Black Widow Read online

  ‘Clearly, there are profound anthropomorphic implications here,’ Scalpelgirl had written. ‘We have to ask ourselves: what precisely is the optimal breast size for a woman pursuing a career in surgery? Why are there no papers on it? This is one of the scientific controversies of our age, and yet nobody is publishing. According to some sources, we need big tits to get on; and yet according to others, big tits are an impediment to being taken seriously as professionals. The Royal College of Surgeons’ ideal standard career-tit has to be empirically defined, and ought to be offered by breast surgeons as a template for reduction or enhancement.’

  Parlabane didn’t find it as daring or hilarious as Sarah evidently did, but the levels of decorum expected of medical professionals apparently set the bar pretty low for what could be considered risqué. That wasn’t what had her punching the air, however. Sarah and her peers loved it because here was a female voice that was saying all the things that same decorum prevented them from saying themselves.

  It was also possible that he judged it harshly because he was a tad jealous. It used to be journalists like him whose pithy comments were being quoted and shared, though as it was often by shouting across an office to recommend the piece to others who owned copies of the same paper, the process wasn’t quite so immediate or dynamic.

  The blog’s principal thrust was concerned with themes it considered more substantial than this ‘background hum’, or even with the frequently busy topic of unwanted touching in the workplace. These were the over-arching issues of career advancement and work-life balance.

  ‘Dressing for the Big Interview’ was one of the early articles that first put the blog on people’s radars. It started off ostensibly as a discussion of how much more vexed a question this was for women than for male candidates, who knew the answer was simply a shirt and tie. Wearing a dress could make you look insubstantial, it had been suggested. Even a skirt could seem sexualised, apparently, by making a statement of gender.

  ‘Why are women supposed to be sexually neutral in their interview dress code?’ she asked. ‘Nobody is suggesting men dress in a way that somehow de-emphasises their gender. Perhaps it’s to comfort the crusty old golf club bores on the interview panel: you know, the ones who have never gotten over the fact that they no longer work in an all-male profession. So if we all put on a pair of trousers, then if they squint hard enough they can at least pretend that they do.’

  She then asked more broadly why women were asked to defeminise themselves in order to practise surgery: why feminine traits were typified as weaknesses, and masculine traits lionised.

  ‘We’re always told we need to toughen up. Why do we have to be tough? Scar tissue is tough. It is not sensitive: it feels less. To feel less is not a good thing in a caring profession. Sensitivity is feminine. Compassion is feminine. The irony is that it is this over-emphasis on the value of masculine attributes that tends to make so many of our male colleagues accurately describable as cunts.’

  Yeah, he had to admit that one was always going to startle the horses.

  Parlabane thought she came across as too snidey and acidic sometimes, but seeing Sarah’s reaction and hearing her colleagues talk about the blog, it was clear that women in medicine loved Scalpelgirl because it felt like she had their back. They took pleasure in her takedowns and they applauded her acerbic tone because you kind of want a badass on your side. That’s what she was to them: an anti-hero.

  Emboldened by Scalpelgirl’s forthright style and the discussion she was encouraging, the blog became a touchstone and support base for female whistleblowers in the profession. For instance, interviewers for surgical positions were no longer allowed to ask whether the candidate had or was planning to have children, and the blog allowed women to highlight the more subtle ways in which it remained the conspicuous subtext of their questioning.

  ‘What do you see as your life goals?’ they might ask. Not career goals, Scalpelgirl noted: life goals. It was subtle, but once you knew what you were looking for, it was hard to miss. As a result, regardless of their wardrobe choices, she had a suggestion as to the most important thing female candidates could present in order to make the right impression.

  ‘Bring along a uterus in a jar. Your local university anatomical museum will have one, so ask if you can borrow it for the day. What you need to do is slap it down on the table and tell them you’ve had it removed.’

