George Barnabas - 04 - Fourth Attempt (12 page)

She had laughed; he sounded for all the world like an excited child with a new toy to display, and when he quirked his head enquiringly at her laughter, she told him why and he’d rubbed his face with both hands in some embarrassment.

‘Oh, hell, I’m sorry, I’ve always been like that. When I want things I go for them baldheaded. My mother said I drove her crazy with it. And then when I’ve got them —’

‘You lose interest?’ she said lightly as she turned to pick up her bag. Behind her he caught his breath sharply, and she heard it.

‘Oh, no,’ he said softly, looking at her very directly. ‘Quite the contrary. If I get something it’s mine and it stays mine. For always. That’s why I stick at getting what I want, you see. It’s worth the effort.’

Had she misconstrued what he was saying to her? She didn’t know; all she was aware of was the way he had looked at her and the way he had made her catch her breath too.

Now, scrubbing herself dry with a towel that was so deliciously rough it made her glow all over, she castigated herself for being so stupid and romantic and childish. The man
wanted her to help him with a research project? Big deal. It didn’t mean he had any ulterior motive. So shut up, already. Go to bed; sleep it off; wake up sensible.

She woke up miserable. It felt odd not to have Gus beside her; even though they still technically lived in separate flats he spent more nights with her than away from her, and those when he was away were due to work, which she understood. To know that she was alone on this rainy summer morning because she had been silly didn’t offer her any comfort at all.

She spent the day being virtuously domestic: cleaning the flat thoroughly — indeed almost ferociously; then trolling around the supermarket to fill her fridge and freezer, both of which had been sadly depleted; and on impulse buying a number of bedding-out plants from a street trader. If she bought them, she thought, she’d have to plant them; to spend the afternoon busily window-box gardening and perhaps fiddling with a hanging basket to install in her front porch (to match those of others which were blossoming up and down her rapidly gentrifying Bermondsey street) would be fun.

And it was, up to a point, but when she had the alyssum, the lobelia and the small fuchsias neatly in place, fed and watered, there was still a long weekend stretching emptily ahead of her; and still she refused to call Gus.

Instead she sat down at her little desk and did what she had come to find was the best way to handle any puzzles with which she was faced. She would write it all down.

On a piece of paper she wrote ZACK in large letters. And then crumpled it up and tossed it in the waste basket. He wasn’t a puzzle, of course he wasn’t. A silly idea. So she took another piece and this time wrote GUS. She stared at it, and then, slowly, tore the page into tiny segments before throwing it away. There was more to the Gus situation than she could handle this way.

But she still felt the need to sort out
something
, and this time she wrote SHEILA in capitals. That’s better, she
thought. This one I can deal with. There are real conundrums there, in what’s happening to her, and why.

NATURE OF PROBLEM, she printed carefully, the way she had been used to at school. She stopped for a little more thought and then began to write in good earnest. SHE WASTES TOO MUCH TIME GOSSIPING INSTEAD OF WORKING.

Another heading followed rapidly: SEVERITY OF PROBLEM. Beneath,
It’s very irritating but in all honesty
, she found herself scribbling, not bothering with capitals any more,
it doesn’t matter unduly as a rule. Generally she gets through all her work and does it well So why does it irritate me so when she pops off to other departments?

She thought for quite a long time, and then, knowing she had to be honest, returned to the paper again and wrote, unwillingly:
Because she doesn’t tell me all that she knows.

George contemplated that line for a long time, frowning. It was true and she couldn’t deny it. What had really made her angry was the way Sheila whispered to other people and then when she, George, came into the room, ostentatiously silenced herself. George, who had as urgent a desire to know what was going on in her environment as everyone else, found this infuriating, and even more infuriating the fact that she couldn’t do anything about it. Yes, she was Sheila’s superior in rank at the lab but that didn’t mean she could insist the woman told her the same things she told everyone else. Sheila would just look at her with that blank insolent stare of hers and refuse.

