Dirty Work Read online

  Most of these antics didn’t amount to much. Spencer had shown Victoria how to make an earthy paste by mixing a few drops of water with soil and some extra-powerful ingredient such as her mother’s Pert shampoo or a little shaving foam. This paste was to be applied to the cracks in the concrete next to the garage where the ants streamed, and Spencer enjoyed watching them drown in it. She also showed Victoria a book of black-and-white photos their father kept in his bedside table and insisted they look through them together.

  But, one day, my friend told me about something that had happened over the weekend that had really scared her, an incident she had kept to herself. When their parents were out, Spencer had come into her room and asked if she’d like to do something cool. Victoria recognised her father’s golf-ball key ring in her sister’s palm and Spencer was shaking the bunch of keys in the air so that they danced and jangled.

  The girls went down the stairs. Perhaps they taught kids to drive when they were really young in the home that Spencer had just come from, Victoria thought. Perhaps they’d just roll the car along the drive. Down and down they went, into the cool dark basement. Spencer headed for the door which led to the garage. They got into the car, with Spencer in the driving seat and Victoria where her mum usually sat, just as it should be. It was too dark to find the square button that opened the garage door, but Spencer must know where it was, for she had put the key in the ignition and started the car.

  Victoria recognised the smell of the car smoke. It made her long for other smells. For leaves in the driveway, and chlorine, and the metal stink on one’s hands after going on the climbing frame. But the car smell got stronger and the garage door didn’t open. Victoria looked at Spencer and saw that her sister’s eyes were closed and she had a special smile on her face, which Victoria had already learned to find scary. She told me that they stayed there like that until it was hard to see much in the garage even though the car windows were open. Then suddenly Spencer turned the car off and opened the garage door with the remote control, and they both watched as clouds billowed from the garage. Victoria said it reminded her of a genie, the way the poisonous smoke rushed out and up into the thin, blue air of their backyard.

  The day after Victoria told me this story, she was due to come to my house to play. I had been thinking a lot about what she had told me, so when I heard the doorbell and went to answer the door, my heart thumped in my chest when I discovered it was Spencer standing outside. She told me her sister was ill with strep throat. That her mum had asked her to come and play instead and she had brought their swingball game over, which we could use in my backyard.

  I felt disappointed and not a little afraid, but there seemed nothing for it but to invite Spencer in, then out of the back door into our garden where she began to set up the swingball. The garden sloped down a hill, but there was one small patch that was flatter than the rest where a tree had been felled ages ago. The old spiky bits from the sliced trunk, softened with time like driftwood, were covered with moss. On the steep gradient of the scraggy lawn, this old tree base was relatively flat so we thrust our swingball pole right through the middle of it. It lodged there surprisingly stiffly.

  Spencer offered to stand down the hill a bit because she was bigger than me. And we began to play our game, like girls do, not competitively, but working together to see how many times we could hit the ball consecutively before one of us missed it – finding new patterns, hitting it directly back and forward or letting it swing right round before whacking it with the satisfying centre of the plastic bat.

  When we let the ball free to fly in its improbable circle through the sky, we loosened too as we beheld its graceful flight. I was happy to watch Spencer reaching high, her face lightening as she stretched up and out without inhibition to reach that lime ball with the blue bat. Then abruptly the moment was cut with a cry that I knew had nothing to do with the small effort of hitting the ball. Spencer was sitting on the grass, leaning over her bare foot which she was holding shakily in her hand.

  It was the first time I had ever seen someone else’s blood. Across Spencer’s fat white foot ran a bright-red line of about three inches with a thick piece of brown glass in the middle of the gash, poking upwards. It was a wound so severe that you could see the precise thickness of the skin and, beneath it, a pool of absolute redness which soon overflowed its bounds, trickling off Spencer’s sole and into her hands as she sat palely holding it and staring at me.

