Chapter 7

Entr’acte: California Dreamin’

I arrived in San Diego late on the Friday, going straight to a spa hotel on Hotel Circus. I was tired and my shoulder was aching. On Saturday I eased the ache in the pool by swimming my slow laps, followed by a workout in the gym. At lunchtime I Skyped Alice and Brian; it would be Wednesday before I was fit enough to show my face again. You can explain to an adult why you look so ill after an operation, but I would not inflict that on the youngsters.

Saturday was also our first live performance, so to speak. I messaged Audrey to confirm the exact time of the connection and they were all there when my screen opened. Brian was already talking about his friend in nursery who had brought in a Lego tractor, but it was not so good as the ones I made. He wanted to give me more details, but his sister nudged him off the chair onto the floor, where he sat and howled for his mum. Pat’s face appeared on the screen for a moment:

“You started this Mark, but it seems I’m the one who has to be the big bad mummy!” She said it with a friendly smile, however, which gave me a good feeling.

Audrey spoke to me while her daughter restored order, telling me that they all missed me already. Then the kids came back and politely deferred to each other for the rest of the call. It was a bittersweet occasion and Alice was not the only one with tears in her eyes when we parted. The rest of the day I devoted myself to preparing for the operation. Hector had readied me for so many surgical procedures that my body responded like one of Pavlov’s dogs.

On Sunday morning I reported to the Naval Base at Point Loma where I was whisked away to the naval hospital. I had worked before with American forces but that did not prepare me for the formality I encountered. Everyone I met introduced themselves by surname and rank, saluting and calling me ‘Sir’ at every opportunity. The morning was taken up with a routine but thorough medical examination. Armed forces everywhere have a way of saying ‘Sir’ that conveys contempt for the recipient. You can see them thinking ‘You’re probably a shit but I’ll be in trouble if I don’t show you respect.’

By the time they told me to get dressed, Sir, I was thoroughly unhappy. I did not expect to be treated like a long-lost friend, but I did hope that they would at least grant me the status of fellow human being. It reminded me too much of the treatment I had received in Newcastle where it was made abundantly clear that medical staff knew everything, and mere patients knew nothing and could safely be disregarded. The ache in my shoulder confirmed that they sometimes got things wrong. I had resolved to see out the day with the arrogant specialists before catching a flight back to London to throw myself on the mercy of my stepdad.

Everything changed in a flash with the arrival of a little man wearing a baseball cap; he was no taller than my chin. He breezed in, high-fived the stuffy doctor who had led the examination, greeted the rest by their first names and finally turned to me, grinning widely.

“Hi I’m Mike. You must be Major Mark Henry Ferguson. I’ll be your butcher on this voyage. So, what’s it to be, ‘Major’, ‘Mark’ or ‘Henry’?”

“How about Sir Hal,” I laughed.

“You cannot be serious,” he grinned. “Don’t suppose you play much tennis at present with that arm. Quinnie says you’re an Ok guy.”

His delivery was breathless, and he did not stop grinning all the time I spent with him. He is Miguel ‘Mike’ Hernandez ‘the best orthopedic surgeon in the world’ as he modestly told me – ‘next to Quinnie, that is.’ Quinnie turned out to be my stepfather who had kept very quiet about being Christened Quentin. As Mike said, ‘what kind of way is that to treat a kid’.

We lunched together, but not before he had taken all the starch out of the doctors and nurses who had made my morning miserable. From then on, we were on first name terms, swapping stories and photographs of our private lives. They were never less than totally professional but they never again called me ‘Sir’. I began to enjoy my time in California. It was only later that I came to understand that Mike was using his position to make a political point. He was showing the ivy-league doctors and senior naval officers that Mexican Americans had a vital part to play in the future of the nation.

That Sunday afternoon was pretty rough since they had to explore my shoulder in considerable depth, causing me a good deal of discomfort. It was about ten and I was reading in bed, when Mike came in to brief me. Stepdad prepares meticulously for even the most routine operations; for complex surgery, he even produces sketches of the stages, pinning them up around the operating table. His theatre nurse says he never actually looks at them, but he likes to have them there – she called them his security blanket.

Mike committed nothing to paper but in his head, he had a moving picture of what he expected to see and his response. Good poetry helps you to understand sights or emotions; Mike, in this sense, was a poet, for I truly understood for the first time the mechanism buried beneath the flesh of my left shoulder. There were no jokes, and the grin was mostly suppressed. It was only as he rose to go that I asked if I would be able to swim the front crawl. The grin was back in place:

“Good chance, amigo, but no promises. I might have one of those days when my fingers are all thumbs, as Queenie says.” He made a very poor attempt at an English accent.

