Page 6 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“You really do!” said Kiran, who had been a scrub nurse when Dell and I were core trainees at the Royal London back in 2010.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” I picked up an untouched glass of champagne from their table and took a long swig. “I’m feeling very proud.”
“So you should!” Dell and Kiran raised their own glasses. Then Dell stood up, hugging me. “You’re incredible, Carrie. And I haven’t seen you look this happy since, well…for a long time.”
Since you were with Johan, she’d managed not to say.
I made way for a couple of men from the Heynes table to walk past.
“I am happy,” I said, smiling. “Thank you.”
“I know what it took to put yourself back together.” Dell was uncharacteristically emotional. “You should be proud.”
I shrugged. One of the many things I’d learned in my career was that no matter the scale of rupture our bodies suffer, they are united by a penetrating and intrinsic desire to repair. Three days earlier, I’d helped my consultant resect a seven-hundred-gram tumor from a man in his sixties. When I’d come in yesterday the man was propped up in bed, joking with ward staff and FaceTiming his daughter in New Zealand.
That untaught ability to heal, that drive to survive, is life. I had had my rupture; I had healed. It was the natural order of things.
I made my excuses and headed off toward my donations table, in the same direction as the two men from Heynes’s table. One went to the toilet, the other to the bar. The bar-bound man was the one who’d tucked Andrew Heynes’s shirt back into his trousers as if he were Heynes’s long-suffering wife.
For a brief moment I tried to imagine the sort of world these men must inhabit: the houses abroad, the yachts, the comforting knowledge that they would never need to take the tube. The staging laparoscopy I’d performed that afternoon had been on a woman so hard up,she’d had to take four buses to get to the hospital. It was a different world.
I was still following the shirt-tucking-in man. He wasn’t heading for the bar, I realized: he was heading for my donations table, just up ahead, where Kenny, my consultant, was throwing on his dinner jacket and talking rapidly into his phone.
“I have to go,” Kenny said as I arrived. “One of my patients needs me.”
“But you’re not on call!”
“I took her stomach out yesterday and now she’s been transferred to ICU,” he called, already off. “Over to you, Carrie.”
I was left with the man from Andrew Heynes’s table. Behind him, an elderly couple had joined to form a small queue.
“Right…” I said to the man. “Plan B it is. I just need to get this card machine up and running. Then I can tell you all about the incredible work we’re going to do with this robot.”
He waved a hand, smiling, as if to say, no rush. While I wrestled with the machine, he started chatting with the couple behind him. But after a few minutes with no progress at my end, he turned back toward the table.
“You look stuck,” he said. “Can I help?”
“Do you know how to operate a card machine?”
“I have Google?”
“Oh, no, it’s OK. I’ll just…” I trailed off. “Actually, yes please,” I said. “And thank you. I am completely stuck.”
“I see that. OK, so, Carrie? Is it Carrie?”
“Yes…?”
He smiled. “Your friend yelled your name earlier when you walked past. It was hard to miss.”
“Ah, yes. That’s Dell.”
“OK. Carrie. You radio for backup. I’ll sort this machine out. Andyou can talk to the lovely couple behind me about robotic surgery, because that is something I definitely cannot do.”
With that, he came around the table and sat down. Five minutes later, the machine had taken £1,000.
“How do you know Andrew Heynes?” I asked him as we waited for our next donation. He was nice-looking in a slightly posh, British sort of way. Lots of healthy brown hair, tanned skin as if he’d just got back from the Caribbean or wherever it was the wealthy went on holiday at this time of year.
“I work for him.”