  The ball was swinging just a little now on its string. You could hear the click of the plastic loop banging against the metal spiral as it slowed down. I too felt a sort of swinging inside. A bit of a white sickness, but also a red sort of fulsomeness. The white feeling would have just kept me still, observing the moment. But the red feeling gave me a strong sense of purpose. I picked the glass gently out of the wound. Then I took off my T-shirt and I wrapped it around Spencer’s bleeding foot and tied it. I put on my discarded flip-flops and ran to get my mother, relieved enough in my knowledge of her stoic nature to enjoy some excitement at the shocking news I was running to give her.

  When my mum followed me back out to the garden, she untied the T-shirt on Spencer’s foot to have a look at the wound, nodded quietly and retied it just as I had done, which was satisfying. We each took one of the bleeding girl’s arms and led her to the car. And together we drove the fifty or so yards to the hospital over the road.

  Spencer’s mother was stuck at home with a feverish Victoria, so my mum sat with her while her foot was stitched and I stayed in the waiting room. I didn’t mind this, but I did resent the way the nurse kept bringing me toys. I knew I had not behaved like a child that afternoon. I had mastered a crisis. I had been calm and collected. Later, we went back to my house and Mum let us have Coke as well as Oreo cookies. When our neighbour came to pick up her daughter, Spencer piped up and said, ‘You should have seen Nancy. She was amazing! She totally looked after me’, so that I got to feel the warmth of everyone’s eyes on me. And I thought to myself that it hadn’t been difficult at all, doing what I had done. I had loved coming to the rescue.

  There is a clatter as Miss Mansfield replaces her teacup on its saucer. She makes a tiny noise in her throat as if to acknowledge the mistake as she rights it. Is she embarrassed not to be in perfect physical control just because she is a surgeon? Or perhaps it’s more of a female thing. That she feels un-dainty to have fumbled with fine bone china? Looking across the judges’ table, I see there is a cup in front of each one of them. I don’t know where the tea came from. I don’t remember anyone bringing it in. I look around myself, down at my own ankles. It seems I haven’t been given any.

  Miss Mansfield’s eyebrows are raised and I realise I have missed something else. She repeats herself.

  ‘Do you have any questions? Anything you want to add at this stage?’

  ‘Nothing, ma’am,’ is my reply and I am glad to hear my voice at all. I have hardly used it during this hour. I have said so little since that day.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  All of them are looking at me now. Miss Mansfield consults her bracelet watch and turns to me again. She leans towards me with her message. She uses her arms and her face together in a lively way to tell me not to be passive, that this is my time to stand up for myself. It’s not what becomes of my patient that will make the difference. It’s what I say in this room that counts. There is no more in me, though. I cannot muster another word. And so it is in silence that my first panel session comes to an end.

  I leave the conference suite behind and re-enter the clinical part of the hospital. As carpet gives way to lino, I hear the sound of my footsteps again and I allow myself to exhale. My patient is still alive. I have not collapsed at the first hurdle. There is still something to play for.

  I pass the surgical ward in which I did my first house-job and I remember how I learned to put in a cannula there. A little further along the corridor, I take note of the tutorial room in which many of my unde
rgraduate clinical exams took place. I walk out of the hospital and cross the road, heading for the bus stop.

  A rubbish truck pulls up to the pavement and I wait while two men in green tabards load bags into its open back. One of them disappears from view, down to the basement of a terraced house. I can only see his arms as he chucks up his cargo. The other stands in the middle of the pavement, catching the sacks and dumping them in the back of the lorry. Two doctors, on their way to the Day Surgery Unit, angle their way alongside the rubbish man, taking care not to brush against him, grimacing openly at the stink of refuse as they pass. I wait. When the last bag has been thrown up, I step forward. I feel the worker’s eyes on me as I pass, but I do not meet them with my own.

  My bus arrives and I have only just found a seat on the empty upper deck when my phone begins to ring. I pull it from my rucksack and peer at its screen, more out of curiosity than with any real intention of speaking to anyone. But I press the green button straight away when I see it’s my sister calling me.

  ‘Julia.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  Well, she’s still alive.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness. Thank God! How was it, though?’

