Under the Knife. Andrea Goldsmith

      2nd September, London.

      I was happy during those first few months with Edwina. Indeed, in many respects it was the best of times. Simone and Greg became engaged and moved in together, Claire was less impossible, and work couldn’t have been better. We’d just completed the pig experiments with excellent results, and the submission for limited human trials was with the Ethics Committee. All very satisfactory.

      Edwina and I would meet for an interview every couple of weeks, and in between she’d see my friends, family and colleagues. She also honed up on the bowel as she said she would, studying monographs and journals as well as my own published work, and a formidable task for a layperson. There were days, and I liked these best of all, when she’d shadow me as I went about my work. She even observed me in theatre, proving to be of sterner stuff than a good many of my students.

      It’s a quality of any intricate task that it creates its own seemingly airtight world. A dense world and complex too, fired by a shared concentration. This is the atmosphere of the operating theatre and it has always appealed to me. The noise of the machines, the theatre staff, their voices and hands are all components in this world, all working in harmony. So when I’d catch a glimpse of Edwina, it was from another place, as if I were in the cabin of an aeroplane and she out on distant clouds. The shock of it, and a feeling I can only describe as rapture.

      She’d keep her questions for an appropriate time and I was surprised how much I welcomed them. In a pleasant, easy way her inquiries provided the impetus for a mid-career stocktake. I felt refreshed, more alert, less likely to perform out of the habit that’s an avoidable side-effect of a long career.

      I’ve never been the type to talk about myself. The facts are what matter and the facts are clear: surgeon and medical scientist, leader in artificial intestine research, married to Cynthia for twenty-five years, two daughters, Simone a physiotherapist and Claire in her last year at school. Yet I went beyond the facts with Edwina. She was so receptive, so attuned to me, she made it so easy.

      I’ve never attended therapy, have always found repugnant the idea of exposing myself to a stranger, yet in those early months with Edwina I found myself wondering whether biography mightn’t be a little like therapy. You start talking at a familiar point, wander off into unexpected territory, then, when your time is up, you spring back into the present, take up your medical bag and re-enter your life. But the diversion leaves its mark, you feel lighter, invigorated. And your listener, Edwina, has been so focussed on you that you’re convinced she regards you as more than just a job. Certainly she was more than just a job for me.

      I looked forward to our interviews. It was not only the career investigations I enjoyed, but revisiting childhood with the unexpected appearance of people and events long forgotten. There was the milk bar man with the missing finger who would always throw in a few extra lollies, and fishing with Charlie Slonim near Port Campbell, and the Guy Fawkes weekend on a farm with the Faines when we stuck sparklers in the cow pats and lit up the whole paddock. Occasionally her questions would lead me to a locked door and I knew to turn away. At other times, I’d be aware of an uneasiness, an event partly submerged in memory’s murky waters. My gropings at these times were half-hearted. I believed then, though I’m not so sure now, that what has been efficiently forgotten is meant to be.

      Don’t you have any dissatisfactions? Edwina once asked me.

      I didn’t, and told her so, then took the opportunity to turn the question back on her.

      Too many to mention, she said with a laugh.

      Very guarded about her life she was, as she ploughed her way through mine.

      3rd September, London.

      Cynthia used to say I achieved more in an hour than other people managed in a week. Now I could spend all day in bed and it would make no difference to anyone except me. I’ve seen it time and again, patients full of fight and against unbeatable odds, but as soon as they take to their bed it’s all over. He won’t get up, a distraught wife will report. He just lies there waiting to die.

      And if I stay in bed, the same will happen to me.

      Immediately I wake I plan my day, converting all the inconsequential aspects of an active, useful life into work. After you get up, I tell myself, you’ll shower and dress. At eight o’clock you’ll buy the papers and read them over breakfast at the High Street café. At half past nine you’ll return to the flat, select lunch destination, plan route, do accounts, follow up query with electricity company. You’ll leave the flat at eleven, drop off clothes at the laundry, two hour walk, lunch — and so on until midnight, when at last I let myself go to bed. It’s like filling a room with air, these days I fill with nothing.

      A few days ago, I realised I was talking to myself. It reminded me of Rosie and I was horrified. Better to talk to a notebook instead, so I started this account. It’s such a relief to have something to do.

      A year or so before meeting Edwina, I had a brief affair with one of Cynthia’s best friends. Sally was a woman with too much time on her hands. Her days were full, yet she achieved nothing. She’d jog before breakfast, go to the gym each morning, lunch with friends, play tennis two or three times a week. She spent as much time toning the body as I did repairing them.

      What on earth do you talk about? I’d ask Cynthia. Her life’s so empty.

      Cynthia must have wondered at my sudden hostility toward someone we’d known for years, but one’s choice of partner, whether wife or girlfriend, reflects on oneself. The sex was good with Sally, bloody good actually, but I didn’t respect her.

      Yesterday, while wandering a distant High Street, I came across a public gym. It was a large place, separated from the street by a wall of glass. The patrons faced the passing traffic while they sweated over the machines. I saw them crank up their performance for the people who stopped to watch. There was one fellow, dressed in T-shirt and boxer shorts and wearing a weight-lifter’s belt, who was particularly industrious. The sweat patch on his shirt never dried. Thick-necked with tree-trunk biceps, he went from one machine to the next. He talked to the other customers, he spoke on the phone, he maintained his sweat patch, he never ran out of things to do. I envied him, and was tempted to go in and sign up. I’ve become everything I despise. I’m no better than Sally.

      I took a taxi back to the flat, a quick escape before I did something I’d regret. But there was nothing for me here. I read for a bit, I tried writing in this journal, I even toyed with ringing Cynthia. In the end I went out and joined the men in the park. Never have I felt so dissatisfied.