Chapter one- Part 1- Charlie as narrator

Chapter one

Charlie narrates

I was at one end of the long table in A&E, hiding behind a computer while looking over my list of overnight admissions. I had been warned by an incredible number of people that the consultant who reviewed the admitted patients every morning was quite the taskmaster, hard to please but easily amused by a junior’s incompetence, imagined or otherwise. It was my first night shift at this hospital. I had started working here last week, three months after passing my final exams and six years after first entering medical school. Already its ugly facade repelled me and I had realised that the one advantage of working here was that you could not see its dilapidated outside from the inside.

Drumming my fingers on the table, I willed Dr. Boss to turn up. After the ward round, I intended to go to the local McDonald’s to celebrate with an artery-clogging feast and could not bring myself to wait any longer. Hearing footsteps echo down the corridor, I stood up awkwardly, trying to appear confident and mature but not aggressively so. When I had first started clinical school, I had been hugely amused by the chest-puffing, chest-thumping sub-tribe of junior doctors, the kind that invariably falls on its face, proving that slapstick in metaphor is every bit as funny as slapstick in action. I had vowed I would dodge such a fate with quiet aplomb. Dignity, calmness and composure would flow through my veins like a steady infusion of morphine. With the footsteps arrived my hour of reckoning. Still hiding my tremulous legs behind the desk, I stood still, hugging a stack of patient notes, my armour of words.

He was younger than I had expected. Tall, dark-haired, dark glasses, long face, beady eyes that stared at me, trying to make me feel as welcome as a trespasser on his terrain.

“What was your name again?” he demanded.

“Charlotte. Everybody calls me Charlie,” I said, in what I hoped was a friendly, non-ingratiating tone.

“Well, Charlie, let’s see how you did last night,” he said. I did not like the way he said my name, managing to mock it without apparently trying to.

“Mr. Sinclair is a sixty seven year old gentleman who presented with swollen legs last night. He reports that this has been progressing over the last few days...” My voice droned on. Around two minutes into my recital, I looked up to find him still staring at me. Despite myself, I felt a little shaken. Continuing, I heard a note of doubt creep into my voice, which grew quieter and seemed to punctuate every sentence with a question-mark at the end. I dared to sneak a glance at Dr. Boss and caught him rolling his eyes. I felt punctured, my earlier sense of victory draining out of me, like spilt juice seeping into my clothes, leaving behind its unsavoured taste. My confidence now a pool on the floor, I finished Mr. Sinclair’s story.

“Is Mr. Sinclair on fluids?” asked Dr. Boss.

“Yes, I have kept him hydrated with a litre of fluid overnight, I replied.

“Wonderful. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the latest addition to our circus, little Miss Charlie the clown. Tell me, why does a man with swollen legs need more fluids?” he sneered.

“A lot of the fluid in his blood is trapped in his legs. He needs a boosting of his supplies,” I replied.

“Your knowledge of human physiology is truly astonishing. Let’s ask the hospital’s senior staff for their comments on your views at the teaching session this week, shall we? Great job, little girl,” he added, patting my head like I was five years old. I desperately wished I was that age because then I could have bitten his hand without coming to too much grief. Instead, I swallowed the lump at the back of my throat. On the pretext of pushing my fringe back, I wiped away a tear that had escaped. My McDonald’s triumph was not going to materialise after all.

That evening, as I entered the kitchen to cook (i.e. boil) some pasta, I found Emma chopping some long vegetables with tapered ends that looked like they had been specially imported by our local corner-store from some war-torn country (judging by their state). Knowing Emma, this probably meant that an excruciatingly complicated recipe was in the offing and knowing me, so was some free-loading. Some may argue that boiling pasta into a flaccid mess and then drowning it in sauce is charming in an eat-like-a-hobo-and-show-them-how-little-you-care kind of way. I'm not one of those people. Never say no to a free meal is my hobo policy of choice.

I picked up another knife and joined Emma in attacking those bruised vegetables.

"What was Dr. Boss like? Is he as bad as they say?" asked Emma in a tone that implied hopefulness for a funny story but not at my expense, of course.

“Worse. You know how, in books, the author makes the narrator say things like 'his eyes gleamed with malice'. Well, let’s just say I never thought I would actually see the real thing.”

"Awww, you poor thing," she said, reaching out and squeezing my hand. "I knew this would probably be a hard day. So I made us all a chocolate cake for dessert. Mastication for recuperation, eh?"

I grinned, feeling better already. Years of conditioning meant that, at the slightest mention of chocolate, anticipatory euphoria flooded my nervous system. Some of my patients tell me the same is true of whisky. Anyway, my doomsday scenarios involving Dr. Boss were probably far-fetched. Perhaps, by the end of my placement, I would even be doing impressions of him at dinner parties. It would make me an instant hit. He was widely despised.

“Hopefully, Maddie will be joining us to have some cake after dinner,” said Emma.

Maddie was our third and final flatmate. Tall, raven-haired and glamorous, Madeleine was nothing like us: she was training to become a surgeon, for a start. According to her, she had made up her mind when she was ten years old and had accompanied her mother to her pre-surgery clinic appointment. Her mother was a great talker at the best of times. At the appointment, there had been a bad bout of verbal diarrhea secondary to neurotic anxiety. The surgeon had told her to shut up. Maddie had been very impressed, mostly by the fact that her mother had obeyed. A man who could hush her mother was a man who was capable of great things. And thus was born Maddie’s pursuit of power. Not the story she told at her medical school interview for obvious reasons.

 “She's on a date with Mr. Ahem-ahem,” continued Emma.

"No...You’re not serious, are you? Is she actually doing this?" I asked.
"Don't be so hard on her, Charlie. Sometimes you got to do what you got to do," said Emma, ever the defender of the absent.

“Well, she has to quite literally do him in this case," I said, trying not to sound too judgemental.

 Mr. Ahem-ahem was the boss Maddie was planning on screwing in order to ‘assist’ him in all the surgeries she wanted. Maddie the helpful, assisting him both inside and outside the bedroom. Not the way she would put it. In fact, her argument had been as follows: every one of us has to suck some pompous twat’s cock anyway, metaphorically speaking, by laughing at their inanities and massaging their egos and so on and so forth. So why not take it one step further and get your hands dirty, literally speaking? To which I had replied, rather more angrily than I had wished, that while I was just as much for cock-sucking as the next person, I would rather not be paid for the pleasure. But my arguments had done nothing to sway her. As her determination grew stronger, the flirting grew more outrageous and the necklines plunged deeper. Tonight’s date had been the culmination of a long militant strategy aimed at Mr. Ahem-ahem’s balls, at times turning them blue. I heard a key turning in the door and our conversation found other avenues as Maddie joined us for cake.