Transition (38 page)

Another doctor I haven’t seen before arrives after lunch. She is a solid, square-set woman with no-nonsense glasses and a
mass of bleached blonde hair swept up and gathered in a bun from which a variety of curled wisps have escaped. Caught in the
afternoon sun flooding into the room, they look like solar flares.

She treats me like an idiot. She speaks very slowly and carefully and asks me – I am pretty sure – did something bad happen to
me? I think I am right in nodding, indicating that it did. She asks me if I would like to come with her so that we can talk
about it somewhere else. I try to make it clear that right here in the security and comfort of my own room is just fine but
she looks very concerned and talks over my halting attempts at her language and says we’ll go to her office.

I try to protest but eventually she calls on an orderly and, over my protests that this is tantamount to another assault,
I am helped into a wheelchair and taken along the corridor, down to the ground floor in a large, creakily protesting lift
and along the corridor underneath the one we just left until we get to what I assume is her office, situated, if my navigational
skills have not entirely deserted me, somewhere close to the day room where the usual cast of droolers, slack-jaws and incontinence-pad
habitués will be congregating about now to argue over the choice of afternoon TV channel.

She thanks the orderly, closes the door behind her and after some smiles and soothing words she sits me to the side of her
desk while she moves her chair so that we are sitting quite close together at the corner of the desk. She produces two dolls
from a drawer. The dolls look as though they have been knitted from vaguely flesh-coloured wool. One is dressed like a girl,
one like a boy and they both have blank faces. She hands me the girl doll for some reason and seems to want me to use it to
indicate where I might have been touched when the interfering miscreant came to my room last night.

I sigh, lift up the skirt of the girl doll – at least it is not embarrassingly anatomically correct, with only a little sewn
line to indicate the female genital area – and point at its crotch. She holds the male doll up and asks do I want it as well?
I nod and she hands me the male doll.

I indicate on it as well where I was touched, which seems to confuse her. She leans forward and seems as if she wants to take
the dolls for herself and show me what she thinks must have happened, but then stops herself. I begin to use the two dolls
to show her what actually occurred, then hold up the girl doll and ask – as slowly as she has been talking to me – if she has
another male doll. She looks uncertain at first, then takes the girl doll away, swapping it for another male doll.

I use a box of handkerchiefs on her desk as a makeshift bed for one of the dolls and point from it to me a couple of times
so that there is no ambiguity about what is going on; that’s me asleep in my bed. I even mime sleeping. Then I use the second
male doll to indicate it walking along, entering my room and approaching the bed. At this point it occurs to me that I am
not absolutely certain that the person who did the attempted interfering was indeed male. I did not see them clearly enough
and could not tell from the touch of their hand, the feel of their skin or their smell what gender they might have been. I
just assumed it was a man.

I show the second male doll reaching over the first, sleeping one and briefly touching it around its genitals, then the bed-bound
one sitting up quickly and shouting while the second doll startles and runs away. I lay the second doll down on the desk and
spread my arms, indicating that the little show is over.

The broad lady doctor sits looking thoughtful and makes some more soothing noises. She appears to be thinking. I pick up the
second doll and sit it on my knee, crossing its legs as it sits there.

From what I can tell, the lady doctor seems to be questioning my version of events, although on what authority I am at a loss
to tell. Is there another, conflicting account? I wouldn’t have thought so!

I take the doll on my lap in both hands. Is the doctor saying what I think she is? Is she saying that this did not, could
not have happened the way that I say that it did? How dare she? Who does she think she is? She wasn’t there! I had hoped that
at least I might be believed. Does she think I would bother to make something like this up? An injustice upon an assault!
I can feel my hands tightening into fists.

Meanwhile, above our heads, there is the sound of some commotion: shouting and a series of small thumps followed by a large,
ragged one. More distant shouting. It is a warm day and the window of the doctor’s room is lying half open. Outside, I can
hear birdsong and leaves rustling in the wind. That and the shouting coming from upstairs.

You are sure it was another person doing this? the doctor appears to be asking. I nod and say “Yes!” with some considerable
emphasis. Above our heads, some sort of alarm is going off and I can hear running feet. The doctor appears oblivious.

