LENA
January 1999 London
At first things were great between me and Simone. She was the perfect supervisor, somebody I aspired to be, and I looked up to her in a way I never had on my previous placements, although, to my disappointment, initially we didn’t have the chance to chat much, even at ‘lunchtime’, which was really any time I had a spare five minutes to scoff a sandwich and a lukewarm coffee from the machine. Even though our shifts began and ended at the same time, I didn’t always catch her coming out of the hospital and I was too shy to ask her if I should wait.
But, as luck would have it, at the end of my first week I was gathering my stuff from my locker, admittedly taking my time in the hope she might come in, when she appeared next to me. My heart did a funny little skip at the sight of her.
‘Oh, I’m glad I caught you,’ she said, peering around my locker door. ‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you all afternoon to see how it’s going but I got called into theatre to assist Dr Harris with an emergency C-section. I wanted to make sure you’d had a good first week. Janice said you’re doing great and that you’re a hard worker.’ She beamed at me and I felt myself blush in response. ‘So?’ she asked earnestly. ‘How do you feel it’s gone so far?’
‘Oh, great. Really great,’ I replied. I tried to hide my burning cheeks by poking my head further into the locker and pretended to rummage through my bag.
‘Phew.’ She laughed and turned back to her own locker, pulling out a corduroy bag and stuffing her scrubs inside. She was wearing a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt with baggy jeans and, out of the corner of my eye, I could see her applying thick black kohl to her lids, peering at the little mirror stuck to the inside of her locker door. ‘Do you fancy going for a drink?’ she asked, not looking at me but at her reflection as she applied the pencil to her lower lids.
‘What … um, now?’
‘Why not? It’s Friday night. I’m not working now until Sunday. Have you got any plans?’
I’d half-heartedly arranged to go to the pub with my housemates but I already knew I was going to bin that. ‘No,’ I said. ‘No plans.’
‘That’s settled, then.’ She slammed the door of her locker and grinned. We walked to the bus stop together. I was already looking forward to the night ahead and getting to know her better.
‘Shall we go straight into town? I know this great club in Camden that plays alternative music. Do you fancy it?’
I glanced down at my boring burgundy baggy jumper and black jeans. ‘I don’t know if I’m dressed for it.’
‘Oh, it’s very casual. Do you have a T-shirt on underneath your jumper?’
‘Yes.’ Although it was a shabby grey Fruit of the Loom one. If I’d known we were going out I would have worn something better.
‘That’s good. It gets hot in there.’
I wasn’t sure why we didn’t just go to a pub in Walthamstow and was already starting to feel out of my comfort zone. Trendy alternative nightclubs weren’t really my scene. I preferred the familiarity of our local old-man’s pub. I glanced at my reflection as we passed one of the hospital buildings. I looked about twelve with my hair braided away from my face and my long black wool coat making me look shorter. Simone had on a black leather jacket, her straight hair bobbed around her face. I pulled the bands from the ends of my plaits and paused in front of the window to run my fingers through my dark hair. Already I looked older. Simone stopped too, and whistled. ‘Very Catherine Zeta-Jones.’
‘Ha, thanks. I wish.’
‘Trust me. My mate Dan will go wild when he sees you. Are you single?’
‘Um … yeah …’ I’d just come out of a relationship and wasn’t ready to start dating again. Chris had been my childhood sweetheart and we’d been together for nearly three years, but with us being away for long periods oftime at different unis we’d grown apart. Still, I missed him, even though it had been four months since we mutually decided to end things.
‘God, I hate January,’ said Simone, linking her arm through mine. ‘I hate the dark evenings, the rain. Just the greyness of it, you know. The weeks and weeks of dull monotony. Of knowing it’s not going to improve for at least three months until we see a glimpse of spring. It’s such an anticlimax after Christmas, isn’t it?’
By now the bus had arrived and I followed her onto it.
She sat down, dumping her corduroy bag on her lap and hugging it. ‘And the job,’ she continued. ‘So exhausting. I need to let my hair down on my days off. Forget about everything. Do you know what I mean?’
I nodded. I started to feel nervous again that we were going so far away from what was familiar to me. Would she get off her face and leave me alone in a part of London I wasn’t very familiar with? I’d been to Camden Town only a few times with my housemate Kerrie, and that was to look around the second-hand shops for 1970s cord flares and retro jackets. My mates were all as vanilla as I was.
I could already tell that Simone wasn’t like my friends. She was a lot older, more confident and experienced. And she talked, a lot. On that forty-five-minute bus journey I learnt that she’d grown up in Muswell Hill, in a four-bedroom 1930s detached where her parents still lived. She had one younger brother, Oliver, she’d done her degree in Reading, she loved all kinds of heavy rock, punk and metal, and she’d wanted to be a midwife because she lovedbabies. But she also dreamt of having money and travelling the world. She was single but had had two serious relationships (‘and a lot of flings’), planned to marry a successful musician or an investment banker (‘someone who earns a lot of money as I’m never going to be rich working as a midwife’) and wanted either two or four children (‘so one doesn’t get left out’).
As I followed her into that cavernous dingy club, to the thud of some heavy metal band I’d never heard of, I thought she was fascinating. Even when I realized, too late, that she was probably on something, that she kept sneaking off to the loo, leaving me with her mate Dan, a large, lumbering guy with dyed black hair and too much beard who kept telling me how his band were going to be famous.
When Simone had disappeared to the toilet for the umpteenth time, Dan leaned towards me in a cloud of stale beer and fags and said, ‘Just be careful of Simone. She’s a great girl and everything, but she’s on a quest.’
‘What do you mean?’
He tapped his nose in an infuriating manner. ‘What you see isn’t always what you get with her.’
I didn’t like where this conversation was headed. I was enjoying the music, even if it was heavier than the bands I usually listened to, and I liked how unpretentious the club was, how unglitzy, how raw. I was happy that I’d made a new friend and already envisaging introducing her to my other mates, how they’d look up to her too. I didn’t want to hear anything negative about her. ‘She seems great to me.’
