me, I didn’t need to execute my regulation sixth-sense style scan of the house to determine whether the others were in or not. Normally I stood really still in the hallway by the kitchen door and listened with bat-like intensity. I didn’t just use my ears; I could smell people too – their grubby attire tinged with stale cooking odours or perfume. Unwashed hair was a frequent olfactory delight I encountered in the surgery, along with BO, mildewy clothes and mothballs.
Tom used to laugh at my detection skills. ‘You’re like Skippy the Kangaroo – smell this jumper, Skippy, and hunt down little Billy lost in the bush.’ It was odd that I found cooking such a chore because most chefs have an almost superhuman overdeveloped sense of smell.
Other times, I just ‘feel’ people in places – my skin tingles, especially on the back of my skull. If I hadn’t been a doctor, I would most likely have been a detective or a tracker. Or maybe I could have been The Chef Detective, starring in my own TV murder mystery culinary show… (It was Ms Scarlett, in the pantry, with the out-of-date hummus…)
Justine and Mia thought I was a freak at university. ‘You’re going to be one of those spirit healing doctors who lives in the rainforest and just places their hands on someone or sniffs their aura and announces that the patient has pancreatic cancer or is about to suffer an aneurysm.’ But sometimes I could smell illness spilling out of their pores, especially if a patient was very poorly and it was too late for them.
However, my Skippy senses didn’t always come up trumps. I had regrettably misdiagnosed colon cancer in a patient eleven years ago. I’d thought it had been ulcerative colitis – the symptoms are the same, and he’d had a history of it – but alas my judgement had been off kilter. I had felt like a quack for well over a year afterwards. I don’t ordinarily take the emotional side of the job home with me (endless paperwork and essential reading always find their way, however). I think it’s necessary to leave it at the surgery because otherwise it infiltrates your life and you can’t enjoy your precious down time. But I found his death hard to shake.
Obviously the family made a claim (this was before I became a partner), and Girish, the senior partner, reassured me things do happen. ‘You’re human, Christa. This is why we have insurance to protect us from mistakes like this. All of us have done it, though we don’t take it lightly. You mourn it and then you have to move on. Other patients need you to have your head in the game. Next time you will double check and check again.’
The TV was blasting out of the living room and I poked my head round the door to say hi. Jo’s taste in décor put me in mind of a burlesque dancer’s dressing room – the naked pole-dancing lady wallpaper, framed pictures of naked women, the animal print rug that still smelled of wet dog even though the ankle snappers no longer lived here, and the formidable statue of a gorilla placed next to the smaller purple velvet sofa all stoked the fire of my imagination.
Omar and April were curled up together like a couple of kittens on the big leather sofa opposite the planetarium-sized TV while George lay on the smaller one eating a bowl of egg salad (it must be leg week at the gym). George was in control this evening and paused one of the banal reality shows they all loved so much. I guess that’s what you watched when you were twenty. Technically, I was old enough to have birthed the entire living room and not been a teen mum.
‘You’re back! How was the funeral?’ April asked kindly, unfurling herself from Omar. April was a second-year nursing student at King’s and was dating Omar, who was training to be a dentist. George was studying environmental science and was the house recycling monitor, hoarding plastic bags under the sink in preparation for Armageddon. Omar and April lived in the double room below mine, in a Romeo and Juliet doomed romance that would most likely never see fruition. Omar is Muslim and April isn’t.
When Omar’s parents came to visit last term (staying in the office on the double sofa bed), George swapped rooms with Omar and pretended to be April’s boyfriend. We’d had to take down