“Because,” Susanna said, buttering half a scone with one hard neat sweep, “Hugo’s not you. He’s sixty-seven, and he’s obviously not some rich powerful big shot—he doesn’t even have health insurance, did you know that? He’s been going public. And let’s face it, he’s vague enough and scruffy enough that if you weren’t paying a lot of attention, you could easily write him off as a batty old loser. At least he’s a guy and he’s white and he’s got a posh accent, so he’s got those going for him, but still: just because they went all out for you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to pump the same resources into some half-senile old geezer who’s probably going to die soon anyway.”
The rush of anger took me by surprise. “Well that’s just bullshit,” I said, after a moment where I couldn’t even talk. “For fuck’s sake, Su. You seriously think they’re deliberately letting Hugo die, just because he’s old and scatty and not a millionaire? These are doctors. I don’t know what kind of social-justice-warrior shite you’ve been reading, but their job is to make people better, if they can. Which sometimes they can’t. That doesn’t mean they’re evil villains rubbing their hands and looking for ways to fuck up people’s lives.”
Susanna pulled the teapot out of a cupboard, whipped the tea bags out of my hand and dropped them in. “Remember when Gran got sick?” she asked. “Horrible stomach pain, for weeks, all bloated up? She went to her GP three times, she went into the ER twice, and they all said the same thing: constipation, go home and take a nice senna tablet, good girl. No matter how many times she told them that wasn’t it.”
“So they made mistakes. They’re human.” I didn’t actually remember any of this. I had been thirteen, head humming with girls and friends and rugby and bands and school; I had visited Gran at least a couple of times a week while she was sick, used my pocket money to buy her favorite fruit-and-nut chocolate as long as she could eat and her favorite yellow freesias when she couldn’t, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to all the ancillary stuff.
“Basically,” Susanna said, “they took one look at Gran and decided she was just a batty old lady looking for attention. Even though ten seconds of actually listening to her would’ve told them she wasn’t like that at all. You know what it took before they bothered to even check for stomach cancer? My dad finally went in and gave her GP a massive bollocking. Then he sent her for tests. And by that time it was too late to do anything useful.”
“It might have been too late anyway. You don’t have a clue.”
“Yeah, it might’ve. Or it might not. That’s not the point. Move.” She leaned across me, grabbed up the kettle and poured the tea, roughly enough that a few drops of water splashed onto the countertop. “The point is, if your doctors went all out for you, great. But not everyone gets to live in the same world as you.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen to yourself. It’s not like they have a, have some, some—” I knew exactly what I meant, couldn’t find the words to get it into Susanna’s head, bit down hard on the inside of my lip— “They don’t have some secret score card where they take points off you for having a skanger accent or being over sixty-five, and then you only get as much treatment as your points can buy. That’s ridiculous. You’re going to have to trust that they’re doing their best.”
Susanna had the tray ready. She started tidying around it: crumbs swept into her hand and flung into the bin, milk and butter shot into the fridge, door flicked shut, deft economical movements with a snap to them.
“Having Zach wasn’t fun,” she said. Her voice was very level, but there was a tightly controlled undercurrent to it. “The consultant did some stuff to me—I mean, I’ll spare you the details, but basically there were a few options and I really didn’t agree with the one he wanted to go with. So I said no. And he told me, quote, ‘If you try to get feisty with me, I’ll get a court order and send the police to your door to bring you in.’”
“He was winding you up,” I said, after a startled second.
“He was dead serious. He told me all about the times he’d done it to other women, in detail, to make sure I knew he wasn’t winding me up.”
“Jesus,” I said. I wanted to know what the fuck Tom had been doing while someone talked to his wife like that. Presumably he had been nodding inoffensively and pondering which cringeworthy baby-carrier to schlep the kid around in. “Did you file a complaint?”
Susanna turned, butter knife in hand, and gave me an incredulous stare. “About what?”
“He can’t do that.”
“Of course he can. If you’re pregnant, you don’t have the right to any say about your health care. He could do whatever he wanted to me, whether I agreed to it or not, and it would be totally legal. Did you seriously not know that?”
“Well,” I said. “I mean, in theory he could. But in practice, I really doubt it works out like—”
“It works out exactly like that. I should know. I was there.”
I didn’t particularly want to get into a fight about this, plus I felt like we were getting a little off topic here, given that Hugo was unlikely to be pregnant. “That consultant was a shithead,” I said. “I’m really sorry that happened to you. And I can totally see why you’d be gun-shy about doctors. But just because you ran into a bad one, that doesn’t mean—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Susanna said. She threw the butter knife into the sink with a clatter, picked up the tea tray and left.
* * *
?Normally I would have handled that conversation a lot better. After all, it wasn’t like Susanna had transformed into an entirely different person; she had always liked getting up in arms about injustices, real and imagined, and I’d never done anything but roll my eyes cheerfully and let it go. The same with Leon: he had always been a moody little bollix, I knew better than to let it get to me, normally I would have walked off and left him to it long before his mood could rub off on me. Now, apparently, minor variations on their usual bullshit had the power to knock me sideways.