It sounded pretty awful if I described it to anyone, but it worked. I could keep my marks up this way, and get enough sleep, too.
What I hadn’t expected was to find someone else sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea and a paper when I went downstairs at six on Sunday morning, tea bag in my hand.
“Hi, Angie,” I said sleepily, putting the kettle on and leaning against the pantry. I could see through the laundry to the little store room that was where Heidi and Tim slept. It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Tim for a few days. “Did you sleep in Heidi’s room?” I asked Angie.
She nodded. “I can’t afford a room anywhere, so it seemed the obvious thing to do. Guess Heidi had neglected to mention she lived with her boyfriend, so it wasn’t until I found all his stuff that I realised I’d kicked him out of the bed.”
The kettle boiled, and I took a clean mug … There were clean mugs! And plates when I opened the cupboards. In fact, the sink was empty. “Oh, wow, you washed up,” I said as I poured water onto the tea bag.
“Doesn’t anyone usually do it?” Angie asked.
“No, we all wash up what we need for ourselves each time,” I said. “I’ve got used to it. I can remember early in the year, we had some sort of roster, but it rapidly became anarchy. I keep all my food in my room. You found Heidi’s food?”
Angie nodded. “Took me a little while to work out why she had cans of baked beans in her room, and a jar of coffee.”
She smiled knowingly. “Andrew came around yesterday while I was at the hospital. He’s really rather gorgeous,” she said.
“He had his son with him, too.”
I sat down at the kitchen table with my tea. “You met Henry?” I said. “What’s he like?”
She pursed her lips for a moment. “Spoilt would be my guess. His dad obviously adores him. You’ve not met him?”
I shook my head. “I’ve only seen photos of him.”
“Gruesome little child,” Angie said. “Just like my eldest. He was obsessed with plane crashes.”
“I had a thing about bones,” I admitted. “I had shoeboxes of them, scrounged off Tile Hill, in the woods. I always hoped I’d find human remains one day. I found a dead cat once and cleaned it up and reassembled the skeleton with glue.”
Angie stared at me, and I smiled in a way that I hoped was disarming, but probably just made me look like a serial killer in training.
“Think I’ll get started on my revision,” I said, standing up again.
I didn’t hit the pub that afternoon. I had no money, and had no inclination to charm strangers until they bought me beer. It wasn’t that all I could think of was Andrew, because that wasn’t true. I was managing to think about metabolic pathways, complement cascades, classical disease presentations, and neurological anatomy quite well, but when I took my five minutes per hour break my head was full of him.
Angie brought me a plate of sandwiches at one stage, and the household remained blissfully quiet. I liked this; it made it much easier to study. Perhaps it was time to move out, borrow some more money. It was only a few months until I started earning and getting through my finals would be easier if I lived somewhere quiet.
I lay back on the mattress, Kelley open on my chest. I couldn’t help it; I couldn’t stop myself from imagining living with Andrew, in his comfortable house, in his comfortable bed. I’d never lived with anyone before, I’d never wanted to, but it would be wonderful to sleep next to Andrew every night.
Reality dumped a bucket of cold water over my fantasies.
Andrew had a son whom he obviously adored; I couldn’t just move in on him, no matter how annoying my housemates were.
I was practicing my physical assessment techniques on Angie when Andrew arrived. She was proving to be far more obliging than any of my housemates had been, letting me run through the procedure over and over again, trying to get my time under thirty minutes.
Andrew was leaning against the doorframe, and he waited while I went through the process of checking Angie’s pedal pulses to finish up her circulatory system.
He knelt down beside me and took my index cards out of my hands and tossed them over his shoulder. “Start again,”
he said. “This time, instead of doing it in anatomical systems, start at the top and work down.”
“But…” I said, and he smiled at me and I couldn’t help but smile back at him.
I did what he said, checking Angie’s eyes, retinas, ear and teeth. Palpebral conjunctivas were pink. I did the neuro stuff, looking at nystagmus, pupil dilation and tracking, then moved down. Larynx wasn’t deviated, no lymph glands in her neck were palpable. Chest next: palpate, chest expansion was symmetrical, percuss, auscultate. Then her heart: aortic valve, pulmonic valve, Erb’s point, tricuspid, and mitral.
No Murphy’s punch for the kidneys. I remembered Andrew warning us he’d fail any medical student who used so barbaric a method of assessment. If we couldn’t pick a kidney infection by general assessment, apparently we shouldn’t be practicing medicine.
Lymph nodes under her arms. Angie lay down on the couch and I checked for her aorta pulse, listened for gut sounds, percussed, locating liver margins. No masses in her stomach.
Hands: pulses, sensation, strength, reflexes.
Lower limbs: pulses, reflexes, strength, sensation.
Andrew was smiling encouragingly at me when I looked up as I helped Angie to her feet. Balance, proprioception, gait.
I was done in twenty-nine minutes.
Angie seemed as excited as I was, bouncing up and down and hugging me, then she disappeared into the kitchen and I wrapped my arms around Andrew’s neck and kissed him quickly. “Have you eaten?” he asked me quietly.
“We’ve had dinner cooked for us,” I said.
Angie carried a cardboard box into the lounge room.
“Curry,” she said. “I’ve cooked rice, too, so you’ll just need to reheat it. And there’s a nice pudding in there, too.”
Andrew looked flabbergasted, and I could understand the feeling. I handed him the box and left him thanking Angie for her cooking while I ran up the stairs to grab my backpack, laptop and textbooks.
Chapter Twenty Four
The smell of curry filled the car, and it was a smell I would forever associate with England. Until I’d found ‘Dulang Thai’
the only takeaway food I’d been able to stomach had been Indian. I couldn’t believe that any one would actually eat a deep fried Mars bar. Henry had force-fed me Red Dwarf at about the same time, and Dave Lister was right; curry and lager were meant for each other. Mind you, the curries were distinctly English, too, swimming in grease, served with too much dhal, and sultanas, of all things.
“Are you starving?” I asked Matthew. “Do you need to go ahead and eat the curry now, hopefully without spilling it over my car?”
Matthew laughed. “I’m not starving. I was brought a plate of roast beef and mustard sandwiches at four this afternoon.”
He leaned forward in the car and fiddled with the radio, presumably trying to tune it to something other than Radio 3, just like Henry. “Did you have a good weekend?” he asked, sitting back up, having found Radio 1.
“Yeah,” I said. “I sorted my office out yesterday, and Henry ate all my gummi bears. Went to the movies last night, and Henry and I spent this afternoon wandering around the city some more. We start out, head somewhere that sounds exciting, and see what happens. We spent today in Whitechapel, looking at the Jack the Ripper sites. What about you?”
“Study,” Matthew said. “House was blissfully quiet because Angie kept grumping about the noise, so everyone went elsewhere to party.”