Doctor God

By Arlo Mercia

Doctor God is set in Australia, in the early 1990s, with flashbacks to London in 1949-52. At Civic Hospital, Canberra, a routine test for a brain tumour erupts into a crisis and a talented young man’s life is at stake. Max Godfrey, the Director of Harbings Institute for scientific research is called upon to solve the mystery, only to find he might have been the cause. Both his career and new-found love are at stake if the past is revealed. What was the secret behind the drug trial he worked on in the 1950’s; and was the fire that killed the local doctor an accident – or murder? Max is not the only person seeking the truth . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arlo Mercia
• Release date: Jun 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310090714

Arlo Mercia

I am Australian and currently live on the island of Tasmania. I have worked in a range of jobs including as an artist, running a small business selling tea, and in education. Currently I am a senior teacher at the local high-school. I love travelling because then I can indulge my passion for infra-red landscape photography – you can see some of my photos in the background of my author’s website. Writing fantasy novels is the perfect complement to my love of painting, and you can find my artwork both in the books and on my website. I began writing novels about twenty years ago with ‘Margot’s Men’, and now I focus on the fantasy series ‘The Lygons of Fraith’ which is about a race of beautiful reptilian cats called lygons, their cheeky companions the geflars, many colourful dragons, and a few humans . . .

Book preview

PROLOGUE – A FAIRY TALE

Once upon a time, late in a night when rainclouds cluttered the night sky, and the thin branches of the trees tossed restlessly in the windy dark, the Nightwatchman heard a desperate pounding on the castle door.

He opened the door to find a bedraggled waif of a girl shivering on the doorstep. ‘Please Sir,’ she pleaded, ‘let me in! For I am cold and hungry, and lost in the night. I am afraid that I might die!’

‘Be gone!’ Cried the Nightwatchman, who was used to dealing with beggars.

‘But Sir,’ she replied, undaunted, ‘I am a Princess.’

And indeed, when the Nightwatchman looked more closely, there was a certain air of nobility in the way she moved, and an intelligent lilt to her voice that caused him to pause in shutting the door.

Taken with curiosity, he let her in.

The Queen was passing through the Great Hall on her way to bed, and stopped to see who had entered at this late hour. She was most puzzled to find that the Nightwatchman, usually such a sensible man, had let in a bedraggled young beggar-woman.

‘But Your Royal Highness,’ he tried to explain with embarrassment, ‘she says she is a Princess!’

The Queen regarded the young woman with care, and despite her dishevelled state it was possible to tell that her face was intelligent and bright, her hands were fine and white, and her clothes, though wet and muddied, were richly woven. She carried herself with grace and spoke well. She was certainly a noble woman, but was she a Princess? And how did she come to be knocking at the castle at this late hour on such a hostile night?

The Queen ordered that the young woman be bathed, clothed and fed. The news spread throughout the palace, and courtiers gathered to see the intriguing stranger.

When she reappeared, fresh and replenished, even the Queen was entranced by her beauty. If she were indeed a Princess, thought the Queen, she would make an admirable wife for her son.

Despite enquiries, the mysterious young woman was reluctant to explain how she came to be wandering alone, lost and so far from home - when that was not the customary behaviour of a young lady.

There is but one way to discover if she is truly a Princess!’ exclaimed the Queen. ‘She shall sleep here the night, and in the morning we shall know!’

The Queen ordered that a special bed be made for her. She sent for every spare mattress in the palace, and piled them high. Seventeen mattresses she stacked, one on top of the other, and when nobody was watching, under the very bottom mattress, right in the middle, she placed a pea . . .

CHAPTER 1 – Crisis

The phone blaring in the dark tore Janice from the blank sleep of exhaustion.

‘Hmm?’ she grunted, barely conscious; her head spinning and heart pounding with apprehension.

‘Doctor Ewing?’

‘Mm.’

‘It's your patient Robin Carter. We administered the drug as you ordered, but he's having seizures. Deteriorating rapidly. We need you back here.’ The Ward Sister’s voice was efficient, but the collective panic felt by her nursing staff was thinly veiled.

The sterile efficiency of the hospital invaded Janice’s cosy bedroom. She was alert now, her mind racing over the details of the case.

