Black Widow (36 page)

‘In a fantasy realm of infinite time and resources, maybe. Here in CID we have to make decisions according to the real world. Do you know how much money this bloody car crash has already cost us? It's become the most expensive fatal accident in the history of Highland policing. And that's all it is, hen: a fat-acc.'

Desperation's fuse burns slow. It is a gradual, drawn-out process of doors closing, options being withdrawn, possibilities disappearing, amidst a growing sense that only the negatives prevail. Then there comes a moment when you realise that your hopelessness is absolute.

My marriage was over. It ended on that car journey, when Peter confirmed what I had discovered in his medical records. I didn't consciously acknowledge it to myself right then, but something in me knew from that moment forward that there was no repairing the damage.

It wasn't merely a response to my feeling hurt at Peter's lies and betrayal, but something more fundamental: this desperate awareness of a door closing, of my hopes for becoming a mother suddenly disappearing. That was why I absolutely knew we were finished, because in that same moment I understood that I would have to move on and leave him behind.

We literally didn't speak for two days, our silence thawing only into a stiff forced civility. Eventually Peter broke the deadlock with an impassioned plea that we should rally together, delivered with a concern and sincerity that was now paradoxical in its effect upon me: the more heartfelt he sounded, the less I trusted him.

‘Marriage is for life, for decades, generations. You don't bail out because of some bumps in the road this early in the trip. It's riding these things out that brings us closer and prepares us for the long-haul together.'

And where does Courtney Jean Lang fit into our travel plans, I wanted to ask him.

In the days that followed, it shocked me how easy it became to inhabit a house and to politely negotiate everyday practicalities while feeling so utterly isolated from one another. It wasn't that different from normal, really. Peter was out most of the time, working late (or at least saying he was working late), staying up into the small hours and waking after I had left in the morning.

I started saying yes to every management request for someone to cover extra sessions for colleagues who were off sick or on annual leave. I volunteered for waiting-list initiative sessions, which ran late into the evenings and all day at weekends. I was probably working more hours than at any time since my house-officer years, my regime becoming a sad parody of the work-life balance aspirations that had driven the ‘Sexism in Surgery' blog.

I was hurting so much inside that I was starting to feel numb, as though there was a buffer between myself and the outside world. Under those circumstances I might not have expected to notice anyone else's pain, but conversely it seemed my radar was more sensitive, picking up on signals of emotional distress to which I would have previously been oblivious. Or perhaps I was drawn to help someone else with their suffering as a proxy means of dealing with my own.

I was on-call from home, with Calum Weatherson resident in the hospital as my first line of defence.

I had put my head around the door earlier in the day, checking how he was getting on with a solo case. He wasn't his usual chirpy self: tersely monosyllabic in his responses. I put it down to his feeling under pressure about doing an elective list unsupervised, or maybe he was resentful about having me look over his shoulder and thus effectively rendering it supervised after all. Trainees could get tetchy about these things, and they were never alike: some hated the thought they didn't fully have your trust, while others got jumpy if they thought you'd abandoned them.

The next time I spoke to him was when he called me at home around eleven, to tell me about an emergency that had come in: a case of peritonitis that required a laparotomy. He described the symptoms and the general health of the patient, and I decided I had better come down and take a look for myself rather than give him the nod to forge ahead on his own. It was as well that I did. When I opened the patient, there was gross faecal contamination from a perforated carcinoma. It was a total mess, and Calum didn't have the experience to deal with it.

As he stitched up for me at the end, I tried again to engage him in non-clinical conversation, but he was gloomy and joyless, barely making eye contact. I put this down to him being annoyed that I had come in and taken over, compounding his resentment about what had happened earlier in the day.

When I was content that the patient was comfortable, I checked to see whether there were any other cases in the pipeline, either needing attention immediately or likely to require my return shortly after I got into bed. There was nothing: it was set fair for a quiet night. I was about to leave when I bumped into Zeinab, one of the anaesthetic registrars. We chatted briefly about how our respective evenings were going and I mentioned how I thought Calum was in the huff with me.

‘It's probably not you. His wife was up for a consultant post down in Bristol. She was being interviewed yesterday. I'm guessing she never got it.'

I was approaching the hospital's main entrance a few minutes later, heading towards the car park, when suddenly I changed my mind. I had been relieved to learn that it wasn't something I had done that upset Calum, but the thought of going home for the night while he was resident until morning sparked something in me.

I knew what it was like to spend the night in an on-call room when there were worries troubling your soul and no work to distract you. Sleep never came on nights like those. Or maybe it was me who knew I wouldn't sleep and couldn't face the prospect of lying awake with my own troubled thoughts; me who didn't want to go home to find Peter still up, doing God knows what online; me who didn't want to have to pretend to be asleep when he finally came to bed stinking of beer and single malt.

I knocked on the door of the on-call room and opened it when Calum responded. He was sitting at the battered and Formica-peeling desk next to the bed, scrolling Twitter on a laptop. He looked surprised and a little concerned by my presence.

‘I thought you might need to talk to somebody.'

‘What? No, I'm fine. Thinking of grabbing some kip, actually.'

‘Come on, Calum. You're so conspicuously in pain that even the orthopods might notice.'

That made a scratch in the ice, at least. I closed the door and walked across to the desk, leaning with my bottom against its edge so that we were facing each other, side by side. He rolled his chair back and folded his arms.

‘I heard Megan was up for a consultant post down in Bristol. I take it the news wasn't good.'

He sighed.

‘Probably for the best,' he said.

‘It must be tough on you guys, being apart so much of the time. They say what's for you won't go past you, so maybe the right post is just waiting for her, for both of you. Or did you have your eye on Bristol too?'

