Excerpt 1
Ocean Diamond
Gaia
Somewhere, lost in the depths of our shared memory, is a story about a sunrise that wasn’t.
A story about ancestors, the many thousands lost deep in the fabric of the past, holding the stitches that would one day be sewn into you. Ancestors who stood on a hill after a night of dancing, thinking the darkness was ending early, only for the orange in the sky to turn grey, the air to detonate around them like thunder, the smell of burnt earth unmooring itself in the tropical wind.
It is a tale that has been told time and time again. A guttural roar that washes over our island like the irrepressible ocean that surrounds it. Faces change colour, sticks turn to swords, which in turn become shells. Fingers of the same violent hands that reach out of the darkness, trying to make this place their own.
They call it a strategic location. A rough diamond rising out of the sea, too small to shine above the mountains casting their eyes, but large enough to be sold to the highest bidder. I wonder what it must have been like for the first people that landed on the beaches. I wonder, the joy, the relief they felt after crossing the ocean, coming across a land of cinnamon and cashew, carpet forests glistening with endemic birds that bowed in the shadow of elephants whose tusks would kiss the ground. I wonder if the sense of peace they felt as they made sand-angels amongst turtle nests still lives in us. I wonder, after wave after wave of people washed ashore, foreign colours and cultures melting together, then slicing apart, jostling and shouting over each other for the prize cut of the land, if our bloodlines still have the capacity to breathe for its own sake and feel the spirit of the land warm our bodies, just as they did.
How strongly I feel this nostalgia, yet it makes no sense.
The land where I was born lies adrift in the cold of the North yet remains entrenched in history’s soil.
Sometimes, trapped on the other side of the world, I feel like shrapnel. A fragment flung eight thousand miles across the sky from the country I hear about every day in the news. The country whose kin I resemble, who speak the same tongues. Some days, when hear what’s happening, I just want to scream. Scream at the scam artists trailing their slime across the Government. Scream at the animals stoking arguments on the internet. Scream at the injustices that refuse to end even though the war is supposedly over.
Nobody hears these screams, yet my throat is still sore.
My voice as cracked as the home that I yearn for.
Something Familiar
2016
Thushara
He’s staring again.
When I first noticed, in the lecture halls, in the hospital corridors as we walk up to our designated wards, I told myself it was nothing. Just a quirk of personality, or maybe he’s realised he fancies me. The more I look back however, the more I realise that I could possibly be wrong. The more his dark irises, as rich as the colour of his skin, meet my own, the more I realise that those eyes aren’t ordinary eyes. The lower eyelids, the way they grey and disappear into her bags, carry an invisible weight. I can’t make the connection, not at first, but the sight of those eyes creates a deep pit in my stomach that I simply can’t explain.
The positioning of our names on the register ties us together as clinical partners. Arjun Devananthan. Thushara Dias. Tamil and Sinhalese. We near each other in the hospital café as the rest of our group grab something from the counter.
“Food from home?” he asks me, having seen the pot of vegetable rice I’ve just heated in the canteen microwave. I nod.
“Have you seen the pasties here? They give me heart attacks just looking at that fat content.”
Arjun takes a bite from his sandwich and doesn’t reply. He’s a great deal taller than me – at least 6’4” to my 5’8” – slim with a long neck that cranes slightly forward. His words are measured, something that doesn’t match his fitted chinos, the puffa jacket stuffed into his rucksack, his wig-dense hair knotted in a bun with sides cut to a fade, his beard intentionally cropped to square his jaw. For some reason, I expect him to carry a swagger, an easy charm and knack for conversation, but instead, he sits back, slumped behind his tense shoulders.
“Pretty cool that they paired the two Sri Lankans in the group together right?” I say, trying to make light of the situation. “Back in my old Uni, there were like four of us in one group, it’s like I couldn’t get away from them.”
He pauses before answering.
“You’re not from here?” he asks. The year’s got like 300 people, nobody knows everyone.
“Transferred from Bristol. The thought of doing a PhD while in med school was pretty cool so I thought, hey why not.”
“You got onto the PhD programme? Good for you.”
“Oh no, no, I mean…I wanted to, but I didn’t have enough stuff on my portfolio and…I mean they let me transfer at least, so I think I’ll just re-apply next year and see what happens. Fingers crossed.”
That seems convincing enough a backstory for the moment. At least it gets him to open up a bit. He’s been at Uni for 4 years now, having completed a BSc in Psychology. He came to medical school straight from school, same as me, commuting in from East London where he lives with his family.
“Ah man,” I say, thinking of the cold flat I’ve chosen to live in, the mould behind the cupboard that never goes away despite my getting on my hands and knees to clean it, the twenty-minute trek to the nearest National Rail, “you can roll here whenever you like.”
