Lily

Steve White, 32, surgeon at the Queen Margaret Hospital in Fulham, London, did not turn up for work today (o8/12/08). It was the first time he had ever been late. His girlfriend discovered him when she returned home from work earlier this evening . Though the autopsy is not yet complete, he appears to have been poisoned. All that he had on his person at the time of death was a newspaper, though the police dismiss this fact as irrelevant.

Lily looked from her plastic cup. The hospital lights are so bright it takes her eyes a while to adjust. For a second or two she’s lost in the void, not sure what she’s seeing. Then the world came back to her.
Her heart felt like it was slipping down her spine. The chart was still resting in her hands, bumping slightly against her shaky fingertips. The worst patient chart she’s seen in years.
For once in her career she was stumped. Sitting in the relentless white corridor, watching as the wheelchairs roll back and forth hypnotically.

By five o’clock today she must tell five people that they’re going to die.
All five of people assigned to this last month needed transplants. A kidney for a schoolgirl, a liver for a famer, two bladders for a PHD student and a 40-year old divorcee and a heart for a receptionist.
The hospital didn’t have enough organs available. People died there all the time but most of the time they didn’t have organ donor cards, so there was nothing the hospital could do. There was no evil in it, only bureaucracy.
She wished it was her fault. She wished she had messed up somewhere, made an error of judgement. She hadn’t. She was brilliant as her reputation suggested. It was still no match for the sickly pinch of chance.

“Lily?"

“Uh-Hi Steve”

Steve had joined the hospital as the assistant deputy head of surgery last September. Good natured enough, he was also boorish, stubborn and a lot dimmer than his surgical expertise implied.

“You look....are you okay?” He cocked his head to one side and peered at her. She could barely resist the urge to swat him away.

“Mmm.” She replied without looking up
.
“Okay, cool. Just to let you know, Melissa’s not going to be able to make it tonight. She’s feeling really sick”

“Oh. Oh, dear. Do you want to rearrange?”

“No! We’ve been trying to get a date fixed for months! I’ll come along anyway, then maybe the four of us can grab a pint when she’s feeling better.”

“Sure.” Lily gives a flimsy smile. “See you later then”

She thought her tone had been dismissing enough but Steve was immune. He stayed rooted like a great tree, carrying the prickly scent of someone wishing to make small talk.

“Yeah” He cocks an eyebrow, “I’m just off to this, er, Medical Ethics seminar they’re making us do,” He leaned down towards her slightly as though letting her into a juicy secret, “ Crazy, isn’t it, sending us to listen to talks when there are people in need....” He drew back again. He evidently hadn’t got the response he expected. Lily continued to hold her thin smile. “Anyway, I can see you’re busy....”

“See you later then” she repeats lifelessly and, with a final scan of her face, he bounces off down the hallway, shoes squeaking as he goes.

*
Five hours later Lily was kneeling on a toilet bowel. Cramped into her tiny bathroom, kneecaps twinging, and a cigarette packet stuffed clumsily into her armpit, she tried again and again to open the window. It refused to budge.
With one final surge of frustration, she put her weight under the ledge and pushed. With a groan and a strain that felt like was coming from the depth of her stomach, the sill broke free. Cracked paint splintered everywhere.

“Lily?”

“What?!”

Her boyfriend’s mellow voice came from the hallway outside. There was a beat before he replied.

“Just saying. He’ll be here soon”

“O-okay. Thanks”

Now she felt guilty. It was bad enough she was smoking. She didn’t need to snap at him as well. Lighting up, she watched the faint ember at the end of the cigarette pulse. Very bright, then almost no light at all. Silently she smoked, staring at the streetlights down below until her eyes blurred. For a moment she was calm. The whole world seemed to descend and rest on those baseless blobs of light.

“Lily?” The voice was more pressing this time. She stubbed out the cigarette with a hiss.

“Coming love”.

The surgeon arrived promptly. It was the first time she’d seen him without scrubs on. It made little difference. He was unique in this way. His presence defined his appearance, rather than the other way around. He really was stubbornness personified; it seemed to leak out of him, dribbling a faint odour wherever he went. Lily could feel the atmosphere in the flat shifting to accommodate it.

“You must be Tom” Steve strode forward and grabbed Lily’s boyfriends hand brashly but didn’t meet his eye.

“Yes I am. Pleased to meet you. It’s always good to meet people Lily works with at the hospital” Tom replied smoothly,

“Please, come through,” and he shuffled Steve into their modest living room, where a wooden table was laid with painted plates.

