people,’ he says, ‘should not be taking your biannual appraisal lightly. If I may use my favourite analogy—’
Let me guess. Space, the final frontier?
‘—a career is rather like interplanetary travel—’
Bingo!
‘—The slightest misfire on your rocket’s trim controls—’
Trim controls, trim controls…Must have left them in my workstation. In my desk-tidy perhaps? Oh, I was forgetting; this is an analogy.
‘—and you’ll miss your destination by light years. Your ship, my friend—’
Pur-lease, Haye—I am not your friend.
‘—has yet to leave the launch pad. If you’ve any interest at all in achieving lift-off, you’ll reschedule the hospital.’
Oh yes, how I’d love to cancel an urgent investigation into a potentially life-threatening disease so I can listen to you marking me out of ten on my performance across fifteen key criteria.
‘I’ll do my best,’ I say.
He turns and walks briskly away, all things-to-do-people-to-see. I can’t believe how jaded I feel. A thirty-one-year-old burn out. Yet there’s one thing that gives me hope. I do, after all, have a dream, though not one of which Megan would approve. I’m not sure I entirely approve of it myself. This is how it goes:
Haye: Murray, something huge has come up, a gold-plated revenue opportunity and a chance to make the world a better place.
Colin: What is it, Niall?
Haye: Before I tell you, I need to know I can count on you one hundred and ten per cent. You’ll be playing on the A team, pissing with the big boys, and I need to know you’re up for it.
Colin: You know I relish a challenge, Niall. Show me your biggest executive urinal and let me hose down that porcelain.
Haye: We’ve been appointed to handle Mr Muscle.
Colin: Fantastic! Stupendous. This is the one we’ve been waiting for.
Haye: Isn’t it? We’ve got the whole lot. The kitchen spray, the bathroom cleaner, the entire kit and caboodle.
Colin: Even the oven spray, the drain cleaner and the handy orange-scented kitchen wipes?
Haye: Their entire product portfolio is ours and I believe there’s only one man who can handle it…(Unnecessarily over played dramatic pause)…Murray, this is your baby.
SFX: Manly backslaps and high fives.
It isn’t always Mr Muscle. Sometimes it’s Cif, sometimes Dettox. Other times, as a sop to my ex, it’s an as yet un-launched range of eco-friendly products that really do make the world a better as well as a cleaner and more fragrant place.
Murray: Can you believe it, Meg? Thanks to me the Midlands and the Southeast have been officially pronounced germ-free, and it’s been achieved without any increase in CFC and chlorine levels.
Megan: Oh, Murray, you really have made the planet safer for our unborn child and you’ve done it without sacrificing market share. Come here and let me smother you with kisses.
Whatever, I honestly think that being given control of a bigspending household cleaner account would give my life meaning and purpose. I imagine the factory tours where I’m shown how they mix the chemicals that cut through grease, yet leave no unsightly powdery residue. I picture myself in a white protective suit being allowed a glimpse of the aggressive solvents that, if they weren’t so busy breaking down baked-on filth, could be used by some crazed despot for his WMD programme. I dream of brainstorming sessions where I lead a crack team of marketing pros and detergent boffins in search of the Holy Grail: a multi-surface cleaner suitable for kitchens and bathrooms. It’s a question of fragrance. You may or may not have noticed, but kitchen cleaners smell entirely inappropriate when you use them in the bathroom and vice versa. It’s only a little thing, but a one-product-fits-all solution must be out there…If only they could find the right scent.
I’m rambling. My point is that, sad to say, the task—the job of Detergents Tsar—would be more than advertising. For me it would be evangelism.
seven: i have done this before, you know. that’s why i keep my nails short
thursday 13 november / 9.26 a.m.
Why Saint Matthew? He started out as a tax inspector, didn’t he? Hardly a name to comfort the sick, and surely it only reminds the dying of death duties.
The place is vast; an industrial sprawl reminiscent of a Soviet uranium facility in the Siberian wastes—except somehow it ended up in east London. It must take the health budget of a third-world country just to heat and light the place.
Where’s Outpatients? Is it the same as Aamp;E or is it something different? I wonder this as I walk past a group of three old men in winceyette pyjamas smoking by a fire exit. Don’t think I’ll be asking them.
The story goes that a minor royal—the Duchess of Chingford or something—turned up to cut the ribbon on a new paediatric ward in the early nineties and she still hasn’t found her way out. Never mind pegging out on trolleys in corridors, people must die simply trying to find the right department—unless they’ve had the good sense to pack a rucksack with food, water and Kendal Mint Cake.
I’m walking around in circles. I know this because the chain smokers are looming into view again.
9.55 a.m.
By the time I find the right Outpatients I’m nearly half an hour late. I’m tired and footsore, and I’m wishing I were significant enough to qualify for Blower Mann’s corporate BUPA membership. I’m also worried that I’ve missed my slot. I shouldn’t be. This is the NHS and they’re running well behind.
My appointment is in one of Saint Matthew’s new bits. The reception area has floor to ceiling windows and a bracing view of big trees, though I think I can make out a tall chimney stack between two sycamores. Hospital incinerators always unsettle me. I know they put old bandages and stuff in them, but what else? I mean, if you’d asked the commandant of Auschwitz about his, I bet he’d have said, ‘Ach, zose zings? Zey are just for burnink ze garden rubbish und votnot.’ Hospitals bring out the paranoiac in me. I’ve seen Coma too many times. Show me a couple of doctors chatting by a coffee machine and I’ll show you a conspiracy. I’m scared of flying, but I’m terrified of hospitals. And it’s an entirely rational fear. Statistics are used to soothe the nervous flyer: you’re far more likely to get knocked down by a car and so on. But when it comes to nervous patients they’re flummoxed. Hospitals are perfectly safe—more people die in…Er…Die in…Die in what, then? Look at it this way: even if you get whacked in a car crash there’s a fair chance you won’t die in the wreckage—no, they rush you to a hospital to do that.
I
