The Family Way

She had put it down to Will witnessing stab wounds on a regular basis, for the Homerton is in Hackney, and their A & E is busy every night of the year. Now Megan felt she should have guessed that Katie was wagging her tail in the doctors’ mess during tea break. One of the first things that every medical student learns is that the average hospital has the sexual mores of a knocking shop when the fleet’s in. All those extremely young doctors and nurses working all hours of the day and night in a highly stressed environment, most of them too busy for a proper relationship – it did something to the hormones.

As part of her vocational training, Megan had done six months at the Homerton’s A & E herself, and it had done nothing for her libido. She had felt as though she was seeing the world as it really was for the first time in her life. But perhaps she had more imagination than Will and Katie.

He attempted to put his arms around her but she shrugged him off, almost baring her teeth. He really didn’t understand that it was over. How could he? He wasn’t like Megan. His parents had stayed together.

Nobody left in his home. Nobody decided to cut their losses and bolt. He had never seen the rotten, messy aftermath of fucking around.

Will had grown up as the youngest child in a tight, loving family in Hampstead Garden Suburb. That was one of the things she had loved about him. The intact, secure world that he came from, the long Sunday lunches and the gently mocking humour and the years of unbroken happiness. At weekends, and at Christmas, he took her home to his parents and they made her feel like she belonged, and she wanted to be a part of this other family, this other life, this better world.

These kids from their nuclear families made her laugh. Will thought he would always be forgiven, he thought that trust could never be broken and love could never be pissed away. Like all the saps from happy homes, Will believed in his right to a happy ending.

But she snapped the suitcase shut, hefted it from their bed and placed it at his feet.

‘Megan? Come on. Please.’

She saw him now as the rather pathetic figure he had always been. Will was one of those good-looking short guys who are destined to a life of discontent. Sweet enough but totally unreliable, bright but lazy, socially charming but academically listless, he truly wasn’t cut out for a career in medicine. He desperately wanted to be, and his parents – a silvery, gym-fit eye surgeon father and a blonde, well-preserved paediatrician mother – desperately wanted him to be, but during the long years of training their good-looking boy had struggled at every stage.

Will had been one of the unhappy minority of medical students who have to resit their finals, finally scraping a pass only to discover that dealing with death, sickness and gore on a daily basis gave him a funny tummy, and minor league depression. Even his depression was half-hearted. Now a part of Megan wanted to strangle him. But she also felt sorry for him. Poor Will. He was wrong for this life. Just as he was wrong for her.

And there was something else he was wrong about. It was true that she was not led around by a part of her anatomy, the way Will’s penis apparently dragged him around like an insane tour guide, taking him to places he had never in a million years planned to visit.

But there were times when Megan’s craving for that kind of human contact was just as urgent. There were days when her yearning – for love, for sex, for something better than both – was far stronger than anything Will could have felt when he bent Katie over in the darkened doctors’ mess at three in the morning. She had a biological imperative of her own.

The big difference was that Will’s craving was determined by a little pink courgette that was on call twenty-four hours a day, vulnerable to the whim of anything in a mini-skirt that took a shine to him. And when it came, Megan’s craving was determined by something far more powerful than that.

It was on one of those craving nights, about two weeks after she had sent Will home to his bitterly disappointed parents in Hampstead Garden Suburb, that Megan went to a party for the first time in ages, and met a young Australian who, after taking a look at the world, was soon to go home to sun and surf, Sydney and his girlfriend.

What was his name again? It didn’t really matter now. She was never going to see him again.

Where Will was small, dark, with cheekbones that really belonged on a woman, the man at the party was tall, athletic, with a nose that had been broken twice playing rugby in college, and once falling off a bar stool in Earls Court.

Not really Megan’s type at all.

But then look what her type had done to her.

Cat Jewell loved her life.

Every time she entered her Thames-side flat, Tower Bridge glittering just for her beyond her windows, it felt like she was taking a little holiday from the world.

Almost twenty years after leaving home, she had finally found a place of stillness and silence and fabulous riverside views, a place that felt like the home she had been looking for all these years.

In an underground car park, there was her silver Mercedes-Benz SLK, and although her brother-in-law Paulo, who knew about these things, made gentle fun of her – ‘That’s not a sports car, Cat, it’s a hairdryer’ – she loved zipping about town in a car that, rather like her life, was built for two. At the very most.

