Page 13 of Beg, Borrow or Steal
Frightfully thorough
‘Okay, Little Louse,’ Libby said as she squatted down in front of Rosie. ‘This will only be a few minutes. All you have to do is be quiet as a mouse and stay behind me, then you can have a – ’
‘Kinder Egg!’ Rosie shouted, jumping up and down on the spot. Libby sighed and gently put two fingers over Rosie’s lips.
‘Quiet, remember, honey? Just like a little mouse who’s lost his voice.’
‘Okay, Mummy,’ Rosie said in a stage whisper that for some reason managed to be louder than her normal volume. ‘I’ll be as quiet as a slug.’
‘Um … great. Let’s – ’
‘A slug whose been stepped on and all his insides have shot out … so he’sdead. As quiet as that.’
‘Right … well, thatisquiet. Let’s go.’ Libby straightened and grabbed Rosie’s hand to lead her into the radiology department. They stopped outside Dr Morrison’s office. Libby positioned Rosie out of sight next to the doorframe, then widened her eyes at her and put her finger to her lips before knocking.
‘Hello?’ she heard a male voice from inside the office and felt relieved that Dr Phillips was in there too – at least he bothered to acknowledge her existence. ‘Come in.’ She pushed open the door, giving Rosie one last warning look. Rosie nodded enthusiastically and made a zipping motion with her lips.
‘Uh … hi, Dr Phillips, Dr Morrison,’ Libby said, flashing them a nervous smile that was only returned by Dr Phillips. Dr Morrison hadn’t even bothered to turn around in her chair to make eye contact. ‘I’m not here to request a scan, just to get some clarification on a report if possible.’ Still no response, and no attempt at a greeting. ‘Sorry,’ Libby added, shifting uncomfortably on her feet and chewing the side of her lip.
‘I’m not on call,’ Dr Morrison said sharply to her computer terminal as she carried on flicking through the images.
‘But … I thought.’
‘Sorry, young lady; Camilla finishes her on-call at five today and then hands over to Dr Ford,’ Dr Phillips explained. ‘She’s only here because she’s a workaholic.’ Dr Morrison flashed Dr Phillips a brief, annoyed look, then focused back on her screen, still managing to avoid eye contact with Libby.
To Libby’s horror she felt her eyes fill with stupid tears. Her day had been an uphill battle from start to finish and now, just as she thought the end was in sight, there was yet another stumbling block. For the third day in a row Dr Grantham had been waiting outside her flat at seven to drive them to the hospital, despite Libby’s protests. She wouldn’t have the money to get Brian towed until after the weekend – and that was only if the club had some big players in and her tips were good. Sitting in his car, smelling his freshly applied aftershave and seeing the way he interacted with Rosie was slowly killing her – Rosie was now rushing out of the block of flats straight to his car every morning, demanding he pick her up and then squeezing his cheeks for as long as she had access to them, none of which Dr Grantham seemed to mind.
So Libby was actually pleased to be moving on in the rotation to a different department; less time with Dr Grantham could only be a good idea given her growing obsession with him. But unfortunately, whilst the urology team she was put with was great, she was still now paired with Toby – an unashamed, complete and total wanker.
Libby hadn’t really had time to socialize at medical school and had decided to spend the five years either working or studying. What she didn’t bank on was the force of nature that was Kira. Libby and Kira had been best friends since they were babies, as were their mothers before them. They decided to do medicine together, and when Libby had her little ‘hiccup’ at seventeen, Kira hadn’t wanted to start without her. She’d shrugged off Libby’s protests, arguing that she needed to do the science conversion course anyway, and then delayed another year to backpack all over the world. Kira worked in Africa and India, doing everything from building wells to teaching English. She meditated in Nepalese monasteries and took the opportunity to do every other crazy Kira-esque thing she could think of, before starting at St George’s with Libby. Libby had Rosie after her A-levels, then worked to save up before starting the course. That money, together with the grants and bursaries she’d fought for helped to cover her fees, but she’d have to pay most of it back eventually, and it certainly didn’t cover living expenses.