I had no such fears and the next day he operated with ten magic wands. He had intended to perform the surgery in two parts but, while I was open on the table, he saw a way to do the whole job there and then. He explained it to me in graphic detail later, but I can only appreciate his skill at second hand. About three weeks after the operation, I was with him when he explained it over lunch to stepdad and another eminent surgeon: both the older men were awestricken at Mike’s skill with the scalpel.

The more immediate consequence was that I spent longer on the table than originally planned, which led to a tsunami. Just like the real thing it caused less damage to me at the epicenter than to others many miles away from the action, although it was many weeks before I found that out. Instead of being back in my bed by Tuesday morning, I spent most of the day in the recovery unit. As a result, I was decidedly wan at Wednesday lunchtime when I had arranged to Skype the children. In an exchange of messages with Audrey, and later Pat, I was persuaded that they would be less troubled by my appearance than my absence. In their defense, I should point out that neither woman had actually seen the state I was in. I think I would have argued more vehemently if I had looked at myself in the mirror before agreeing to show my face in public.

The nurses could see me so, having failed to deter me, they did what they could to minimize the damage. They closed the drapes and turned the lights as low as possible. I was still looking a lot like Frankenstein’s monster when the screen lit up and I was facing the little ones. Alice barely blinked, although Brian, who has a taste for big words, said I looked gashly. I must admit that I felt a bit ‘gashly’, particularly as there was still a drain in the wound. It took them less than ten seconds to adjust to my appearance.

I did not know it until much later, but the first quake occurred at that time. Apart from a couple of things the kids would rather their mum did not know, there was nothing secret about our conversations, so I had given no thought to security. It seems incredible to me even now, but someone was interested enough to hack into our conversation to capture a screen shot of me in my sickbed. Although I knew nothing about it at the time, this tidal wave was actually more harmful to my enemies than anything I could have anticipated.

My concern was at an incident that occurred at the end of the conversation when we were discussing the next rendezvous. Mike breezed in, rounded the bed, and stuck his smiling face in the screen.

“Hi kids! Your daddy’s doin’ great. I’ll bet you’re missing him.”

He was bending to inspect the fluid in the drain when Alice spoke:

“Mark’s not our daddy.” Brian then surprised me by adding: “Not yet.”

“Mummy says we have to go,” Alice whispered, sounding miserable. “Love you, Mark. I wish you were our daddy,” and the screen went blank. I am not sure if she heard me saying I loved them.

Mike and the nurse were looking at me expectantly, so I explained the strange relationship I had with Pat and her children.

“I’m surprised the English haven’t died out by now,” was Mike’s considered opinion on my painfully awkward courtship. “She needs to be swept off her feet by a Mexican stud. If she’s as pretty as her kids, I might give her a thrill myself.”

“Shut up Mike!” nurse Rodriguez snarled. Then her tone softened: “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. A man falling in love with a woman because he loves her kids. If she turns you down, Mark, I’ll have you.”

“I thought you were married Conchita?”

“I am but I’ll divorce his ass. What d’ya say Mark?”

“I don’t understand why his donkey has to suffer.”

It took the remainder of the consultation to convince her that in England an ass is a donkey. Finally, still laughing, she shook her generous derriere at me as she went through the door. “Kiss my donkey, Mark.”

When I was alone, my mind went skittering through all the possibilities. I think Mike released some sedative into my IV line, for I fell asleep before I had reached a resolution. I was awakened for routine checks and an evening meal, the first solid food since Sunday. That calmed me down. I was certain that Pat would react negatively to the earlier revelations, but I was resolved not to lose the children; I had no idea how to set about it, but I must convince her to let me play a part in their lives.

While I was being settled for the night, I was warned that the next day would be a busy one. They will have me on my feet, and I will be scanned and x-rayed. I had been composing a text to Audrey, but the medication kicked in and I was asleep again before I had time to finish. I wanted to beg for the Skype sessions to continue but without groveling. I wanted to claim the right to interact with Brian and Alice while recognizing Pat’s ultimate responsibility. I finally sent a text message just before lunchtime, more in hope than expectation.

It was after four when the reply came from Pat.

‘You can call. Tomorrow at six. No daddy talk. I know its not all your fault. X.’

I was still grinning when Mike came in that evening to settle me.

“Think you have something to smile about? I might be here to fit you for a wooden arm.”

“Not you - that would mean that you made a mistake, and you’ll never admit that.”

“Of course I would admit my mistakes. It’s just that I never make any!”

I showed him the text from Pat. “I’m looking at your future, amigo.”

