Quite Ugly One Morning (8 page)

‘Are you sitting comfortably?’

Parlabane smiled, cradling his tomato juice and leaning back against the wall, one foot pulled up on the bench beside him. They were in one of the more shadowy caverns of Bannerman’s in the Cowgate, quite the most conducively conspiratorial drinking establishment Parlabane had ever seen. It was like a rabbit warren beneath the belly of the Old Town, a haphazard network of caves and hollows. They sat alone in their cavern, their words dulled and absorbed by the ancient stone of the walls.

There had been a look of, well, at least acknowledgement in Parlabane’s eyes when she appeared, looking a rejuvenated being compared to the pile of damp washing he had seen the night before.

She had undergone a spontaneous self-deconstruction whilst attempting to get dressed and ready to meet him, by which she questioned the motives, semiotics and possible intentions behind every considered article of clothing. It always felt great to get into something attractive after a night on-call, an indulgent glance at herself in the mirror reassuring her that the nocturnal labours hadn’t done any permanent or at least visible damage. It was a feeling of bouncing back. But why the black lycra skirt as opposed to the comfortable and even business-like culottes? Why the light – and let’s face it, practically see-through – black blouse and not a white cotton one or even a nice T-shirt? And make-up – she didn’t wear it very often and certainly never for going out in the afternoon.

She wanted to make a good impression. Nothing wrong with that. And she had every right to look good just for herself and the confidence it gave her. Going to an effort didn’t mean anything.

Except that it did.

Whatever she told herself, she still knew that the fact she was meeting him was governing her thoughts. She didn’t have any daft, girlish feelings, she just knew that something made
her want to look good around him. And
that
didn’t have to mean anything, yet.

‘It’s just that this might be a bit of an epic,’ she explained. ‘I feel that I have to give you the big picture because what I pick out as highlights might miss something you could consider important. I mean, I could tell you straight out that he had a gambling problem – that’s the big juicy bit – but unless you know some more about him . . . I don’t know, I’m not sure it should be taken out of context.’

‘Well, I’ve got nowhere else to go.’

‘Very well. I did my training here, Edinburgh University. There’s a surprise, huh? Firmly established as third choice among England’s upper middle classes to educate their offspring. In my case, as in many, it was the consolation prize for not getting into Oxbridge. No dreaming spires and no punting, but it’s got plenty of history and the natives are terribly decent as opposed to that unruly Glasgow place. I think many of them see it as a kind of drifted satellite city of the Home Counties with different architecture, and as many of them stay here for years without going north of Jenners or south of Marchmont, it’s probably possible to keep up the pretence. If you drink in the right bars you can even avoid hearing a local accent that would spoil the effect.’

Parlabane blinked slowly in slight incredulity.

‘You could be Scottish Watch’s first English recruit at this rate. Whatever happened to the
United
Kingdom?’

Sarah sipped at her glass of tonic water and shook her head.

‘Just distancing myself from my past. I’m quite good at that. What I’m saying is that I was one of that crowd. Public school boys and jolly hockey sticks girls thinking we were academic geniuses by day and the hell-raising élite by night. We were boorish, arrogant, obnoxious, immature . . . just typical medics, really. I suppose I’m trying to offer some explanation for why I got involved with Jeremy in the first place, give you an idea of what kind of person I was to be impressed by someone like him. Everything I’m about to tell you . . . everything about medics, about doctors . . . that was me, Jack. Fully signed up for all of it until maybe three or four years ago.

‘I met him when I was in my fourth year, when he was in his first junior job. He was two years older than me, but he had
left school at seventeen to my nineteen, and had taken seven years to my five to complete training because he had done a BSc after second year. It’s what you do if you either want to procrastinate or are an incurable academic over-achiever. Jeremy was the latter. He came from one of these Edinburgh medical dynasties – the place is full of them. Generations of doctors, trained here, working here. His father is Professor Ponsonby, head of the cardiac unit at the RVI, his mother’s a consultant at the Western, his sister Veronica is an SHO in Livingston, his grandfather was a professor of medicine too . . . The closest thing this family could have had to a black sheep would have been if Jeremy or Veronica had gone into surgery.

