Page 62 of The Elements
“Everyone I know, all my friends, we have mothers, sisters, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, we had female teachers, we have female bosses, we’ve been surrounded by women, just like you’ve been surrounded by men, and some of us have scars too.
Not scars like they have, of course,” he adds, pointing back toward the hospital, where our most recent patients lie.
“Not the sort you can see. But they exist all the same.”
He’s speaking quietly but passionately, displaying his empathy once again, and I realize how, more than any other intern who’s ever studied under me, he’ll develop into a brilliant doctor. Surprisingly, I feel an almost maternal pride in him.
“You’re a good man, Aaron,” I say, the words out of my mouth before I even knew I was going to utter them.
He turns to me, and I expect a smile of gratitude, but instead he’s frowning. He looks like he’s about to say something unexpectedly aggressive, but before he can, a man approaches and introduces himself as the detective assigned to the case.
“What happened?” I ask. “Do you know yet?”
“There’s history,” he tells me.
“What kind of history?”
“The husband,” he says, confirming what both Aaron and I had already suspected. “The wife was in a shelter. He couldn’t track her down. The council found temporary accommodation for her, he found out where, came over, and set the place alight.”
“His own children?” asks Aaron, looking aghast. “He’d do that to his own children?”
“She pushed him too far, I guess,” the detective says. “There was a custody hearing due to take place on—”
“She pushed him too far?” Aaron asks, raising his voice, the first time since he arrived on my rotation that I’ve seen him express anger. “I’m sorry, but… what the fuck?”
“No, I didn’t mean—”
“What, there’s a point she can push him to, and after that he can’t be held responsible for his actions?”
The policeman stares at Aaron for a few moments before turning to me.
“You might want to ask this young man to control his emotions,” he says. “Those kinds of comments do nothing to help the situation.”
“Fuck you,” I tell him, and a staring competition begins between us.
He’s overweight and trying for movie-star stubble but only looks like he was too lazy to shave.
I glance at his left hand and see the telltale whiteness on the flabby fourth finger of his left hand where a wedding ring used to be.
There’s no point arguing with men like him.
Eventually, when the case is built, he’ll be in touch, and I’ll find myself in a courtroom testifying to what took place.
A prosecution barrister will tell the jury why the husband should spend years in jail for his crime, while a defense barrister will offer reasons why the jury should let him get away with it.
And twelve people will decide. As I did a few years ago.
They might get it right or, like me, they might get it badly wrong.
“All I meant was—” he begins, but I shake my head, cutting him off before he can say anything else.
“Dr. Umber is right,” I tell him. “You can’t say things like that. Three people are dead, two of them children. A fourth is in a critical condition. And instinctively, whether you intended to or not, you blamed the victim. You blamed the woman.”
“It was a turn of phrase, that’s all.”
There’s no point continuing to argue the toss.
He’ll fight his corner to the death, men like him always do, especially when arguing with women, so I simply turn away and make my way back inside and along the corridor toward the nurses’ station.
Holly is still on shift and asks me how things went.
I shake my head, and she’s experienced enough to understand what this means without any words needing to be exchanged.
Around us, gurneys pass by while outside, in the waiting room, people sit with broken arms, sprained ankles, knife wounds, all the injuries that human beings suffer on a daily basis because our skin is only so thick and our bones only so resilient and from the moment we arrive on the planet the universe is against us, conspiring to drown us, set us on fire, bury us in the earth, our spirits floating off into the atmosphere.
I’m about to return to the staircase and the comfort of my office when a fresh gurney is pushed through the doors, followed by two paramedics and a woman in her late thirties.
I glance toward the patient. Around his neck I see dark purple bruises that tell me he’s tried to hang himself.
Emergency doctors rush toward him while I take a step back; it’s not my department and I know better than to get in their way.
They check his blood pressure, his heartbeat, his eyes.
They place a mask over his mouth and feed him oxygen.
The woman accompanying him—his mother, I assume—is distraught, telling us that she heard a loud noise from his bedroom, which turned out to be the sound of a chair being overturned.
She ran upstairs, discovered him, but was too weak to cut him down.
She held his legs, trying to keep him elevated for as long as she could, while he kicked and struggled against the tension of the noose he’d created for himself with his school tie.
Finally, she let his legs go, reached for some scissors from his desk, and jumped on his bed to cut away at the fabric, and he fell to the ground, unconscious.
“They weren’t even sharp, the scissors,” she tells us, looking around at each of us in turn, her eyes desperate with fear.
“Just a kid’s scissors, you know? Blunt ones.
For his arts and crafts. He loves his arts and crafts.
He always has, since he was a child. So they’re blunt.
You know. For children. So they don’t hurt themselves.
I couldn’t get them to tear away at the fabric. ”
I’ve been a doctor for a long time, and I can usually tell, simply by looking at a patient, what their chances are.
This boy is still breathing, but there’s little hope.
He’ll be placed on a life-support machine almost immediately and within a few hours, or a day at most, his mother will be told there’s nothing more that can be done for him, that brain activity is nonexistent, and then she will have to make the decision to turn the machine off.
In the moment of her most extreme grief, she’ll be asked whether she’ll allow his organs to be harvested.
“What’s his name?” asks one of the A&E doctors, and although the boy’s mother is the one to answer, I hear the words emerge from my lips at the same time, so quietly that the chances of anyone overhearing me are almost impossible.
“Rufus,” I whisper. “His name is Rufus.”