‘Seizures?’ Janice sat up on the edge of her bed groping for the light switch and reaching for her glasses.

‘Yes, two so far. The second was worse than the first.’

‘Ok, give him three hundred milligrams of Dilantin to stop the convulsions. Orally if you can, if not, then intravenously - but you’ll need him on a cardiac monitor to do that. I’m on my way.’

She struggled back into the clothes she had been so relieved to take off a couple of hours before. She’d already worked a long day, and her body rebelled at having to go back. She ran her fingers through her hair to lift where she had slept on it, grabbed her car-keys and headed out.

The cold night air of Canberra made her gasp. It cleared her head, but her stomach reeled with the nausea of fatigue. She fumbled the keys into the ignition. Who the hell ever cares how I feel? she wondered as the car finally roared to life in the still, dark street.

On the way to Civic Hospital, she thought about Robbie. She had never heard of seizures as a side-effect of the standard drug he had been administered – psychotic states, high blood pressure and diabetes – but not seizures.

She thought Robbie had Cushing’s Disease; a rare condition caused by a brain tumour in the pituitary gland. It can happen at any age, but Robbie was only seventeen. His rapid decline from lithe team-sports player, to flaccid and depressed recluse, seemed particularly cruel.

Accurate diagnosis was tricky. She had ordered a scan of his brain just yesterday, but it hadn’t been conclusive. It wasn’t clear if there was a tumour in the soft, periwinkle-shell shaped pituitary gland sheltered under the front of the brain; but then small tumours didn’t always show in a scan, and that was why she had ordered the standard drug test this evening. A dose of the steroid dexamethasone, or DMZ, at midnight, should have had an easy to interpret effect on his urine in the morning. A positive result would mean a pituitary tumour, and a negative result would mean a tumour somewhere else.

Diagnosing any condition means working through possibilities. When the body responds predictably it is a challenging task thought Janice. But when a body does something totally unexpected – where on earth do you look for cause, let alone a cure?

She pulled into her parking bay in the Drs’ car park and ran in through the side door. She took the stairs because they were always quicker than the lift. ‘Doctor Ewing!’ exclaimed the Ward Sister, who knew she always took the stairs, and so was waiting for her at the top, ‘I'm so glad you're here – he’s in a coma . . . scale five, just a few minutes ago.’

‘A coma?!’ This is a nightmare – what on earth have I done to deserve this from you Robin Carter? Although on the outside Janice remained calm, attentive, in control; inside the nausea of panic came in waves that she adamantly ignored.

She and the Ward Sister hurried down the west wing of the hospital, to where Robbie lay efficiently attached by tubes to a phalanx of drips and beeping monitor machines; deeply unconscious to the drama that revolved around him.

Janice looked down at his familiar face. She was used to him smiling. Even in the depths of depression, when his big brown eyes were dark and broody, he would still manage a wry grin and a sardonic comment. He had the foundation of that manly way with him. Now his face was pale and blank, almost puzzled; there was nothing amusing about this. How our bodies betray us, she thought as she checked the record sheet. She felt heavy, and afraid – sad that so much was expected when she had so little to give.

The neatly noted facts and times told of something going suddenly, drastically wrong. She stared again at the record sheet. Within a few minutes of receiving DMZ, Robbie had reported headache, nausea, blurred vision. Then his temperature had soared. He had started vomiting, become incoherent, lost co-ordination of his limbs, and had the first of three whole body seizures. His level of consciousness dropped dramatically, and during the third seizure he became unconscious. All this in just under an hour.

It seemed there was little time to save his life.

‘Doctor, are you alright?’ asked one of the nurses.

‘Oh? Yes, I’m fine. Just tired. Nurse, looking at these records, what would you say they indicate?’

‘Oh, I would say . . . a raised ICP?’ the nurse answered nervously.

‘Mm. Raised intracranial pressure. That’s interesting. So would I.’

The nurse smiled in relief. ‘However,’ Janice went on, ‘This reaction appears to be in response to DMZ, which, as we know, is commonly used on patients with brain tumours to reduce ICP . . . There is something very strange happening here . . . Is there a radiologist in at the moment? If not, call one in. I need another scan, and I need it now. Meanwhile give Mr Carter 100 mls of twenty percent Mannitol solution. That should keep the pressure inside his head down for a few hours until we work out what to do.'