  ‘How was it? I don’t know. It was fine. No, it wasn’t fine. It was horrible. I had so much that I wanted to say. ‘But I just … I don’t know. I just didn’t say it. Or I didn’t say it right. I didn’t say enough of it right—’

  ‘But you managed to hold it together?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess I did. Is that something?’

  ‘Nancy, that’s the main thing. It’s all you needed to do. All the rest will take care of itself. But they—’

  ‘They told me the rubric of the thing. Asked me a few questions. And they went over what happened in theatre. Which was awful, hearing it aloud like that. Anyway, the next session’s with a bloody psychiatrist. I’m already dreading it. But enough. How’s Dad? It’s been two weeks now since I saw him. I feel terrible.’

  ‘He’s fine, Nancy, absolutely fine. We all are. And you know I’m happy to cover your visits for a while. God knows, I owe you. So what I want to know is this. Will you come and stay the weekends with us while this whole thing is going on? I’d love it. We all would.’

  ‘Well, all right. I mean, yes please, I’d love to, if you’re sure it’s okay. I’ll tell you something, though. There is one good thing about this whole business. I’ve actually got time to do some studying now. I’m going—’

  ‘You know what, Nance? I actually don’t want to hear about your work. I’m absolutely sick of it, and all the trouble it’s caused. Sorry, but can we talk about something else?’

  ‘Okay, Jules. But let me ask you something. You know when we were kids? Do you remember that feeling of being little, when all we did was charge about and get filthy? And being a wild thing was totally okay? Was that just in America, or were we still like that after we came home? I was just trying to figure it out. When was it suddenly not acceptable to be doing all that stuff?’

  ‘Oh, Nancy. For goodness’ sake!’ is all my sister says. ‘Look, I’ll call you again tomorrow. Lots of love.’ And then she hangs up.

  I know Julia is upset with me. But I don’t stop to think of her in that moment. Because there it is, for the first time in years, the memory of child-passion. Heavy as a stamp in my mind. Still a bright clean memory, despite its sordid sequel.

  I am twelve. We are coming to the end of our stay in America. During our last summer we are visited by family friends from London. I hardly remember them but when they arrive I find that their boy, who is about my age, has become beautiful. I stand in front of him and think straight away that Tom is the best boy I have ever seen.

  My sister is a delicate thing who likes to play with dolls. And Tom’s brother has grey skin, and only wants to be fast at solving the Rubik’s cube, his wrists clicking, his fingers flicking at its coloured squares. So Tom and I go outside. And everything waits for us. The creek at the base of the yard, and trees as giant as all American things, and the forbidden vacant lot.

  Every summer’s day leading from that first one is for throwing ourselves against the world. In my evening bath, I lie in mire, counting my injuries, pleased to see fresh ones replace those that are healing, knowing that Tom is somewhere on the other side of the door, not far away. And he will be there again tomorrow.

  Towards the end of the vacation, we all go together to the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia. The outdoors is even grander there, its expansiveness bringing us closer together as we dash at it. The hugeness of this world makes us more tired than we were in my backyard. So that we start to take a rest even quite early in the day, perhaps before we are really tired, our puffing and panting and finding a log to sit on not without a histrionic element.

  In the final week, the grown-ups suggest the four of us kids might like to camp out for a night. The dads help us find a good spot, on a ledge near the top of the mountain, a mile or so from our log cabin. The boys nick two bottles of beer from a dusty fridge in the garage of the house, stashing them in a nearby tree stump for our night out.

  There are two tents, one for my little sister and me, one for Tom and his brother Richard. We pitch them both, and all get into our sleeping bags to make a show for Julia of the evening’s fun being over. Once she is asleep next to me, the boys go off to get the beer, taking the big torch and leaving me the small one. I know they’ll be away half an hour since the booty tree is quite a distance from where we are camping.

  When the boys leave, I am spooked. It’s a blustery night. The shape of the empty tent nearby looks scary, its triangular outline harsh, its billowing fly-sheet ghostly. The sheer face of the mountain opposite is luminous and rises steeply above where I lie. But it is not these things, really. It is that Tom is gone and I am still there. The gentle breathing of Julia sleeping next to me offers no comfort. It is the sound of my own softness.