  That particular rant brought forth a torrent of stories from women who had experienced these subtle probings at interview but had previously been afraid to put a name on what was really going on. This in turn led to articles in doctors’ publications and a call for the royal colleges to toughen up their guidelines, or at least think about actually enforcing the ones they already had.

  But while it was officially not permitted at interview, the subject of women’s child-bearing intentions was constantly arrogated elsewhere as fair game for discussion, opinion and unsolicited advice.

  ‘A woman can be a good wife and mother, or she can be a good surgeon. She can’t be both,’ one correspondent had been told by a cardiac consultant she was training under. ‘If you want children, become a GP. Or a dermatologist.’

  Other specialities were frequently assessed by senior male colleagues for the apparent benefit of Foundation Year trainees, with the out-of-hours commitments and other demands of each discipline weighed up against the practical implications of motherhood. These ‘helpful impromptu careers-advice pep talks’, Scalpelgirl noted, never cited any implications for fatherhood. Nor did anyone ever ask how surgery or other specialities might be altered – ‘dear God, we mustn’t say improved’ – in order to better accommodate motherhood.

  To illustrate what she called ‘the blindness of entrenched privilege’, Scalpelgirl quoted at length from an email she had received, recounting the regular pontifications of a particularly outspoken colleague.

  ‘You’d think doctors of all people would understand human biology,’ he said. ‘You can’t change it, so why are they in denial about it? They can say it’s unfair, but it’s a bare fact that it’s women who have to be pregnant if a couple wants babies, and it’s women who have to breastfeed them and nurture them. That’s not some archaic sexist convention: it’s the inescapable reality. It is unavoidably going to cause them to interrupt their careers and it is unavoidably going to distract them in other ways: sleepless nights, worrying about their welfare, organising the school run and what have you. They should accept that and commit to a decision. It’s not fair on their children and their husbands, and it’s not fair on their colleagues and the patients if they’re trying to have it both ways.’

  The kicker in all of this, Scalpelgirl revealed, was that the surgeon quoted was a father of four. He got to have it both ways. He never had to commit to a decision.

  Scalpelgirl could not disclose who had sent the email or where she worked, in order to conceal the identity of her correspondent. Unfortunately this necessary discretion also conferred protection upon the identity of the surgeon quoted. She did, however, reveal that his colleagues secretly called him Leatherface, ‘because he leaves his theatre looking like the scene of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre’. He featured regularly on the blog, partly through ongoing correspondence updates, and more significantly when Scalpelgirl established the ‘Leatherface Award for the worst instance of family-man hypocrisy’ sent in each month.

  There was also a Golden Bow Tie Award for boorishly chauvinistic old-school pomposity, and more controversially the Girl-on-Girl Action Award for the worst instance of a female surgeon deemed to have stabbed her sisters in the back.

  The inaugural recipient of this emerged from another early rant that helped grow the blog’s readership, highlighting attitudes on behalf of female surgeons that Scalpelgirl’s piece eponymously damned as ‘Our Own Worst Enemies’. Again she was able to illustrate the issue by showcasing the account of another anonymous correspondent to the site, who encountered a less-than-sympathetic response to her pregnancy and
subsequent motherhood from a senior female consultant. The young registrar had been put on a run of nights when she was thirty-five weeks pregnant, and then, upon her return after six months’ maternity leave, had been stuck back on nights again.

  These rota assignments were the work of a female consultant whose unsupportive attitude seemed all the more disappointing when it was revealed that she was a mother of two herself, but her perspective on work-life balance turned out to be most revealing.

  ‘If you’re committed to this career, you need to prove that,’ she had said. ‘I always tell women to stop whining about sexism because it becomes a built-in excuse for failure. I was back at work within a fortnight after my first child, and within seventy-two hours after my second.’

  Scalpelgirl suggested that if this self-styled superwoman had a third, she could book to have it delivered by C-section in the morning and then be free to undertake a half-day list in the afternoon.

