“Wait. You’re that doctor. Off the telly.”
“Yes,” allows Joe, after a pause. “I am.”
“My girlfriend’s obsessed by you!” The bouncer is suddenly full of friendly animation. “Obsessed! She changed her free pass from Harry Styles to you. And she wouldn’t do that lightly, because she loves Harry Styles. I was like, ‘Babe, you sure?’ and she was like, ‘That doctor is hot.’？”
He looks at Joe as though expecting an appropriate reaction, and I bite my lip hard because otherwise I’m going to splutter with laughter.
“Right,” says Joe. “Well. Thanks. That’s…an honor. Although you should be aware I have a policy of not taking up free passes with women whose boyfriends could flatten me with one blow.”
“I’m telling her now.” The bouncer has stopped listening and is texting. “Listen, I’m not supposed to do this, but can I get a selfie?”
He grabs Joe and beams at his phone screen, while Joe gazes pleasantly ahead—not exactly ignoring him, but not doing a cheesy grin either. Then Joe’s phone rings and he says in evident relief, “So sorry, I’d better answer this.”
As he moves off to take his call, Bean disappears inside the house, and for a few moments there’s quiet. Cautiously, I shift position again, because a muscle in my leg has started to spasm. This is getting ridiculous. What am I going to do? How do I get into the house? I still need a hand grenade. Or a different plan altogether, except I don’t have one.
Guests are still arriving in dribs and drabs. An entire family in black tie approaches and is admitted. I have no idea who they are, must be more friends of Krista’s. Kenneth from the golf club arrives, wearing a tartan bow tie, mistakes the bouncer for a guest, and starts groping politely for his name—“Now, I’m sure we’ve met”—before the bouncer puts him right and sends him inside.
Then Joe wanders past, still on the phone, and I stiffen.
“Hi, Mum?” he’s saying. “Did I miss a call just now? Yes, I’m here. Oh, I see. Well, no worries, I haven’t gone in yet, I’ll wait for you.” He listens a moment, then says, “No, don’t be silly. We’ll go in together. See you in ten minutes.”
He moves to one side of the house and starts reading something on his phone. It’s gallant of him to wait for his mum, I admit to myself grudgingly. But, then, they’ve always been close. Joe’s father died when he was small, and his sister, Rachel, is eleven years older than him. So after Rachel went to university, it was just his mum and him at home. Joe was teased a bit at junior school, his mum being the headmistress, but he tolerated it calmly, almost as though it was irrelevant. He stayed focused on what he wanted from life. He could see the bigger picture long before the rest of us could.
She must be super-proud of him now, I think, a little bitterly. Everyone in the country loves her precious, talented doctor son. From bouncers to the prime minister. Everyone in the whole country loves Joe. Except me.
Maybe you have to have a streak of cruelty to be a good surgeon? Maybe that’s why he was able to treat me so badly and just walk off? I don’t know. For all that I loved him, I never got to the core of Joe. I never reached his innermost Russian doll. He always kept a part of himself locked well away.
When he got into King’s College London to read medicine, for example, it took everyone by surprise. I don’t know what I’d thought he was aiming for in life. I knew he had good, strong, sensitive hands—but I saw them as pianist’s hands, not surgeon’s hands. He played jazz piano in the school band and used to joke about making his living in bars. I took him at his word.
I didn’t even know he was applying for medicine. He’d kept it completely quiet. He’d talked vaguely about physics at Birmingham, or maybe taking a year out to study piano, maybe teaching, like his mum… But it was all a smokescreen, hiding the truth, hiding his fierce ambition.
After he announced that he’d won his place, he admitted it to me: He hadn’t wanted to reveal what his goal was, in case he failed. He’d secretly volunteered at a local hospital, worked into the small hours, done what he needed to do to apply for medicine, without sharing a word except with his mother. Not even with me. There’s something tungsten protecting the core of him.
I’m not surprised he’s doing well. His brain is like a machine. And he has a streak of arrogance. I can see him in an operating theater, talking firmly, never wasting words, everyone else obeying his orders.