The Physician

Dr Asha Rai has spent twenty years becoming the person a large international health body reaches for when something is going wrong and nobody yet knows how badly. She is fifty-one. She is deputy director of outbreak response — not the director, the one who drafts what the director signs — and her technical recommendation is adopted, every time, because it has never yet been wrong.

She works the way you would want someone in that chair to work. She reads a notification twice before she does anything with it. She asks what population a figure is drawn from and who produced it and in which year. She will not carry a number she cannot trace to a named owner, and when a projection arrives that would make a difficult allocation obvious, she takes four minutes and a sheet of paper and establishes that its central assumption is not merely unverified but false — and pays two days of her team's time to say so.

The decision she makes instead is the hard one. There is a finite quantity of containment and two districts asking for it inside forty-eight hours, both of them right to ask. One option protects more people than the other by a margin large enough that the committee rises in under an hour. She drafts the recommendation that afternoon, strikes a qualifier out of it because it would not have been true, and sends it. It is correct on the information in that room. It stays correct.

Then the ordinary year. A teaching hospital in the Midlands. A coroner's court. A cordon on a riverbank in east London on a morning that comes to nothing. An outbreak on a housing estate that she closes in nine days with a case definition, a letter through eighty letterplates, and seventeen rows she has walked twice in both directions. Work done well, by someone who is good at it, and nobody sees it but the file.

And the year thickens. Her name goes on more agendas. Her judgement is wanted in more places, on worse problems, by decent people for entirely correct reasons — because she can do the arithmetic without flinching, and most people cannot. Nothing about it is sinister. The institution is working exactly as designed, and what it selects for is her.

In the autumn, nine items come up on a Monday and she takes them in the sequence the log gave them, which is not the sequence a person reading for interest would take. The third is three notifications on a standing form. One of them is a hospital in south London, two cases on one floor, and a list with two lines on it.

I am not waiting on a result, she tells the consultant. A result tells me which organism, and I can count people without knowing that.

She is entirely right about that, too.

*THE PHYSICIAN is the second volume of Weights and Measures, a five-book sequence in which each book re-reads the one before it from an irreconcilable point of view. It can be read on its own. Readers of Paparazzo will find they are holding something its narrator never had.*

For readers of Claire North's The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, Iain Pears's An Instance of the Fingerpost, and the quiet administrative dread of Kazuo Ishiguro.