No Longer Safe(9)

I swallowed the tablets and rested my head against a cushion. I glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece – it must have been fast. Karen said I’d only been unconscious for a few seconds.

‘It’s just a little bump,’ she insisted. She made a cup of tea and ladled sugar into mine.

‘Thank you,’ I said trying to hide my grimace. It felt like I’d been in some dark faraway place for longer than a few seconds and I was on the verge of changing my mind about A&E. I could always get a taxi and not bother Karen. On the other hand, I didn’t want to kick up a fuss and come across as a dreary hypochondriac. I was sure Karen would have taken me without hesitation if she’d thought there was any serious concern.

‘So – tell me what you’ve been up to,’ I asked with fake levity, ‘What happened to Roland?’

‘Roland? He’s been and gone. That was a long time ago. I’ve no idea what he’s up to now.’

‘Anyone else on the scene?’ Karen always had a man in tow.

‘I’m taking a break,’ she said unexpectedly. ‘Don’t you find relationships can be hard work sometimes?’ I smiled, but didn’t have enough experience to be able to share her sentiments. ‘I’ve got someone lined up for when I get back,’ she added. That sounded more like it.

‘Where do you work? Where do you live?’ I asked.

‘Well – in the last few years, I’ve been working in West Hollywood as an au pair for a film star – did I tell you?’

‘What? The Hollywood?’

‘Yeah,’ she pulled a funny self-congratulatory face. ‘I met this amazing actor over there and things were going really well, but then,’ she shrugged, ‘I got pregnant.’

‘Right.’

‘He was too high-powered, you know,’ she rolled her eyes, ‘so I couldn’t tell him.’

‘Who was he? This actor. Would I know him? Tell me.’

She took her eyes away, ignoring my questions. ‘It was only a fling for him and we split up. I wanted to keep the baby so I came back to Britain. After Melanie was born, I worked from home doing telesales and was a doorstep rep for a make-up company. Then I needed more flexibility, because Mel kept having to go to hospital. Things got really complicated when she was moved to Glasgow. I’ve been doing the odd bar shift near the hospital up to now.’

I wanted to ask why, with a first-class degree in Anatomy and Human Biology, she’d settled for doing au pair work in the first place, but I didn’t want it to sound like a criticism.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘I could have done a lot better for myself. But au pair work gave me the freedom to live my life. I didn’t want to be stuck in an operating theatre with brown-nosing high-fliers – all that cut-throat rivalry.’

Except that was the Karen I knew in a nutshell – she was ruthlessly competitive and always took the lead, out manoeuvring anyone who got in her way.

‘You seemed so ambitious at Uni, talking about medical school and becoming a surgeon.’

She laughed, scoffing at her old dreams. ‘I realised, in practice, it was going to be a long arduous slog to get that far.’

‘But you were so keen – you couldn’t get enough of dissection. I thought that was what you wanted – the challenge of learning…saving lives…’

‘People change, Alice,’ she said sweepingly. ‘I’m glad I gave it up – now I’ve seen the daily grind inside a hospital rather too often, with Mel. Then there’s all the funding cuts and pressure. I made the right choice.’

I dropped it. ‘So, what made you decide to go to America?’ I asked.

‘Oh – there’ll be plenty of time to tell you all that. It’s pretty boring really.’

I was disappointed. She was fast-forwarding through all those missing years too soon. I wanted to be the judge of whether I found her life interesting or not. There was a hole – six years deep – since I’d last seen her and I wanted to find out what was inside it. What did she do? How had she changed? Maybe it was too early to go deeper. Like she said, there would be plenty of time to find out more. All the same, I had the feeling she was shutting me out.

At that moment a harsh wail broke through the baby monitor. Karen excused herself and went upstairs to check on her daughter. She crept back ten minutes later. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘She’s been waking up all the time. It’s all so new – being outside the incubator at last and back in the real world.’ She sank down beside me on the sofa. ‘Where were we?’ She spoke again before I could answer. ‘I know. Jobs. What about you? What do you do?’ she said.