Mourning Ruby Read Online Free PDF

buy him lemonade as his reward. Iris had her widow’s pension, and her widowed mother’s allowance. She never spoke to Joe of money.
    Once, stupidly, I mentioned the size of a phone bill that had just come in. Iris frowned but said nothing. After she had gone Joe found an envelope propped behind the coffee jar. There were four twenty-pound notes in it. Towards your bills, I know how heavy they get this time of year .
    I blushed when I saw those notes. Iris had never dared debt, or lived sloppily. ‘What we never had,’ she said to me once, talking of her own childhood, ‘we never asked for.’ Now Joe and I and everyone else under thirty had got into a different world, but Iris didn’t trust it. If she had known about Joe’s overdraft she’d have tried to post her twenty-pound notes into the mouth of that, too.
    She liked me and I liked her. She never spoke the questions in her head. Two separate rooms, two beds plump with pillows and duvets. She wanted more to happen, she wanted Joe to be happy. I was a nice girl. But she knew, because her instincts were good, where our limitations lay. Our flat, to her, smelled of compromise.
    She was squarer than ever now, well past seventy, broken veins in her cheeks and hair whipped into blue-white curls by a local girl who was ever so good and would come to the house. But she’d loved and she’d been loved and she knew what there wasn’t between us, even if what there was still puzzled her.
    Adam was the new consultant neonatologist at The Stephen Maternity Hospital. Joe had met him a couple ofmonths before, one Friday chess night at the Volunteer. Someone else had brought Adam to play chess.
    News of Adam came to me like a flag in front of a rare new engine. He’d been at Bart’s, doing work on apnoea of prematurity.
    It’s all a long time ago now. I don’t remember the difference between what I knew then and what I know now. I probably didn’t even know what a neonatologist was, let alone apnoea of prematurity. Living with someone, you can’t help absorbing what they do. You get the language around you and you start to use it yourself, without thinking. Maybe that’s what makes people pretend to be doctors when they’re not: it’s so easy to absorb the language to yourself.
    Adam was thirty-eight, Joe was thirty, and I was twenty-six.
    Adam used to say that not many doctors were good scientists, and at first I couldn’t understand what he meant. What else were they, if not scientists?
    ‘They have a gift for doctoring,’ said Adam. ‘All they need is enough science to back it up. They want to know which pages to look up in the book, or on the website.’
    But Adam wanted to write new pages in the book. He had the open-mindedness, the fluidity matched with precision, the playfulness which lets you dance on the edge of what’s known. He was clever. He was good. He was working on surfactant, the stuff that coats the lungs and lets you live.
    In neonatology, clinical practice changes week by week. Ten years ago was another world. Different technology, different drug protocols: a whole different world. Adam lived all those changes minute by minute.He knew who was doing what, how the clinical trials were going, when the fresh ground would take his weight.
    I don’t believe they even had artificial surfactant then. I’d have to check it. More babies died, and more babies lived on with crippled lungs.
    Joe and Adam started to play chess together on other days. They became friends. The private room at the Volunteer was only available on Fridays, so they’d go to the flat Adam was renting while he looked for a house. Both of them worked late most nights, and Adam lived alone. Adam must have talked about his work, and Joe probably talked about his, because for both of them work was what they were.
    Joe has the fastest, most powerful mind I’ve ever known. He needs five hours of sleep, I need eight or more. If I woke in the night there was always a line of light under