Green (34 page)

‘But you're not touchy about the subject or anything, are you?'

We park down the back, next to the fence.

‘With minutes to spare,' Frank says, looking at his watch as we get out of the car. ‘It's amazing that you live in such a complicated world, and yet practically nothing happens there. You realise—and I'm speaking strictly theoretically—that if it turns out she's available and you're off wandering somewhere near Outer Bullshit, someone else might make a move.'

‘That's a chance I'm completely prepared to take. Now, let's go in. You've got us here on time. You've saved us the cover charge, so that's two more drinks each. Tonight, I'm going to dance badly with girls I don't care about and will never see again. I'm going to get the taste of my father's brandy out of my mouth and Alec Guinness out of my head and I'm going to have a better time.'

‘Listen, your Dad, he really means it when he plays
The Bridge on the River Kwai
, you know.'

‘I know. He's a good man. A strange man, but a good man. I realise that.'

 

 

 

14

 

 

 

B
y
Sunday
, I'm definitely going with ‘political differences'. Irreconcilable political differences, and her father's Special Branch contacts confirmed it. We fitted together no better than a Montague and a Capulet, and those kids would have done well to work it out much earlier.

‘The planned date's never been your strongest option, has it?' Frank said on the way home on Friday night. ‘Never great for either of us, really. Which is a shit, since it seems to be a mainstay of the contemporary courtship ritual.'

And I wanted to say to him, ‘Look, I'm so much better than I used to be. If it hadn't been for that lapse in concentration on the
Paradise
. . .'

I'm right about acute polyhydramnios (Sunday's task: read Beischer and Mackay, chapter twenty-one, ‘Amniotic Fluid'). It's much rarer than chronic polyhydramnios and almost always associated with uniovular twins. Frank must have got them confused. But at least he's now got his own second-hand copy of the book so, if he can find some time away from tree-lopping, he should be okay when the exams come around. And they can't be far away, if Frank owns the text book and has been sighted in the hospital outside minimum rostered hours.

I don't know what he was doing on Friday, though. I'm sure it's just Doppler gear down the back of the clinics, and the nearest scanning ultrasound's on a different floor. There's too much wrong with his story. It's almost like it was made up from scratch, as if he wasn't there at all. Maybe he was working for his father, and he didn't want to get into talking about all that again. No, there was a pager. A pager went off in the background during the call. So it was the hospital because, apart from hospital staff, the only person we ever see with a pager is Zel Todd. He was at the Mater, somewhere.

Enough of chapter twenty-one. I go into the kitchen, get myself a drink of water and a couple of biscuits, turn on the radio. ‘Eye of the Tiger'.

Like Sophie said, it's everywhere. It mightn't be getting any action as Frank's fuck song, but it's everywhere. He's singing it, I'm singing it, Zel's singing it.

Zel's singing it, or at least humming it. How has she crossed my mind twice in the one minute? Zel Todd, humming ‘Eye of the Tiger'. Zel Todd, pager owner. Coincidence. No, reclassify that as ‘ugly coincidence'.

But Frank's Mater story was odd. The more I think about it, the more he seems to have come up with something that couldn't have happened at the hospital. His story doesn't work, and he hasn't been there enough—or studied enough—to make it up convincingly. Over the last few weeks, he's missed at least one whole day and bits of others. I thought that was just him, and maybe it is. He was there for his whole Labour Ward shift. I remember the charge sister talking about him—him and his interest in older women. Which Frank put down to her having an interest in him.

Older women, a big lie about Friday (and a pager involved), a series of absences and none of the usual libido madness that's around when Frank's single.

I tell myself this isn't evidence. It's supposition, with some sketchy circumstantial evidence to help it out. Frank is not having an affair with Zel Todd. That's it said, and the very idea that he might be is insane. In fact, amusing. An affair—the word sounds so out of date but, with Zel married, I guess that's what it'd be. Maybe I should call and tell him Beischer and Mackay's got to me so much that this is how my brain's working today.

