Bodies [Paperback]

The unnamed narrator of Jed Mercurio's Bodiesis a newly qualified house officer in a busy city hospital. He arrives with his ideals intact and a vision of what his career in medicine will be. Within a short time the relentless procession of sick and damaged patients, the long, wearying hours he is obliged to work, the cynicism of his colleagues and the constant presence of death and disease take their toll. His idealism vanishes. He looks the other way when senior doctors are negligent or treat patients with contempt. He suffers guilt when a terrible mistake of his own is routinely covered up. His only escape is an intense sexual relationship with a student nurse. Sex is as clinically described in Bodiesas the indignities that age and accident inflict on the body. Mercurio wants to replace the melodrama of TV hospital series in which square-jawed doctors and glamorous nurses battle heroically against sickness and disease. In order to do so, he spares the reader few of the physical details that accompany illness and the body's disintegration. In pursuit of realism he peppers his text with medical slang and jargon, carefully annotated and explained in footnotes. What he has produced, however, is not realism but an inverted version of the melodrama. Instead of everything finally turning out well, the reader knows that, in this novel, everything will turn out very badly indeed. In place of square-jawed doctors saving the sick, Mercurio gives us drug-popping cynics exchanging the blackest of banter over dying patients. Melodrama it may be but, as the book's narrator seeks redemption by turning whistle-blower on hospital practices, it is very gripping melodrama.--Nick Rennison

'Deeply likeable and entertaining...funny, galling, painful and terrifying in all the right places...I couldn't put it down' Julie Myerson, The Guardian 'The malignant humour is relentless.' Daily Telegraph --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

An incredibly powerful and disturbing novel about a junior hospital doctor. The first novel by the writer of Cardiac Arrest.

Inside every hospital exists a world no outsider has been allowed to see, not even the young men and women who arrive there to begin careers in medicine. They think it's going to be like TV, and pretty soon they wish it was, because instead they're surrounded by death, disease and suffering and their only outlets are pitch-black humour and urgent, visceral sex.

Into this world plunges an idealistic young doctor. But as one harrowing ordeal follows another his relationship with patients and colleagues becomes increasingly cynical and he finds escape in a purely physical relationship with a student nurse. Then something happens that shocks him into seeking redemption, but he can gain it only by challenging the most powerful institutions of medicine.

Written by a former doctor, Bodies is a novel of almost unbearable power and intensity, an urgent despatch from the frontline of hospital life. It is also a moving portrait of the loss of innocence, the healing power of sexual love, and of a young man's quest for redemption in a world that long ago lost its sense of right or wrong.

An incredibly powerful and disturbing novel about a junior hospital doctor. The first novel by the writer of Cardiac Arrest.

Jed Mercurio trained at the University of Birmingham Medical School and worked at various hospitals in the West Midlands. He wrote the highly acclaimed television drama Cardiac Arrest (under the pseudonym of John Macure). Bodies is his first novel. (20020220)

ONE
The Killing Season
...like the stars, these ideals are hard to reach -
but they serve for navigation during the night.
'Ideals ', The Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine..
1: The Interior
Leaving behind the outside world I turn off the perimeter road and on the First of August I pass under the metal arch of the hospital gates. Ahead towers of concrete and glass carve blocks out of cloudless blue sky under which I'm swallowed into a city within a city with its own speed limits and language and even its own weather.
As I enter the building my reflection slithers over panes of glass. Windows reframe the sky into blue squares while my heels click on hard .at floors and echo off corridor walls. The air turns dry and sterile and as I burrow deeper into the hospital it cools to a constant twenty-one Celsius. Sunshine fades to a trickle then in its place humming strip lights burn.
Bracketed to a high white wall a sign throws down directions for wards and departments. Each destination is coded a colour and a line of that colour is etched into the floor and it maps the route ahead.
Standing here under the sign looking lost I look like what I am. I slip into my white coat, the same one I wore in finals but with a new badge that puts 'Dr 'in front of my name, and with the white coat stiff like armour I plunge farther into the hospital.
Some people ask me the way to Pharmacy. I think I might be able to remember from the sign but I can't and I blush and I have to shake my head.
I say, 'It's my first day.'
They laugh. It's a nervous laugh. If a doctor doesn't know the way round his own hospital then maybe there are other things he doesn't know.
Ahead of me a straight white corridor drops away to a set of doors and through the glass of the doors I see another straight white corridor stretching to another set of doors. In the glass of those second doors I make out a third straight white corridor and all together the corridors and the doors are an ever diminishing series of arrows pointing me deeper in and I feel like I'm falling.
I'm falling through layers of brick, concrete and glass. In the weatherless vaults of corridors and stairwells outsiders dwindle. Here come only the sick, those who love them and those who look after them. From the perimeter road I've travelled inwards three-quarters of a mile. This is the interior.
On my home ward I meet the SHO. Rich is mixed race with light brown skin and pale eyes, tall with wide shoulders and hair razored to stubble. He says, 'At ten, there 's an induction seminar for new housemen,' and then he gives me a list of jobs.
Word spreads that the new houseman's arrived. The nurses stack in front of me a pile of drug charts that each contains a patchwork of boxes for me to. fill in. It takes me ten minutes to work out how to write up a patient for paracetamol. Even then I have to check with Rich. Later a nurse tells me she can't find Rich and she needs someone to look at a heart monitor. I stand at the foot of a bed and in it lies an obese man whose body smells of sweat and skin creams. Mysterious shapes float across the monitor's black screen. As I struggle to make sense of them my heart rate outruns the patient's.
I turn to the nurse. I open my mouth about to confess I 'm worried so we should bleep someone more senior when she says, 'Oh. It s .fine. He's stopped doing it now. 'She pats me on the arm. 'Thanks,' she says and then she goes. I glance at the monitor but to me it still looks the same. I smile a nervous smile and then I leave the smelly fat man to return to my list of jobs.
At ten to ten the time bomb strapped to my body goes off at last. I shudder. It could be anything, anything at all, they want me for. I read the four red numbers displayed on my bleep's LED then with my thumb press a button to cancel the beeping but it must be the wrong button because the sound continues. I try all the buttons but the beeping won't stop. In the end I give in and dial the four numbers on the phone at the nurses 'station with my bleep cycling through chorus after chorus of beeps and people looking at me to switch it ff and me acting like it's not me at all -no, the noise must be coming from somewhere else. At the other end of the phone line a casualty nurse tells me they've got a patient for me to see. I find Rich and tell him the one true fact I know I know for sure. I tell him, 'But we're not on take today.
Rich reaches inside my white coat and presses the right button and my bleep stops beeping. He says, 'If it's an old patient of ours, it's us rather than the firm on call who have to clerk them in.' With a shrug he adds, 'It's a hospital rule,'and in shrugging them his shoulders rise like mountains and then he turns to go.
'But I've got this induction seminar.'
'I've got Outpatients. Sorry.'
Wearing my stiff dry-cleaned white coat and my badge saying 'Dr 'I tread out into a building full of patients and diseases not even knowing the way to Casualty and halfway there or not there realising I don't know the way back either. Lost and late I arrive at last. A nurse laughs at me because I've run. 'Sorry,' she says but then she continues to snigger behind her hand.