The conversation over dinner was dry. Thanks to Steve’s ability to keep stoically and monotonously reiterating the same point over and over, there weren’t many awkward silences. But everyone was bored. Lily played with her spaghetti; Tom made regular affirmative noises but kept glancing over his shoulder.

“More wine, Steve?”

Lily groaned inwardly. The redder Steve’s face got, the fewer the pauses between his monologues.

“Love some. Thanks Tom.” He took a sizeable gulp, “So Lily,”

She looked up, feigning an expectant smile.

“You been made to take this seminar class, then?”

“Not yet, no. I was meaning to ask you about that actuall....”

He cut her off with a wave of the hand. “Not worth it.”

“No?”

“Bollocks”, He wiped a speck of food from the corner of his mouth. “They ask you the most juvenile things.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah.” There was a pause while he chewed unattractively and then laid down his fork, “For instance, they asked us, us , medical graduates, right? Whether we would kill five people, or one person, given the choice. Pffft.” He picked his fork up again.

“What? They asked you that outright? Surely, that’s...”

“Nooonononononono. No. But in essence, yes. They asked us this: If there’s a train, speeding towards five people on a track, you’re the only one who can stop it, by pulling this lever, right?.”

“Right”

“So, if you pull this lever, you know, the one that diverts the train from the five people, then it goes down the other track and kills one person. And then they put you in groups and give you twenty minutes to come up with your answer, as though there’s anything worth discussing!” He went back to his food, chuckling slightly.

“What did you say?”

Steve stopped mid-chew, “You’re kidding me, right?”

“No, no. I’m genuinely curious,” Something snagged in her tone. Tom watched her, apprehensively, as though he could smell a storm brewing.

Steve swallowed, face aghast. “ Well I chose to kill the one person. Bloody hell what was I meant to say? You’re smart, Lily. It’s simple maths.”

“Simple maths?!”

“Well, yeah. If you do nothing five people die. If you do something, if you take action, take responsibility, one person dies.”

“But that’s like saying Doctor’s should....”

And then something very strange happened. Right in the middle of her sentence, Lily’s urge to fight died.

“Okay, I guess” she offered serenely.

Tom continued to stare at her, as though she was having them on. She shot him a look as if to say “I can’t be bothered, I’ve had a long day”. But that wasn’t true. She was filled with the stoic calm of someone who finally understood what needed to be done.

“Alright, Steve, can I offer you some dessert?”

“Thanks, Tom.” Steve’s joviality returned, “Tell you something Lily, “he took another glug of wine, “You’ve got a funny way of thinking about things but you sure can pick ‘em”

Half an hour later she was washing dishes when she felt Tom’s hands on her back.
“You ok?” He asked, voice whispery on her neck.

“Fine,”

“Were you alright in there? You looked...I don’t know. You’ve never backed down from a fight before” His words trailed off into her hair.

“I-, “ She leant into him and breathed deeply, then gently prised herself away.

“I’ll just be a second,”.

Lily herself didn’t know what had come over her. As knelt on the toilet seat, knees twinging once more , her head felt clearer than ever before. All it took was one conversation and all the grey in the world faded to black and white. Wrong and right. She was surprised at herself. She never thought she could ever conceive of such as thing, let alone do it fearlessly. But there was no fear in her. There wasn’t even the glimmer of apprehension. Just calm sense of purpose, and a feeling that a hundred bricks had been lifted.

The next day Lily made sure she took the late shift. Half an hour after she was done, she turned up outside the operating theatre where she knew Steve was working on a car crash victim. It hadn’t been ten minutes when Steve walked out, mopping his brow.

“Hey there Steve,”

“Oh” he look very flustered, “Hi Lily,”

“Go ok?” She gestured to the dark theatre.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, actually. Not as serious as we thought,”

“Ah good. Sorry to catch you at a bad time. Me and Tom were thinking, theres a concert on at the Roundhouse this
weekend if you and Melissa fancied joining us? We’d love to finally meet her,”

Still breathing heavily, a look of pleasant surprise crossed his sweaty face, “Yeah that’d be-that’d be nice. Sorry, it’s baking in there. I’m out of breath”

“Sip?” she asked, offering him her bottle of water.

“Thankyou.” He opened the lid and drank heartily.

“Not at all,” Lily smiled. Now it was simply a job of waiting.

Steve White, 32, surgeon at the Queen Maragaret Hospital in Fulham, London, did not turn up for work today(08/12/08). It was the first time he had ever been late. His girlfriend discovered him when she returned home from work earlier this evening. Though the autopsy is not yet complete, he appears to have been poisoined. All that he had on his person at the time of death was a newspaper, a kidney, a liver, two bladders and a heart.