Losing It
Chapter 11 – Bloodthirsty
Hope had been on duty for twelve hours and managed five epidurals and done the gassing for three Caesarian sections by the time six o'clock Sunday morning came around. She was never quite sure why so many babies were born at these odd hours, but the rush of seeing these new little lives begin was what kept her coming back for these overnight shifts. Now she was knackered. And she had another night just like this one starting in twelve hours. She headed for the changing room and wondered about just putting her coat on over her rumpled scrubs for the trip home, instead of showering here and changing back into street clothes. It was tempting to shave half an hour off the time between now and the moment she could fall asleep in her own cozy bed.
As she reached in her locker, she saw that the message light on her mobile was blinking. She wondered who had been looking for her – her family and close friends were used to her eccentric weekend schedules by now. As she punched in her pass-code, various scenarios, each less probable than the one before, crossed her mind. Did someone want to take her Sunday night shift? Had Grace been in an accident? Had Rosie gotten engaged? None of them prepared her for what she heard when the message began.
"Hope, sss Martin. I've made ssssuch a messs of thingsss. I wanted to kisssss you but I was a fool and I don't deserve it. You don't deserve the trouble. Damn messss of thingsss. I needed to ssssay goodbye. Oh Hope."
Martin? Was he slurring? And what did he mean by this? She was very worried by the sound of his voice. He seemed despondent. And the comment about needing to say goodbye - was he trying to tell her something? Would he do something really stupid? She looked at the call log – the message had been left at 2 o'clock this morning. Oh God. If he'd done something drastic, it might be too late.
She was wide awake and frantic now. She had been very deeply hurt by the way he had left things Tuesday morning and had spent most of the week trying to forget he existed. And that had not been hard to do, because he was nowhere to be found around the hospital. Officially, he had been placed on administrative leave, whatever that meant. And she had received some very odd looks from Mac Nab and Thompson when she asked them, she thought quite casually, if they knew how he was doing.
Still it was hard not to react to the obvious distress in his message. And no matter what she told herself, she felt something for him. She admired his quiet dignity and knew that the haemophobia thing must be tearing him apart. And she had a nice memory of the tingle that went up her spine when he helped her change the light bulb. If she was honest with herself, she would have to admit she was still curious about what kind of spark might be growing between them.
Just then she saw Diana Webster stride up to her locker, shucking off blood spattered scrubs.
"Ms. Webster? It's Diane, isn't it?"
"Diana, actually. Mum was nuts about the Princess – my twin is Charlotte and I don't think Mum will ever forgive her not being a boy."
Hope smiled at this. "Surgery at this hour? What happened?"
"Oh, I've been on call all weekend with Bell. We've been operating on a crash victim since three. I'm on until six tonight so I'm guessing I'm not done yet. What about you?"
"Obstetrics. Three C-sections during the night – one was a set of twins."
"Lovely."
"Yes they are. Diana, I need a favor. I've got a feeling that Ellingham is in trouble and I need to find someone who knows where he lives. Do you know who would?"
Diana looked at her long and hard. Finally she replied, "Dr. Fairfax, if anyone else had asked me that question, I would have told them to call you. Word around here is that you and Ellingham are an item."
Hope gulped and her cheeks flushed, remembering Martin sitting in her lounge wrapped only in her picnic rug. "Where would anyone get that idea? Not a bit of truth to it."
"Well I heard it from Percy. He's been telling anyone who would listen. But you know he's got it in for Ellingham so who knows what his reason is.
"Well next time you see Percy, you can tell him to stop it. You said you were working with Bell. That's Griff Bell, right? Is he still here?"
"Should be. He was still in post op when I came down here."
"Thanks, Diana. And please, I'd appreciate your discretion on this until I figure out what is going on."
"Yeah, alright. It's tough enough being a girl around here."
"Exactly."
X X X X X
At seven thirty, a taxi dropped Hope in front of a posh block of modern flats in Kensington. After she had made embarrassing promises to Griff Bell, he had called his girlfriend and awakened her, to have her call a friend in admissions, who had been promised an astonishing amount of fine French wine in exchange for taking a peek in Martin's file and disclosing his address. They all could be fired for this.
She strode into the marble-tiled lobby and up to the reception desk. A uniformed concierge greeted her.
"Mr. Ellingham's flat, please."
"I'm sorry, he's not answering."
"You haven't even tried." Hope was exasperated.
"Well I just did – for that very insistent man over there. And we called three times and he didn't answer. I'm sorry, but he must not be in, or if he is in, he must not want visitors."
Hope whirled around to look at Ellingham's other early morning caller. A balding, bespectacled man in a golf shirt looked back at her. Suddenly he seemed to recognize her.
"Fairfax? Foxy Fairfax? Is that you? We'll I'll be. You haven't changed a whit."
"Yes, I'm Hope Fairfax. But do I know you? No one's called me Foxy since med school, at least not to my face."
