Hooper Hopes
Beggars can’t be choosers and hopers are just losers. She cleans her phone screen smudged in her own fingerprints fixed by the rain, as she can’t help reciting in her head the chant that some girls would chant with scorn in secondary school while waiting for the bus to get back home. How do these chants even come back? How are they triggered by some wicked part of our brain, a closet of bad memories that all of a sudden decides to get aired? The bus arrives and she lifts from her semi-sitting position on the bus stop and walks in line up the steps to the machine to tap her travel card. The bus is not that busy. She had the evening shift, one of the shifts she likes the least because as much as she would like to be productive in the mornings, she’s not the morning person that she would like to be, that some people would believe she is. Mary. Mary believed she was a morning person, organized and rewarded by her little routines until she got inside, inside what exactly?... Until Molly let her in. Dr Molly Hooper, much more guarded than people believe, less methodical outside her place of work than people imagine, more of a mess. She looks outside the bus window but all she can see is her own reflection in the dark silhouetted by the neon lights inside the bus, watched by a few who happen to share the cramped-up space, sparsely populated at this late hour. But evening shifts suck. You start at 3 p.m. and finish at 11 p.m., if you are lucky, if you don’t take a break. And Molly doesn’t if there’s nothing else to do. Mornings are easier 7 – 3 p.m. with the whole entire day to enjoy and to gallivant in the streets of London. Night shifts have the calm of the humming of the fridge and the silence filled with oddly rhythmic steps down the hospital corridor to her lab. When did she start saying MY lab, MY morgue? She isn’t really sure when her small body merged into the surroundings, when she became the pathologist and life revolved around work, instead of the other way round. But it happened almost organically and probably before she met Sherlock, she would even argue that it happened in college, when she decided to forfeit the surgery options for this career, with less risk of damaging the patient. Pathologist don’t need to follow Hippocrates Oath. What a relief. Except for the last bit in the modern version of the oath: Understanding that a dignified death is an important goal in everyone's life. That bit maybe had become her mission without even noticing.
Buses are soothing. When she arrived in London, just before classes started at Queen Mary’s University of London, she used to walk the streets of London on her own to get to know the city like you know a patient, the veins, the arteries, but she also took lots of buses, jumping from one to the other from one side of the city to the other, and when she got home, she would open up the oversized street map and colour the streets she had walked. Her goal was to colour every single street, every single alleyway, every bridge in the five years that it would take her to study medicine. This project she never completely finished. One more of her unfinished ideas, unfinished projects, she thinks now, with her eyes closed because she knows the bus trajectory from St Bartholomew’s hospital to her apartment almost by heart, every sound, every turn that she doesn’t need to keep them open and the people on the bus at this late hour aren’t that interesting either to engage in people watching. She never thought she’d stayed. She arrived at the University with a big scholarship after her remarkable performance on A-levels. Her family would not have been able to afford the accommodation and tuition fees otherwise. Her mother was an English teacher in her secondary school in Edinburgh and her father a farmer, just outside of it, in the farm where they lived, the farm where Simon, her brother still lives with his partner, Liam. They don’t farm any more, but they have chickens and a greenhouse and an idyllic life she used to hope that she would have for herself when she had weird notions of what her life should be like in the future. She was no stranger to cities. Edinburgh was her main place of wandering through secondary school in the all-girls school where she suffered through all those years. But Edinburgh doesn’t compare to the messiness, the dirt, the hustle, and bustle that to this day bring a smile to her face. She thought she would not stay at least those two or three years at the beginning. She thought she would not fall through the sticky web of the city. She thought she’d stay like in a cocoon and then come out the other end and pursue a flamboyant medical specialization destined for glory: neurosurgery or some such. She hoped and dreamed she’d be a remarkable doctor of some sort. Beggars can be choosers and dreamers... What are dreamers supposed to be?