He looked at me for a while before responding, like he was evaluating whether to answer at all.

‘No, I didn't. But you're getting the wrong end of the stick. She got the job.'

I didn't quite follow.

‘Right. So you're not sure you want to end up in Bristol?'

He gave a weary laugh.

‘I'm sure Bristol's great, but that's not the problem. It's that I'm not sure we want to end up with each other.'

I tried to think of reassuring things I might say, but this wasn't a young trainee in need of a pep talk. My role here, if I genuinely wanted to help, was simply to listen. I said nothing, just nodded in a way that I hoped seemed sympathetic and an invitation for him to go on.

‘We've seen so little of each other over the past two years: just weekends as long as one of us isn't on call. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but it's also true that distance provides perspective. We've been growing further and further apart.

‘Her applying for a job at pretty much the opposite end of the country: you can't miss the subtext there. We both know it's not working. It's not even like there's animosity between us. It's something far worse: indifference. We don't love each other any more. Today just made it official, somehow.'

He touched a hand to his cheek, seeming surprised to discover tears there.

‘I'm sorry,' he said with a sniff.

‘Not at all, Calum.'

‘I just realised my head has been on the verge of bursting for weeks, months, because I couldn't tell anybody about all this. You must have got more than you bargained for when you knocked on my door.'

‘I could tell you were in a bad way. I only wish you had come to me sooner.'

I reached to where his hand sat on the desk in front of the laptop and gave it a squeeze.

‘Not how us guys do it, though, is it?'

‘Not generally, no.'

‘Plus, you're probably the last person I'd have expected to understand.'

‘Why? Because I was Bladebitch? My point was never that men should be the ones who sacrifice their happiness for their partners' careers. It was about balance.'

‘I understand, but that's not what I was getting at. I meant because you've made sacrifices and bided your time and now you've got what you wanted: marriage and career on your own terms.'

Part of me wanted to laugh, and for a moment I thought I might. Instead I felt my eyes fill and a swelling in my throat.

‘Oh, Calum. You've no idea. My marriage is crumbling into dust in my hands.'

As I spoke my eyes overflowed and I thought my voice would crack, but instead it remained steady. I felt a surge running through me, a relief like Calum had just described at sharing something I had been unable to tell anyone who knew me.

‘I understood it was a risk not knowing a lot about someone before deciding to get married. What I didn't anticipate was that I would know less about him now than I did six months ago. He's a cypher, a shadow. It's not merely that I think our marriage is finished: it's that I don't think it was ever real in the first place.'

I wiped my cheeks with the back of my free hand. The other remained interlocked in his.

‘Christ, look at the pair of us.'

‘Do you need a tissue?' he asked.

‘No, I need a hug.'

I leaned into him and he stood up from the chair so that our posture wasn't so awkward. I felt his arms around my shoulders, resting my head on his chest. We stayed there for a long, comforting few seconds that I was in no hurry to see end. I'd seldom felt so much in need of human contact.

Eventually, reluctantly, I pulled away before the duration became unseemly. When I lifted my head, I found his eyes looking into mine. They stayed locked like that for a moment, then he leaned forward and kissed me.

For a moment I felt like I was falling. All kinds of instincts told me this was wrong and I tensed up, pulled away.

I could see Calum was in the early stages of being appalled at himself.

‘I'm so sorry. I don't know what…'

As he took a step back from me I felt like I was watching a ship pull away, the last ship leaving for a place I desperately needed to be.

I grabbed him by the back of his head and all but launched myself on to his lips: not passive and unready like before, but greedy, lustful and abandoned. I pressed against him, my hand holding his head to mine as my fingers tangled in his hair. I didn't want this to be an innocent snog, a tender if confused encounter between two overwrought people misinterpreting the emotion of the moment. I wanted this to go too far.

I remember unbuttoning my blouse. I remember taking his hand and pulling it down the waistband of my trousers, inside the elastic of my knickers. I remember how I bucked when he touched me. I remember all heaven broke loose.

Ali could feel the heat in her cheeks as she strode briskly to the car. There was a whooshing in her ears, like all the blood was rushing to her head, muting the sounds of the outside world and exacerbating her feeling of isolation. The fear of breaking down in front of her colleague was the hardest thing to deal with right then: that would put the tin lid on it. She'd be okay, though: crying would have been more of a danger had she been alone in her humiliation and Rodriguez was offering sympathy. The fact that she and Rodriguez had shared the ordeal would make it easier. They could drive around in a pact of silence, mutually aware of what they weren't talking about and why.

But when she got behind the wheel, everything she'd been dealing with seemed to crash in upon her and she found herself in floods of tears.

‘I just need a minute.'

‘Don't mind me.'

‘I wish I could, but you're here, aren't you? Nothing personal, but I resent letting anyone see me like this.'

‘I'm going to take a flyer on the basis that this isn't how you normally react to a setback and ask if there's something more that's troubling you.'

She was about to bat him away with the standard denials and assurances, then she figured what more did she have to lose? Plus, she already had a good sense about this guy. He was different.

‘I'm late.'

‘Late?'

It took him a moment.

‘Oh. How late?'

‘About a week.'

‘I see. And I take it you and your boyfriend don't have ambitions towards parenthood?'

‘Would it answer your question to tell you there was a burst condom and the bastard acted like it never happened? He didn't acknowledge it. Hence he's no longer my boyfriend, but I'm afraid I'm carrying his kid.'

‘Are you religious?'

It struck her as rather tangential but then she sussed where he might be going with it.

‘No. Though with my face I might as well be, given the assumptions people make. They say that down in Glasgow, if you tell folk you're an atheist, they ask if that's a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist. I don't have a moral objection to abortion, if that's what you're getting at.'