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Susannah HarrisonCAROLINE'S BOXPeople change jobs frequently in my profession. ...There are a million "what ifs." If there was something I should have said or done... For six months you might be best friends, working together, sharing meals and socialising in the evenings. At the end of it all you pack up your room into the boot of your car and move on to the next job. Sometimes there’s an e-mail or phone call, but ultimately we’re all leading busy, separate lives, careers in a constant state of flux, our worlds adopting a certain transience that we learn to accept. I met Caroline when I moved in with her. She had been in the flat longer than any of my predecessors and had made it her own. Educated in Singapore and Ireland, her world now consisted of the contents of her bedroom, most of the kitchen cupboards and a large number of cardboard boxes strewn around the communal lounge. At the time I was a casualty officer. Caroline was a medic, trapped in the inescapable cycle of repeatedly resitting her postgraduate exams. Tim was one of my seniors, a crazy Irish man with a shaved head who turned up for work every day in jeans and a t-shirt. He was a brilliant doctor who never left us at night until there were only one or two patients left to see. When he went to bed, he’d leave us his mobile number. He was kind and funny and bought all the drinks on nights out in the pub. He was thirty-three. He had no wife or family, no car and no mortgage. He was saving his money to open a diving school in the Far East. In the spring he resigned from his job, but stayed on to locum in the department. I think Tim was on the night they stabbed a young man to death outside my boyfriend’s flat. I’d got back there at about eleven. The attack occurred some four hours later, about twenty metres from the window. Guiltily I looked out on the police cordon the next day. I’d slept through the whole thing. I was one of nine SHOs. One of my peers was a little Asian guy called Mo, who spoke four languages fluently and whose family divided their time between America and Pakistan. “Hey Mo,” I’d call across the department, “know any Punjabi? I’ve got a man with a nosebleed, who only speaks Pubjabi,” and Mo would go to see him next. One night Mo and Caroline delivered a baby. He was in resus with the lady and Caroline went in and put on a pair of gloves to help out. I was starting at 07.30 that day and taking over from him. He was so excited- we said that the little girl should be called Mo, after him. In the summer I got married. I moved out of the flat I shared with Caroline into a rented house with my new husband. By September it was exam time again. I am fairly disciplined. I also tried to make my friends study. We spent the weekend before the exam doing practice questions seated in silence on my parents’ plastic garden furniture in the lounge as my husband made us cups of tea and served Battenberg Cake. On the Sunday evening Mo called. He couldn’t concentrate. Come round, I’d said and he’d driven round and joined the hopeless, desperate study group. I passed. The others failed. Caroline handed in her notice and moved out of her hospital room to stay at her parents’ flat in London. She gave me many of her possessions to keep, but also left a large brown cardboard box of things she intended to collect later. Before my exam, before my wedding, one Sunday morning we were called into the office at the back of the department. A doctor at the hospital had been accused of rape. It was Tim. I have never doubted his innocence. One Saturday in November, the day I bought a dining table to replace my parents’ plastic one and a few days before his trial, Tim committed suicide. There are a million “what ifs?” If there was anything I could have said or done, I‘m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. I told Caroline about Tim in an e-mail. I don’t think her mobile number was working at the time. I still had her box, patiently waiting for her with its secret contents in one of our rented cupboards. I applied to medical school, an idealistic seventeen year-old, a member of the all-talk-no-action world changing movement. I thought I was going to do something with my life, I thought I would live forever, as if a medical degree conferred a sort of immortality. After A+E I didn’t really keep in touch with my best-friends-for-six-months colleagues, but I’d hear of them through others. I’d know what they were doing when I received a patient’s transfer letter in handwriting I recognised. Sometimes I saw Mo’s writing, sweeping flourishes that made a biro look like calligraphy. One day, several months later I went into work and my colleagues were discussing a friend who’d died of a brain haemorrhage. Mo hadn’t been to work for three days when they finally opened the door of his room and found him. I told Caroline by e-mail. She was now back in Singapore. A few weeks after Mo died, we moved into our new flat. I started to write to his parents several times, but just didn’t know what to say to them. We brought Caroline’s box with us. We didn’t have much storage space and I decided to open it, to see if I could throw anything away. Inside were a pair of boots and a few hangers, not much else. I taped over the top again and put it back in our cupboard. Susannah Harrison says: "When I was a child I always wanted to be a writer or an artist. As you will see from the story, I am actually a doctor. I'm 29 and I live in Brighton." With thanks to chalkdog for the box photo. 10:17 PM - 27/6/2006 - post comment
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