Doctor Tony Hoi was just about to get into his car when he saw the nurse running towards him, calling his name. It occurred to him to pretend he hadn’t noticed, and quickly drive away; it had been a long shift. He had already turned off his pager, because it was just after 1 a.m., and he had the next couple of days off. He wanted to get some sleep so he could enjoy them. But then he heard the nurse call ‘Doctor Hoi! Doctor Ewing wants you!’

The nurse noticed as he came towards her, that his right foot was slightly turned in at the ankle, and he limped. It was something he managed to conceal when he walked around the hospital, but out in the open, in the dark expanse of the car park, it was quite pronounced.

When he reached her, he placed his hand lightly on her shoulder to guide her back to the hospital. ‘Doctor Ewing needs me, so I will come.’ he said, smiling down at her from his round, warm, wrinkled face; all crinkled and fragrant, like a benevolent moon that had been soaked in jasmine tea. ‘She is a very clever lady. You can learn a lot from Doctor Ewing.’

‘Oh, I do. But she’s rather intimidating.’

‘Ah, no!’ he laughed. ‘What do you call those chocolate biscuits that have marshmallow and jam in the middle?’

‘Chocolate Royals?’ the nurse answered, rather bemused.

‘Yes, those biscuits. I think her heart is like one of those, but she has locked it away in a biscuit tin in her desk so that we do not know. Don’t you think?’ he said in a conspiratorial tone.

The nurse found this a rather bemusing view of the highly focussed endocrinologist. She remembered Doctor Ewing’s comment ‘There is something very strange happening here . . .’ and she decided that maybe there was.

Now they were hurrying down the corridor of the west wing. It was still busy, even at this early hour of the morning; but with the lights subdued and staff absorbed in the careful, precise movements that are necessary if one is to be quiet and efficient at the same time. There was Doctor Ewing deep in discussion with the Ward Sister.

Janice looked up just as Doctor Hoi and the nurse reached her, and smiled in genuine pleasure and relief to see him. Her smiled warmed him to the heart, and he was glad that he she had needed him.

‘Doctor Hoi, thank goodness it was you they found! You did a CT scan for me yesterday on a young Mr Carter. I need another one, and I need it right now. But he’s in a coma.’ Doctor Hoi raised his eyebrows and wrinkled his wide forehead in surprise. ‘I’ll explain while they get him down to Radiology for you.’

Nowhere else in the hospital are the machines larger or more complicated than the Radiology Department. The Computed Tomography, or CT, machine X-rays sections of the body. Yesterday Robbie had cracked jokes as he lay down on the narrow white bed that slid in and out of the large white box. It had made him feel dizzy for the rest of the day. Then they had told him the results were inconclusive and they would have to do further tests, and he was very disappointed.

Tonight he was silent and still – trapped in a comatose body, unaware that this time the scan results would be surprisingly clear.

The nurses carefully strapped him onto the scanner bed. Janice stood in the computer room with Doctor Hoi, waiting anxiously until an image appeared on the screen. She thought she might see a haemorrhage in his brain, but she wasn’t sure. Certainly neither she nor Doctor Hoi expected what they did see.

His trained eye spotted it first. He gasped, touched her arm lightly to get her attention, and pointed to a dark shadow. ‘That is the largest pituitary tumour I have ever seen. That was not there yesterday.’

Janice was too shocked to do more than repeat, ‘No, it wasn’t there yesterday. It’s the largest one I’ve ever seen come out of nowhere. Shit. There is something very strange happening here tonight.’

‘Indeed, Dear Lady – there is.’

They called in the neurosurgeon. His team started setting up for the operation while they contacted Robbie’s parents. Only his father, Bill, came in.

They met him in a private waiting room with low, comfortable chairs, a coffee table, and the usual pale, unobtrusive artwork on the walls. Bill looked too robust and muscular for the room. He was ruffled and sleepy, but alert with concern. He knew the doctors would not get him out of bed in the middle of the night without good reason.

Bill started by apologising that his wife Lynette hadn’t come because she didn’t cope well with hospitals. Doctor Hoi looked a little surprised, but Janice wasn’t. She whispered, ‘I’ll explain later.’

