Green (46 page)

As the car pulls away from the kerb, he gives a honk of the horn and his hand comes out the window and waves. He takes the first right after the hospital, a side street that'll bring him back to the main road, and maybe we both have calls to make today. I look down at the card. Zel's number. I have to do something.

The noise from Antenatal Clinic comes out of the open double doorway at the top of the steps. There's the usual crowd of people clustering round the entrance: a couple of smokers having their last before going in (and lying about giving up), a woman six months pregnant punching a vending machine as it fails to deliver whatever she's promised the two-year-old gripping her leg. Inside, someone's name is being called.

Smokers don't seem to know that, to a non-smoker, they just about always smell of smoke or its metabolites, and those lies about giving up don't stand a chance if you've smoked the last one just outside.

I have Ron's card in my hand, with Zel's numbers on the back. I've tried sorting this out with Frank. I've talked to him. I've done the best I can, and it isn't changing a thing. If I don't talk to Zel, this'll turn bad for everybody.

Frank's judgement is out, and I have to do something.

Frank's judgement is out. It sounds as though one of Frank's headlights is out and I've taken the car to get it fixed. It's not the same. Not the same as being straightforwardly helpful, or bailing him out of the usual trouble. Every time that's been my job—every other time in the past four years when Frank's judgement has been out—I've got involved with his consent. Even with the butt photos, my plan was to talk him out of it if they got developed. But this is a new situation. There's no precedent.

I've wandered away from Antenatal Clinic, downhill towards Mater Adults' and the on-call rooms. I can think there, and make phone calls if there are phone calls to make. But I don't have to do anything, unless I definitely decide to. Then I'd call switch, say she's a doctor and I need to page her. They'd give me an outside line and I'd call the paging service and she'd call me back direct on the number of the phone in the hall. It wouldn't surprise me if she's called it before.

I stop. I put the card in my pocket. I'll talk to Frank today. This morning. One last time.

Two men come out of the on-call rooms with large bags of used sheets and towels.

‘Dirty buggers,' one of them says. ‘What if someone had called? Isn't that what they're supposed to be doing in those rooms? Waiting for emergencies?'

The other one laughs, and heaves his load up and into the already overloaded laundry cart. ‘Reckon we're done.'

One pushes, one pulls, and the cart moves up the camber of the road and down towards the opposite gutter. Exposing—right in front of me—the bins, Zel Todd's car and Zel and Frank. Zel and Frank, who are engaged in something that should be kept much more private. She's standing on the broken low wall, Frank's reclining against the car and Zel's taking to him in a way I haven't had to think about since I saw
Alien
. Any more tongue and she'll have his head slurped into a sticky cocoon within seconds. We might never need to have that talk, if Zel's using Frank to feed her young.

The noise that comes out of me is a genuine groan, and it's out before I realise it. Zel turns and, suddenly, I'm part of this. Suddenly, it's Zel and Frank again. It's not a movie and she's not an intergalactic predator looking at me as though I'm her next victim. She's horrified, just as she should be.

Her head jerks away from Frank's and she stumbles from the wall. Then he sees me, too.

‘Fuck,' he says, taking some time over it.

I go at him. ‘What do you mean “fuck”? How can you possibly be surprised? You're outside, you idiots. You're next to a road. In the Mater.'

‘Yeah, um . . .'

‘Oh, right, they came for the sheets, did they? So you figured you'd have sex against the car.'

‘No, no,' Frank says. ‘It's just a goodbye thing. Look . . .'

‘I've looked. I've seen enough.'

‘Um, yeah. Shit. Antenatal Clinic. Thanks for reminding me, mate. Lost track of time there.' He picks up his bag and pulls out his white coat. ‘Um, see you,' he says to Zel, and he's off. Across the road, into Nursing Admin, his bag trailing on the ground, one arm stuffing itself down an inside-out coat sleeve.

‘Philip,' Zel, says, in a tone of voice that tells me she's older and I'm to be talked into a respectful silence. Big mistake, Zel.