You know not who it was? she asks.

“No!” I tell her. “I know not!”

You might have dreamed it, she suggests.

“I might have but I did not! It happened!”

“You know not who it was?”

“No! No! How many more times? No!”

“Or could have been?”

“Anyone. Any person it could have been.”

“Not nurse,” she begins, then I lose the rest. Possibly something about duties, which would make sense.

“Not nurse,” I tell her. (Upstairs, more thumping.)

The broad doctor looks down at the doll in my hands. I am holding it rather tightly, squeezing its chest as though trying
to throttle it by the lungs. She reaches over and takes it gently from my hands, placing it beside the other one, which is
still reclining in its handkerchief-box bed.

Upstairs, the rhythmic thumping ceases and a weak cheer sounds.

“There is (something something) of doll,” the doctor says.

“What?” I ask.

Above our heads, the sound of something scraping, probably chair legs on the wooden floor of the day room. Is that clapping?

The male doll I was holding earlier slides off the edge of the desk and flops to the floor. There is a scream from somewhere
outside and a white-clad body falls from above, past the window, hitting the ground outside the window with a thump and a
roar of pain. I seem to feel that pain. I shiver, half closing my eyes. The room around me starts to dim.

I watch the doctor recede in my gaze, seeming to fall slowly horizontally away from me as the office disappears hazily around
me, starting with the outskirts, spreading to the wall behind the desk and the desk itself and ending with just the doctor,
an indeterminate dot somewhere in the far distance, looking round in horror at the window and then starting to her feet and
dashing towards it.

I see no more. It is as though I am falling down a great dark pipe away from everything and eventually I’m too far away to
make out anything at all.

Upstairs: more shouting, again. It too sounds like it is being heard from one end of a long pipe, very distant and echoey
and strange. It fades quickly away to nothing.

Finally, I think, I faint.

Adrian

What? Kennedy? Man on the moon? The Wall comes down? Mandela walking? 9/11? 7/7? Notable dates for your diary, end-of-an-era
stuff like that? I’ll tell you one:

“What, to each according to their greed, is that it, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking about this. “Yeah, that’s a pretty fair what-do-you-call-it. Summation. Yeah, I should think.”

“Ho ho!” The girl just widened her eyes and shook her head and took a drink. “You are so fucked up.” She flashed a shit-eating
smile and added, “Dude.”

We were in the Met bar, when it was still cool. I’d already seen one Gallagher brother. I was meeting some mates there; we
were off to watch the F1 race the next day at Brands Hatch or Silverstone or wherever. The girl was there with a couple of
old school friends, though the other two had gone off to the Ladies, one looking unhealthily pale and the other to hold her
hair, I was guessing. Leaving this one. Called Chloë. Chloë with the diaresis, which is the two-little-dots thing, apparently.

The girl who was probably doing the hair-holding by now had volunteered their names earlier. In all the noise I didn’t think
Chloë had caught my name and she hadn’t asked either. She was cute. Young enough to be a student, maybe: curly black hair,
cheeky little face with big eyes. Nice top, great tits, designer jeans, red heels. Tasty, in other words. And a challenge.
Patently.

“Greed gets a bad press,” I told her.

“Yeah. What, like fascism?”

I winked. “You’re an idealist, aren’t you?”

“I have ideals,” she agreed. Her voice was western Home Counties. Girls’ school. She was trying a bit too hard to sound bored.
“Plus I’m human, so I’m a humanist.”

“And feminine,” I said. I’d got better at seeing how this sort of stuff worked.

“You’re catching on.”

I drank my lager, smiled. “Doing all right, am I?”

She raised her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t get too optimistic. I don’t fuck guys like you.”

“What sort of guys
do
you fuck?” I asked her, resting one elbow on the bar and leaning just a little closer to her, taking up more of her field
of vision. I’d already got a semi. Just a girl using the f-word like that was usually enough. To be talking about fucking
with a girl even when she was basically saying no, or at least was telling you she was saying no, was enough. Promising, know
what I mean?

“Nice guys.”

“Nice,” I said, looking sceptical.