Nobody at their medical school knew how Libby made her money except Kira. As Kira was incurably social she insisted that Libby’s single-parent status was not going to mean all work and no play. She decided that Libby’s social life would be her responsibility. She made her sit with everyone at lunch most days, and even, albeit rarely, managed to drag her out to the student bar a few times a year. (Kira, being pushy in the extreme, had somehow managed to enlist Libby’s parents to extra babysitting duties in order that Libby could ‘have a life’. As Libby’s mum and dad were already worried that their bright and previously carefree daughter would never ‘have a life’ again after getting pregnant at seventeen, they were the perfect targets for Kira’s emotional blackmail. She even recruited her own mum as the babysitting contingency plan for if Libby’s parents were busy.)
So, through Kira, Libby was involved in her year to some extent. A single teenage mother is a rarity at medical school and she was a source of fascination to the other students. Of course guys made passes at her – men had been interested in Libby to an unhealthy degree for many years by that point – but once her daughter’s existence became widely known, and she had rebuffed any man brave enough to approach her, these approaches became much rarer, which frankly was a relief. The only really persistent bloke was Toby. He was another mature student, having done a degree in biomedical sciences before starting medical school, and very popular with the other girls in their year, despite his obnoxious personality. Libby could not stand him; he was always staring at her, sitting too close to her in lectures, and giving her significant looks whenever he mentioned ‘The One’ – a woman he would eventually settle down with after she had ‘tamed the wild beast’ (his words).
Libby couldn’t really understand his interest; it wasn’t as if he didn’t have his pick of the other, less complicated, students. One night a few months ago he had tried to kiss her, telling her magnanimously that he was ‘ready to be tied down now’ and had ‘sown his wild oats’. When Libby politely declined, things got ugly. He told her she was lucky he’d given her a chance, that nobody was going to want a ‘used-up slag who got herself up the duff as a teenager’. Libby had shrugged and taken that on the chin. It wasn’t the first time she’d been called a slut after turning a man down (always an ironic turn of events), and in her line of work she was used to people judging her.
The only problem was that the abuse didn’t just stop with insults. Toby then made it his mission to show Libby up whenever he could. She was in the same dissection group as him and he deliberately sabotaged her in front of the tutors at every opportunity. A prime example being when hethrewthe brain at her across the table when the tutor’s back was turned. Of course, not being prepared for an actual human brain to come flying towards her, and not even wearing gloves, she had dropped it. She was too shocked to defend herself when Toby had rolled his eyes telling her to ‘be careful’ when the appalled tutor turned back around.
And the fact they were now working with live patients was not, apparently, going to deter him from his mission to make her life a misery. The very first morning on the urology ward Toby told her that the registrar had asked that she examine the prostate of one of the patients. Libby had no reason to be suspicious. After all, they were on a ward where prostates and external genitalia were their bread and butter. She went and gave the patient a rectal examination. He had looked slightly baffled when she asked for his consent prior to the procedure, but she forged ahead anyway.
‘You’re frightfully thorough at this hospital aren’t you?’ the patient had commented after she’d finished.
‘No, honestly,’ she reassured him. ‘It’s absolutely standard procedure.’
When the ward round started and they skipped over the patient she had seen earlier, she tried to stop the consultant surgeon, who happened to be Dr Grantham’s friend, Mr Pavlos Martakis.
‘That’s not one of mine,’ he’d told her. ‘He’s a max fax case – wrong end I’m afraid.’
Libby had shot Toby a furious look but he just smirked, saying: ‘Oh well, you must have misheard the bed number.’
Then today the patient list went missing after the ward round. It had all her jobs written on it and she knew Toby had taken it. She’d had to go back through all the notes to find out what needed to be done, and had been late to pick Rosie up.
After getting Rosie from the nursery and hurrying back to the ward she had found Toby sauntering down the corridor, having finished up for the day, and swallowed her pride to ask him if he would discuss the results of the scan for her. He owed her that, seeing as she wouldn’t be late if it hadn’t been for him stealing her list, and he had been the one to insist they sort out the report for the registrar anyway, proclaiming it to be ‘a valuable learning opportunity – don’t you think Libby?’ All she could do was nod, even though she knew from experience that it was totally inappropriate for a medical student to attempt something like that. But when she practically begged him to go down to the x-ray department instead of her he’d just sneered down at her and Rosie.
‘I’ve donemyfair share of the work today thanks,’ he said. ‘If you can’t manage to get everything done at this stage then maybe …’
‘It’s fine,’ she’d snapped, pulling Rosie away before the little girl could kick him in the shin (it wouldn’t be the first time). ‘I’ll sort it.’
