Dead Tomorrow

liver transplants, so that needn’t be a cause for worry. Caitlin was going to be fine, he told her. And Lynn knew that Dr Abid Suddle did want her to be fine.
    But she also knew he was part of a system. He was just one exhausted member of a very big, very overworked and permanently exhausted but caring team. And Luke, who had frightened her, had made her go to the Internet herself. It was hard to find an accurate figure for the number of people in the UK waiting for a liver transplant. Dr Suddle had admitted privately that 19 per cent at the Royal died before one became available. And she felt sure he was not telling her the whole truth. Priorities got shifted at every week’s Wednesday meeting. In all the down-time she had, she talked to patients who found themselves endlessly bumped down the list by others in worse condition than themselves.
    It was a lottery.
    She felt so damn helpless.
    Thethick wodge of the Observer newspaper and all its supplements lay on the table and she glanced at one of the front-page headlines, forecasting more economic gloom, falling property prices, rises in bankruptcies. And tomorrow, going back to work again, she would have to deal with the human fallout from all of that stuff.
    She felt sorry for almost everyone she spoke to on the phone when she was at work. Decent, ordinary folk who had got themselves into a financial mess. There was one woman, Anne Florence, almost the same age as herself, and with a sick teenage daughter. Her problems had begun a few years back when she bought a car on hire purchase for £15,000, but failed to keep up the insurance payments and then the car was stolen. It left her still owing the hire purchase company, but without a car.
    Unable to afford another car, she had gone ahead and bought one using plastic. And had then taken out new cards, using the cash limits of each new one to pay off the previous ones.
    For over a year now, Lynn had almost weekly renegotiated her monthly repayments on a £5,000 debt to one card company, a client of her firm, allowing her smaller and smaller repayments. But to make matters worse, she had fallen badly into arrears with her mortgage. She knew it was only a matter of time before the poor woman lost her house–and everything else.
    She wished she had a magic wand that could make everything OK for Anne Florence, and the dozens like her she dealt with daily, but all she could do was be sympathetic but firm. And she was a damn sight better at being sympathetic than at being firm .
    Max, their tabbycat, rubbed himself against her legs. She knelt and stroked him, feeling the reassurance of his soft, warm fur.
    ‘You’re lucky, Max,’ she said. ‘You don’t know all the shit that happens in human lives, do you?’
    If Max did, he wasn’t letting on. He just purred.
    She picked up the phone and dialled her best friend, Sue Shackleton, on whom she could always rely for cheery support. But the phone went to Sue’s voicemail. She remembered, vaguely, something about Sue’s new boyfriend taking her away to Rome for the weekend. She left a message, then hung up forlornly.
    As she did so, the microwave pinged. She waited for another minute, then opened the door and took out the pizza. She then cut it into sections, put it on a tray and carried it through into the lounge.
    As she opened the door, the television was blaring. On the screen she recognized two of the characters of Laguna Beach , one of the soaps her daughter was addicted to. Caitlin was lying on the sofa, her head on Luke’s chest, barefoot, her toes curled, two cans of Coke open on the glass-topped coffee table. She looked at her daughter’s face for a moment, saw her totally absorbed in the programme, smiling at something, and for an instant she felt overwhelmed by a rush of emotion. She had a strong desire to cradle Caitlin in her arms.
    God, the girl needed reassurance– deserved reassurance. And she deserved someone a lot better than that dickhead, with his stupid, lopsided hairstyle, on the sofa with her.
    She was still furious at him for spooking Caitlin–and herself–with the statistics about the numbers of people on transplant waiting lists–and their mortality rate.
    ‘Pizza!’ she said, a lot more cheerfully than she felt.
    Luke, ina hoodie, ripped jeans and untied trainers, peered at her from under his slanted fringe, then raised a hand as if he was directing traffic.
    ‘Yeah! Cool! I’m cool with pizza.’
    You’d look even cooler