Staying Alive

‘—The slightest misfire on your rocket’s trim controls—’

Trim controls, trim controls…Must have left them in my workstation. In my desk-tidy perhaps? Oh, I was forgetting; this is an analogy.

‘—and you’ll miss your destination by light years. Your ship, my friend—’

Pur-lease, Haye—I am not your friend.

‘—has yet to leave the launch pad. If you’ve any interest at all in achieving lift-off, you’ll reschedule the hospital.’

Oh yes, how I’d love to cancel an urgent investigation into a potentially life-threatening disease so I can listen to you marking me out of ten on my performance across fifteen key criteria.

‘I’ll do my best,’ I say.

He turns and walks briskly away, all things-to-do-people-to-see. I can’t believe how jaded I feel. A thirty-one-year-old burn out. Yet there’s one thing that gives me hope. I do, after all, have a dream, though not one of which Megan would approve. I’m not sure I entirely approve of it myself. This is how it goes:

Haye: Murray, something huge has come up, a gold-plated revenue opportunity and a chance to make the world a better place.

Colin: What is it, Niall?

Haye: Before I tell you, I need to know I can count on you one hundred and ten per cent. You’ll be playing on the A team, pissing with the big boys, and I need to know you’re up for it.

Colin: You know I relish a challenge, Niall. Show me your biggest executive urinal and let me hose down that porcelain.

Haye: We’ve been appointed to handle Mr Muscle.

Colin: Fantastic! Stupendous. This is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Haye: Isn’t it? We’ve got the whole lot. The kitchen spray, the bathroom cleaner, the entire kit and caboodle.

Colin: Even the oven spray, the drain cleaner and the handy orange-scented kitchen wipes?

Haye: Their entire product portfolio is ours and I believe there’s only one man who can handle it…(Unnecessarily over played dramatic pause)…Murray, this is your baby.

SFX: Manly backslaps and high fives.

It isn’t always Mr Muscle. Sometimes it’s Cif, sometimes Dettox. Other times, as a sop to my ex, it’s an as yet un-launched range of eco-friendly products that really do make the world a better as well as a cleaner and more fragrant place.

Murray: Can you believe it, Meg? Thanks to me the Midlands and the Southeast have been officially pronounced germ-free, and it’s been achieved without any increase in CFC and chlorine levels.

Megan: Oh, Murray, you really have made the planet safer for our unborn child and you’ve done it without sacrificing market share. Come here and let me smother you with kisses.

Whatever, I honestly think that being given control of a bigspending household cleaner account would give my life meaning and purpose. I imagine the factory tours where I’m shown how they mix the chemicals that cut through grease, yet leave no unsightly powdery residue. I picture myself in a white protective suit being allowed a glimpse of the aggressive solvents that, if they weren’t so busy breaking down baked-on filth, could be used by some crazed despot for his WMD programme. I dream of brainstorming sessions where I lead a crack team of marketing pros and detergent boffins in search of the Holy Grail: a multi-surface cleaner suitable for kitchens and bathrooms. It’s a question of fragrance. You may or may not have noticed, but kitchen cleaners smell entirely inappropriate when you use them in the bathroom and vice versa. It’s only a little thing, but a one-product-fits-all solution must be out there…If only they could find the right scent.

I’m rambling. My point is that, sad to say, the task—the job of Detergents Tsar—would be more than advertising. For me it would be evangelism.

seven: i have done this before, you know. that’s why i keep my nails short (#ulink_e61520f5-133b-543d-a0c4-6d44141eb801)

thursday 13 november / 9.26 a.m.

Why Saint Matthew? He started out as a tax inspector, didn’t he? Hardly a name to comfort the sick, and surely it only reminds the dying of death duties.

The place is vast; an industrial sprawl reminiscent of a Soviet uranium facility in the Siberian wastes—except somehow it ended up in east London. It must take the health budget of a third-world country just to heat and light the place.

Where’s Outpatients? Is it the same as Aamp;E or is it something different? I wonder this as I walk past a group of three old men in winceyette pyjamas smoking by a fire exit. Don’t think I’ll be asking them.

The story goes that a minor royal—the Duchess of Chingford or something—turned up to cut the ribbon on a new paediatric ward in the early nineties and she still hasn’t found her way out. Never mind pegging out on trolleys in corridors, people must die simply trying to find the right department—unless they’ve had the good sense to pack a rucksack with food, water and Kendal Mint Cake.

I’m walking around in circles. I know this because the chain smokers are looming into view again.

9.55 a.m.

By the time I find the right Outpatients I’m nearly half an hour late. I’m tired and footsore, and I’m wishing I were significant enough to qualify for Blower Mann’s corporate BUPA membership. I’m also worried that I’ve missed my slot. I shouldn’t be. This is the NHS and they’re running well behind.

