Chapter Nine
Nine.
I did go back that night, and the night after that.
At the time I was living in a gray box in Colliers Wood, which had been helpful during medical school but was not convenient in any way now.
Nor, I realized, as I learned the landscape of Johan’s flat, was it much of a home.
His was full of ideas, colors, words, beautiful books, and music.
Mine had been no more than a place to sleep and study.
I already loved him by then.
“I really don’t want to leave this flat when you’re here. But I think we should celebrate your exams, even if I’m several months late. Plus, I just want to be out there in the world with you.”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, please! Where are you taking me?”
He frowned. “Where are you taking me? With your substantial new paycheck?”
“There are no substantial pay checks in the NHS, so you can get that idea out of your head. Besides, I’m still a core trainee. I don’t start as a registrar until October.”
Johan took his coffee off the stove and there was a pause as I thought about a suitable date.
“Maybe diving?”
He stopped pouring his coffee and turned around. “Really?”
“You’re teaching this evening.”
“And you want to join my class?”
“Yes! We could go for drinks afterward. Food. Normal date stuff.”
Johan drank some coffee. “You said you’d have a panic attack. That you’d never dive. What’s changed?”
“I—I decided to reject that kind of thinking.”
He laughed again. “Of course you did.”
“But I also told myself that a woman like me couldn’t get a registrar number, and then I ranked eleventh in the country. My thinking isn’t always to be trusted.”
We watched each other for a few moments. I was still finding it hard to take my eyes off Johan. To believe that if I blinked, or moved suddenly, he would not disappear.
“Before I agree to anything, I want you to tell me what kind of student you are,” Johan said.
“An excellent one! I concentrate hard and take notes.”
“Of course you do. But what I really want to know is, how are you when you don’t get it straight away?”
“Oh, terrible. But I’m really good at pretending to fail with grace. You’d never know I was dying inside.”
From somewhere nearby the disquieting wail of an ambulance, dodging through Whitechapel, seeped into Johan’s kitchen.
He came over to get my bowl. He’d made porridge earlier with apple sauce and cinnamon, brown sugar laced across the surface. It had been exactly what I’d needed for a long day in theater, and exactly what I would never have taken the time to do for myself.
“You always leave a bite of food on your plate,” he said, stopping by the table. “What is that?”
I looked at the single spoonful left in my bowl and told him—truthfully—that I had no idea.
Johan smiled as if to say, I know exactly why that is, but did not enlighten me. He took my single remaining spoonful of porridge and ate it, before adding it to the washing up.
“Let me talk to the dive school and check they’re OK with me teaching someone I know,” he said. Then he turned around. “And for what it’s worth, I would most definitely know you were dying inside. You’re a lot more transparent than you think, Carrie Cole.”
I shut my laptop. Yanika had arranged with one of her colleagues in hepatobiliary for me to assist on a Whipple’s procedure that morning and I’d been reading up. I hadn’t observed one since med school, and it was a complex operation.
I’m not transparent at all, I thought, zipping the laptop back into its sleeve. It was one of the things that drove Dell mad. Nobody knows what’s going on in there, she’d say. You have to tell us, Carrie.
It was simply that Johan could read me in a way nobody else seemed to.
—
The operation started well. Karl, the consultant, was friendly, which was never a given. After the briefing he put on an excellent playlist of seventies tracks. The energy in the theater was good.
As first assistant I stood across from the table from him, helping with retraction and the diathermy.
For a while, all was calm and I had a clear view as Karl began to tunnel carefully under the neck of the pancreas.
The cancer had already spread since the patient’s scan three weeks earlier, increasing quite substantially the risk of injury to the portal vein.
“Oof,” Karl said as he pushed on. “Can you see what a mess this is? How everything’s got stuck together as the tumor’s grown?”
I could see. I would not want to be working next to a delicate portal vein in among all that mess. Avoiding a bleed seemed near impossible.
Sure enough, the cavity began to fill with blood minutes later. Karl sighed. “OK. Carrie, please start packing.”
The scrub nurse handed me swabs—one after another after another, but my careful pressure was no match for the insidious flow from underneath the pancreas.
To my left, the anesthetist warned that the patient’s pressure was dropping.
Soon after, the heart monitor alarmed. People began to talk over each other.
Karl put out an urgent call for one of his colleagues; he was going to need to split the pancreas to get at the damaged blood vessel.
The blood kept pouring from the portal vein, on and on, faster than I or anyone else could have packed it.
The anesthetist put out a major hemorrhage call.
The theater door was unlocked as help arrived.
We all react differently to emergencies, Yanika had once told me. Those who fare best are those who go into a mental underpass. Let the traffic roar above your head. Just keep on walking to the end of the tunnel. Do nothing else except that.
I made myself feel my feet on my metal box. Hands calm and precise in spite of my elevated heart rate. I listened only to what Karl was asking me to do and nothing else.
A senior consultant arrived at speed and scrubbed in.
Karl briefed him; the nurses gowned him up.
In the background the music continued to play.
It was “Wild World” by Cat Stevens, the bass smooth and muscular, the tune buoyant.
I waited for someone to ask for it to be turned off but they were all too busy to notice.
As Stevens sang about getting by with only a smile, the monitors alarmed and the anesthetist started squeezing blood and vasopressin. The senior consultant arrived at the table, scalpel in hand, and began incising without so much as a moment’s pause.
Minutes later, the pancreas had been divided at the neck and Karl did a formal resection of the injured portal vein. I suctioned blood and cut sutures. I had learned this script years ago and I remained steady, consciously holding myself in the safe rhythm of my training.
As soon as the vein was repaired, the anesthetist took over. The operation would now be on hold until the patient was stable.