"Chris Parsons. We were at St. Mary's for a while together."
"Parsons. I remember you. Sorry I didn't recognize you. How are you?"
"I'm fine. Though I am royally pissed at his eminence, Mr. Ellingham. Stood me up completely last night – he was supposed to meet me at my hotel for dinner last night and he never showed. No message or anything and now he's not answering his phone or his buzzer. I was just going to try to hunt him down at St. Thomas's."
"Well I'm looking for him too. No point going to the hospital; I've just come from there. He hasn't been there since Monday as far as anyone knows. He's having some medical issues, I guess you'd say. He left me a very weird message on my mobile this morning around two and I am very worried about him. Worried he might harm himself."
"Martin? Martin Ellingham? You're sure?"
"No, I'm not sure but it was a disturbing message. He sounded despondent, he was slurring his words. Might have been drunk except he never gets drunk. I wondered, well, I wondered whether he'd taken something. He said something about needing to say goodbye."
"Oh God." Chris raced back to the reception desk. "You, there, we need someone to let us into Mr. Ellingham's flat. Immediately. It's a medical emergency."
"I can't do that sir. Mr. Ellingham is very particular. He would be most unpleased if I let you in."
"Well I know how bloody particular he is but he won't have a chance to be particular any longer if he's up there by himself dying, now would he? This is Dr. Fairfax, his doctor. He called her – she has a message from him and he is gravely ill. We need to get up there. We need to do it now."
The man behind the desk blanched, now not certain which fate was worse – a dead Ellingham or one who was angry with him. Dead might actually be better, given the man in question.
Hope added her own plea, "Something is really wrong. You know him, right? He's been acting weird lately, hasn't he? He's ill. He needs help."
The concierge considered. It had been weird, actually, that he'd seen Ellingham around so much during the last couple weeks. He hadn't been following his usual schedule.
"Well, perhaps I can make a well- being check. If he is in distress, I will let you in. That is the best I can do."
"Thank you!" exclaimed Hope. Chris nodded and handed the man twenty pounds to encourage him.
He looked at them and then sighed and motioned them to follow him to the lift. They jumped at the chance. They all exited at the sixth floor. At Martin's door, the concierge knocked loudly and called Martin's name. They could hear music playing, then a loud thud. The concierge looked alarmed. Again he knocked and again there was no answer. Finally, he took a deep breath and unlocked the door. Immediately they all noticed a foul odor - vomit and whiskey overlaid with the unmistakable stink of rubbish left to rot. The concierge turned green and fled immediately, leaving Hope and Chris alone with the open door and the task of finding out what was wrong.
They found him in the lounge, lying on the floor in a pool of vomit next to a leather chesterfield sofa, similarly besmirched. There were several empty whiskey bottles on the table along with a number of sticky tumblers. One bottle had obviously spilled at some point, as it was on its side with a dark pool on the carpet below it. He was dressed in filthy pyjamas and looked as if he hadn't shaved in several days.
Both Hope and Chris felt their instincts, honed in their medical training, take over. Chris rolled Martin onto his back and Hope felt at his neck for a pulse. His heartbeat was strong and he was breathing fine, but he felt sweaty and clammy at the same time.
"Look for pill bottles," she instructed, "and see if you can find his stethoscope."
Chris went rummaging around in the lavatory, the bedrooms and the kitchen. He found the stethoscope on the bureau and brought it back to Hope.
"No sign he's taken pills. There's a nearly full bottle of hydrocodone in the lav – if he'd wanted to do damage, he would have taken that. Nothing else but antacids and paracetomol."
"That's a relief. The pain pills are probably from when they stitched up his hand." Hope hesitated. "Did you see any anti-depressants?"
"No, but why do you ask? I mean, I can't imagine Martin taking something like that."
"Well he's been through a bad patch lately."
"Are you going to tell me what's up?" He looked at her quizzically.
"He's such a private person, Chris. I know you two go back a long while but I think we'd better wait and let him tell you himself."
Chris nodded, knowing how his friend valued his privacy. Looking around the room, he saw some photos on the mantel above the fireplace. He picked one up and brought it back to show Hope. It showed two impossibly young men, recognizable as Parsons with a full head of hair and no glasses, and Ellingham with shaggy blond locks and a bit of a tan.
"That's the two of us. We were twenty-two then, ready to take the medical world by storm. He's been a good friend, if a difficult one. I couldn't stand the sight of him when we first met but now, I'd do anything for him."
"Well where do we start? Should we call an ambulance or try to work this out ourselves?"
"Well if he's just drunk, he'd be mortified if we hauled him to hospital."
"I was thinking the same thing. Do you think we can get him to vomit up the rest of the whiskey? Then put him under the shower and pour coffee into him, see if we can sober him up?"
"Yeah. Help me get him in the bath tub and I'll see what I can do."
