The Family Way

‘You look good, Jess.’

‘And you look worn out. Nobody would guess that I’m the ill one.’

‘You’re not ill!’

‘Got this bloody test coming up. Where they drill a hole through your belly button, for God’s sake.’

‘The laparoscopy. Who’s doing it?’

Jessica named an obstetrician and an address on Wimpole Street.

‘He’s good,’ Megan said. ‘You’ll be fine. Everything okay with Paulo’s sperm?’

A businessman at the next table turned to look at them. Megan stared back at him until he looked away.

‘There’s a slight mobility problem.’

‘Motility problem. That’s not the end of the world. It just means some of them are lazy little buggers. You would be amazed what they can do with lazy sperm these days.’

The businessman stared at them, shook his head, and signalled for his bill.

‘I’m not so worried about Paulo.’ Jessica idly ran her fingers through some spilled sugar on the table in front of her. ‘What I’m worried about is me, and what they are going to find when they cut me open.’

Megan had her own ideas about what they might find when they looked inside her sister. But she smiled, taking her sister’s sugar-coated hands in her own, saying nothing.

‘I feel like I’ve got something wrong with me, Meg.’

‘You’re lovely. There’s nothing wrong with you.’ Megan shook her head. Nobody who looked like her sister should ever feel this sad. ‘Look at you, Jess.’

‘I feel defective.’ Jessica gently released herself from Megan’s grip, and considered the small crystals of sugar stuck to her fingertips. ‘That I don’t work the way I should work.’ She carefully placed her fingers in her mouth, and grimaced, as if the taste wasn’t sweet at all.

‘You and Paulo are going to have a beautiful baby, and you’re going to be the best mother in the world.’

The waitress arrived with Jessica’s pasta and Megan’s salad, and that’s when the wave of nausea struck. Megan pushed back her chair, shoved her way through the crowded café, knocking aside an authentically French waiter, and just about made it to the toilet before she threw up.

Back at the table, Jessica hadn’t touched her lunch.

‘What’s wrong with you, Megan?’

‘Nothing.’

Jessica stared at her with a sullen stubbornness that Megan knew from their childhood.

‘What is it?’

‘Just really tired, that’s all. Working too hard, I guess. It’s nothing. Eat your pasta.’

Megan couldn’t tell her sister.

Jessica had to be protected from this secret, more than she had ever needed to be protected from anything.

How could she ever tell Jessica? Megan’s baby would only break her heart.

It wasn’t as though she was planning to keep it.

‘I tell you, doctor – I’m so knackered today I ain’t hardly got the energy to light up.’

Megan soon understood why the other doctors were reluctant to make house visits.

It was hardly ever the truly sick and infirm that demanded a doctor come to their door. The pensioner crippled with arthritis, the single mum with a disabled child, the middle-aged woman who had just been told that there were cancer cells throughout her body – these people somehow struggled to the overcrowded waiting room of the surgery.

The ones who called you out were invariably the loud ones who talked a lot about their rights, the ones who managed to be both self-pitying and egocentric. Like Mrs Marley.

She was a large woman in a small council flat in the bleak heart of Sunny View, one of the most notorious estates in London. If you didn’t live among these concrete warrens, then you didn’t venture into the Sunny View Estate unless you were buying drugs, selling drugs or making a concerned documentary. Apart from summer, when the annual riots came round, even the police gave the Sunny View Estate a wide berth. Megan didn’t have that option.

She had been frightened before. During her year as a hospital house officer she had spent six months attached to a consultant at the Royal Free, and then six months working in casualty at the Homerton.

The Royal Free was a breeze – her consultant, a paediatrician, was a kind and generous man, and the children of Highgate and Hampstead and Belsize Park were mostly beautifully behaved little children who wanted Megan to read them Harry Potter. But casualty at the Homerton was another world.

After the first shift Megan felt that she had seen more of the world than she ever wanted – stabbed teenagers, beaten wives, mangled bodies pulled from car wrecks. Meat porters with hooks in their heads, pub drinkers who had been glassed at closing time, drug entrepreneurs who had been shot in the face by a business rival.

It was Megan’s responsibility to assess the level of injury when the patients crawled, hobbled or were carried in. Seeing those wounds and that misery, and having to make an instant judgement about what needed to be done – that was as scared as she had ever been. Somehow walking through the Sunny View Estate to see Mrs Marley and her sick child was worse. How could that be? Hormones, Megan thought. It’s just your hormones going barmy.

At the foot of the stairwell to Mrs Marley’s flat, a group of teenagers were loitering. With their unearthly white skin and hooded tops, they looked like something out of a Tolkien nightmare. They didn’t say anything when Megan passed through them, just smirked and leered with their generic contempt and loathing. They stank of fast food and dope – a sweet, rotting smell coming from under those hoods.

‘You look a bit young to me, darling,’ Mrs Marley said suspiciously. ‘Are you sure you’re a proper doctor?’

Megan was impressed. Most people never questioned her authority. ‘I’m a GP registrar.’

‘What’s that then?’

‘I have to do a year under supervision before I become fully registered.’

Mrs Marley narrowed her eyes. ‘Next time I want a proper quack. I know my rights.’

‘What appears to be the problem?’ said Megan.

The problem was the woman’s daughter. An impossibly cute three-year-old – how do such repulsive adults produce such gorgeous children? – who lay listlessly on the sofa, staring at a Mister Man DVD. Mr Happy was having the smile wiped off his yellow face by all the other inhabitants of Mister Town. Megan knew the feeling.

She examined the child. Her temperature was high, but everything else seemed to be normal. Megan saw she was wearing small diamond studs in her ears. They couldn’t wait for their children to grow up on the Sunny View Estate, although with their casual clothes and recreational drugs and loud music, the Sunny View adults seemed to stew in a state of perpetual adolescence.

‘What’s your name?’ Megan said, pushing the child’s hair from her moist forehead.

‘Daisy, miss.’

‘I think you’ve got a bit of a fever, Daisy.’

‘I’ve got a kitty-cat.’