‘What I’m saying is that Jeremy didn’t spend much time staring at the stars and wondering what he would be when he grew up, and medicine is full of people like that. The word vocation is redundant. Hundreds of them, for whom it was just understood that that was where their future would lie. And there isn’t much in the way of rebellion or resentment – it’s bred far too deep.’

‘Plus they know their name will open doors, presumably,’ Parlabane offered.

‘Well, yes. Their name will also carry responsibility and expectations, but it’s still less daunting than venturing into the unknown world outside. And as well as the medical dynasties there’s the academics, who consider it a straight choice between medicine and law when they leave school, as everything else is for those less gifted than themselves; with such intelligence and qualifications, any lesser career would be a pointless waste. That was me, by the way.’

Sarah sipped at her drink and looked Parlabane in the eye.

‘The point is that medicine is full of people who went into it for all the wrong reasons,’ she continued. ‘Well, maybe not entirely the
wrong
reasons, as anyone who goes into it to “save lives and cure the sick” is too dangerously naive to be allowed to practice. But still not enough of the right ones. For me it was a career path, an academic route to pursue. For people like Jeremy there isn’t even that element of choice. It was simply what he was born to do.

‘Anyway, he was impressive, a catch. My whole world was medicine and this guy was on his way to the top of it. Older,
more experienced, a known name, and doing the job for real – you spend so much time worrying about whether you’re going to make it to that part, and whether you’ll be able to handle it if you do, that someone already there commands great respect. So for him to show an interest in me felt all the more complimentary. And with him being from this big Edinburgh medical family, I thought I was really arriving. I wasn’t just looking at a career in medicine here, I was
chosen
now, I was on my way to the
inside.
Taken to the right drinks parties, the right social gatherings, the right “at homes”. Regular dinners at the Ponsonbys’ in Morningside, first-name terms with all the major medical bods before I was even in my first house job.

‘We went out for almost two years, and got married a fortnight after my graduation; time for a brief honeymoon before my first Junior House Officer post. We bought a flat in Bruntsfield. It’s near the RVI, near the university, and there and Marchmont are where every bloody junior doctor in the city lives. The ones who consider themselves alternative live in Stockbridge along with the lawyers and coke dealers.

‘There were two more doctors in our close. You’d bump into colleagues in the supermarket, see them in the street, the restaurants, all a happy wee medical community. There’s a couple of hateful wine bars up that way. I doubt you’d ever have call or reason to go into them, but if you do and you feel ill – which is likely – don’t ask if there’s a doctor in the house, as you’ll get crushed to death in the ensuing stampede.’

Sarah laughed bitterly to herself.

‘You all live around there as students. You move into a nicer street once you’re qualified. And then once you’re a consultant you move half a mile down the hill to Morningside.’

She shook her head and gulped at her drink.

‘Anyway, married life didn’t get off to a great start, as I was working an illegal two-in-five rota for the first six months and a one-in-three the next. Combine that with Jeremy’s one-in-four and you’re lucky if there’s two nights of any week that you’re both sleeping in the same bed. Plus Jeremy was constantly studying for the two-part Royal College of Physicians membership exam by this time, which took precedence over spending “quality time” with his new wife. We had all our lives to spend together, for God’s sake, whereas the MRCP was urgent.’

‘Is there a time limit on it, then?’ Parlabane asked, pulling his other foot up on to the bench and crossing his other leg beneath his knee.

‘There’s a limit to the number of attempts you can make to get each part, usually four. They hit you for between two and three hundred quid for each attempt, and there are those malcontents who would suggest that there might be a conflict of interest generated by the fact that first-time passes don’t make the Colleges as much money, but I digress. The attempt limit wasn’t the reason for Jeremy’s urgency. It’s a race, you see.’

Parlabane clearly didn’t.