Mary had asked her one day in her kitchen. John had gone to work, and she had taken the day off. Mary was heavily pregnant, and Molly had called in after physio. She had been going for treatment every week for a case of debilitating tennis elbow. They had gone for a walk near the river and grabbed some food at their house on the way back before Molly headed back into work. Mary was chopping some tomatoes, and this action triggered the question: ‘Why did you choose pathology, Molly?.’ Molly had laughed. Trust Mary Morstan to ask the questions everybody asked and make them sound like they were new, fresh, original.
- What is so funny? - Mary had made that funny face that a mixture of being offended and honestly wanting to know.
- Just the way you asked. – Molly replied. – Everybody asks at some stage.
- So?
- The fact is that I still don’t know… I thought I wanted neurosurgery all my life. But when I sat down to fill out my options… - She clutches the mug of tea, which has gone cold, with both hands.
- You thought you didn’t have what it takes to deal with people.
Molly laughs again at Mary’s signature bluntness.
- Not while they are alive anyway… - Molly replied.
- It is exhausting to constantly come up with… formulas, to read people, to empathize…
- But you do it naturally…
- What? Read people?
Mary shakes her head but midriff she decides to nod
- Yeah, but I meant empathize.
- Yeah. I guess I do. But for … fun. Not for work.
Mary smiles softly.
- Nah, I get it. I really do.
- I can’t deny there’s also the fact that I was scared. I was 23 and the thought of being able to have someone’s life in my hands in exactly 5 or 6 years terrified me. My mistakes are not as relevant.
- I’m sure Sherlock would argue with that…
- You know what I mean.
Mary knows what she means. The responsibility of having someone else’s life in your hands is huge, and this comes from the woman who helped Sherlock fake his death and put on a poker face for years to protect her friends.
The bus sighs arriving at her stop. She grabs her bag, which was lying between her feet on the dirty floor, way to go Dr Hooper, the pathologist’s malpractice with her own possessions. She gets off and walks the few streets to the apartment where she has been living since she secured her permanent position at the hospital. Rent to buy. One day it will be hers but for now it’s still a project that she may or may not finish. She punches the code into the gate and heads into the building. She walks up the stairs, one flight only and puts the key in the lock. Toby, the cat, doesn’t wait anymore, hoping that the excessive purrs and dancing around her ankles will land him a bigger portion of food. She leaves her bag and her coat on the coat stand at the entrance, a tiny hallway with three doors, one to a guest’s toilet on the left, one to the living room straight ahead and one to the kitchen on the right. She goes to the kitchen and starts the kettle while filling Toby’s bowl. Then she heads to the living room, a wide rectangle at the end of which are two bedrooms: a guest room and her bedroom ensuite. She plops on the couch and turns the T.V. to hear some fictional company. She walks to the kitchen when the kettle stops and grabs her own tea with just a dash of milk, it’s too late for lemon, and let’s be honest she hasn’t been able to cut any lemons since the day of the phone call, weeks ago now. The team that Mycroft Holmes sent to her apartment had explained why they needed to search her place for explosives, although they found none. It all had been a game. A game that John had explained, badly and with lots of gaps, when she visited him in the hospital where he had stayed for two nights to make sure that there was no damage, and then she had decided not to press. She didn’t need to know, not really. It was up to Sherlock to share, to ask, to offer explanations and with Sherlock it was unusual enough to get anything beyond a need-to-know basis. It was enough, it had to be enough; to know she wasn’t an experiment. The experiment that Eurus Holmes had subjected her to, however, had rendered some truths:
- You are my friend, we are friends, but… please just say those words for me…
- Please don’t do this… just … just don’t do it,
- It’s very important. I can’t say why but I promise you it is.
- I can’t say that. I can’t say that. To you.
- Of course you can, why can’t you?
- You know why.
- No, I don’t know why.
- Of course you do.
- Please just say it…
- I can’t, not to y…
- Why?
- Because it’s… tr- Because it’s true. It’s always…
- If it’s true, just say it, anyway.
- You bastard!
- Say it anyway.
- You say it, go on, you say it first.
- What?
- Say it, say it like you mean it.
- I-I… I love you. I love you. Molly... Molly, please.
Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.