  ‘Superwoman is our enemy,’ Scalpelgirl had written. ‘I’m not criticising her choices – there’s enough men happy to do that without us joining in – but don’t dare tell us that it’s normal; don’t dare tell the rest of us we should be aspiring towards it. Superwoman isn’t pushing the boundaries for women in surgery: she’s pulling up the ladder. She’s a sell-out, making it harder for the rest of us. And she’s legion.’

  The piece sparked a wave of highly polarised online debate on doctors’ forums, leading to a lot more hits on the blog and inevitable speculation as to the carefully protected identity of its author. As its reach grew, though the website’s title remained the same, the contributions saw its remit expand first to cover sexism across medicine, and then sexism in hospitals generally. This, although indirectly, was what led to its downfall.

  Scalpelgirl authored what she probably regarded as one of her less contentious pieces, which began as an account of lecherous attitudes from hospital IT techs before broadening into an unfocused rant about the incompetence of hospital IT staff in general. It was, in Parlabane’s opinion, not her finest work, with its low point being her assertion that ‘considering that IT consultancy remains the most unjustifiably over-remunerated profession of the age, given what the NHS pays, you’ve got to be the worst of the worst if this is the only gig you can get’.

  Nonetheless, something in it proved cathartic to her readers, and set the tone for the torrent of me-too outrage that followed below. Word of this dogpile somehow found its way to hospital IT personnel, and from there spread rapidly to the kinds of forums frequented by guys who demonstrate the internet adage that the response to any article on feminism proves the need for it.

  It was actually some of the postings in the unmoderated comments section that had caused the most outrage, describing IT guys as socially inept geeks, virgins, neckbeards, basement dwellers: the full bullshit-bingo card on tech-head stereotyping. However, it was Scalpelgirl whose name was at the top, so as is the way of these things, the Chinese whispers reductionist perspective meant that these remarks soon became indelibly misattributed to her.

  Suddenly she was a target, though the death and rape threats we have come to expect from such scenarios were not immediately unleashed. The guys who send that stuff prefer a name and a face before they can really saddle up, but nobody knew who the newly christened Bladebitch was or what she looked like. Unfortunately she had pissed off precisely the constituency most adept at finding out those things.

  LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

  Sheena Matheson’s call was logged as being connected to the first contact at precisely 02.41, and a request to investigate went out from Dispatch shortly after, graded S for significant priority.

  PC Ali Kazmi was the responding officer, on routine vehicle patrol accompanied by PC Ruben Rodriguez. It had been a quiet shift, a northerly breeze bringing the wind chill factor down to minus ten and keeping the pavements relatively clear. People didn’t hang about outside the chippies and kebab shops when it was cold like that, though the serious drinkers always had their liquid insulation to keep them warm. Only heavy rain kept those buggers off the streets.

  It had been an opportunity to break the new guy in gently, give him the guided tour. She had found him standing at the back door, glancing back and forth between the building and the car pool like he had lost his mummy. However, his problem was that it wasn’t a woman he was looking for.

  She had watched him for a few moments, waiting until she was sure he was starting to feel the cold before she pulled up and slid down the patrol car’s passenger-side window.

  ‘You’re PC Rodriguez, aren’t you? Can I help at all?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m supposed to be going out with PC Ali Kazmi,’ he replied. His accent was English: Home Counties generic. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Every time I look in the mirror.’

  Ali watched his eyes close in brief self-reproach. Some of them acted like it was her fault she hadn’t met their assumptions. She decided he looked just about contrite enough.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, climbing in.

  ‘It’s short for Alison. But round here, when most folk hear it they think Ally as in Alistair.’

  ‘No, I’d seen it written down. I was forgetting that there’s no WPC up here. And in conjunction with your surname, I assumed … never mind. I’ll quit digging.’

  Ali pulled away and commenced her first circuit of the one-way system.

  ‘Are you partly Spanish?’

  ‘My dad is. I was brought up in Wimbledon.’

