A Mistake Read online

  ‘Congratulations on your appointment by the way,’ she said, ‘well deserved,’ then here came Jessica down the stairs and she was resplendent, an insult in a black silk dress with a deeply carved décolletage and thin gold necklace at her heart and a spangled black clutch in one hand and she was tan and her hair was near black from the shower and tied back hard in a simple ponytail and she grinned at Elizabeth and Elizabeth smiled and Jessica was so obviously pleased to see her that Elizabeth had to look at other things. Stephen turned from Jessica to Elizabeth and then Jessica looked over the living room and shouted, ‘Ruby, come on put the bloody train set away,’ and then she turned back and her face was all dark and she said, ‘Fuck, Stephen.’

  The sun was in the heights of the pōhutukawa over Aro Valley as they walked in and out of the shadows on the switchbacks of the dead stretch of Kelburn Parade. Elizabeth had worn flats because it was a concert, but Jessica was wearing silver heels and she’d taken them off and they were dangling from her fingertips and she was padding, tiptoeing down the rough paths. Elizabeth could smell the hot concrete and the dry macrocarpa and something small and dead and rotting in the bush and Jessica’s perfume drying off in the last sun.

  ‘My taxi driver’s name was Lovedeep,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Pfft.’

  ‘Lovedeep.’

  ‘Why did he stop loving Eep,’ Jessica said.

  ‘I know. I know.’

  ‘Because she sounds so nice. She sounds so lovely.’

  The crickets buzzed and the streets were empty and they were both wearing big sunglasses.

  Elizabeth, aware she was almost strutting, through empty Wellington suburbia, with Jessica. She could see Jessica’s upper arm beside her and she was tan and the fine hairs were blond or transparent, and the muscle had softened with age but there was still that visible V in her triceps that she’d forgotten about but suddenly realised she’d known that V for more than 30 years and in a way that was a kind of ownership wasn’t it, to have looked upon something age for 30 years. Who else could claim that. But you could choose to look at that or not to look at that and just not claim anything.

  She looked away over the valleys and the gig was not till nine.

  ‘It’s been so fucking windy I’ve wanted to kill someone,’ said Jessica. ‘Would that help? Oh—’ and she fumbled in her clutch for her iPhone and showed Elizabeth a picture of Atticus flat on his back with his legs spread, curled sideways in a quarter circle. ‘The art of seduction, by a dog,’ she said, and Elizabeth laughed with an exhalation through her nose and a hoiking sound in her throat, and they walked on.

  After a while, Elizabeth turned to her in mock alarm and said, ‘Oh, no—gin.’

  Jessica stopped and turned to her and said, ‘Fuck. Fuck.’ Elizabeth could see herself in the big dark lenses and then they waited and waited, staring at each other, for the other to do something or laugh or come up with something and the cicadas howled and whined and then Jessica said who do you think you’re dealing with and she opened the clutch and inside as well as the phone and some Party Feet and an eftpos card was her hipflask.

  They sipped the warm gin walking down the hills into the shadows and by the crèche Jessica said cool it, that wouldn’t be right, and they laughed. Forty-two years old, they were preloading on their way to Aro Valley for some ales before a concert, and it was sunny and warm and then Elizabeth did what she always did and she got too serious. She started talking about work and Andrew and Richard and her students and she talked about working on the editorial with Andrew and she said he’s just such a walking pile of macho type-A privilege and Jessica said, ‘You are,’ and Elizabeth laughed but then she didn’t. She didn’t say anything about Lisa and she never talked about cases. She talked about easy office stuff and Andrew and the Queenstown conference coming up and Jessica let her and Jessica listened and said, ‘And you’d be almost literally like—’ and she leaned her head back and shook it side to side, making a face, and went, ‘Aaaaargh.’ Elizabeth said, ‘Oh God exactly’ and then she explained the new legislation and public reporting of her outcomes and Andrew coming into the op and went on and on.

  Jessica beside her tiptoed, nodding, her head inclined.

  ‘What do you do in a situation like that,’ she said.

