Читать книгу Staying Alive - Matt Beaumont - Страница 12

thursday 13 november / 9.26 a.m.

Why Saint Matthew? He started out as a tax inspector, didn’t he? Hardly a name to comfort the sick, and surely it only reminds the dying of death duties.

The place is vast; an industrial sprawl reminiscent of a Soviet uranium facility in the Siberian wastes—except somehow it ended up in east London. It must take the health budget of a third-world country just to heat and light the place.

Where’s Outpatients? Is it the same as Aamp;E or is it something different? I wonder this as I walk past a group of three old men in winceyette pyjamas smoking by a fire exit. Don’t think I’ll be asking them.

The story goes that a minor royal—the Duchess of Chingford or something—turned up to cut the ribbon on a new paediatric ward in the early nineties and she still hasn’t found her way out. Never mind pegging out on trolleys in corridors, people must die simply trying to find the right department—unless they’ve had the good sense to pack a rucksack with food, water and Kendal Mint Cake.

I’m walking around in circles. I know this because the chain smokers are looming into view again.

9.55 a.m.

By the time I find the right Outpatients I’m nearly half an hour late. I’m tired and footsore, and I’m wishing I were significant enough to qualify for Blower Mann’s corporate BUPA membership. I’m also worried that I’ve missed my slot. I shouldn’t be. This is the NHS and they’re running well behind.

My appointment is in one of Saint Matthew’s new bits. The reception area has floor to ceiling windows and a bracing view of big trees, though I think I can make out a tall chimney stack between two sycamores. Hospital incinerators always unsettle me. I know they put old bandages and stuff in them, but what else? I mean, if you’d asked the commandant of Auschwitz about his, I bet he’d have said, ‘Ach, zose zings? Zey are just for burnink ze garden rubbish und votnot.’ Hospitals bring out the paranoiac in me. I’ve seen Coma too many times. Show me a couple of doctors chatting by a coffee machine and I’ll show you a conspiracy. I’m scared of flying, but I’m terrified of hospitals. And it’s an entirely rational fear. Statistics are used to soothe the nervous flyer: you’re far more likely to get knocked down by a car and so on. But when it comes to nervous patients they’re flummoxed. Hospitals are perfectly safe—more people die in…Er…Die in…Die in what, then? Look at it this way: even if you get whacked in a car crash there’s a fair chance you won’t die in the wreckage—no, they rush you to a hospital to do that.

I badly need a distraction. I reach into my briefcase, fish out the Guardian and open it at random—‘MIRACLE’ CANCER DRUG DISCREDITED IN TRIALS. Why didn’t I buy the Daily Sport? Right now I could do with a light-hearted lap-dancers-abducted-by-aliens-for-intergalactic-sex-orgies story. Ironically, I have a sudden urge to take up smoking—nicotine might be just the ticket. Without even moving my eyes, though, I can see three NO SMOKING signs. I look at a kid in a baseball cap on the far side of the waiting area. He’s got no eyebrows, which suggests that he’s most likely bald beneath the hat. Jesus, cancer. He’s trying to read a Spider-man comic, but it’s obvious his heart isn’t in it. How old is he? Nine? Ten? He should be in school. Or bunking off. Whatever, he doesn’t deserve to be here. At least his mum is with him. I don’t often wish for my mother, but I’d like her to be with me now. What am I thinking? No, I wouldn’t. She’d be crying. When I gashed my shin at scouts she was hysterical. I needed two stitches and a tetanus. She required treatment for shock and was kept in overnight for observation. I had to catch the bus home on my own. Could she cope with cancer or, rather, with the faintest and most wafer-thin outside chance of it? Forget about it.

But I wish someone were with me.

A few weeks ago that someone would have been Megan. Situations like this bring out the best in her—her innate empathy makes her a natural Florence Nightingale. Last night I came close to calling her—I got as far as dialing the first five digits of her mobile. I couldn’t go through with it—I hate to seem needy.

The engagement ring. How needy must that have made me look? She must have found it and seen it for what it was—a cheap (six-and-a-half-grand-cheap!) shot at emotional blackmail. I picture the scene:

Megan: Jesus, Sandy, have you seen this? He thinks he can buy me. He just doesn’t get it.

Sandy: Have a heart, darling. He must be—(The rest of his answer is drowned out by…

SFX: £6,499 of diamond solitaire being flushed down a toilet.

I need that ring back—with or without Megan attached. I still have no idea how I’m going to pay for it. I’ve started buying lottery tickets—£20 blown on them today—because odds of fourteen million to one must be better than no chance at all.

Can’t think about all that now. I return to the newspaper. With eyes closed I flick past the cancer drug story. When I open them again I’m staring at RADICAL QC CAMPAIGNS FOR REFUGE and a picture of Sandy Morrison. Well, who the hell else? He’s standing outside an asylum centre in Highbury that’s facing closure. The neighbours can’t stand the place, apparently. Sandy is one of them, but he’s swimming against the NIMBY tide and is all for it. Normally I’d be sympathetic to his argument, but seeing his handsome face makes me want to round up every last refugee, load them into containers and truck them out of the country. And if a certain radical lawyer gets caught up in the mêlée and ends up being shipped to a crime-ridden tenement in Tirana…Acceptable collateral damage, if you ask me.