It was true that her flat was the smallest one in the riverside block, and the car was five years old and etched with a beading of rust. But these things filled her with a quiet pride. They belonged to her. She had worked for them. After escaping from the prison of her childhood, she had made a life for herself.

When she had come back to London after university, the woman who gave Cat her first proper job told her that you could get anything in this town, but sometimes you had to wait a while for a good apartment and true love. At thirty-six, she finally had the apartment. And she believed she also had the man.

Over the years Cat had had her fair share of sloppy drunks, premature ejaculators and the secretly married – on one memorable occasion, all on the same date – but now she had Rory, and she couldn’t imagine being with anyone else.

Cat had met him when he was teaching Megan wado ryu karate. He was standing in the corner at a party celebrating Megan’s end of term at medical school, and Cat had taken pity on him. You could tell he didn’t have it in him to start a conversation with anyone.

To Cat he had seemed an unlikely martial artist – soft-spoken, socially awkward, no swagger about him. Then as the party rapidly degenerated into what Megan said was a typical med school do, full of legless nurses and young doctors off their faces on half an E, Rory explained to Cat how he came to the martial arts.

‘I was bullied at school. The tough guys didn’t like me for some reason. They were always pushing me around. Then one day they went too far. I had concussion, broken ribs, a real mess.’

‘So you decided to learn – what is it? – kung fu?’

‘Karate. Wado ryu karate. And I enjoyed it. And I was good at it. And soon nobody pushed me around any more.’

‘And you mashed up the bullies?’

He grimaced, wrinkling his nose, and she realised she liked this man. ‘It doesn’t really work like that.’

Thirty years on, you could still glimpse the quiet, bullied kid he had once been. Despite his job, all those days spent teaching people to kick and punch and block, there was a real gentleness about him. A strong but gentle man. The kind of man you might want to have children with, if you were the kind of woman who wanted children.

Which Cat Jewell was most certainly not.

Rory’s body was fit and hard from the endless hours of wado ryu karate, but there was no disguising the inner wariness of a divorced man in his forties. He had done the whole happy families bit for so long, it hadn’t worked out, and he was in no rush to do it all again. He had been there, done that, and was still paying the child support. And that was fine by Cat.

Rory was more than ten years older than Cat, living across town in Notting Hill with a son who came to stay, usually when he had argued with his mother and stepfather.

Since his divorce, Rory had dated plenty of women who all seemed to have the alarms ringing on their biological clocks – women in their early thirties who had yet to meet Mr Right, women in their late thirties who had met Mr Right only for him to turn out to be Mr Right Bastard. It was too much. The last thing a man wanted to hear about on the third date was how much the woman wanted a husband and a baby. It would turn off any man. Especially a divorced man. After all of that, Cat was a sweet relief.

She didn’t want him for a husband, or a father. She loved her life, and didn’t need some ageing Prince Charming to change it. If their relationship was going nowhere, then that was fine. Because they were both happy with the place that it had arrived at.

And that was just as well, because Rory wasn’t in the position to give any woman a baby. Cat had heard all about it the night, a month after Megan’s party, that they had slept together for the first time.

‘I’ll wear a condom if you want me to, Cat. But there’s not really the need.’

She stared at him from the other side of the bed, not trusting him and wondering what line she was being spun.

‘I mean, I’ll wear a condom if you want me to. Of course I will. But you don’t have to worry about getting pregnant.’

He wasn’t going to promise to pull out before he came, was he? Yeah, right. And the cheque’s in the post.

‘I’ve had the cut,’ Rory said.

‘What?’

‘The snip, the cut, the operation. You know. A vasectomy.’

For some reason she knew he was telling the truth. There was just something about the way he hung his head, smiling ruefully, saying the words that she knew he must have rehearsed.

‘I had it just before my marriage broke up. My wife and I – well, things were bad. We were both getting older. We knew we didn’t want any more children. So I had it done. And then she got pregnant by her tennis coach.’ The rueful smile. ‘So it was perfect timing, really.’

‘Did it hurt?’

‘A bit like getting your balls caught in a nutcracker.’