‘Thanks for coming in so quickly, Mr Carter.’ she said, ‘Something very unexpected has happened with Robbie, and we need to discuss the situation with you, tell you what we think needs to be done, and seek your permission to go ahead if you agree.’ Bill nodded warily.

‘You realise that he was admitted to be tested for possible Cushing’s Syndrome; that is, we thought he might have a tumour in his pituitary gland, and we wanted to make sure. Well, it seems we were right. Normally pituitary tumours are not cancerous, but we believe this one is, although we will have to wait for the test results to confirm that. For some reason that we’re not sure of, the tumour has suddenly grown rapidly, very rapidly. Robbie is unconscious, and it is threatening his life. We feel the only course of action is to remove it as quickly as we possibly can – which means surgery – and as Robbie is a minor we need your permission to go ahead.’

‘But why would it grow all of a sudden like that?’ Bill muttered. He could tell they meant it when they said Robbie’s life was in danger; he could feel how urgent they were about the whole thing.

‘Mr Carter, we’re being honest when we say we have no idea. We really don’t. But here are the scans we have done. You see this one from yesterday, and then this one done today as soon as we realised he was in trouble. This area here is the pituitary. Here it is yesterday, looking relatively normal, and here it is tonight – that shadow is the tumour. We took another scan just before you arrived, and if you look carefully you can see that it has grown a little, even in the short time between these two scans. This is why we feel we don’t have much time, and need your permission to proceed with surgery as soon as possible.’

‘So you’re going to cut a hole in his skull?’

‘Actually no. Not with a pituitary tumour. The neurosurgeon can reach it through the back of his sinuses. Here, I’ll show you on this diagram . . . they make an incision here, up under the top lip, so there is no visible scar, they hold the area open with a speculum, cut through the sinuses at the back of the nose, and from there they can reach the front of the brain and bring the tumour out. Although it is large we are very fortunate that it is not near the optic nerve.

‘In this case they will have to remove most of the pituitary because it has been destroyed by the tumour; so Robbie will need to be on replacement hormone therapy after the operation.

‘Then they pack the gap with some of his own tissue, and stitch him back up again. He will feel very little pain at the site of the operation because the pain receptors in that area will be cut, and the wound will heal faster than they do. For brain surgery it is very safe, and there are usually few complications. Our only concern is to get to the tumour before its size makes it too difficult to remove.’

‘Yes I see. Oh.’ Bill bent his head down and raked his fingers over his smooth head. ‘I know you did say, even before, that he might have to have surgery.’

‘If you’d like some more time to think about it . . . ’

‘No. There obviously isn’t time. Where are the forms I have to sign? Just do it. I’ll ring Lynette soon, when I've worked out how to tell her. Can I see my boy first, just for a moment?’

Afterwards, Bill wished he hadn’t hovered by his son’s bed for those few awkward seconds while the staff hurried around him, preparing for the operation. It was hard to accept that the creature he found there; flabby, deathly pale, barely sucking life from plastic tubes, was his son. His slightly shy, but robust, joke-cracking, kick the ball around the backyard for hours, work-out at the gym with his dad – his big son, young Robbie.

Somehow he felt that he had walked in on a crucial, intimate moment between Robbie and his life, and he did not want to interrupt, lest he alter the outcome.

‘I might go and work for a while . . .’ he told Doctor Ewing, ‘Driving the taxi will keep my mind off things. Get them to call me when it’s nearly over and I’ll come in. I ought to be here when he wakes up. He’d want that, wouldn’t he?’

She rested her hand on his broad, muscular arm and said ‘Yes. We’ll call you. I’ll make sure you’re with him when he comes out of theatre. He’ll need you. Even in a coma, people know what’s going on around them. In fact, I sometimes think they are more sensitive because they don’t have the same distractions that we do.’ But she hadn’t missed the note of anxiety in his voice, ‘This isn’t easy on any of us, Bill. You’re doing fine, and if there’s anything we can do to help, just ask.’

‘When is he going under?’

‘Very soon. The neurosurgeon is nearly ready. Doctor Hoi and I will stay and keep you informed. We usually spend a long time preparing a patient and their family for brain surgery – I’m sorry it’s like this.’