But what is she gossiping about that I want to know and that she doesn’t tell me? George asked herself reasonably, staring sightlessly at the square of her living-room window down which another rainstorm was now sending its spatter. I’m just being stupid. Childish and stupid and —

And then she remembered. It was the sort of memory that in her childhood had been a common experience: a sudden visual and aural reconstruction of an event which was as
vivid an experience as the original. Nowadays it happened less often, but when it did, it was a powerful experience. And one that she learned from, if she let herself. She relaxed her shoulders and closed her eyes and let the memory happen.

She had been sitting in her office six or seven weeks ago, quietly checking over a report she was to take in next day for a special court hearing on a death from a drugs overdose when her phone had rung. After waiting in vain for someone in the lab to take it, she had pulled herself away from her complex calculations about the amount of heroin that the dead boy had taken and, annoyed, picked up the phone. She was greeted by a tirade from the senior administrator of the Medical Records department. George had become steadily angrier, until at last she had managed to get a word in edgeways.

‘If you will stop and listen for just a moment, Mrs Ellesmere,’ she had said loudly. ‘Perhaps we can sort this out. Now, as I understand it, you’re worried about one of your staff—’

‘Of course I am. When a member of my staff, one I need and pay a good rate for, goes sick as often as she does, I’m entitled to know just how much is genuine and just how much is put on! I know the woman’s a diabetic, but other diabetics don’t give this sort of trouble to their bosses. I’m entitled to know what’s what and I thought I could simply have a look at some of the reports and see where the trouble is. I may not be a nurse but I’m highly qualified, well able to understand a path, report. As head of all the medical records, of course I am! But that madam flatly refused to let me see, wouldn’t even talk about it when I’ve seen her, seen her with my own eyes, head down with the woman herself, gossiping like fury over, would you believe, a lab report! I’ve had enough of it. Either you, as her manager, deal with her, or I tell you, doctor, I will make this a proper disciplinary affair and make a report to the Trust management and then you’ll see what a fuss there’ll be. They’ll raise hell with you and with that woman and —’

‘What woman?’ George had been bewildered. ‘I don’t follow you.’

‘That Keen woman from your department! Weren’t you listening to me? She comes up here, making a pest of herself, and when I ask her to tell me what is going on, she flatly refuses and makes me look and feel a complete idiot in front of my own staff! I won’t have it!’

‘Let me understand you,’ George said. ‘You are saying that Sheila Keen was in your department, showing a path, lab report to someone.’

‘Showing a woman her own path, report! You didn’t
listen.
She was showing her her own path, report and whispering away and when I demanded to be told what it was all about she said it was confidential so I had no right to know. Me, the manager, no right to know! I have every right to know! If she goes on wasting my staffs time like this and refusing to be co-operative, I tell you, the Trust management will be informed and you’ll be up to your neck in a disciplinary.’ And she had hung up the phone with a snap.

George had of course gone to look for Sheila and found her in the lab red of face and clearly just back from wherever she’d been, and about to start telling everyone who would listen why she was in such a state.

‘Sheila!’ George had snapped. ‘What the hell is going on?’

Sheila had had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘I was just — I just got back from an errand,’ she muttered.

‘An errand? What do we have juniors in this department for? Why are you running errands?’

‘This was sort of a personal one —’ Sheila began and then George lost her temper.

‘I know perfectly where you’ve been. I’ve had that Ellesmere woman on the phone shouting about it. You’ve been up in Medical Records showing someone a path, report she had no right to see, and refusing to show it to Mrs Ellesmere.’

‘The person in question had every right to see it,’ Sheila
had said with sharp dignity, looking redder than ever. ‘And Mrs Ellesmere certainly did not. It was confidential patient data. The relationship with the patient can’t be damaged by professional staff prattling to managers!’

‘You go too far, Sheila, sometimes, and this is one of them,’ George had said. ‘Now, what is this path, report? And who is the person who you’ve been showing it to? Give it to me!’

