Swimming Upstream

9

The King's Arms in Smithfield was a classic seventeenth century back-street pub with a beautiful half-beamed exterior, hanging baskets and wooden beer casks lined up along the outside. Inside the public bar was an expanse of wood panelling, oak beams and a polished wood floor. The seating was provided by antique settles and benches and there was a beautiful inglenook fireplace in the corner. That evening the pub was jam-packed with hospital staff who had just come off duty. They stood or swayed around the bar area in an imposing mass, the hum of excited chatter filling the air along with loud screeches of laughter and clouds of cigarette smoke, the nearby tables overflowing with drinks. One girl had removed her stockings and used them to blindfold one of her male colleagues, who was now the delighted recipient of a lengthy embrace from an unknown female on tiptoes. She was being egged on by the crowd behind her.

“Friday night,” said Zara, as she edged her way into a gap at the bar. “Everyone goes a bit mad. What are you having?”

“A pint of lager please. And I’d better have some crisps.”

“Two pints of lager,” she said to the barman. “A bag of cheese and onion, and,” - looking at me for approval and finding no argument - “a couple of whisky chasers?”

We found a table at the back of the pub. Zara hopped me into my seat, placed my leg on the chair in front of me and went back to fetch the drinks. I looked around me at the old black and white photos of Smithfield market that were pinned to the oak beams nearby. In one, a slim man in a white apron who looked like Charlie Chaplin was grinning broadly in the sunshine and holding up a very large fish. He looked so ridiculously happy that it made me wonder if that was all it took for some people: a sunny day and a big fish.

I lit a cigarette and exhaled deeply. Zara reappeared with the drinks. “So, how have you been?” she asked, slipping in beside me. “Tell me everything.”

So I did.

“I never liked that Jude,” said Zara, loyally, when I’d finished.

“I never liked that Marion,” I smiled back.

A cheer exploded from the crowd next to us.

“Hooray!” said Zara. “Hooray for us!” We clinked glasses.

“Just look at that lot,” Zara smiled. She nodded in the direction of the bar. “They're going for it tonight.”

“Wild,” I agreed.

“Are you shocked?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said truthfully. I'd seen worse.

“I suppose we have a bit of a reputation, nurses ... you know. It's being surrounded by sickness all day that does it. You become more impulsive, like there's a desperate need to enjoy life to the full. I suppose it's because you're constantly reminded how quickly it can be taken away from you.”

“Live fast, die young,” I smiled.

“No,” said Zara sharply. “I don't hold with all that rock 'n’ roll rubbish. Maybe this,” - she raised her glass - “is a bit self-destructive. But I value life; I really do. I wouldn't spend all day trying to save it if I didn't. But it’s hard, sometimes. Last night I was on the Neuro ward. The staff nurse had to tell two young girls that their mother was dead. An aneurysm, it was. Which caused a haemorrhage. One minute she was there, the next ... well, she wasn't. The oldest must have been my age, about twenty-five or six. I tried to persuade them not to, but they still went in to see her. In the end we had to drag them screaming off her body.

“When I got home I rang my mum.” She stopped abruptly and glanced away from me up at the ceiling. I jerked my head upward to see what she was looking at but there was only an oak beam. “I only wanted to talk, hear her voice. It was late,” she muttered. “She was tired, I think, just wanted to go to bed.”

She hiccupped and I started to laugh, then realised stupidly that she was crying. I squeezed her fingers, tentatively.

“It's nothing really.” Zara mumbled and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “It's just…like I said, not a very good day.”

Zara shifted in her seat and leaned forward. She looked like she'd spotted someone at the bar. She glanced back at me, her watery eyes suddenly alert, and lifted her glass. “Another?”

I nodded, and leaned back into my seat. I watched as Zara weaved her way quickly through the crowds towards the bar area. Just before she reached the bar she stopped and tapped the arm of an attractive black man. Her back was to me but I could clearly see his expression as he swung round to face her. It was one of extreme annoyance. He looked back at the man with whom he'd been talking, who smiled and backed away towards another group. He shoved his hands into his pockets and turned back to Zara. They spoke for a few minutes before he lifted both hands up abruptly as if he was a policeman stopping traffic, then he turned round and walked off in the direction of the door. Zara disappeared after him.

I lit another cigarette and waited patiently. After ten or fifteen minutes she returned to the table with two large whiskies and slipped in beside me again. We drank in silence for a minute. The whisky was starting to have a pleasantly anaesthetic effect on my ankle.

Zara sat beside me and sniffed and wiped at her eyes with her sleeve while I tried to think of something to say.

“I can't take the exams, you see,” she said eventually. “If I was qualified ... things would be different. Bloody exams.” She took a huge sip of her whisky and turned to me. “You know I only became a nurse because I failed my art degree. Or dropped out, I should say. Three months before my finals.”

“What?” I was horrified. “After all that work?”

“I know, I know.” A wry smile flickered on Zara's lips and was replaced by an anxious frown. “But I'm serious, Lizzie. I just can't handle the pressure. I worked hard at school and somehow got through, but I only sat one A-level. I've studied and trained for every module of the first two years of the RGN, but without sitting the exams. Until I do,” she shrugged, “I remain Nurse Bedpan. There's this other staff nurse on the Neuro Ward, she finds fault with everything I do. It's getting so I can't bear working with her. I'm losing my confidence around her. Today she started making snide comments about Joel. He's my - one of the doctors I'm seeing.” She glanced at me sideways. “Kind of. We're supposed to be a secret,” she added. “Also he's black. She's found out and she doesn't approve.”