‘Just do what you gotta do, Doc. I’ll be off now. I can’t stand hanging round . . . Oh, I . . . ’

‘Yes?’

‘Do they play music in the theatre?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Well if they’ve got the Bach Brandenburg Concertos? Or even just anything by Bach will do. They’re my favourite to drive to, you know, and then Robbie will know his ’ol dad is . . . ’

‘Sure, I’ll see what I can do. It might do us all some good.’

Then he left to drive his taxi around the empty streets with the Brandenburg Concertos up loud, trying to stop himself wondering which route his son’s life was going to take.

The music playing in the operating theatre was definitely not a Brandenburg Concerto. In fact it was definitely not Bach at all.

‘What on earth is that?’ Janice queried the nurse.

‘It’s some movie soundtrack – I’m not sure which one.’

‘I thought I asked for Bach or Mozart.’

‘Yes, Doctor Ewing, I know. I’m sorry. It’s just that reception didn’t have any proper classical music, but they thought this might do.’

‘Good grief.’ Janice muttered to Doctor Hoi, ‘There’s a taxi driver out there who’s going to think we’re a bunch of philistines.’

The humour didn’t last long.

Tony and Janice watched as the neurosurgeon carefully made a series of incisions; each one prising away a layer of the delicate flesh that shielded his precious brain from the harsh external world. Finally he peeled back the last flap of dark pink tissue to reveal what was left of the pituitary; quivering, moist and defenceless. Janice sucked her breath in through her teeth with apprehension; the task of removing the tumour was daunting.

Slowly, carefully, he pulled the mass of malevolent tissue out through the limited path that had been opened in the sinuses. When the neurosurgeon finally turned to her and passed her the tumour; when she finally held the mass of tissue in her gloved hand, it was larger and heavier than she had expected.

She had held many tumours, but there was a quality to this one beyond the sense of malignancy. She felt suddenly dizzy with a gut-wrenching fear, and leant against the wall. Something here is very wrong. For a moment she saw the hazy image of a fallen tree, in dappled sunlight, beside a pond.

Beads of sweat formed on her brow.

‘What is it, Dear Lady?’ Tony asked, as he held her wrist gently, to steady her. With his touch, she calmed a little.

‘Oh, nothing. I’ll be right. I don’t know what happened – just tired I guess.’ Then she snapped back into her usual efficient self and held the tumour out for him to see, ‘We must get this to pathology.’

It was as Janice said. Robbie felt no pain. He later wished that he had; as that would have given him some indication of what had happened, and what was happening now. As it was, he became vaguely aware, as one does when waking from a deep sleep, of a blank exhaustion. His mind with its familiar drift, or sometimes cascade, of interrelated thoughts, memories and perceptions, simply did not function. It was as though they had all vanished and left behind a profound and eerie emptiness. It was all very still inside his head. Dark, like water on a silent, moonless night. Occasionally, an image would drift in for a moment, like a wisp of fog, or a fleeting wraith, but before he could identify it, let alone connect it to a thought; it was gone, and all was still again. The effort it took to hold one thought, even on the edge of a second, was beyond him.

Most of these evanescent figments, if he could follow them to a memory, were from his past – they had a familiar sense to them. But some did not. They were cold and minatory. They carried a sense of lurking intent. They frightened him – and the fear was amplified by the silence in his mind.

Janice slept fitfully throughout the day. Several times she was torn awake by a dream that she couldn’t remember. She felt ill and afraid. Her skin prickled with unease. She could not make any sense of what had happened when she had held Robbie’s brain tumour in her hand; the sudden sensation of foreboding that had transfixed her in the sterile operating theatre.

She had held hundreds of cancerous growths in her hands before, and they were ugly and repulsive things that she treated with detached efficiency. But this one disturbed her. She kept returning to the momentary image of a fallen tree near a pond as though it held a clue, but the more she tried to remember the scene, the faster it slipped, elusively, from her mind. It made no sense to her anyway.