“You’d think so,” he said, sitting back on his hips a bit more and stretching his legs beneath the table. “My bro would probably have something to say about that though.”
“Ha. Little monster?”
His eyes slightly widen and flit from side to side. His lips, previously open enough to let me see his teeth, form an envelope seal.
“Something like that.”
By the time the rest of the group returns, he’s hunched back forward, crumpling his cellophane sandwich coverings into shiny little balls. Without a bin nearby, they disappear back into his lunchbox. The group’s conversation spins onto revision methods and the reams of boring paperwork for the coming year. Beyond furtive glances, I don’t speak to him for the rest of the day. By the time we have to leave, he’s gone before I even have a chance to say bye.
Not that I ever really wanted to.
*
I’ve come to Clinical School having primarily been based in lecture halls and laboratories. The culture is completely different. Gone is the rather regimented set of lecture notes you relied on to pass exams, the need to find research papers and spit them out verbatim onto essay sheets. Now you have to go your own way. Navigate a sandbox environment of random cases with, really, only the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine (affectionately known as Cheese and Onion for its colour scheme) and the aid of older friends to guide you.
It’s hard for me to keep up at first. It takes over an hour to get home and when I do, making notes and flashcards becomes so much harder the longer I keep at it. We had a few hospital placements at Bristol. Thing is, we weren’t coming in every day, braving long commutes and crush hours to stand around waiting for something to happen. If it doesn’t, and you realise you still have so much to get on with at home, you worry about how much of the day you’ve laid to waste.
You can’t avoid seeing a lot of your clinical partner in all of this. As a pair, you’re assigned to individual patients, told to take it in turns when asking their medical histories or examining. These cardiology patients, perched at the edges of their beds as their nurses - sweating at the brow - rush between them, have it all to tell. Men and women on drugs with endless names, seething with disappointment at not being able to eat their favourite food, regaling tales of serious operations that followed an innocuous beer at a pub…it’s as if all this has become irritatingly routine for them. By and large, I know my stuff. I like being systematic with my knowledge, but actually speaking it out is different. I’m just glad the patients are open books, allowing me to make mistake after mistake as I fumble through my basic structure, wondering whether I’ve remembered social history, tracheal deviation, tactile vocal fremitus.
Arjun never forgets, however.
“Have you ever noticed any cramps in your legs? Has your cough ever woken you up at night? Do you take that medication in the morning or evening?”
Okay, sure, he’s not the sharpest when it comes to consultant quizzing. Most of the time he has to answer something, it’s like someone’s slapped him awake. The guy literally finds any excuse he can to go to the kitchen and grab a coffee. When he sits down with patients though, has to take histories from and examine them, he becomes a completely different person. When he talks, it doesn’t feel like he’s rattling off a list; it’s a true and natural conversation. The patients want to tell him about their symptoms, seem impressed when he can find things even they didn’t notice. He probably has a revision group already, I tell myself, practising this stuff to perfection.
I think back to our talk in the cafeteria. How incongruent this Arjun is from the person who shut down as soon as I got too personal. I can’t say I blame him. I was once as open as the patients we see, before I found out I had something to lose. Still, when it comes to our…acquaintanceship I guess, we talk through cases and that’s it. If I get a ping on my phone, it’s because he thinks we shouldn’t leave something out when we present interesting findings to our supervising consultant. For some weeks, this arrangement runs like clockwork: we realise there’s something we can add or change, we discuss the specifics over the course of two to three messages before we come to an agreement and end our conversation.
With one, late-night, exception.
Me: Did you hear about Chris and Olivia???
They were medical students in another group. I’d had to do a catch-up session with them after being a bit ill and couldn’t believe how hard they would disagree with each other. So what if the associated symptoms didn’t match the guidelines you were familiar with? There was no reason to raise your voices like that in a tutor group.
Him: Sort of yh
Me: So grim can’t believe he told her there was no teaching
Prof really got onto her said she was being irresponsible with her timetable
Him: Everyone gets emailed about teaching
Why would she suddenly trust a guy she clearly hates the guts of
Me: Turns out they were dating on-and-off at the time
After an argument he deleted the email from her phone so she had no proof
Him: Rah fitness to practice?
Me: That’s what she’s claiming
Him: Damn
Me: Anyway I know it’s late but how are you
He leaves me on read, but for some reason, I feel completely carved out, way more than I should have for someone I barely knew, and whom – it seems – has no interest in really getting to know me. I stay like that till it’s past 3am, when cumulative tiredness finally forces me to sleep.