  ‘You’ve transferred here from the Met?’

  She couldn’t keep a note of amusement from her voice. It was a career move so unusual as to seem absurd.

  ‘Well, after two of my colleagues were gunned down right in front of me, the PTSD counsellor suggested a change of scene as an alternative to giving up the job completely.’

  Ali felt her stomach heave.

  ‘Oh God, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to…’

  Then she noticed he was grinning.

  ‘You’re a fucking liar.’

  ‘You got to have your fun, I’m giving some back.’

  ‘Fair do’s. So what did bring you here?’

  ‘Something only marginally less traumatic. Bad break-up.’

  ‘It must have been. Met to Highland. Though if you’ve come here thinking it’s like Hamish Macbeth …’

  ‘Your gender aside, I’ve not made any assumptions. I’m in your hands.’

  She stole a look while they were stopped at lights and his attention was fixed on the entrance to the railway station on Academy Street. His father had been generous with his genes: hazel eyes, thick black hair and olive skin. Stick a conquistador’s helmet on him and he could have stepped out of a painting.

  The brief moment it took to assess that – on a physical level, anyway – she fancied him was also enough to bring her mind back around to the thing she had managed not to think about for half an hour. Maybe he only looked so good to her because she was contemplating a possibility that would rule out dating altogether for the foreseeable future.

  Ach, don’t be hysterical, she told herself. There were always options. Difficult options, certainly; adult options: a decision that would be difficult to live with, but not as difficult to live with as the alternative.

  It was twenty past midnight when Dispatch relayed that there had been reports of a drunk causing a disturbance on Union Street.

  ‘Dispatch, this is Romeo Victor Four. We are one minute away. Will deal.’

  ‘Romeo Victor Four from Dispatch, is that yourself, Ali?’

  ‘Roger, Cathy. Go ahead.’

  She gave Rodriguez a knowing look, imagining how this exchange must sound to someone used to the legions of call-handlers at Central Communications Command.

  ‘Aye, well, seeing it’s you, it’s worth mentioning that, by the sound of it, we’re talking Red Dougal here.’

  ‘Understood. Thanks, Cathy.’

  Ali swung the car across Academy Street to execute a U-turn, thou
gh it turned into a three-point turn instead due to cars parked on the other side. Not that it was a blue-light job.

  ‘Red Dougal,’ said Rodriguez. ‘Is that a local code?’

  ‘No, it’s a local nutter. Mostly harmless. Just need to handle him right, so let me take the lead.’

  ‘You got it.’

  Ali drove slowly along Union Street and brought the car to a stop roughly ten yards from where a grizzled old man with a beard like an upturned Afro was sitting on top of a bin, kicking his heels against it. As they climbed out, they could hear that he was singing to himself, thumping his heels in time to the song, though there was an aggression to his cadence. This could go either way. Ali knew him of old; knew him when most of the beard was still ginger, in fact, rather than grey.

  They approached slowly. Rodriguez was tensed up, readying his reflexes. She patted him gently and held out her palm, signalling that he should stay behind her.

  ‘What are you singing, Dougal?’

  He swung his head around to focus on her, like his eyes couldn’t swivel independently.

  ‘Ali,’ he slurred. ‘Bonny wee Ali. Will I sing for you?’

  ‘Not tonight, Dougal, it’s late. Folk are in their beds.’

  ‘Are they?’

  Dougal asked this like it was an astonishing revelation and, in his mind, two minutes ago it had been four in the afternoon.

  ‘It’s after twelve. You should be in your bed. Will we give you a lift home?’

  She didn’t wait for a response, but put an arm out and helped him slide off the top of the bin.

  Rodriguez looked at her like she was crazy, then seemed to work out what was going on. Wrongly, she’d wager.

  They helped Dougal into the back, but gave up trying to put a seatbelt on him after a couple of futile attempts.

  ‘You’re not going to spew in my car, are you, Dougal? Because that would upset me.’