‘What the fuck do you think you're doing? Are you insane?' Not silence, nothing like it. ‘Not only is this a road in a hospital, but what the fuck are you doing with your life? Haven't you thought about your family at all? Have you thought about what you might be throwing away, about the people who are going to get hurt?'

‘Um, I really do have to go,' she says in an infuriating pastel-lipped voice, and she rearranges her hair and starts looking in her bag for her keys.

‘No. No. You can't go. You can't run away from this. Frank can behave like a complete child, but you can't.'

‘You should just mind your own business. That's what you should do.'

‘And you should sort yours out. I've got dragged into this, but I'm in it now. Right in it. So don't give that shit about “business”. You're going to listen to me, and you're going to hear just how it really is. And then you're going to sort this out.'

‘This is nothing to do with you,' she says, her voice low and hard and angry.

She turns to the car, unlocks the door. I drop my bag and I run between the bins.

‘It is to do with me,' I tell her as I jump down into the parking bay. ‘I know things you need to know.'

‘What rubbish. I'm going.' She climbs into the car, swings the door shut and turns the engine on.

I pull the passenger door open, and I'm still shouting. ‘Listen, just for one second.'

‘Away, Philip, away.' She puts it in gear.

‘It's Ron. It's Ron, fuck you. It's the stress. It's taking its toll.' I get my right leg into the car, she hits it with her bag. As she stamps on the accelerator, and just before the tyre screech drowns out all other sound, I shout, ‘Ron's masculinity is on the line. It's medical.' The car jumps from the parking bay, and No one hears me say, ‘You mean the world to him.'

Something, some part of the car, thumps into my right thigh and tosses me to the ground, the door swings open and clangs against the branch of a frangipani tree, snapping a piece of it away, and Zel is off down the road. I'm left sitting on the concrete in the last of the blue exhaust smoke.

 

*

 

‘Hey,' Frank says when he comes up to me between patients. ‘Bit of a spin-out earlier. You, me and the lady. Hadn't been banking on that.'

‘No, not much on the planning, are you?'

‘You, um, wouldn't be up for a coffee, would you?'

‘Coffee's shit here. Always has been. I don't know why you keep suggesting it.'

I walk away to pick up the next patient's file but he comes after me, like a dog that knows it's in trouble and wants to slink along showing contrition.

‘So, um,' he says, as if there's still a conversation to be had. ‘It's got a bit complicated all of this, hasn't it?'

‘A bit complicated? I might have suggested that a while back.'

‘Yeah.'

‘Come on.' Said just like an instruction to a dog.

I walk past the waiting patients, across the lino floor to the door, and Frank follows me. We go out and up the steps and across the road, across a patch of grass, on our way to nowhere in particular.

‘Hang on a sec,' he says, and we stop. I turn around and he looks at me and then past me. He smirks, he can't help himself. ‘We wouldn't have done it up against the car.'

‘Yeah, that's the issue, isn't it? Whether she was going to be happy just pushing her tongue out the back of your head, or whether she was up for more by the roadside.'

‘So, um, what do you reckon then? What are you going to do?'

‘What am I going to do? I don't know. What do I reckon? I reckon the two of you are behaving like fuckwits and you couldn't be more selfish. I reckon this is going to turn very bad. And I reckon I've tried to point that out and you haven't been particularly interested, and I've had enough. You're on your own.'

‘Yeah,' he says, and rolls his eyes. ‘But what do you really reckon? Quit holding back on me.'

‘Okay, what you don't know is that I still am holding back on you. I just gave you the mild version of how I feel about this.'

‘Okay.' This time no roll of the eyes. ‘I'm getting the picture.'

‘Really?'

‘Really. So, how did it go down there after I left?'

‘Well, there's a set of big fat tyre marks on the concrete in the parking bay. You're not exactly good at confronting issues are you, the two of you?'

‘Who is? Who likes issues?' He shakes his head. ‘This was supposed to be much more straightforward, you know. I only agreed to this on the grounds that there'd be no complications.'

