Move.” She leaned across me, grabbed up the kettle and poured the tea, roughly enough that a few drops of water splashed onto the countertop. “The point is, if your doctors went all out for you, great. But not everyone gets to live in the same world as you.”
“Oh for God’s sake,” I said. “Listen to yourself. It’s not like they have a, have some, some—” I knew exactly what I meant, couldn’t find the words to get it into Susanna’s head, bit down hard on the inside of my lip— “They don’t have some secret score card where they take points off you for having a skanger accent or being over sixty-five, and then you only get as much treatment as your points can buy. That’s ridiculous. You’re going to have to trust that they’re doing their best.”
Susanna had the tray ready. She started tidying around it: crumbs swept into her hand and flung into the bin, milk and butter shot into the fridge, door flicked shut, deft economical movements with a snap to them.
“Having Zach wasn’t fun,” she said. Her voice was very level, but there was a tightly controlled undercurrent to it. “The consultant did some stuff to me—I mean, I’ll spare you the details, but basically there were a few options and I really didn’t agree with the one he wanted to go with. So I said no. And he told me, quote, ‘If you try to get feisty with me, I’ll get a court order and send the police to your door to bring you in.’”
“He was winding you up,” I said, after a startled second.
“He was dead serious. He told me all about the times he’d done it to other women, in detail, to make sure I knew he wasn’t winding me up.”
“Jesus,” I said. I wanted to know what the fuck Tom had been doing while someone talked to his wife like that. Presumably he had been nodding inoffensively and pondering which cringeworthy baby-carrier to schlep the kid around in. “Did you file a complaint?”
Susanna turned, butter knife in hand, and gave me an incredulous stare. “About what?”
“He can’t do that.”
“Of course he can. If you’re pregnant, you don’t have the right to any say about your health care. He could do whatever he wanted to me, whether I agreed to it or not, and it would be totally legal. Did you seriously not know that?”
“Well,” I said. “I mean, in theory he could. But in practice, I really doubt it works out like—”
“It works out exactly like that. I should know. I was there.”
I didn’t particularly want to get into a fight about this, plus I felt like we were getting a little off topic here, given that Hugo was unlikely to be pregnant. “That consultant was a shithead,” I said. “I’m really sorry that happened to you. And I can totally see why you’d be gun-shy about doctors. But just because you ran into a bad one, that doesn’t mean—”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Susanna said. She threw the butter knife into the sink with a clatter, picked up the tea tray and left.
* * *
Normally I would have handled that conversation a lot better. After all, it wasn’t like Susanna had transformed into an entirely different person; she had always liked getting up in arms about injustices, real and imagined, and I’d never done anything but roll my eyes cheerfully and let it go. The same with Leon: he had always been a moody little bollix, I knew better than to let it get to me, normally I would have walked off and left him to it long before his mood could rub off on me. Now, apparently, minor variations on their usual bullshit had the power to knock me sideways.
It’s tempting to blame it on the stress of Hugo dying, or on the cracks, neurological or psychological or whatever, from that night, but if I’m honest I think it was a lot more mundane and pathetic than that. The truth, I suppose, is that I envied Leon and Susanna. The sensation was so unfamiliar that it took me a while to recognize it; I’d spent my life taking it for granted that, if anything, it was the other way around. Social stuff had always come easily to me—not that I was some charismatic leader type, but I was always effortlessly part of the cool crowd, invited to everything, secure enough in my footing that Dec had been accepted into the fold