to make house visits.
It was hardly ever the truly sick and infirm that demanded a doctor come to their door. The pensioner crippled with arthritis, the single mum with a disabled child, the middle-aged woman who had just been told that there were cancer cells throughout her body – these people somehow struggled to the overcrowded waiting room of the surgery.
The ones who called you out were invariably the loud ones who talked a lot about their rights, the ones who managed to be both self-pitying and egocentric. Like Mrs Marley.
She was a large woman in a small council flat in the bleak heart of Sunny View, one of the most notorious estates in London. If you didn’t live among these concrete warrens, then you didn’t venture into the Sunny View Estate unless you were buying drugs, selling drugs or making a concerned documentary. Apart from summer, when the annual riots came round, even the police gave the Sunny View Estate a wide berth. Megan didn’t have that option.
She had been frightened before. During her year as a hospital house officer she had spent six months attached to a consultant at the Royal Free, and then six months working in casualty at the Homerton.
The Royal Free was a breeze – her consultant, a paediatrician, was a kind and generous man, and the children of Highgate and Hampstead and Belsize Park were mostly beautifully behaved little children who wanted Megan to read them Harry Potter. But casualty at the Homerton was another world.
After the first shift Megan felt that she had seen more of the world than she ever wanted – stabbed teenagers, beaten wives, mangled bodies pulled from car wrecks. Meat porters with hooks in their heads, pub drinkers who had been glassed at closing time, drug entrepreneurs who had been shot in the face by a business rival.
It was Megan’s responsibility to assess the level of injury when the patients crawled, hobbled or were carried in. Seeing those wounds and that misery, and having to make an instant judgement about what needed to be done – that was as scared as she had ever been. Somehow walking through the Sunny View Estate to see Mrs Marley and her sick child was worse. How could that be? Hormones, Megan thought. It’s just your hormones going barmy.
At the foot of the stairwell to Mrs Marley’s flat, a group of teenagers were loitering. With their unearthly white skin and hooded tops, they looked like something out of a Tolkien nightmare. They didn’t say anything when Megan passed through them, just smirked and leered with their generic contempt and loathing. They stank of fast food and dope – a sweet, rotting smell coming from under those hoods.
‘You look a bit young to me, darling,’ Mrs Marley said suspiciously. ‘Are you sure you’re a proper doctor?’
Megan was impressed. Most people never questioned her authority. ‘I’m a GP registrar.’
‘What’s that then?’
‘I have to do a year under supervision before I become fully registered.’
Mrs Marley narrowed her eyes. ‘Next time I want a proper quack. I know my rights.’
‘What appears to be the problem?’ said Megan.
The problem was the woman’s daughter. An impossibly cute three-year-old – how do such repulsive adults produce such gorgeous children? – who lay listlessly on the sofa, staring at a Mister Man DVD. Mr Happy was having the smile wiped off his yellow face by all the other inhabitants of Mister Town. Megan knew the feeling.
She examined the child. Her temperature was high, but everything else seemed to be normal. Megan saw she was wearing small diamond studs in her ears. They couldn’t wait for their children to grow up on the Sunny View Estate, although with their casual clothes and recreational drugs and loud music, the Sunny View adults seemed to stew in a state of perpetual adolescence.
‘What’s your name?’ Megan said, pushing the child’s hair from her moist forehead.
‘Daisy, miss.’
‘I think you’ve got a bit of a fever, Daisy.’
‘I’ve got a kitty-cat.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘I’ve got a puppy.’
‘Lovely!’
‘I’ve got a dinosaur.’
‘I just want you to take it easy for a couple of days. Will you do that for me, Daisy?’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Are her bowel movements normal, Mrs Marley?’
‘Shits like a carthorse, that one,’ said the mother, running her fat pink tongue along the edge of a cigarette paper. Megan stood up and faced the woman. When she spoke she was surprised to find her voice shaking with emotion.
‘You’re not smoking drugs in the presence of this child, are you?’
Mrs Marley shrugged. ‘Free country, innit?’
‘That’s a common misconception. If I discover you are taking drugs in front of this child, you will find out exactly how free it is.’
‘You threatening me with the socially serviced?’
‘I’m telling you not to do it.’
The woman’s natural belligerence was suddenly cowed. She put down the cigarette papers and began fussing over Daisy as though she was up for mother of the year.
‘You hungry, gorgeous? Want Mummy to defrost you summink?’
Megan let herself out. That woman, she thought. If Daisy were mine I would feed her good nutritious food and read her Harry Potter and never pierce her little ears and never let her wear cheap jewellery and –
Her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Daisy was not her child. She was just her patient, and she had three more to see on the Sunny View Estate before the start of afternoon surgery.
Megan pushed through the hooded youths at the foot of the stairwell. They didn’t laugh at her this time, even though their ranks had been swollen by a number of smaller hooded creatures, who looked like elves on mountain bikes.
These people, thought Megan. The way they breed. Like rabbits.
It was lucky she was here to save them.
Cat’s boss was the woman with everything.
Brigitte Wolfe had a business she had built from nothing, a boyfriend she had met in one of the more exclusive resorts in Kenya and, above all, independence.
If Cat’s dream on leaving home was pure, unencumbered liberation, then surely Brigitte was closer to achieving that dream than anyone she had ever known. There was no husband to answer to, no children to prevent her jumping on a plane to anywhere she felt like going. Nobody owned Brigitte. Unlike most people on the planet, Brigitte wasn’t trapped by her past.
So Cat was surprised to walk into Brigitte’s office at Mamma-san on Saturday night and find her boss feeding a shoebox full of photographs to a shredding machine.
Brigitte held up her hand, requesting silence. Cat stood there and watched her deleting a box full of memories.
Brigitte would select a photograph from the shoebox, give it a cold smile, and then feed it to the growling shredder. A wastepaper basket overflowing with coloured streamers indicated Brigitte had been at her work for some time. Cat noticed that the photographs were all of Brigitte and her boyfriend. If a forty-five-year-old property developer called Digby could reasonably be called a boyfriend.
There had been a string of men in the past, all that bit older and bit richer than Brigitte, and she tended to stick with them for two or three years, and then trade them in. ‘Like cars,’ she told Cat. ‘You get a new one before the old one fails its MOT.’
Digby had been around for longer than most. Brigitte always said that he could stay until she found a vibrator that liked going to galleries. Now Digby was clearly out, but it didn’t look as though