After we’d descrubbed the two consultants sat down and started chatting about the senior consultant’s son. He’d told his dad he didn’t want to do A-levels and wanted instead to “chill for a while,” doing ski seasons “or whatever.”
“Not necessarily a bad move,” Karl grinned, as if they were just two friends in a cafe, having a catch-up. “Would you really want him to end up in a career like this?”
“Fuck, no!”
The Velvet Underground was playing now, yet nobody thought to turn it down.
The anesthetist and her registrar were working hard on the patient, who was beginning to stabilize.
Their medical student, watching intently, crossed and uncrossed her legs, but I knew she wouldn’t go to the loo. I never did when I was a student.
“Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” started playing, and I couldn’t take it anymore. I went over to the speaker and turned it off.
Not quite able to ignore what was happening in front of me, I stood watching for a while longer while the consultants chatted about summer plans and the “insufferable” manager who kept overfilling their surgical lists.
The patient’s blood pressure was increasing.
A greater calm began to take root, and I felt my own heart rate decrease.
Eventually I forced myself over to my laptop to clear some emails.
Johan had messaged a little over half an hour ago.
You’d better have meant it about the scuba lesson because I’ve booked you in. Meet me outside Marshall Street Baths at 7:45. I’m looking forward to it. Carrie Cole in a wet suit is something I badly need to see.
I smiled, then laughed, then felt sick. In spite of everything that had happened over the past hour, it was this email that opened a space of fear in my body—this disquieting promise of water closing over my head like a coffin lid in a few hours, my body reliant on a tank.
—
He was outside the baths when I arrived, leaning against the wall.
He watched me walk toward him. I had rarely seen him outside the context of the hospital or his flat and I felt skittish and uncertain suddenly—a girl on a first date.
He was almost unbearably handsome, and he looked as if he could read every thought in my head.
Time to overcome that ridiculous fear of submersion, I’d told myself earlier. Outgrow these limiting beliefs! How naive, the idea that I or anyone else could just switch off fear as if it were a light.
“Good evening,” he said as I arrived in front of him. “And just a reminder that, as your teacher, I’m unable to kiss you.”
I paused momentarily, then kissed him on the mouth.
This, I now remembered, was why I’d decided to do this stupid lesson in the first place. I might not believe in my own ability to outgrow fear, but I believed completely in Johan.
“If I wasn’t working I would cancel this and just check in to the nearest hotel,” he said. “Carrie Cole, I can’t get enough of you.”
“You should not be talking to me like that,” I said, straightening his jacket. “You’re my teacher.”
We went inside and the rest of the group joined soon after.
We were given wet suits and then met by the pool to talk about safety, before Johan’s colleague took us through the equipment basics.
I tried to listen, but really I just wanted to stare at Johan in a wet suit, hair wet, long legs pacing between the class participants.
After his colleague had showed me how to inflate and deflate my buoyancy-control device, I lay on my back in the pool, watching kaleidoscopic water reflections pulse on the arching roof lights above.
Johan was somewhere to my left, teaching two young guys how to do their BCDs.
I trusted this man completely, I thought, as I bobbed weightlessly on the surface of the pool.
Not just to show me how to breathe underwater but to show up for me—today, tomorrow, the next day.
Until now, the only man I’d trusted had been Dad, and even he’d let me down at times; all that bile and hatred toward my mother had often stopped him being present. Johan was an entirely new kind of human. He was here.
He returned to teach me how to find my regulator and its backup, amusingly called an octopus.
He checked and rechecked my technique, standing there in the water, glorious and untouchable.
Then, when I’d cleaned my mask and deflated my BCD, he showed me how to take my first breath through the regulator.
When I was breathing smoothly, he said, “Let’s try a couple of breaths underwater.”
And suddenly we were kneeling underwater, watching each other through masks, breathing through regulators.
I knew breathing apparatus inside out, I realized, once I’d taken the first few breaths.
And I’d never been afraid of water, nor suffered claustrophobia.
As we faced each other on the pool floor, gently waving our arms for stability, I began to see that my fear had really been of the unknown, of environments over which I had no control.
Medicine was a surprisingly safe, closed-off environment, if you never stepped outside.
Johan signaled, in the underwater language they’d just taught us, Are you OK? I shook my head: No.
He made the signal for us to move up, but I shook my head again.
He realized then that I was smiling; he started smiling too.
Bubbles catapulted happily up to the surface as we knelt opposite each other, Johan and I, clad in wet suits in a pool in central London.
He made a shrugging gesture as if to say, what’s wrong then?
I make an obscene gesture: I want to fuck you.
Bubbles shot up in a sharp cloud from his mask and he rose to the surface. “Behave,” he said when I emerged. He moved to the two lads next to me. He was laughing.
—
A couple of hours later we were perched at the bar of a Japanese place on Kingly Street, drinking bottles of cold Sapporo while we waited for our food. Johan wedged my knees between his. “I enjoy these strong legs of yours,” he said. “I especially enjoyed them in a wet suit.”
“For what it’s worth, I thought you were a great teacher.”
He smiled. “I only wish I could say the same about you as a student.”
“Excuse me? I went underwater, I faced my fears—what more do you want?”
“You also tried it on with your teacher.”
“He’s hot.”
Johan chuckled, those eyes trained straight on me. “I heard he’s been fired.”
“What? Why?”
“Under duress, he admitted that he wants to have sexual relations with you. We can’t allow that.”
We finished the food as quickly as we could. When I left the final tiger roll on my plate, Johan picked it up and ate it, and I felt recklessly, almost violently happy inside—it had only been four days, but we already had a thing.