Then we got down to business. He had restored the joint so it would be as good as new, but he could do nothing to prevent the scar tissue crisscrossing my back from inhibiting my movements. As I age, losing flexibility, it will get worse. He wanted me to move to Oakland to have treatment from a plastic surgeon. I asked if he would resurface my back like a damaged highway.

“You’re the one that wants to do front crawl. This guy, Ray, is good. He was transforming millionaires ‘til he did a pro bono on a neighborhood kid that got badly shot up in Iraq. Gave up the high life – but don’t think he’s a bleeding-heart liberal.”

“Not another wetback?”

“No, but a nice guy despite that. Jewish or Arab or something. Who cares?”

I moved to the Bachelor Officer Quarters the next day and remained there until I traveled to Oakland on the following Wednesday. The problem was that I was idle, apart from long sessions in the gym, and everyone else was working. My shoulder was healing rapidly; Hector had taught me the importance of being physically fit before an operation and it paid off now. My mens was as sana as my corpore was sano.

To be blunt, I did not have enough to think about so I let myself delve into matters some of which might have been better left alone, at least while I was on the other side of the world. My first preoccupation centered on my dismissal from the laboratory. Despite what I preached to my team I was more concerned with scientific integrity than commercial success. I wanted the work we were doing to become publicly available in due course and I wanted David and the others to get the credit for their efforts, but I was happy for Molly to have a share of the plaudits.

Left to myself, I would have sought to put her name on the published paper announcing our success. What made me very angry was the underhand way in which she had attempted to extract our most recent results; stealing other people’s ideas has no place in science. Marginally worse than buying secrets is selling them. I could picture her as a scientific Henry II moaning too loud about his turbulent priest, but that did not excuse the knights who slaughtered Beckett at his own altar. I will not forgive James, if he is indeed the traitor.

The charge against me is so ridiculous that I did not at first consider the possible consequences. I would have been deeply unhappy if the people who knew me best had believed me capable of spying, but I did not consider the prospects for my future employment as a researcher. If I had betrayed my team, I would be unemployable in any position of trust. It was only when I allowed myself to consider Paul’s reaction that I became afraid.

However hard I tried to blank it out, the picture of him staring fixedly at his desk while Bowen accused me would not go away. Paul knows me better than anyone and yet he clearly believes that I was the source of the information passed to Molly. His name is woven into the very fabric of my curriculum vitae; any future employer will be certain to seek the opinion of the director before offering me a job. That was when I accepted that I would never again be a researcher.

I tried to cheer myself up by considering some of the offers the army had made to me. I could never again be a frontline soldier – I would have been a liability to my comrades – but there were a great many things I still could do that were necessary in a modern army. Some of the ideas that had been put to me sounded interesting, but I could not rid my mind of the fact that they would be routine. Every day I would arrive at my desk, do the work, and go home. I could not contemplate living life in that way; leading a platoon involved hours of tedium leavened by terrifying action, and I loved it. Science for me means hours of dull slog with occasional ‘Eureka’ moments to add the necessary spice to life.

I considered other careers. Lifeguard might be good; hours of lazing about and then the adrenalin rush of a rescue when a swimmer got into difficulties. Then I thought that the sight of the map of scars on my back would frighten away the customers. At least that thought reconciled me to the plastic surgery I was soon to undergo. For the moment I allowed my self-mocking laughter to drive out concern for my future employment.

With days to go before I would be fit to drive myself to Oakland, my mind drifted into other concerns. There were two Skype sessions on the Friday after my surgery that sparked things off. The first was a lively session with Alice and Brian which seriously depleted the world supply of the word ‘why’. I stumbled through the minefield of questions for half an hour; they had been more disturbed by my appearance on Wednesday than I had realized at the time. They lacked experience and they struggled with the vocabulary, but they had intelligent queries about the operation and the incident that had necessitated it.

Both Audrey and Pat looked in to assure themselves that I had recovered.

“What exactly did they do to your shoulder, Mark dear?” Audrey asked.

“Ask the kids! They’ve wormed everything I know out of me.” She chuckled but did not ask any more.

About quarter of an hour after we had ended the gruesome conversation, I got a text from Pat asking if she and I could Skype, without the children. I agreed although it is only fair to say that I was more than a little apprehensive.

“I was pleased to see you looking better,” she began as soon as the connection was established. “In fact, you look better than for some time before you left.”

That was probably true since I had been in a good deal of pain for some weeks. Chatting about my operation relaxed us. We talked for some minutes, exchanging smiles, until I asked what she had done with the kids to keep them away from her terminal. Her face clouded with worry.