  I am also having one of my first ever periods. I have brought sanitary towels with me in my rucksack and plastic bags and, knowing how hard it will be to look after myself discreetly when Tom and his brother come back, I force myself out into the wide night to change my towel. The angled focus of the torch I lay at my feet, and the swishing of the bag I have under my shoe in the wind, and the very fact of having to negotiate barely understood genitals in the open blackness of outside intensify my fright. I am snugly in my sleeping bag, heart thumping, dressed again, when they return. Each carries a bottle of beer to avoid clinking and their spirits are high. I could cry with how glad I am to see them again.

  We find the edge of the mountain top and make it our seat. We’re still near the tents so that we will hear my sister if she wakes. We love our high lookout, without feeling its treachery. Tom sits in the middle. The boys must have swigged some of the beer on their way back to me, for the first bottle is soon empty. One of them throws it behind us, and I hear its glassy thud on the ground and know by our laughter, which is not hushed now, that it is happening, just as we fantasised it would, the preposterous effect of this drink on us – setting me up for a habit of thinking, for years after this, that being drunk is the only possible way to do what I am about to do. We pass the second bottle along, backwards and forwards, but more slowly now. Every time I tilt my head back to sip starrily, there is a wider strange tipping, and I want to sit next to Tom, here on this ledge in the darkness, for ever.

  The boys are hearty to start with, but Richard’s laughter soon becomes querulous. Next, he is standing right out on the precipice, a dark star wavering against the blackberry night. He exclaims that if he jumped we wouldn’t care, that we just want to be together. And it is true, I think, it is true. Go away, go far away, I wish in my head, and I say nothing and nor does Tom.

  It is no time before Richard goes off in a huff to his tent. We hear him zipping it shut. As soon as we are by ourselves, Tom asks to kiss me. No one will ever ask me this so courteously again. His face is like ice cream in the moonlight. And I swear to God that grown-ups
are wrong to think we can know nothing of such things at our age, because this is the kissing against which all the other kissing in my life should be measured.

  Tom is only fourteen so I am amazed by his hard arms, his rough cheek. I immediately feel more solid and true because I am wrapped in Tom and he is not just a boy. There is no taste to us at all. We kiss and talk, as if about the beach. The words are just the words. They do not suggest we are making a mistake. The only limit is the sanitary towel, all bunched up in my jeans, which is warm, not just with the effect of Tom, but with the harsh fact of my period. It reminds me that there are edges to this night.

  When we return to the house the next morning, I expect our parents to comment on what is right in front of their eyes. I want everyone to know. I feel we should be fed a celebration breakfast. But they completely ignore how things are. Our experience is given no adult meaning. It has no currency at all, then or later. So, as we write to each other for months after that bright night, even as we name our love, we use the word furtively like stealers and half-cheats. Then we fall out of touch, although the memory of that night sustains me throughout a whole adolescence.

  My journey home takes no time. There’s hardly any traffic. I get off the bus and head for the building in which I have had a studio apartment ever since I started to earn a doctor’s salary. I let myself in with the fob and am greeted by a security guard, sitting at the front desk. Behind him, a screen shows a view of corridors, all clean and empty, stretching this way and that towards multiple flats, all decked out in the modern style. I walk past the hideous blue sofa and armchairs that form a reception area, and make for the lift.

  Two minutes later, I am opening the door to my little flat. I scoop up a pile of mail, hold the fire door so that it closes quietly behind me, and go straight over to my desk, which occupies the best position in my all-purpose room next to the window. As usual, the flat is too hot, baked from all sides by other people’s radiators. I throw open both windows, and spread my mail on the desk in front of me before sitting down. Facing me, across a space of about forty feet, are the five identical windows of the flats on the other side of the building. Beneath these, four longer windows announce the more generous flats on the floor below. And at ground level is a paved courtyard with trees growing in among the stones and a bench or two for sitting on, on an afternoon like this one.