  On Devon Street there was the danger of people passing by who might overhear so she shut up and closed her face because everyone knows everyone and they walked on. Jessica took a huge swig of the gin and shuddered and said, ‘Ay caramba, I need a friendly pint.’

  The Taproom was full and before they went in Jessica tried to put her shoes back on. With a fingertip tugging on a heel strap, bent almost double with her tits all hanging out, on the footpath in front of Aro Café people were staring at her in her black dress and her wet hair tied back and her sunglasses and Elizabeth remembered she’d forgotten what it was always like, to be stabbed and sick and weak and bent and flabby, and she said, ‘For God’s sake woman, why are you wearing those.’ Jessica said, ‘I know, I know,’ and she pulled them on awkwardly and tottered as she jammed the Party Feet into the heels. Then she stood up straight and she was 6 feet tall. She sighed at Elizabeth and made a face and Elizabeth smiled horribly back and Jessica just said, ‘Oh shut the fuck up,’ because she never got anything.

  They sat on the stools by the mirrors opposite the bar and people pushed past them. A slim man with white hair in a denim jacket was leaning on the bar and he stared at Jessica until Elizabeth stared back at him and he laughed and turned away.

  ‘Peter tells me these stories,’ said Jessica. ‘He tells me these stories about the minister. The minister, apparently, told him this thing about a certain issue I can’t mention and then he explicitly says verbatim, oh but well, you know, that’s just Māori boys being Māori boys. With a big laugh. In his position. He’s not allowed to say or even think something like that. But “That’s just Māori boys being Māori boys” he tells his staff. And Peter’s like oh my God.’

  ‘Back under Helen you couldn’t fart without someone doing a pōwhiri,’ Elizabeth said.

  Jessica snorted. ‘The hypocrisy is what gets him down apparently. Because behind closed doors that’s just Māori boys being Māori boys.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘It’s outrageous.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘Ban this sick filth.’

  ‘Shut up. So who’s Peter then?’

  ‘Oh, we deal with him at ACC. Senior adviser in the minister’s office. So bright.’

  ‘Oh Jessica.’

  ‘What.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘What.’

  ‘You know what it’s called.’

  ‘What what’s called?’

  ‘Pre-bounding.’

  She’d already said it before she meant to because of the gin, and laughed to try and make it funny.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have something of a record.’

  ‘It’s not even like that. I don’t.’

  Elizabeth snorted and looked away at the bar. Two boys, nearly 30, nearly 20, who knew anymore, had pints of chocolate stout and the barman was dipping what looked like a large soldering iron into their beer and it was hissing.

  ‘It’s none of my business.’

  ‘No, it isn’t, actually.’

  They didn’t say anything. After a while, into their silence, Elizabeth said, ‘We should try one of those.’

  Jessica looked. ‘I haven’t done anything yet,’ she said to the bar. ‘He’s really understanding.’

  ‘This is Wellington, Jess.’

  ‘I’m being careful.’

  ‘Oh well.’ There was a long silence. ‘I suppose you’ve got a plan for what to do about the kids.’

  ‘Otto and Ruby will probably go with Stephen’s parents until we’ve organised things. Peter’s got a daughter and she’s into ballet. Six.’

  They were looking away from each other, at the soldering iron.

  After a while Elizabeth said, ‘
Do you want one of those?’

  Jessica reached over to the nearest boy and put her fingers on his wrist and said something to him and he offered her his pint to taste, almost giving it to her, giving it all away, grinning.

  The other boy looked at Elizabeth blank as a cat. His right forearm had a new tattoo from elbow to knuckles and the hair on his arm hadn’t grown back yet, or maybe the tattoo was old and he was still shaving it.