"Okay. I'll see if I can make his bed up and get rid of whatever stinky thing is in that bin."
Together they worked on Martin. Chris got him to vomit a couple times and then peeled off the dirty clothes and turned the shower on him. Hope put fresh linens on his bed and found clean pyjamas. He was dazed and confused and still completely inebriated. When they had him cleaned up and put to bed, they tackled the disasters in the kitchen and the lounge.
X X X X X
Martin awoke around three, tucked in his bed in fresh pyjamas with a pounding headache and only a vague recollection of how he had gotten there. He heard music playing in the reception room and wondered what he had left on. There was a large glass of water and a packet of paracetomol on his bedside table, almost as if someone had known he would be waking up with a headache. There was a savory smell of something in the kitchen and he realized he was ravenous.
Padding to the lounge in his bare feet, he was startled to see Chris Parsons sitting on the sofa, reading the paper and drinking a cup of tea. A familiar jazz CD was playing in the background. The room looked tidy except for a damp spot on the carpet near the sofa.
"Martin! Good of you to join us. Glad to see you back among the living."
"Chris. What is going on? When did you get here? How did you get in? I'm sorry but I don't remember what happened."
"No, from the look of things there are probably a couple days worth of things you don't remember. Took yourself on quite a bender, didn't you. Haven't seen you do that since Edith gave your ring back."
Martin turned pale, and then green.
"You were supposed to meet me at the hotel for dinner last night. We fixed it up a couple weeks ago by email. When you didn't show up, I figured you were operating or something so by nine, I gave in and ordered room service. When I hadn't heard from you by this morning and you weren't answering your phone, I came over here to roust you out and give you a piece of my mind before going back to Cornwall. The guy at reception couldn't raise you on the intercom either. I was about to run over to St. Thomas's to track you down when Hope Fairfax showed up in a tizzy about a message you left on her mobile this morning about saying goodbye. She said it sounded like you had taken something and she was worried you might have tried something really stupid."
"Hope? Hope was here?"
"Yep. Still is, actually. I put her to bed in your spare room about an hour ago. She'd been working all night, and then came here and helped me sort you out and deal with the disgusting mess you had around here. She was exhausted. I made her call in sick and have a lie down."
"Hope? I called Hope?"
"Two a.m. call. Haven't you heard you aren't supposed to drink and dial? Very embarrassing. And you, sir, need to fill me in on what's up with the lovely Dr. Fairfax. You never said anything to me about you and her."
"No, I don't suppose I did." Martin looked stunned. "She came over here? She cleaned up my filth? She's still here?" He couldn't quite believe it.
"She must see something in you, mate, because she was in a lather about the possibility that you might have offed yourself. You two have a thing going?"
"No. Not a thing, as such. She's been very kind to me though. Kinder than I deserve."
Chris sighed. "Well do you think you can fill me in on what's been going on with you? Hope refused to tell me anything other than you'd been through a bad patch and were on medical leave from the hospital."
Martin looked at his friend. "Is there any more tea? Let me start with that and then I can tell you the whole story."
And so slowly, over cups of tea and a take-away curry that Chris had thoughtfully picked up, Martin haltingly told his friend about the day he'd broken down. About Mrs. Clark and her diabetic foot. About Harry Godwin's stitches and Dennis Sedgwick's funeral. About dinner with Hope and hospital gossip and Lakshmi Kapoor and his long walk in the rain across London. About Haemophobia, and despondence, and making a fool of himself and drinking himself into a stupor. When he finished, he put his head in his hands and wept.
"Martin. Pull yourself together, mate. That is a rough patch, no doubt about it. But it's not like you're dying or anything. From what Hope said, I thought you must have inoperable cancer or something. This is a problem you can deal with. Therapy or something. And even if it is permanent, even if you never perform surgery again, you've still got your health. Still got your first-rate brain and loads of medical talent and training that most blokes would give their eye-teeth for. And look at Hope. There's a lovely girl whom you haven't scared off, despite trying mightily to do so. She sees something worthwhile in you, too."
"I don't deserve her. Not like this. Not broken-down and depressed and unable to work. She deserves better."
"That's the thing about women. None of us deserve them. You think I look over at Tracy of a morning and say 'Gee, she's so lucky to have me? I am such a ruddy good catch? And I deserve to have the love of this wonderful woman.' Not bloody likely. I look over at her and thank my lucky stars she sees in me whatever it is she sees in me. Me with my bald head and my specs and my bit of a paunch. Me with my snoring and my golf habit and my socks on the floor. I don't deserve her. And that's why we've been married ten years now."
"That's different. You and Tracy, well you just belong together. And you're happy together, both of you."
"Martin, the one thing you do deserve is to be happy - and to have the chance to try to make someone else happy. Hope deserves to be happy too. Give it a chance. Maybe she's the one and maybe not. But you'll never find out if you keep pushing everyone away."
