The Second Life of Nathan Jones. David Atkinson

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       Chapter 2

      My full name is Klaudette Ainsworth-Thomas (yeah, I know). I woke up on my tenth birthday, decided enough was enough and made a monumental decision. The first person I had to tell? My mother.

      ‘Mum?’

      Janice, my mum, could usually be found behind an ironing board. She ironed every day. Ironing was one of her many obsessions. If it got to 6 p.m. and there were no clothes left in the ironing basket she got all anxious and cranky and started to press things that had already been done, like my dad’s shirts or something random like the bedroom curtains. She had even been known to remove the cushion covers from the couch and press them on a low heat.

      ‘Mum?’

      ‘Yes, Klaudie?’ Now, there was another thing that annoyed me; even though my thoughtless parents had lumbered me with the triple-barrelled name from hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to use it properly and invariably shortened it to Scotland’s prevailing type of weather.

      ‘I’ve made a decision.’

      ‘That’s nice, dear.’

      ‘Mum, I’m serious.’

      My mum put the iron down and stared at me. ‘Klaudie, you’re always serious, that’s your problem, you—’

      ‘No, Mum, that’s not my problem, that’s your problem. I am the way I am. I’ve decided that I’m sick of being called Klaudette, Klaudie and Klaudia, and I’m sick of Ainsworth-Thomas as well. From now on I’m only going to answer to the name Kat, K-A-T.’

      ‘K-A-T?’

      ‘Yep, Kat is much cooler and most of my friends call me that anyway.’

      Mum returned to ironing her slippers. ‘That’s nice, dear.’

      Despite my mum’s apathy I stuck to my guns and from that day on I only answered to the name Kat. Eventually everyone, including my parents and most of the teachers, adopted my new alias, the only exception being the assistant head at my crumbling Glasgow high school, Mrs Brock, who insisted on calling me Klaudette. As a result, I ignored everything she said for the next five years.

      The only issue with this impasse happened to be that Mrs Brock also taught me history for two of those five years. History, therefore, didn’t turn out to be one of my strong points, not helped by the number of Harolds/Haralds mooching about in 1066.

      The fault all lay with my mum. She’d met and married a John Thomas (yes, really) and they decided to join forces and hyphenate their names after they got married. I’d always thought someone who had grown up being called John Thomas would have had more awareness and sympathy about kids’ names instead of lumbering his only daughter with such a mouthful. He’d even managed to become a professor of social anthropology to avoid using his first name. Even his bank cards only had ‘Professor J Thomas’ printed on them.

      As a youngster, before I had the presence of mind to change my name, I had a plump, lumpy body, a squished face and little self-confidence. I used to come home from school, go into my bedroom and slip into a Cinderella or Snow-White costume from my dressing-up box and prance up and down in front of the mirror pretending I lived a different life, using clothes as an emotional crutch, an image to hide behind. I still did.

      I’ve always felt that there was a certain cruelty involved, growing up as an only child, especially with parents like mine, who were too wrapped up in their own obsessions to notice my issues. All parents should be obliged to have two or more children or none. In my opinion, having only one kid could lead to them growing up lonely – well, kids like me who had real problems making friends would, anyway. If I’d had a sibling, they would have played with me and banished some of my loneliness.

       Yeah, but knowing you they would have hated you so that would’ve made things worse.

      ‘Things couldn’t have been much worse.’

       Wanna bet?

      When I get stressed I often argue with my inner self, usually out loud, which can bring me some weird glances from strangers. Well, weirder than normal. Reminiscing about my childhood usually raises my stress levels so I try not to.

      Despite the problems in high school I left with some decent grades, much to the surprise of many of my teachers, especially Mrs Brock, and won a place at Napier University in Edinburgh to study nursing.

      I couldn’t stand the thought of working in an office. I was a practical sort of person and initially believed that nursing would be a good option. I anticipated that it would provide a stimulating and fast-changing environment that would stop me getting bored. It didn’t.

      My first placement in an adult surgical ward saw me dealing with patients who were either waiting for or recovering from an operation. The ward was chronically under-resourced (like so many others), which meant I felt used and abused by everyone, staff and patients alike. On my first eight-hour shift my mentor said, ‘Kat, the patient in room three needs some toast and tea. Can you get that for them?’

      I rushed back to the nurses’ station after I’d finished. My mentor said, ‘Quick work, that. Can you change the two beds in room eleven, they’re covered in blood and vomit, and after that could you be a dear and nip down to the shops for some sandwiches for me and Elaine, the staff nurse, as we both forgot to bring anything in for lunch?’

      By the end of the day I felt more like a waitress and a chambermaid than a nurse. I also wondered why patients were called ‘patients’ as they were anything but, constantly pressing buzzers and shouting for anything and everything.

      I could have probably put up with all that and carried on but for me the final straw came on the last week of my first placement. Whilst I was escorting an elderly male patient to the toilet, he suddenly turned and grabbed both my breasts in his bony (but surprisingly strong) little hands, thrust his head into my cleavage, sighed and expired on the floor.

      Enough was enough, so I dropped out and began a medical internship at the local mortuary. Dead patients didn’t grope me, or demand things, or speak to me, or stare at me, or assault me. In fact, they rarely did anything at all – except lie still. They occasionally stink a little, but you soon get used to that.

      I applied myself and with the help of day release and evening courses I qualified as an anatomical pathologist practitioner, better known as a mortuary technician. I suppose given my view of the world and my relatively serious and introverted nature, the work suited me. I’d been working in Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary for nearly six years now and there wasn’t much I hadn’t seen, or, more pertinently perhaps, smelled.

      Initially, my mum reacted in horror at my relatively unusual career choice and couldn’t understand my motivation. Over time, however, she came to recognise that I enjoyed my job – as weird as that sounds – and never complained about it, the way many people did.

      Monday, 23 November started out like most other early shifts. My alarm woke me at 5.45 a.m., I showered, ate cornflakes whilst drying my hair and staring at BBC News with the subtitles on, so I could understand what the presenters were jabbering about over the noise of the hairdryer. My thick hair always takes ages to dry.

      After that I applied my Manic Panic foundation. СКАЧАТЬ