‘When you’re in school you can get As and Bs, even percentages; you can know you got a higher mark than the rest of the class. In university medicine you can get merit certificates, passes with commendation, passes with distinction, even prizes, again letting you know how you shape up against the competition. Once you’re into the post-graduate world – things like the MRCP, or the FRCA, or the FRCS – they only tell you whether you passed or failed. You don’t find out whether you passed with fifty-one percent or ninety-one percent, and that drives them bloody nuts. So the only way to carryon the academic pee-the-highest, mine’s-bigger-than-yours contest is to get the qualifications in the fastest possible time.’

‘But don’t you need a certain amount of – how would you put it –
clinical
experience to pass these things?’

Sarah laughed. ‘One of the first things you learn at medical school, Jack, is that the exams never
ever
test anything you will encounter in a practical context. It’s always the periphery, the obscurities that you get asked about. And the result is that the system churns out junior doctors who have paid bugger-all attention to the meat and two veg medicine they will find themselves up to their necks in from day one. The favoured medical cliché – and we love our clichés – is that when they hear hooves they look for zebras instead of horses. However, post-grad, the exams are broken up into parts: two for medicine, three for anaesthetics . . .’

‘Why does it have three?’

‘It’s the new kid on the block, with a chip on its shoulder and a point to prove. It needs to have one more part than the others to demonstrate that it’s even more fartily academic than
they are. Anyway, you don’t sit all the parts then find out you’ve passed or failed – you need to pass the first before you progress to studying for the second, and so on. The idea, the theory, is that you are indeed supposed to have that parallel degree of clinical experience you mentioned. What’s the point of a doctor who got the MRCP in record time but can’t spot a sickie if they’re dying in front of him?’

‘Not much, I would have thought, but I am a lay person.’

‘Indeed you are. The theory is fine. The problem is that in practice, the higher echelons are filled with guys like Jeremy a few years down the line; people who are impressed with that sort of obsessive competitiveness, and therefore reward and consequently encourage it. So the theory gets forgotten, and no one cares whether you’re a dreadful doctor, as long as you whizzed through the Membership or the Fellowship or whatever. Reciprocally, no-one cares whether you’re a great doctor if you struggle with the exams.’

‘So did Jeremy win his race?’

‘Of course. Passed both parts first time. Made his family very proud.’

‘But not you.’

‘We had a fight the night he found out he passed part two. He sensed I wasn’t knocking him over with congratulations and I told him why. I said I couldn’t bring myself to celebrate his achievement unreservedly because I felt it had come at a price. He had paid me so little attention for months because of this exam and I was suddenly supposed to put on my party frock and be full of the joys now that he was ready to come out and play again. I refused to come out that night, sent him off to the pub on his own to celebrate with his churns, whom he presumably told I was on-call.

‘I was supposed to have understood the importance of his endeavours and been the supportive wife during those months, then looked on in silent, glowing joy at my wonderful husband’s achievement, secretly content with my own, small part in it. And I soon realised that was the template.

‘He never forgave me for that night. I think it was the first time he hadn’t got his way, got exactly what he wanted; the first time life hadn’t served up what he’d ordered. Maybe that’s what triggered the self-destructive streak. I’ve often wanted to ask the Ponsonbys whether Jeremy held his breath as a child when he didn’t get his own way. Because
although his behaviour was self-destructive, he did it to hurt me.

‘The gambling started about then. I used to think it wasn’t related, but I came to realise that he was already looking for a way to hurt himself and the gambling just announced itself as a timely candidate. He went to Musselburgh races one day with “the lads”, his first time backing horses in his life, got steadily drunk and had a disastrously successful afternoon.’

‘Oh dear. How bad?’

‘About four hundred quid. He went there with sixty.’

‘Ouch.’

‘He had started off putting on a tenner on the first race, on the nose, won at fives. Couple of twenty-quid losers, then a twenty-quid winner at eleven to four. By the last race he was by all accounts so arseholed he had to get someone more sober to place his bet because the bookie offering the best odds was too scrupulous and pitying to accept a hundred-pound stake from someone in Jeremy’s condition.’