At last, though, the sample pot is close enough to full and she reenters the little office and passes the vial across, with the faint sense of embarrassment that never seems to leave the act of handing over a still-warm container of your own urine, no matter how many times she does it. The midwife dips a stick into the pot, reads something off, and nods.
“Very good. Nothing to worry about there. Now, let’s do that BP again and then we’re all done.”
Hannah sticks out her arm and the midwife slides on the cuff and inflates it again, this time much tighter, or maybe it’s just that it’s for the second time, Hannah’s not sure, all she knows is that it’s no longer just faintly uncomfortable but actually verging on painful.
There is silence. Hannah can feel the blood rushing in her arm, trying to get past the constriction, and hear the midwife breathing heavily through her mouth. It sounds like she has a cold and her nose is blocked.
Then the woman straightens and undoes the cuff.
“Okay, well it’s probably nothing to worry about, but it is still quite high.”
“I did run here,” Hannah points out, rolling her sleeve back down. She says nothing about the shock she had with Geraint before the midwife called, but she’s uncomfortably aware that it probably didn’t help.
“Let’s get you back next week for a check, and I’m sure it’ll all be back to normal.”
“Next week?” Hannah is dismayed. The normal routine is monthly. The fact that this is considered worrying enough to upgrade her to a weekly visit has unsettled her. “Are you sure?”
“So that takes us to the twenty-first… I can’t do two o’clock,” the midwife is saying, running her finger down her appointment book, “in fact the afternoon is completely blocked out, but I could see you at nine forty a.m. Does that work?”
Hannah sighs. She nods and takes out her phone to input the appointment.
“Sure. But I’m certain it was just because I was running late.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But better safe than sorry, eh? Now, go home and relax.”
Hannah nods, but as she leaves, the thought of Geraint’s email pops into her head like an unwanted intruder, and she finds herself thinking wistfully, If only it was that simple.
BEFORE
“I can’t do it.” Hannah stood in the center of the set living room, twisting her fingers together, nausea and dread mingling in the pit of her stomach. “I can’t. I can’t go down there and find out in front of everyone.”
“Fine. I’ll go.” April stood up and stretched luxuriantly. “I’ll text you. Castanets for a first, thumbs-up for a second, or skull and crossbones for a third.”
“Dickhead,” Hannah said, but she couldn’t help laughing. Somehow April’s attitude was exactly what she needed—a reminder not to take this too seriously. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt like it. What made it worse was the unfairness of it all: April hadn’t even done collections—it turned out her professor didn’t believe in setting them in the first year. Will and Ryan had just done some kind of extended essay and got the marks back the same week. Hugh, on the other hand, had gone off white and trembling in his academic gown to sit a proper exam paper, and had been checking his pigeonhole every morning to see if the results had come through yet.
Hannah wasn’t sure how she had been expecting to get her results—a slip of paper in her pigeonhole, or an email from Dr. Myers. Instead, without warning, she’d had a group text from Rubye, one of the girls at Dr. Myers’s drinks party. Marks are up on Dr. M’s office door. Rx And that was it. No photo. No hint of how anyone had done. And everyone doing English seemed to have received it—which meant there was a very good chance they were all down there now peering at her name, while she was up here too scared to go and look.
“No,” she said now, making up her mind. “No, I have to go. It’s better to know.”
“You know it’s bullshit, right?” April said. She put her hand on Hannah’s arm. “You do know that? It doesn’t count for anything.”
Hannah nodded. But it wasn’t true. Right in that second, that list was everything.
* * *
SOME TEN MINUTES LATER HANNAH was walking down the corridor towards Dr. Myers’s office door, her palms sweating against her jeans. Even from this distance, she could see there were three pieces of paper tacked against the wood, and a girl Hannah recognized as third-year English was bending down, reading the rightmost one. As Hannah neared she stood and turned, a satisfied smile on her lips.