My appointment is in one of Saint Matthew’s new bits. The reception area has floor to ceiling windows and a bracing view of big trees, though I think I can make out a tall chimney stack between two sycamores. Hospital incinerators always unsettle me. I know they put old bandages and stuff in them, but what else? I mean, if you’d asked the commandant of Auschwitz about his, I bet he’d have said, ‘Ach, zose zings? Zey are just for burnink ze garden rubbish und votnot.’ Hospitals bring out the paranoiac in me. I’ve seen Coma too many times. Show me a couple of doctors chatting by a coffee machine and I’ll show you a conspiracy. I’m scared of flying, but I’m terrified of hospitals. And it’s an entirely rational fear. Statistics are used to soothe the nervous flyer: you’re far more likely to get knocked down by a car and so on. But when it comes to nervous patients they’re flummoxed. Hospitals are perfectly safe—more people die in…Er…Die in…Die in what, then? Look at it this way: even if you get whacked in a car crash there’s a fair chance you won’t die in the wreckage—no, they rush you to a hospital to do that.

I badly need a distraction. I reach into my briefcase, fish out the Guardian and open it at random—‘MIRACLE’ CANCER DRUG DISCREDITED IN TRIALS. Why didn’t I buy the Daily Sport? Right now I could do with a light-hearted lap-dancers-abducted-by-aliens-for-intergalactic-sex-orgies story. Ironically, I have a sudden urge to take up smoking—nicotine might be just the ticket. Without even moving my eyes, though, I can see three NO SMOKING signs. I look at a kid in a baseball cap on the far side of the waiting area. He’s got no eyebrows, which suggests that he’s most likely bald beneath the hat. Jesus, cancer. He’s trying to read a Spider-man comic, but it’s obvious his heart isn’t in it. How old is he? Nine? Ten? He should be in school. Or bunking off. Whatever, he doesn’t deserve to be here. At least his mum is with him. I don’t often wish for my mother, but I’d like her to be with me now. What am I thinking? No, I wouldn’t. She’d be crying. When I gashed my shin at scouts she was hysterical. I needed two stitches and a tetanus. She required treatment for shock and was kept in overnight for observation. I had to catch the bus home on my own. Could she cope with cancer or, rather, with the faintest and most wafer-thin outside chance of it? Forget about it.

But I wish someone were with me.

A few weeks ago that someone would have been Megan. Situations like this bring out the best in her—her innate empathy makes her a natural Florence Nightingale. Last night I came close to calling her—I got as far as dialing the first five digits of her mobile. I couldn’t go through with it—I hate to seem needy.

The engagement ring. How needy must that have made me look? She must have found it and seen it for what it was—a cheap (six-and-a-half-grand-cheap!) shot at emotional blackmail. I picture the scene:

Megan: Jesus, Sandy, have you seen this? He thinks he can buy me. He just doesn’t get it.

Sandy: Have a heart, darling. He must be—(The rest of his answer is drowned out by…

SFX: £6,499 of diamond solitaire being flushed down a toilet.

I need that ring back—with or without Megan attached. I still have no idea how I’m going to pay for it. I’ve started buying lottery tickets—£20 blown on them today—because odds of fourteen million to one must be better than no chance at all.

Can’t think about all that now. I return to the newspaper. With eyes closed I flick past the cancer drug story. When I open them again I’m staring at RADICAL QC CAMPAIGNS FOR REFUGE and a picture of Sandy Morrison. Well, who the hell else? He’s standing outside an asylum centre in Highbury that’s facing closure. The neighbours can’t stand the place, apparently. Sandy is one of them, but he’s swimming against the NIMBY tide and is all for it. Normally I’d be sympathetic to his argument, but seeing his handsome face makes me want to round up every last refugee, load them into containers and truck them out of the country. And if a certain radical lawyer gets caught up in the mêlée and ends up being shipped to a crime-ridden tenement in Tirana…Acceptable collateral damage, if you ask me.

My mobile beeps. The receptionist glares at me and points at the MOBILE PHONES MUST BE SWITCHED OFF sign, which is competing for attention with NO SMOKING. I don’t care though—being in possession of an active mobile could be an imprisonable offence, but at least mine is dragging me from the excruciating thoughts swimming about my head. I turn away so she can’t see me lift the phone to my ear. I listen to the message. It’s Jakki: ‘Niall wants to know where you put the Schenker job-start file. Call me when you can.’

Haye was miffed when I didn’t reschedule my appointment—which guarantees me a column of fat zeros on my assessment, as well as about a dozen pesky messages on my mobile. Well, sod him. I’m having some quality me time.

In a hospital.

With some sick people.

I switch off my phone with a decisive flourish just in time to hear the receptionist call out, ‘Mr Collins?’ She’s squinting at a folder with—I presume—my name on it. ‘It’s Colin. No S,’ I say on autopilot, though I don’t know why I bother.

‘Doctor Morrissey will see you now,’ she says. ‘Third door on the left.’

Just what I need—a doctor whose namesake is pop music’s singing suicide note.

10.29 a.m.