“Jesus, Zara, you want to report her, you know. That's harassment,” I said.

“It's not that easy though,” she sighed. “She's a good nurse; she has a lot of respect from senior staff. And it's so covert that no-one else is ever witness to it. I'm sure she would just deny it, and make me out to be paranoid or over-sensitive or something. That's the sort of person she is. And then it would be ten times worse. I'd end up believing whatever was said about me. At least at the moment I'm hanging on by a shoestring to my self-respect.”

I nodded and sipped my drink in silence. It was easy to give advice when you were on the outside of things looking in.

“And then there's Joel. That's the other problem,” Zara confessed finally. “He was here tonight, actually, but he left.”

“I know,” I said. “I saw him.”

“Ah.” She sipped carefully at her drink. “It's not going very well,” she admitted. “It really isn't going anywhere. He's very...” she tailed off.

“Very what?” I asked her.

“Uncommitted. Ambivalent.”

“Your usual type, then,” I smiled.

Zara pursed her lips. “I don't know what you mean.”

The bell rang for last orders. Zara went to the bar and came back a few minutes later with another large whisky for each of us. I lit another cigarette. It had been a long day and I had eaten practically nothing; I was already decidedly far from sober, but I was feeling ridiculously happy to be with Zara again, and wasn't looking forward to going home again to my empty flat. As if reading my thoughts Zara took my arm and said, “Come back and stay at my place. I share a house with three other nurses. It's only round the corner. You can't walk, and besides it's ages since I've seen you.”

“When was the last time we saw each other?” I asked her.

Zara shook her head and shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. I left Cambridge after Doug and I parted. It was nearly two years ago.”

“So, what happened?”

“Nothing. He chose to stay with her.” She paused. “And he didn’t want the baby.”

“The baby? What baby?”

“Our baby.”

“You were pregnant?”

“For a while, yes.”

“So…what happened?” I asked again.

“I had a termination,” she said. I leaned forward in my seat. Zara was speaking so quietly I could barely hear her. “There were reasons.”

“Well, I’m sure there were. It’s not easy bringing up a baby by yourself.”

“No, but I would have done. That wasn’t it. I would have loved it. More than anything in the world.”

“So why, then?”

“I don’t know. I was crazy. I’ve regretted it ever since. If I could turn back the clock, I would.”

“There’s no point regretting things, Zara,” I said. “You can’t live in the past.”

“Wanna bet?” she said.

When we got outside, the wheelchair, inevitably, had gone. The cool air and the final whisky were having the same effect on Zara as they were having on me, and when it came to walking, she wasn't faring much better than I was.

“Just hold on to me round my neck,” she said, grabbing me round the waist. I put my arms round her. Her head only came up to my shoulder and, despite her strength, the inequality in our size and build and the whole situation struck me as suddenly very funny. I began to giggle, and was soon shaking with laughter.

“Stop it,” pleaded Zara, laughing herself. “I can't carry you when you're wobbling like that!”

I laughed even harder. Immobilised by the stitch that had developed in my stomach and the giddiness in my head, I doubled up and with Zara laughing as loudly as I was and loosening her grip on me, we both sank to the pavement. People were walking past on the way home from the pub. They watched us as they passed but, typically, didn't stop. Eventually, Zara sat up and shook me.

“This is serious,” she said. “I've got to get up. I need to go to the loo.”

“Oh no,” I moaned. “You can't leave me here.”

“Of course not,” said Zara. “I can carry you. As long as you stop laughing. Now come on.”

Getting me up again took a long time. Every effort on Zara's part to lift me was thwarted by my renewed fits of giggles, which were caused by her putting her hands under my armpits, where I was incredibly ticklish. In the end she swung my legs across the kerb and stood in the road over me, yanking me forward by the wrists. She caught me as I reeled towards her.

''Now hold tight.” She hoisted me over her shoulder and we set off again in the direction of the hospital.

Zara was deep in concentration, bent on her mission. I was feeling less hysterical and slightly sick. We stumbled wordlessly through the grounds and out onto the opposite side.

“We're nearly there,” said Zara, stopping for a moment and crossing her legs. “Not far now.”

Finally, we turned into an ill-lit street and stopped at a dark and crumbling three-storey town house. Zara pushed open the gate and propped me up against the porch while she fiddled around trying to get her key in the lock. As soon as it opened she shot inside and bolted up the stairs. I hobbled in after her and hauled myself slowly up in the direction she had gone.

A door opened on the first landing and a head popped out.

“That you, Clare?” asked a male voice.

''No.'' I paused, and leaned weakly against the banisters. “I’m Lizzie.” I suddenly felt overwhelmingly tired.

The door widened, casting a shaft of light across the dingy landing, and the speaker stepped out of the room. He was tall, dark and completely naked.

“Oh, hello,” he smiled, apologetically and cupped one hand between his legs. “I thought you were…” He shrugged, grinned and then held out his spare hand. “I'm Tim.”

“Hello Tim,” I said, and passed out.