Georgina, Cody Haycoplaynt’s partner, bustled into the lecture room, also in a dark suit. Many said she wept to the top on merit, Os, who’d also shed a few tears in her time, couldn’t possibly comment. ‘Sorry, went for these,’ said Georgina. Thickset, Georgina had “big” blonde hair, like a 1980s soap opera barmaid’s, beseeching blue eyes and a snub turned up nose, legs to which even a hirsute Samson would concede defeat in a rugby scrum. In a pair of green heels she tottered up to tip the rucksack off her shoulders and hand the larger of two black laptops to Haycoplaynt.
To a grunt of affront from Cody, a man who confected a massive row on her birthday so he could to jet off alone to gorge himself on fried lemur in Madagascar, she connected the laptops herself. ‘Hurry BT is here,’ he said, wrinkling his nose, playful malevolence eager in his pale grey eyes. BT meant Osese, the Black Teat. Years earlier, after a quiet word in his ear by a senior WEM nurse Cody stopped calling Osese black cunt but took delicious pleasure in morphing her then married name, Bamisetiti, into the Black Teat.
‘It’s seven-thirty,’ he said, banging the table for attention and with a showy glance at his gold watch hopped to his feet to toss his remarks over his shoulder at the BEM doctor. ‘Whatever your name is, first case, and hurry as I, unlike you, am in the rather fortunate position for my sins I might add, of having quite a lot of use.’ His smug smile exposed chiselled spotless teeth that called to mind sugar cubes. The BEM doctor sidled to the whiteboard before the front row, 8 male WEM cardiothoracic surgeons, the oldest seated closest to the podium, their assortment of greying pates and bald patches glowing under the bright lights.
Dewlapped, skin the colour of soaking cardboard, one of the hundreds of West African doctors careening between hospitals in predictably futile pursuit of professional fulfilment until, defeated, youth wasted, they lived through their often gifted children, the doctor picked cherries in Essex until his desperate appeal to the Home Office for a passport succeeded the previous December. ‘Gloria Leicestership, lesssestersheep,’ he said, garbling the name of the first patient. The doctor shook the laser pointer into flickering life, but it died again as he was about to speak, and he got the surgical risk scores the wrong way round.
Osese, stewing in guilty racial embarrassment, willed him on, as if her life’s work or worth hung on his performance. She needn’t have worried. This doctor had seen worse, at government checkpoints in Nigeria.
He smiled. ‘Just testing,’ he said and in a lilting Ibadan/Newham accent launched into the case of a 73 year old retired graphic artist who’d died the day after aortic valve surgery in January.
Osese relaxed a fraction. Not her patient but one of Tim’s. Whilst Cody assigned Osese the satanic equipment in Theatre One, bibulous Tim the Terrible had use of the spiffing Haycoplaynt Theatre, but close to the worst surgical results in the country. Yet all through the BEM doctor’s excellent presentation Tim the Terrible sat with arms folded, looking up at the ceiling in lofty bullet-proof insouciance, as if to keep eye contact with his godmates in the heavens, lowering his head at the end only a fraction to drawl a standard spiel which Osese mouthed along with him. ‘Latent infection, most dreadful tissues I’ve seen in 30 years of practice. Like trying to stitch jelly.’
Os allowed an ironic smile to bend her lips. What a lubricated life some lived, the sort for which she strived for her precious kids – or bairns, as they say in the north-east.