She dragged her eyes open, peered out the curtains at the grey sky, and wintery trees. It all looked so absolutely normal. She was glad it was cold outside, because then she didn’t feel so bad about sleeping all day. She chided herself for being fanciful, irrational. She was hallucinating on fatigue. Tony Hoi would ring her when the pathology report came through, and there would be a perfectly mundane explanation for it all.

She got up to have a glass of water and a snack of cream cheese and crackers. She winced when she saw her pale, heavily shadowed face in the mirror; it looked as scruffled as her bed. She settled down again, seeking to find some distance from the events of the night before, and a return to her customary self. But again, through her sleep, lurked the presence of the tumour, and the same vague, but ominous impressions returned.

CHAPTER 2 – Cake

‘One of our scientists at the Institute brought in the most bizarre birthday cake today. It looked for all the world like a chocolate cake – but it was full of meat!’ Max said to everyone in the tutorial room, presuming they were all listening.

‘Meat?’ asked Doctor Frank, lecturer in Moral Philosophy.

‘Yes, meat! What looked like chocolate icing was congealed gravy, the cake was flavoured with tomato paste, and the filling was mince and vegetables.’

‘Did it taste alright?’ asked Chris, a thin young man who was always eating.

‘Oh, quite . . . interesting really – the first mouthful, when you thought it was going to be chocolate, was absolutely revolting; but once you realised it was meant to be savoury, and started expecting meat, it was really quite tasty I suppose.’

‘So tell me, Max,’ mused Doctor Frank from his chair near the whiteboard, ‘what was the ultimate result of the event? What are the moral implications of such a deception? And who was responsible? The young gentleman who induced you to eat it, or the person who made this strange meat-cake (presuming of course that he didn’t cook it himself)?’

‘Oh no, you’re right there – he said his fiancé made it for him, but it was his idea. To be honest I have no idea about its moral implications, but it was an interesting experience. Is there any intrinsic moral worth in an interesting experience?’

‘Ah, now that depends. But come to think of it, that would make an excellent question for the exam,’ Doctor Frank smiled.

‘Oh no it wouldn’t!’ cried the rest of class in mock outrage.

‘That would have moral implications,’ laughed Max ‘that would be a thoroughly evil deed! Surely you wouldn’t!?’

‘I just might,’ Doctor Frank smiled wryly. Everyone in the class laughed. Except Michele.

If anyone had glanced over to where she was sitting, as usual, at the back of the room near the door, they might have noticed her attempt at a laugh was spluttered out like an embarrassed cough. She had her head down, rearranging her notes so that no-one would see she was blushing. Unexpectedly, as a result of some light-hearted banter, she suddenly felt as though someone had roughly flung open a door in her life and marched in.

She had been attending the tutorial on the History of Moral Philosophy every Tuesday afternoon at 5 p.m. for the last three months. She had grown used to the dynamics of this group; their witty banter, their serious arguments and various preoccupations, and even the sonorous, meticulous sermons delivered by Doctor Frank. She went to other tutorial groups too, as a tiresome requirement of her Arts degree, but there were two things that had set this particular group apart for her.

The first was that she was always tired before she got there. It was the only tutorial she had that was so late in the day, and by 5 p.m. she was invariably feeling limp and vague, and struggling with the peculiar headache that always settled on her in the Library at the Australian National University. It seemed to result from a composite of hours spent reading, book-dust in the air-conditioning, and the worry that even if she sat there for the rest of her life, and read every tome, she would never quite know enough.

She wondered sometimes if it wasn’t more a depression than a headache. But whatever it was, it was chronic; and it meant that she always got to the History of Moral Philosophy feeling as though some academic vampire had drained all desire and motivation from her blood.

Often, as she entered that bleak room with the institutional-cream coloured walls, and the worn green chairs, she was reminded of the line by T.S. Eliot Do I dare disturb the universe? Maybe some days she did, but never on a Tuesday afternoon.

The second factor that made this tutorial different from all the others (for she sometimes felt tired in those too) was the presence of Max. He had impacted on her awareness the moment he had entered the room on the first day, and had continued to do so ever since.

Max – who she thought might be in his late fifties; who was physically attractive in that rugged, well-lived way of some older men; who was better looking now than he would have been when he was younger; and who tossed his unruly hair away from his blue eyes with a gesture that was both defiant and dignified.

