ex-patient interviewees. In other words, he wants to make sure I’m only talking to people who will tell it as he wants it told.
To be honest I didn’t take to the man at all. He talked down to me as if I was a child, calling me ‘dear’. I’m not his ‘dear’. We’ve only just met. Perhaps that’s how he treats all women, but by the end I felt like slapping him.
He didn’t seem to have any objections to the other three patients on the list but when it came to Maria Romano he’s definitely warning me off. He started with the usual caution about patient confidentiality and then proceeded to break all his own rules, telling me that she’d been a patient for many years suffering from what he called persistent paranoid delusional mania, and even reading direct from her file, like he really had a point to prove. Of course I didn’t tell him I’ve already started interviewing her!
His secretary came and whispered something in his ear and he asked me to excuse him for a few minutes. He was gone for much longer so I started wandering around his office, looking through the windows, etc., till I noticed he’d left M’s file open on the desk.
I had a quick flick through but it was all a bit technical and there was not enough time to make proper notes. Then remembered I’d brought my camera so took photos of a couple of pages then got jumpy. Dr W came back after about quarter of an hour, all bright and breezy, we chatted a bit more and I said goodbye.
New problem: how to get my photographs of the medical notes developed without revealing personal information? Can’t take them to Boots the Chemist, can I?
Chapter Four
London, 2008
That very week, despite my impeccable answers to those consultants’ crass questions, I was made redundant. ‘Pack-up-your-desk-within-the-hour’ redundant. And although I knew that the immediate dismissal was nothing to do with their assessment of my honesty and everything to do with protecting commercial secrets, it felt as though I’d been kicked in the teeth and all my hard work for them over the past few years was entirely wasted.
‘I just don’t know who I am any more,’ I moaned, pouring myself a third glass of Pinot, when Jo arrived that evening. ‘It sounds so stupid. It was a hellish, boring job and I couldn’t wait to get out. But being made redundant makes you feel as though they haven’t valued a single thing that you’ve done for them, in four years. I walked out of there feeling like a non-person.’
Jo and I have been best friends since fashion college. We’d shared several grubby bedsits in the early years and were virtually inseparable until relationships and careers took us on different paths. I still have a photograph of us on graduation day, snapped by my proud mum. Jo is squinting at the camera in an attempt to please, and I am gazing into the distance, perhaps daydreaming or simply bored by the whole event. Neither of us would wear a traditional gown and mortar board for the occasion, of course, being far too cool for that sort of thing. We opted instead for some of our more outlandish fashion statement outfits, all torn edges and spray painted patterns – we’d dubbed it graffiti chic, as I recall. I cringe whenever I look at it. She is tall and angular, with an unkempt mop of hair blowing into her eyes; I’m a head shorter, slightly built, my round face topped with a rebellious retro-punk hairstyle like a blonde pincushion. It was not a flattering look and soon got discarded once I started job hunting and saw the disdainful glances of the slick-suited bosses I was trying to impress.
She was always fascinated by historical fabrics and went to work as a textile conservator while I spent my first year out of college living on sofas and struggling as an unpaid intern for various interior design companies until landing a dogsbody job. But I hated the cliquey, hothouse atmosphere of the studios and the arrogance of their rich, self-obsessed customers. Before long I was deeply disillusioned, and decided to get out.
When I joined the bank I’d had to adopt the uniform of the City – dark suit and heels, bleached hair in a neat elfin cut and a mask of make-up re-applied several times daily. Jo still disdained such conformity. She went to work in skinny jeans and a tee-shirt, artfully embroidered, dyed or painted, perhaps, but still a tee-shirt. I never envied her temporary contract hand-to-mouth existence, but respected her for hanging on with fierce determination, despite everything, to her long-held passion for textiles. The respect was not reciprocated: Jo had never disguised her disapproval of my ‘selling out’ to the banking world and her disgust at the bonus culture which, for me, was its only real attraction.
Despite our divergent lives we’d remained the best of friends. Although I’d been devastated when Jo and her boyfriend Mark moved to distant south London for more affordable house prices, we met as often as we could, and she was still the only person in the world in whom I could confide really personal things, the person I turned to when everything was going wrong. This evening, she’d decided to stay over because Mark was away on business.
She sat on the floor hugging her knees, dark curls falling in front of her face, reminding me of our student days, before we could afford chairs. ‘Looking on the bright side, perhaps it’ll be the spur you need to get you back into interior design,’ she said. ‘You can do whatever you want. Something you really enjoy.’
She was right, of course. It had always been my plan to save enough to set up my own business but, even with the generous payoff, how could I do this with no job to fall back on, plus a massive mortgage? Once upon a time I’d had talents and passions, but they’d been so neglected recently that they’d probably packed their bags and emigrated.
‘And that, on top of splitting up with Russell …’ I croaked.
Russell and I had parted more in sorrow than in anger. He is a man of such absurdly perfect features that when he enters a room every female glance is drawn involuntarily towards him. As if that didn’t make him desirable enough, he also has a starry career, having just been made the youngest-ever partner in his law firm. We were the perfect match, or so our friends believed, but appearances can be so misleading. Couples may seem enviably united and loving on the outside, but who can tell what goes on behind closed doors?
Apart from our sex life, which was great, Russ and I had little in common. He wasn’t the slightest bit interested in art or interiors, and I’d rather watch paint dry than go to a rugby match, which was his grand passion outside work. He was a massive carnivore and never understood why meat could be so repugnant to me; in his world vegetarians were there to be converted or, at best, baited for their whimsical ways.
His ideal holiday was skiing, hang gliding or white water rafting; I usually wanted to visit galleries and old houses, or simply crash out on a beach in the sun and read. Apart from law tomes and the occasional trashy thriller, I never saw Russell with a book in his hand. For him, relaxation was getting hammered in the bar on a Friday evening, shouting to fellow lawyers. He didn’t do chilling out, and he wasn’t too fond of my alternative ex-uni friends, either. I think he was terrified I might one day give up being a banker and revert to my artsy roots, take up painting again, dig out my eighties tie dye and big earrings, and start serving organic quinoa with every meal.
Despite our differences we got along fine for a few years but, eventually, the sparkle just wasn’t there anymore and, though we’d tried hard to revive it, deep down we both knew we weren’t right for each other. One tearful evening last November we found ourselves admitting it and, although we were both devastated, agreed to spend some time apart.
I calculated that my salary would just about cover the mortgage payments on the flat, so he’d moved out just before Christmas. Apart from a drunken sentimental night together on New Year’s Eve, we were still officially separated and on New Year’s Day, once I’d