Sheila had been standing with her hand in her pocket and now she tightened it into a fist so that the shape showed through the nylon fabric. ‘It’s confidential,’ she said. ‘I shan’t.’

‘Sheila!’ roared George. ‘Show me! Tell me what this fuss is all about at once!’

Sheila very deliberately had pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket — clearly a path, report — and run across the lab to a bunsen burner on one of the benches, its harsh blue pencil of flame pointing up towards her, and very deliberately set the sheet alight. It had been consumed before anyone had had a chance to reach it, with Sheila standing defiantly by it, staring at George with her chin up.

And that had been that. George had gone storming back to her office to cool down as best she could once Sheila had told her mulishly that the burned paper was only a photocopy of an original, which was now safely filed, and she certainly was not going to tell George or anyone else, unless she chose to, where it was or what was in it, because it was no one’s business apart from the person whose path, report it was, and she cared about patient confidentiality, even if no one else did.

And really that
had
been that. The whole episode had simmered down the way fights with Sheila always did, only Sheila herself had gone on sulking longer than generally and been ever more obstructive. Admittedly, George had made it impossible for her to prowl around the hospital as usual picking up her news and disseminating it, by making a new work rota that ensured any message that had to be delivered by a
senior person, or any non-lab work that needed a special degree of expertise, fell into Jerry’s tray And ever since Sheila had been behaving as though George was the devil incarnate: no wonder George had become irritable with her. Now she was accusing George of trying to harm her. And in fact very unpleasant things
were
happening to her.

The visual memory faded and George shoved her notes into one of the desk’s pigeon holes, though she went on sitting there with unfocused gaze, thinking. She’d forgotten all that fuss until now, and why not? So much happened in Old East that the events of a couple or so months ago were like prehistoric experiences. But this was worth remembering. It explained so much.

But not why Sheila was now being attacked. And that was something that it should be possible to work out. What she had to do, George told herself, was to talk to Sheila about what had happened in the Records department all that time ago, and get a lead from her that she could actively pursue; and a faint tingle seemed to reach her shoulders and give her an agreeable frisson. Perhaps an investigation into what had happened then would lead her to why someone was doing these things to Sheila now? Perhaps once she knew that she’d know who. Anyway, it seemed as reasonable to start in Medical Records as anywhere else.

She cheered up so much at the thought of having a piece of digging around to do that she relented about Gus. She would phone him and forgive him handsomely. Then they could spend this Saturday evening together happily, and tomorrow too. And come Monday, when they both got back to work, between them they’d sort out this Sheila mystery in no time, he working on the car angle and she on the path, lab reports aspect, and she’d be able to relax and enjoy life again. Which might or might not include teasing Gus a little about Zack. Yes, that would be fun; and she dialled his number in a very cheerful frame of mind.

But he spoiled everything, because he was out and his
answerphone said only that if they needed him at the nick to use his bleeper and he’d respond at once; otherwise, his voice said flatly, he wasn’t available till Monday morning for
anyone.

Altogether, it was a horrible weekend for George.

The first person she saw when she got to the hospital early on Monday morning was Zack, and she had had so dreary a Sunday that she greeted him with more warmth than perhaps she should have done. She had managed to park her car, in spite of the fact that half of the car park had been closed off to allow the Estates Department to apply new ground markings designed to make the place easier and safer to use, and was about to lock it up when she spotted a heap of detritus — paper wrappers, dead leaves, flakes of street mud and the like — on the floor. She bent to brush it out, her posture far from elegant, only to receive a mild slap on her bottom. She pulled herself out of the car to deliver a blistering reproof to whoever had delivered it, suspecting it might be Gus, only to see Zack standing there and smiling at her.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said at once. ‘I know I shouldn’t have but I simply couldn’t resist. You have a neat rear elevation and the presentation was more than human flesh could bear.’

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, a modern man like you,’ she said trying to sound angrier than she was, ‘I could have you for sexual harassment.’