Max – who, on the basis of age and professional standing, presumed a matey relationship with Doctor Frank; and presumed, but didn’t flaunt, a broader and deeper understanding of life than the rest of them.

Max – whose confidence bordered on, but did not quite move into arrogance; who seemed sometimes lonely or wistful; and who would occasionally seek approval for his ideas in a manner at odds with his status.

Occasionally, in the idle time spent waiting for the tutorial to start, she would wonder if he had a wife. What would it be like to wake up with one’s arm draped over him in the morning; to place one’s toothbrush in the holder next to his; to hang his underwear out on the clothes line, or listen to him recounting the triumphs and revelations of his day? Would that be any better, she wondered, or indeed any worse, than life with Leon?

Now this. Now this disconcerting coincidence that seemed to be so much more than just that. How could she explain to anyone in the tutorial room why she suddenly felt so shocked and faint, and intruded upon? For the fact was – she had cooked the savoury cake that was the subject of amusement.

What followed from this, was that her fiancé Leon was the scientist in question, and that Max was his boss. Max was the man who Leon affectionately, awesomely, reverentially, and sometimes derisively referred to as – Doctor God. With this revelation, finally and irrevocably, Doctor E. Maxwell Godfrey penetrated her life.

When Michele got off the bus that night she could see from the footpath that, as usual, the light was on in Leon’s room, but the rest of the house was dark. He always forgot to leave the porch light on for her. The front door was awkward to open at the best of times, and if she had books, or a bag of shopping in her arms it was impossible to manage. She had to put everything down on the concrete porch, and jiggle her key in the door-handle which was loose and sticky all at the same time. It was often the last, miserable annoyance in a long, lonely day, and in the winter dark it was infinitely worse.

She would shiver in the shadowy house, and wander around switching on lights, and the heater in the lounge. She would have a shower to wash away the day, and change into her pyjamas. Then she would head down the passage and search out Leon who was ensconced in his study, where the lights were bright, and the heater was on high.

He would look a little startled when she entered. Then he would smile his big childlike grin; drag his thin light-brown fringe out of his eyes; and hang his heavy arms over her neck, as a hug.

He spent considerable time on the computer analysing data from work. Sometimes he came home to do this, and put a sign on his study door not to interrupt. Other times, if he had to use some of their specialist software, he would stay late at work – sometimes he didn't get home from work until long after she had gone to bed. She used to find the uncertainty of all this hard to cope with, but had finally dealt with it by forcing herself to not care whether he was there or not – with the result that she felt more a housekeeper-come-flatmate than a partner.

When he wasn't working – which was not often – he had three solitary hobbies.

Leon played war-games – the traditional, comfortable, cardboard versions – as a relief from the computer screens he stared at all day for work. The Battle of Waterloo was by far his favourite. He had played it fifty-seven times and said he still kept thinking of different strategies to try. Some of the pieces eventually wore out with use, so Michele had spent a Saturday afternoon with coloured pens, re-drawing the tiny images of soldiers and cavalry on tiny squares of cardboard for him. She had tried to play it with him once. ‘Remember war-games,’ he had said, ‘if you ever become a history teacher.’ Ugh, she had thought, I have no intention of ever becoming a history teacher. She had told him she would remember his good idea.

Leon watched Star Trek videos. Until Michele moved in, he had a poster of Spock above his bed. He still didn’t like the frilly Matisse waterlilies she had replaced it with.

Leon looked at girly magazines. It had taken Leon some time to tell Michele about this hobby – and then he had emphasised that what he was actually doing was objective and rationally sound statistical analyses of girly magazines.

He explained that one year he had not found the Penthouse Pet of the Year at all attractive, and so decided to make his own selection by scoring each photo of the featured girls on his own range of criteria. Michele never quite took in the intricacies of his complex methodology, despite him patiently working through the maths with her a couple of times. Michele had once joked, darkly, that while most guys read girly mags with one hand, the other hand was not on a calculator. He had laughed, but missed the point – and she had been sad.

These eccentricities endeared him to her, but she wished he was more of a partner and companion. She wished for more physical contact. She wished he would remember to do practical things, like put on the porch light. She wished he would talk to her about his work. She swallowed her feelings down with rationalisations.