounding so formal, so bloody doctorish.
But he didn’t seem to notice. He merely moved over on the plinth so I could sit next to him, which I did.
It felt too good to be true that he was here again, that I hadn’t had to break any rules to see him.
“I’m sure you guys are doing a great job doctoring Deniz,” he said. “But it’s the other things. Human things, Doctor Carrie. Holding hands, cold flannels for fevers, stories.”
“Your English is impeccable,” I said vaguely. Nobody had ever used my name in that way but I liked it. It felt lustrous and intimate. “Did you grow up bilingual?”
“I did. My dad’s Swedish but he grew up in Canada.” Perhaps sensing that I wasn’t sure what to do with myself, he handed me the book. It was beautiful, a fairy tale in itself.
“Nere vid ?lven,” I read. “…Never Been Alive?”
“I mean, no.”
“Nearly Bit Alvin?”
“Still no.”
“Night of—”
“Stop! It means ‘Down by the River.’ You must never pursue a career as an author.”
“At school I wrote a story about a girl who opened up her own head so she could read her brain in a mirror.”
“Good God,” Johan said. “What did her brain say?”
“It said, you have a tumor in your bowel, you need to go and see the doctor.”
“Seriously?”
I was laughing now. “I’m afraid so.”
“And you were what age?”
“Ten. I’d been teaching myself medicine for a while by then.”
Johan let out a cloud of breath. “Did they call your parents?”
“Yes.”
“And what did they say?”
“Mum found it funny. Dad tried to convince himself I was just a keen medic in waiting, although I think he was worried. But he got busy throwing Mum out of the house and divorcing her soon after. I think he forgot.”
“Oh. That’s not so funny.”
“It wasn’t.”
“So your Dad brought you up on his own?”
“From the age of ten, yes.”
He nodded thoughtfully but didn’t push me further. “My name is Johan,” he said after a pause.
“I know. I’m Carrie.”
He laughed. He seemed to be someone who did a lot of laughing. “I know. Doctor Carrie Cole.” He leaned over and picked up my lanyard, smiling. My ID facial expressions, Maya always said, were only just the right side of frightening.
“Severe,” Johan said, carefully replacing it without touching me.
“Very severe. As you saw with that poor policeman.”
“Oh, he was an asshole. But I don’t think that was normal Doctor Carrie I was watching then. It felt like the supermax version.”
“I…I hope so.”
“She was great! If I was dying and everyone had abandoned me, I’d want that version of Doctor Carrie striding in with her defibrillator, or whatever you’re using in an emergency. Either way, I’d want you.”