‘Because that's how life works, isn't it? Maybe we should just tell Ron and Sophie what you agreed, and everyone'll be fine.'

‘It wasn't supposed to be like this.'

‘Yeah, but it was always going to be like this. And that's why I've been telling you to fix it. Now, they'll be missing us in Antenatal Clinic, so we shouldn't hang around here. We can talk about this later, if you want to talk about it.'

He nods and says, ‘Yeah,' and we go back across the grass and the road, and down the steps. The doors to the clinics slide open.

‘Either of you guys Phil Harris?' the clerk on the desk says. ‘I've got an urgent message for a Phil Harris, one of the med students.'

He tears the top sheet from his message pad and hands it to me. He's ticked the ‘please call' box and written the name Zel Todd next to it.

Frank looks at it and says, ‘That's the home number.'

‘I know it's the home number.'

‘So what are we going to do?'

‘We? I'm going to go down to the end room and I'm going to call. You're going to take the next patient. And I'll tell you what I can later.'

He looks like he wants to say more, and then he lifts the next file from the desk and calls out the name.

Zel answers after the first ring.

‘What's medical?' she says. ‘What did you mean about masculinity?'

‘It's something I found out, something I just found out today.'

‘Yes.'

‘You understand I don't want to be in this position? You understand that I know that all of this is none of my business, but I've found out some things you need to be aware of? Frank talks to me, and Ron talks to me, so I hear things.'

‘Yes. And what's happening with masculinity?'

‘It's Ron. It could be the stress. And I'm really not supposed to tell you this. I'm betraying a trust by telling you this.'

‘Yes, I know.' And she says it as if she actually does know. Her voice couldn't be more different to the way it sounded earlier.

‘I'm not supposed to tell you, but Ron doesn't know why I have to tell you. He doesn't know anything about Frank. Ron's taken the business stress pretty hard, and there were a few problems he couldn't have guessed when he took on World of Chickens. The stress, like I said, has taken its toll on a few aspects of Ron. And he finds it hard to tell you because he doesn't want to worry you and he says you mean the world to him.'

‘He said that?'

‘This morning. In the car on the way here. Ron's invested a lot in what he's made of himself. He's too proud to want to admit to you that it's not all going perfectly.'

‘But he could tell me. Why couldn't he tell me? What would he tell you instead?'

‘Because what you think matters most. He could tell me because that's not such a big deal, and because it's not my business. And some of it has a medical side to it.'

‘But all I see is him being in a bad mood at home, and not wanting to talk if I ask him about it. And getting toothache every night and now his hip problems have flared up whenever he lies down and . . .'

‘And some of the medical stuff, that's the stuff he kind of feels is putting his masculinity on the line. And I don't mean the toothache and the hip problems.'

‘What? What do you . . . masculinity . . .' There's a longer pause this time. ‘Ah, that kind of problem.'

‘Yes.'

‘A physical problem? A performance problem?'

‘That's right.'

‘Why didn't he . . .'

‘I didn't say he was a perfect communicator. There's a bit he could learn there, but he's not alone in that. And he's a good man. Stress can cause this, you know. So can other things, but something should be able to be done.'

‘Oh shit. Shit. Are you for real?'

‘For real? Why would I make any of it up?'

‘Oh shit. Oh, Philip, shit.'

 

*

 

An hour later, it all comes out.

Zel ends the call after ‘Oh, Philip, shit,' and says she wants to see me now. Has to see me now.

We've had a lecture rescheduled for eleven, so that's when I report back to Frank. He catches up with me just as we're making our early exit from Antenatal Clinic, and I tell him she's on her way.

‘On her way . . .'

‘Yeah. She'll be here any time. She wants to talk face-to-face. To me.'

‘Could be trouble.'

‘Could be anything. Take good notes.'

He rolls his white coat into a ball, stuffs it into his bag and follows the others up the path to the lecture room.

Five minutes later, Zel pulls into the patient-drop-off zone outside the hospital. There's a scratch on the passenger door from the frangipani tree, a scratch and a long shallow dent.