Frank and Zel. Ludicrous. Look at how they are when she comes to World of Chickens. Early on she was foul and flirty with him—something Frank would love from just about anyone female, and play up to—lately it's been much more contained. A lot more reasonable. So . . .

So that's exactly how it would be, isn't it? They'd be very careful not to show any signs. Based on how they were before, if they were having an affair, they'd actually be less flirty now. Which is how they are.

 

*

 

The Monday morning Antenatal Clinic is starting to look busy when I divert from my usual walk to our tutorial room from the bus stop. I put on my white coat and badge outside the door, and I go past the desk and past the growing crowd and down to the consultation rooms at the back.

It's ten past eight, and the doctors aren't here yet. I take a look around. There's no sign of any ultrasound equipment.

‘Morning,' one of the RNs says. ‘I think you're the first one here.'

‘I'm actually just meeting someone. I'm with the Friday group, but I'd arranged to meet one of the registrars either here or in Ultrasound this morning. I can't remember which. Is there anywhere down here that he could be doing an ultrasound?'

‘No. Ultrasound's on three.'

‘So there's no unit here at all? Not even a portable?'

‘No. He'll be on three if he said anything about an ultrasound.'

‘Thanks. I'd better get up there then. Don't want to miss it.'

So, whatever Frank was doing on Friday, it didn't involve an ultrasound in the clinics. And if he was at the Mater at all, why did he bother making that up? There's nothing that he could have been doing at the Mater on Friday afternoon that he couldn't have told me at the time or, at the latest, that evening. Which suggests he wasn't at the Mater. Which suggests he must have something interesting to hide—a Friday afternoon, somewhere, with only a pager going off in the background and not a chainsaw anywhere nearby.

He turns up to our eight-thirty tutorial a few minutes late, and he sits across the room.

He comes over when it's finished and says, ‘Mondays, hate 'em. Do you want to go for coffee?'

‘I thought I might take a look in the wards. Why don't we go and drop in on that patient you saw on Friday with polyhydramnios? I've never seen it before and it's a fair bet for the exam.'

‘Yeah, um, good idea, but there's probably a lot of other stuff worth looking at too. She wasn't that interesting. And I don't know if I can remember her name. It was a few days ago.'

‘Why don't we call the registrar you saw her with?'

‘Yeah, right. It was that kind of medium-height guy with the brown hair. Short to medium height. I don't think I'd actually seen him before Friday.'

‘And you don't remember his name either, do you?'

‘No.'

‘Probably couldn't even pick him out of a line-up.' He says nothing. ‘And you don't remember the consultant the patient was admitted under?'

‘No. I was concentrating on the polyhydramnios.'

‘I hope you've got name tags sewn into your clothes in case you wander. Otherwise who knows where you might end up these Friday afternoons when you think you're in Antenatal Clinic. You could find yourself roaming the outer suburbs of the southside being taken in for cups of tea by kindly middle-aged ladies.'

He looks at me, as if he's waiting for more, waiting for some definitive sign. I'm smiling, like someone who might have made a joke out of nothing, or might not.

‘It got busy,' he says. ‘I was all over the place here. I think I'm a bit behind, so I was trying to pack a lot in. So I'm not likely to remember the people's names. I was seeing whatever I could, making the most of it. Which is probably what we should do now, like you said. We should go to the wards.'

‘Okay. Lead on.'

‘I don't think I've been to the fourth floor yet. We might give that a try.'

‘Sounds good to me.'

 

*

 

Our ten-thirty session is supposed to go for an hour and a half, but it finishes fifteen minutes early.

‘I can't believe you're having lunch with Ron Todd,' Frank says, laughing, when I tell him why I won't be in the dining room. ‘You are such a loser. Lunch with Ron Todd.'

‘Ron's not such a bad guy. And it's only coffee, anyway. Just a quick cup of coffee, then I'll be back here for lunch.'

‘You've got such a middle-of-the-day social life happening all of a sudden. Jacinta on Friday, Ron today. Just don't get talking about politics, that's my advice.'