She winked at me. It looked like a what-do-you-call-it, a parody of the way I’d just winked at her. “They finish last.” She
drank from her cocktail glass, looking pleased with herself.

I laughed. I put my glass down and held out my hand, looking tentative about it. “I’m Ade?” I said, quite quietly, head lowered
slightly in that Let’s-start-again? kind of way. She looked at my hand like it might be contaminated. “Adrian?” I said, and
gave her the first-level cheeky smile, which has been known to melt many a girl’s heart and other parts and which I am not
ashamed to admit I have practised in the mirror, to get the effect just right. Hey – it’s for them in the end. But then she
took my hand, gripped it for about a nanosecond.

“Chloë,” she told me.

“Yeah, your mate said.”

“So, what, you’re in the music biz, Ade? Or films?” It was like she was trying to sound sarcastic when there was nothing to
be sarcastic about.

“Nah, money.”

“Money?”

“Hedge fund.”

“What’s a hedge fund?” she asked, frowning. To be fair, not many people outside the industry had heard of them then – this was
pre-LTCM folding, sort of in between the Asian crisis and the Russian crisis.

“Way of making money,” I told her.

“Hedging your financial bets?”

“Something like that.”

“Sounds… totally parasitic.” Another insincere smile.

“Nah, honest, we make a lot of money for a lot of people. We make money work. We make it work harder than anybody else. That’s
not parasitic at all. Your
banks
are parasitic. They just sit there, absorbing stuff from the people actually making the money. We’re out there, we’re predators.
We’re operators. We make the profits happen. We make money perform. We make money work.” I’d already said that, I knew, but
I was getting enthusiastic. Plus I’d taken a toot in the Gents five minutes earlier and it was still hitting me.

She snorted. “You sound like a salesman.”

“What’s wrong with being a salesman?” I asked. She was starting to annoy me. “I mean, I’m not, but so what if I was? What
do you do, Chloë? What’s your business?”

She rolled her eyes. “Graphic design,” she sighed.

“That any better than being a salesman?”

“Bit more creative, maybe?” she said in a bored voice. “Slightly more meaningful?”

I put both forearms on the bar. “Let me guess, Chloë. Your dad’s loaded. You—”

“Fuck off,” she said angrily. “What’s he got to do with me?”

“Chloë,” I said in mock horror. “That’s your dad you’re talking about there.” I snapped my fingers. “Trust fund,” I said.
“You’re a Trusty.”

“No, I’m fucking not! You don’t know anything about me!”

“I know I don’t!” I protested, pretending to match her in general upsettedness or whatever. “And you’re not making it easy
for me, quite frankly!” You never want to overdo that kind of thing, though. I made a sort of deflating motion, dropping my
shoulders and my voice. “What have you got against me, Chloë?” I asked, trying to sound just a little hurt but also being
careful not to overdo the plaintiveness.

“The thing about money, maybe?” she suggested, like it ought to be obvious. “The whole greed thing, yeah?”

“Look,” I said, sighing. I was already thinking this wasn’t a chat-up situation any longer. I just wanted to say stuff that
I’d been thinking about, stuff that I’d sort of wanted to say to people like her before but never got round to. Plus, of course,
there are some women that when you stop trying to chat them up and start treating them like a bloke you’re arguing with, they
really like that and
that
can get them into bed where trying to chat them up normally never would. So, definitely worth trying.

“The greed thing,” I say to her. “Everybody’s greedy, Chloë. You’re greedy. You might not think so but I bet you are. We’re
all out for number one. It’s just that some of us don’t kid ourselves about it, know what I mean? We all want everybody to
think the same as we do and we think they’re stupid if they think any different. And when it comes to love and relationships,
we’re all looking for the right person to worship us, because that’ll make us happy, aren’t we? Wanting to be happy – that’s
selfish, isn’t it? Even wanting there to be no more poverty or violence – I mean, it’s all bollocks cos there always will be:
both. But that’s us being selfish cos we want the world to be the way we personally think it ought to be, know what I mean?
You can dress it up as wanting other people to be happy, but in the end it comes down to you and your own selfishness, your
own greed.”