I Spy. Claire Kendal

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СКАЧАТЬ looked at me carefully. ‘It can be overwhelming when you’re new. You’ll learn quickly. And thank you for passing on the message from the GP.’

      It was only then that I properly registered that he was entirely bald, though from his face I’d guessed he wasn’t more than forty. I blushed, not simply out of embarrassment for my blundering, but because he had already won me over with his life-saving heroics, his composure under pressure, and his courtesy, which I did not think I deserved.

      Although I didn’t get to learn the secrets that working for MI5 would have revealed, I soon understood that the hospital had its secrets too, even if they weren’t of national importance.

      There was a young woman, a few years younger than me, waiting for a heart transplant. Over coffee, Zac spoke to me about the case in a hushed voice. ‘I shouldn’t tell you, but I trust you.’ Even as my eyes filled with tears to hear that the young woman would almost certainly die, I was imagining how I would write about her in my journal. Zac touched my hand. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he said. There was a tender side to him, despite the swaggering.

      When Zac walked through the ward, the eyes of the patients and their families followed him like a flower follows the sun. Zac was a god there, and he knew it. He didn’t bother to hide the fact that he revelled in his power. Zac saw everything. When he saw that my eyes followed him too, he strutted even more.

      My grandmother had told me again and again that my long-dead father was a hero, and I did not doubt it. He was a pilot, flying search and rescue for the Royal Air Force, so he saved many lives. It wasn’t rocket science to see why I would be attracted to a charismatic and commanding older man like Zac, who also saved lives. But self-awareness and self-control are not the same thing. The fact that you know you are acting like a cliché doesn’t necessarily stop you from doing it.

      I was sitting behind the reception desk. Zac brushed his shoulder against mine as he looked with me at the computer screen. I was working on the notes for an eighteen-year-old male with a heart infection that his mother knew everything about, but a sexually transmitted disease that she knew nothing about. Zac was making sure that both were being taken care of.

      ‘Have dinner with me tonight. I’ll cook for you.’ He was so full of pent-up energy he seemed ready to vibrate, but he kept himself still, in control. He was like that whatever he said or did, though he displayed an unflappable cool in all of his interactions with patients.

      ‘Your glasses are steamed up.’ I noticed because I wanted to sneak a glance at his extraordinary eyes. One was violent blue. The other was the real wonder. It was a half circle of cobalt in the top of the iris, and a half circle of brown in the bottom.

      He took the glasses off and handed them to me, an intimacy. ‘Is that a yes to dinner?’

      ‘I think so.’ I fiddled with his glasses. ‘I don’t have anything to clean them with.’

      He looked at his jacket pocket. I fumbled my hand inside, meeting those bright eyes of his as I did, and found a square of grey microfibre covered in tiny stethoscopes. I wiped the lenses. When I handed them back, he let his skin touch mine and gave me an electric shock.

      ‘You’d better watch for Mr Rowntree’s girlfriend. If she turns up during visiting hours while his wife is here, he may arrest again.’ Zac was smart enough to make sure nobody heard him say this – it was the kind of talk that could get even a doctor in trouble. A piece of my hair had slipped out of my ponytail. He slid it between his fingers as he walked off to do his ward rounds.

      Milly came over. ‘You’re looking hot.’

      ‘It’s extra warm in here.’ I tried to tuck my hair into the elastic.

      ‘Not that kind of hot.’ She eyed Zac, who was disappearing into the doctors’ office. ‘Nothing says, I’m a very important cardiologist doing super-cool interventional things like a scrub top and smart-casual trousers.’

      I laughed so hard I almost snorted, which encouraged Milly to keep going.

      ‘That I’m looking beautiful but heroics were needed so I threw this top on outfit is definitely for you. I wish I could dress for impact.’ Milly frowned at the purple dress the staff nurses had to wear. ‘It’s like The Handmaid’s fucking Tale around here, with all this fucked-up colour coding.’

      Milly and I kept an incognito blog. We called it Angel’s and Devil’s Book Reviews. Devil found the novels that everyone loved and gave them one star. Angel found the ones everyone hated and gave them five. We had two thousand followers and the most beautiful review blog in the world, because Milly was an artist, so everything about it was visually arresting. She was the most creative person I’d ever met. There was a photo on our ‘About Us’ page, with both of us wearing superhero eye masks. Mine was white, Milly’s red. She had scarlet horns pinned to her blonde hair. I had a white halo. Milly’s hatchet job reviews got twenty times more Likes than my attempts at justice for the unfairly spurned.

      ‘Please tell me you’re not doing Atwood,’ I said.

      ‘I am for sure going to do Atwood.’

      ‘You will make her cry.’ I clutched my heart in mock sorrow.

      ‘She doesn’t strike me as the crying type.’

      I looked down at myself. ‘She for sure would if she had to wear this.’

      ‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’

      ‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’

      Milly let out a squeak.

      Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.

      Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’

      ‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast, because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.

      ‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’

      ‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’

      ‘That’s true.’

      ‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’

      ‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who …’

      ‘We were four. It was twenty years СКАЧАТЬ