  At the concert the Opera House was full and they were a little drunk and seated right at the back. Soon there were lesbians dancing in the aisles. A straight couple turned around and asked them to be quiet and got laughed at and Jessica called the man a cocksucker and Elizabeth stayed quiet because she thought she knew him from somewhere. Jessica and Elizabeth gasped and stared at each other when he sang the first lines of ‘When the Stars Go Blue’ and they gasped and stared at each other then when he covered ‘Colorblind’ by the Counting Crows. Then Ryan Adams played the first chords of ‘Gimme Something Good’ on his Flying V and it was so golden and right and their song and they stood on their seats and danced. When the drums came in Jessica slipped down between the cushion and the back of her seat and screamed and got her foot stuck and they laughed and laughed and she climbed back up again and they held each other and they sang Gimme something good, gimme something good into each other’s faces and bobbed up and down and her back was so narrow and so hard it was sort of shocking and everything got luminous. But they were playing it too fast and then he played ‘Do You Still Love Me?’ and they climbed down and stood and listened and Elizabeth thought of Lisa and wondered if she was too young to even get this and if anyone young could ever like Ryan Adams and if it was just an accident of history that he became famous, and if Lisa was 24 she would like things so niche that Elizabeth couldn’t even begin to understand the urge or attraction or accident of events that had led her to that artist. She found herself watching him and watching him as if she could squeeze him flat or tear him apart with his girlish thighs and his wealth and the way he flounced and was smiling. She remembered how he’d got Albert Hammond hooked on heroin and she remembered things she’d forgotten from high school and she started to remember she didn’t believe he meant things and then everyone was standing up and she couldn’t see him anymore, only his image on the pull-down screens at either side of the stage, and he was just the same there as he was on a screen on an iPad or something and he moved the same way and she couldn’t feel anything. A man in the row in front of them was talking to Jessica now and afterwards Jessica told her that he knew where the band was going for drinks afterwards and did they want to go and Elizabeth was able to be amazed at her again, and she said no and in the taxi home all she could think about was the darkness behind the pulldown screen on which Ryan Adams was projected, the dark wings of the Opera House stage, and she hated him deeply, him with someone else’s hair, him with someone else’s voice, someone else’s clothes, someone else’s guitars, and she knew she would never go to another concert, for the boredom and the insult of the audience and performance and passivity and ease and that thin gap she could never fit through, into the wings where things were real.

  Teaching

  The most beautiful story of error I’ve ever read, Elizabeth liked to tell her students, is the timeline of the 86 Challenger space shuttle disaster.

  I read it again and again. It’s short and it’s detailed and it doesn’t patronise me. Some of the best writing of a complex physical phenomenon I’ve ever encountered.

  It was assembled from shuttle telemetry, some internal shuttle and mission control comms, public NASA broadcasts and other stuff, and they edited it for shape. Two journalists. One they called a ‘space correspondent’ and a bureau chief permanently based at Cape Canaveral, which dates it nicely.

  The cheering and the tower of light and smoke, the cold and the corkscrew of vapour collapsing in on itself and spreading like the skirts of a swooning actor in a period drama as she sinks to the sands.

  Then the weird quiet and disappointment of the audience. Of all those who watch those who leave. The ambivalence seeping in. Odd moments of awe, staring up, but they’re left behind, and then—

  ‘That’s not right. That’s not right.’

  ‘Get down.’

  ‘Oh, my.’

  Silence, and the roar of wind in the mic.

  Then we pan up to the explosion.

  The single trail swells and becomes two, curling wildly, becomes a pagoda of smoking streaked by debris like rain, and one long white streamer falling to the ocean. The smoke curling, reshaping, morphing. Then it all pauses, at an end, descending, compressing, and fading away.

  Because there are simple problems, aren’t there. There are simple problems, complicated problems, and complex problems. Simple problems are simple. Complicated problems are harder but they have solutions that are iterable. A solution works each time we encounter this problem. But a complex problem is different. A complex problem is a problem that changes as you play.

  Is it a frog or is it a bicycle? she asked her students. Are you astronauts or engineers? Are you both? Are you managers too?

  If you want to understand the implications of massive systems failure determined months in advance but happening in microseconds in front of you as you try to cope in real time the Challenger timeline is the first thing you might read.

  There wasn’t data to back up the case from the manufacturer that the cold temperatures on the day of the launch would inhibit the O-ring from moving to seal the gap as it was designed to do. I couldn’t quantify it, said Roger Boisjoly, the engineer at the company that made the rings. I had not the data to quantify it, but I did say I knew that it was away from goodness in the current database.