‘I don't think it'll come up. Ron's already got things to talk about, stresses going on in his life, you know? The business, the teeth, maybe even stuff I don't know about. Who knows what I'm going to hear today?'

‘Yeah, the business could be doing better. Let me know how that bit of the conversation goes. I'm kind of relying on the job.'

‘Okay. I'll tell him he's got to keep it going for your sake. I'm sure that'll do it. The two of you have always been so close, after all.'

‘Oh, Ron's okay, I suppose. He just aggravates me sometimes.'

‘And you'd be putting that all down to him, wouldn't you? It's not like you'd ever do anything that might add to his stress.'

‘No, I wouldn't . . .' It's not said with the usual pure confidence. Pure confidence would have come back at me with an emphatic denial, and not one that tailed off into something uncommonly like doubt.

‘So, um, on a different topic, are you getting much use for “Eye of the Tiger” at the moment?'

‘Eye of the Tiger?'

‘That song gets around, you know. You'd be surprised who I hear humming it.'

He stares at me, gives me a stare that's as impassive as he can manufacture, shrugs his shoulders. ‘Really?'

‘Yeah. Sophie tells me Zel hums it a lot of the time. And that'd have to make you think, surely. That wouldn't be what you'd want for your fuck song.'

‘Yeah, well . . .'

‘I wouldn't have thought they'd play it much on whatever Easy Listening format gets a run in her car, but there you go. Don't know where she can have picked it up. I would have seen her as more your “Sweet Caroline” or “Delilah” fan, or maybe even one of your cheatin'-heart ballad types. I could see her going for that kind of stuff. Couldn't you? All those songs about women and men and reckless affairs with bad consequences . . .'

That's as far as I can push it. It's marginally short of an open accusation. I can backtrack from here if necessary, and I'll just look like I've taken the conversation a little further down Zel's possible play list than I needed to. Perhaps I'm simply telling him his fuck song's not special enough to do the job, if everyone's out there humming it.

Or maybe not. He gives a heavy forced smile. ‘Actually, she prefers talkback.'

He confesses.

‘Look, I don't know what you know . . .' he says. ‘It's not like it's been going on a long time, okay? But, mate, when she . . .'

‘I don't think that the details are any of my business, okay?'

I tell him I'd wanted to be wrong, that it was supposed to be a stupid idea that I'd got in my head, and that the plan was for him to deny it and come up with a much better explanation for last Friday. Something frat-house, a nurse in one of the on-call rooms.

‘I'd settle for cliché with this one,' I tell him. ‘Every time.'

‘Come on,' he says. ‘Give me a break. It's frat-house enough. With the right interpretation. She's playing the role of the wife of the dean of the college. They always get sexually frustrated and sleep with a student.'

‘I can't believe . . .'

‘It's not that simple. Obviously.'

‘Oh, and because it's complex it's okay?'

It turns out it's been going on for more than two weeks, but probably less than three. It started when Zel said she could find more work for him, if he needed it, and she slipped her pager number into his pocket.

‘And I knew,' he says. ‘I knew what she was on about. There'd been . . . it was pretty clear there was some kind of interest when she turned up at the World. And, you know, she walks into that place and it changes. You can't deny that lady has an impact when she walks into a room. I hadn't expected . . . anyway, I gave her a call. We only talked the first couple of times.'

‘It's okay, you don't have to . . .'

‘No, no, I do have to. There's a lot of stuff you don't know. There's a lot of stuff I still don't know, because she doesn't really want to talk about it. But you want to know how it all adds up to me? I'm pretty sure he hasn't had external genitalia since an incident in Vietnam.'

‘What? Ron?'

A Merc pulls up at the kerb not far away. The horn sounds. Ron's in the driver's seat, waving to me.

‘How can you tell me that when I'm just about to have coffee with the guy?'

‘You're not having coffee with his external genitalia. Or is there something you're not telling me?' He gives that hur-hur-hur-hur laugh another go and says, ‘If you get a pay rise because of it, remember to tell him it has to apply to both of us.'