20

The young doctor’s name is Belasco, a graduate of the medical school at the University of Bristol, where he studied for five years. His father is a general practitioner in Herefordshire, his mother is the deputy headmistress of a primary school in Ross-on-Wye and his sister is currently studying dentistry at the University of Cardiff. He has only been qualified for three years, and St. Justin’s is his second position. Prior to coming here, he was on the staff of a big hospital on the outskirts of Birmingham. During his time there, he wrote a paper on schizophrenia. He lives in a small house in a village three miles away which he shares with his partner, Louise, a mathematics graduate who works as a loss adjuster for a commercial insurance brokerage firm. They have a black Labrador-cross-collie dog called Pliny, so named because he has the long face of a thoughtful sage, and a Siamese cat called Cardinal Sin. The latter is named after an ethnically Chinese Catholic prelate to the Philippine Islands, the irony of it lost on neither the good doctor nor me, although I make no indication of appreciating the joke.

I know all this because Dr. Belasco has told me.

For three days now, he has come to me in the early afternoon, sat at my side and prattled on about his past, his life and current affairs. From him, I have learnt such diverse information as the fact that the United Kingdom is still governed by a parliament of fools, there has been a serious flood in India and the price of petroleum continues to rise at an alarming rate.

On every topic upon which he has touched he passes a comment or takes a stand that is intended to excite or arouse me. He has made outlandishly racist remarks about “niggers and wogs,” attacked the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic church over the matter of contraception and revelled in the downfall of an arrogant and oversexed politician jailed for perjury and perverting the course of justice.

Throughout each diatribe, he has watched me. Not obviously, but astutely, in such a manner as he thinks I have not noticed. He looks especially at my hands and face, hoping to catch a twitch in my fingers, a flicker of an eyelid or a momentary parting of my lips: any sign that I have registered what he is talking about and might be willing to communicate through the curtains of silence he believes I must want to part and in which he must assist me.

What I find touching in his display is the fact that he is willing to betray himself to try to cure me. I know he has no racist attitudes. Watching him converse with several of the nurses who happen to be of black or Asian extraction, I can tell he harbours no animosity towards them. In the instance of one Chinese nurse, I would even suggest that Louise the loss adjuster might, one day, have to adjust to her own loss.

He does not realise he is wasting his time and merely helping me to pass mine on my trip down the road to oblivion. There is nothing he can do, or say, that will shock me. I am old; I have seen the world spin, and men spin with it. There is nothing left that can provoke anger in me. My rage is spent, its flame extinguished and its anguish veiled behind my quietude. All I have left are a few unexpurgated and unexpungeable regrets.