  The last reported communication from Michael Smith at 73 seconds is, ‘Uh oh.’

  Then: ‘My God,’ says Kent Shocknek live on KNBC.

  The Mission Control spokesman carries on reporting the trajectory of the debris as if it’s still the shuttle flying, not the pieces. The band plays briefly on because they’re not yet aware that it is already over; that it was already over when the Morton Thiokol engineers did not have the data to make the case to NASA management that at 30 degrees Fahrenheit the O-rings might not seal.

  So, she said. There are simple problems, complicated problems, and complex problems.

  And then there’s just chaos.

  Conference, Queenstown

  When the keynote speaker rose to the podium and began to shuffle his papers Elizabeth was seated alone at her table, though every other table in the conference hall was full.

  The anaesthetists and the surgeons were the men in suits with no ties. The nurses and anaesthetic techs were the women, and the women who were more senior wore pantsuits and the less senior wore T-shirts and smocks and even trackpants. Teams and hospital units sat together. Pink and hospital blue. The room was an abstract atlas of New Zealand healthcare: medical and surgical, upper GI, orthopaedic, vascular, neuro, cardiac, general; Northland, Southern, Capital and Coast. The teams and the units sat together and the surgeons and anaesthetists roamed the room, table to table, keeping up the chatter, showing their leadership, staying off their phones.

  The nine other places at her table were empty. The debris of the long day strewn about. Conference programmes, Royal Australasian College of Surgeons goodie bags, pens with logos and abandoned mints in cellophane envelopes no one could open. Elizabeth leaned back and she looked up from her phone and raised her eyebrows as the Texan began to speak.

  ‘I’d like to thank Andrew for his very flattering introduction and before I get on to figures and graphs and whatnot there’s a quote I like a lot and it’s been pointed out I seem to like to say it a lot.’

  They tittered for him with good-natured New Zealand willing. The first PowerPoint slide flicked up. Elizabeth eyed it over her glasses.

  Epidemiology is just people with the tears wiped away.

  She looked down to catch Robin’s eye at the C
ap Coast nurses’ table. They smiled fixedly at each other, without teeth.

  Doctors spend an awful amount of time in lectures. They spend an awful amount of time with PowerPoint. Certain platitudes in medicine get a lot of PowerPoint use. The strategy of reminding everybody what they were all really here for had become its own cliché and it could work. It could be right. If you were old enough, if you’d seen enough. Almost the entire group gathered in the pearly, golden hotel for the RACS Queenstown surgical safety and measurement conference 2017—‘Measuring What Matters’ it read on a billboard on an easel—maybe 160 healthcare professionals, a good deal of the country’s surgical community—would be gathered again at the perioperative mortality conference in April. Teams would be operating with each other again inside 36 hours. Applying for jobs. For RACS fellowships. CME points. Passing each other instruments and requesting letters of reference, letters of recommendation. You didn’t roll your eyes in this company.

  Elizabeth looked at Robin and rolled her eyes.

  ‘Now what you all have decided to do, or what’s been decided for you by your health minister and put upon you and hung over your heads, is a huge thing. A huge thing. A bitterly contentious thing let me tell you. You’re going to start measuring and putting your surgical outcomes out there into the public sphere and you cannot expect it not to be. It’s gonna be a shitstorm.’

  The crowd laughed.

  ‘But let me tell you this—it gets better.’

  And then they really laughed.

  ‘Ha ha, now look you’ve up till now—and you might find this hard to believe or imagine—you’ve been invisible to your patients. You are invisible to your patients. You come in there the day before or a few hours before they go under and they remember you but they are not going to remember what you say. And now you’re gonna start telling Joe and Jill Public a couple of things they’ve hitherto been unapprised of.’

  The down-home thing was an angle. He was a Texan but Director of the Division of Research and Optimal Patient Care at the American College of Surgeons and he spoke all over the world for huge sums and he was near-royalty in the profession and the media’s sense of the profession. Flown out from Johns Hopkins on College coin and paid per diem. Demanded first class for himself, his wife and son, the rumour went, and the flights alone came to more than NZ$30,000. Wearing man make-up because this thing was being filmed. A star.