My mobile beeps. The receptionist glares at me and points at the MOBILE PHONES MUST BE SWITCHED OFF sign, which is competing for attention with NO SMOKING. I don’t care though—being in possession of an active mobile could be an imprisonable offence, but at least mine is dragging me from the excruciating thoughts swimming about my head. I turn away so she can’t see me lift the phone to my ear. I listen to the message. It’s Jakki: ‘Niall wants to know where you put the Schenker job-start file. Call me when you can.’

Haye was miffed when I didn’t reschedule my appointment—which guarantees me a column of fat zeros on my assessment, as well as about a dozen pesky messages on my mobile. Well, sod him. I’m having some quality me time.

In a hospital.

With some sick people.

I switch off my phone with a decisive flourish just in time to hear the receptionist call out, ‘Mr Collins?’ She’s squinting at a folder with—I presume—my name on it. ‘It’s Colin. No S,’ I say on autopilot, though I don’t know why I bother.

‘Doctor Morrissey will see you now,’ she says. ‘Third door on the left.’

Just what I need—a doctor whose namesake is pop music’s singing suicide note.

10.29 a.m.

Doctor Morrissey doesn’t have a bunch of gladioli sticking out of his trousers and a comedy quiff. In fact she has very short hair indeed. She’s young as well. Which is reassuring, actually—if I were on some critical, tumours-sprouting-out-of-his-ears list, surely I’d be seeing a battle-scarred senior consultant. With her Peter Pan haircut and pert features she’s quite elfin. No way would an elf pull the literal graveyard shift.

‘Take a seat,’ she says pleasantly with a hint of a West Country accent—not one of the Manchester Morrisseys, then. ‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re here.’ She must know why I’m here. Hasn’t she got some notes, a letter or something? Do I really have to explain? She seems to sense my discomfort and says, ‘I know you’ve found a lump…On one of your testicles. I just need to know how long you’ve been aware of it.’

‘A couple of weeks. Maybe three,’ I say.

‘That’s good. Our biggest headache is when men find something and then ignore it for months. Why don’t you let me take a look?’

I knew she was going to ask me that. In fact, I showered twice this morning because I knew someone was going to ask me precisely that question. So much for all the preparation because I feel extremely uncomfortable now. I hated it enough when sixty-something Stump had me drop my trousers and felt me up. Twenty-something, not unattractive Doctor Morrissey is an entirely different proposition and I imagine a lot of blokes would be thrilled at the thought of her small and fragile hands down there. Not me, though. I suppose I’m shy. Or uptight and repressed. Whatever, I’m someone who needs to be on very familiar terms with delicate feminine hands before I’m comfortable with them touching me below the waist. Again she senses my awkwardness and says, ‘I have done this before, you know. That’s why I keep my nails short. You can take your trousers off behind the curtain if you like.’

11.17 a.m.

I’m sitting on the edge of an examination couch, a needle in my arm, and under the circumstances I feel remarkably relaxed. Doctor Morrissey is taking blood. ‘We’ll do some tests for tumour markers,’ she explains matter-of-factly. ‘They indicate the possible presence of cancer cells.’ I flinch at the mention of the T-followed closely by the C-word. ‘Of course, you most likely don’t have cancer,’ she goes on, and I relax again because I believe it from her. ‘It’s much less common than you might imagine. It looks like you have some sort of growth down there though and we need to get to the bottom of it.’

She knows that I have some sort of growth because she sent me to a room along the corridor where a technician gave me an ultrasound scan. This, bizarrely, is what sparked my sense of calm. Ultrasounds—to me, anyway—are Good Things. My only experience of them was when Liz Napier, a senior account director at work, brought the print-out from hers into the office. A small, fuzzy black and white image that drew a gaggle of cooing onlookers. I peered at it too. I looked at the snap of the perfectly formed foetus that everyone agreed was sucking its thumb, though all I could see was something that resembled a photo of Greenland taken on a particularly cloudy day by a satellite equipped only with a disposable Kodak. But of course Liz didn’t give birth to Greenland. She had a perfectly formed, thumb-sucking baby girl called Carmen. That’s why ultrasound scans equal nice, warm and pleasant, even when they’re looking for cancer. So what if this has no basis in reason? It’s a sturdy-looking straw and just try and stop me clutching it.

Doctor Morrissey has helped to ease my stress as well. She has told me several times that I most likely don’t have testicular cancer and that even if I do, the cure rate is up in the very high nineties when it’s caught early enough. I’m choosing to go with her because she’s pleasant and competent and seems to know what she’s talking about. She takes the needle from my arm—very competently, I might add—and says, ‘OK, we’re done.’

I stand up, roll down my shirtsleeve and pull on my jacket. I bend down to pick up my briefcase and my Lotto tickets tumble out of my pocket and onto the floor. She picks them up and hands them back to me. ‘You’re the optimistic type, then,’ she says.

‘More like desperate, actually.’

‘Well, if it’s any consolation, the odds of there being something seriously wrong with you are almost as long.’

Almost? Only bloody almost?

Bloody Morrisseys. Why do they always have to drag things down?