TWENTY-TWO

I was not looking forward to that night because I was on call. Merging practices had meant that the on-call rota was now considerably better, in that I was only on call once in every seven days; it was therefore also, of course, now considerably worse when it did come round, because that one night in a week was one hell of a humdinger. Not only did we not get to sleep, we barely got to sit down; these days, after a night’s on-call we had to take a day off, whereas before we would have made do with a half-day. There was, of course, variety. We got to see all ages, all sexes, all predicaments, all moods and all reactions. We saw the trivial and the serious, we saw the extreme and the exasperating, the hilarious and the appalling; unfortunately, by the time it got to four in the morning with barely time for a fluid break (either in or out), I didn’t care. By that time, I could have been called to the scene of a bug-eyed, two-headed, slime monster from Venus giving birth and I wouldn’t have been capable of reacting in any way other than as I had been taught by experience and learning to do; this was fine, as long as my subconscious was fully functioning but, as every pilot knows, once the autopilot goes tits up, you very quickly find yourself in unpleasantly odiferous waters without a means of propulsion.

On that night it went pretty much as expected – the highlight being the drunken man with a ferret bite and a tear in his trousers – until I was called to attend to Albert Stewart, a forty-two-year-old man who had collapsed. I thought nothing of it – was incapable by then of thinking anything of anything, as it was three in the morning – and duly attended the drab upper-floor maisonette not far from the junction of Keston Road with Thornton Road. It was starting to drizzle but, despite the heat, it was still so hot that this gift of moisture was almost a joke, as if it were merely the gods applying a bit more sweat to my brow. I was shown in by the woman who lived on the ground floor and who, it transpired, was the landlady. She was a short woman, broad about the beam and, it must be said, slightly shabby; I tried to make allowances, given the hour and given the fact that I probably looked as if my suit was a charity shop reject, but I think there was little excuse for the smell of urine that seemed to envelope her. I say ‘envelope her’, but what I mean was the stench hit me with eye-watering intensity as soon as she opened the door. Her quilted pink dressing gown of the finest pseudo-silk had seen better days, largely in the way that a corpse has.

‘I’m looking for Mr Stewart,’ I said. ‘I’m the on-call doctor.’

She bore a look of wide-eyed excitement. ‘He’s upstairs. I found him.’ She spoke triumphantly, as if she had won a treasure hunt. ‘I heard a crash and I went out to see what was going on, and I called up the stairs but he didn’t answer . . .’

Like Rolf Harris, she appeared to have mastered the art of breathing in and out and vocalizing all at the same time; certainly I didn’t notice any pauses in her monologue. We were standing in a small hallway, off which two doors led; the one through which she had come showed a living room that was crowded and untidy, the wallpaper sporting a garish orange pattern that fought ferociously with the deep red of the carpet; only the eye of the beholder was the loser. She continued, ‘So I fetched me key . . . I wouldn’t normally go in, of course . . . I mean, I may be the landlady and he may be only a tenant, but he’s entitled to some privacy . . . anyway, I went up and found him on the floor . . . he was twitching . . .’ At last she paused but, before I could speak, she carried on in a stage whisper, ‘I think he wet hisself . . .’

The irony of this remark did not strike her, although I had to try mightily not to point it out to her. Indicating the other door, I asked, ‘Is he upstairs?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said and delved deeply in her pocket for the key. Whilst she did so, she said over her shoulder in a wounded tone, ‘He was very rude, you know. He told me to go away, only he didn’t use those words, if you know what I mean . . .’

‘Does he know you’ve called me?’

‘No.’

Which meant that he might well tell me to take a walk, in which case, I would have to wish him ‘sayonara’ and be about my overly fatigued business. Oh well . . .

I began to trudge wearily up the stairway that the opened door had revealed, but was a bit disconcerted to discover I was still not alone. I paused and turned, smiled and suggested firmly, but I hope not impolitely, that she should stay downstairs. Her look of disgruntlement might have been hard to take had I not been so tired and had the thought of fresh air not been so enticing, but she complied. At the top of the stairs was another door, upon which I knocked.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s the doctor, Mr Stewart.’ Saying the name out loud made me realize that it was familiar, although I could not place it.

‘Go away.’

‘Your landlady called me, Mr Stewart. She’s worried about you.’

‘Sod off.’

‘She said you collapsed. Perhaps I should check you over.’

There was a pause, then the door was suddenly wrenched open, something that made me jump so that I almost took a tumble backwards down the stairs. The man in front was dishevelled, clearly very distressed, angry and probably drunk; I finally recognized the name as that of the man who had so recently been in my surgery. He had his mouth open, presumably to exhort me once more to depart the scene in rich and ringing Anglo-Saxon, but on seeing me, he paused. A look came over his face, one of recognition true, but one in which there was something more; it was something I couldn’t place. ‘Oh, it’s you.’

‘May I come in?’ I asked, eager to do my Hippocratic duty.

A pause, then he stood aside, but said nothing.

It was tidy. That was the first and overwhelming impression. It was basic, much of it looked second-hand, and some of it looked broken, but there was a dignity about that room. This was a man who had little but, most importantly, amongst it was order. A bed, a small bedside table, two chairs and a bookcase; I could see a bedroom through a doorway, a kitchen in another; the carpet was thin and focally worn, but clean. The only thing in that room that wasn’t neat was the bed; he went and sat on the edge of it, gesturing that I should sit in one of the chairs. ‘I told you. I’m epileptic. I had a fit. Nothing serious.’

Saying that having an epileptic fit wasn’t serious was a bit like saying that it was only an amputation. I said, ‘Maybe not this time . . .’

He considered this. ‘I did a couple of stints in Ulster.’

That was all he said, but it was all he had to say, especially using the tone that he did. To him, an epileptic fit was nothing and I was a naive fool if I thought otherwise. I looked around for something to say, found nothing. Then my eye caught the empty dog’s bed in the corner. ‘Are you going to get another dog?’

He stared at me with an intensity that was quite striking, if not frightening. Slowly and in a voice that was calm, and yet all the more chilling for that, he replied, ‘I haven’t decided yet.’

‘It was probably the stress of his death that precipitated the fit,’ I suggested.

‘I expect.’

There was then a silence between us. It wasn’t a comfortable silence and inevitably one of us felt compelled to say something; just for once, this time it wasn’t me. He suddenly said, ‘I’ve done some terrible things in my life, Doctor.’

It was a long way into a day that was rapidly becoming everlasting, at least in my mind, and the last thing I wanted was an in-depth therapy session with a man who had clearly seen and done things that would probably give me sweat-drenched nightmares for a year; a man, moreover, who was undoubtedly trained in various ingenious methods of separating people from their lives, and who had a physique that was ten times better than anything I’d ever seen in a mirror. However, he was also a man who was clearly in some sort of torment and, for better or worse, I had once made the colossal, stupid mistake of applying to medical school.

‘You were a soldier, Mr Stewart; it goes with the job. We – the rest of us – expect you to do it, because if you didn’t, there wouldn’t be anyone else to.’

I know he heard because he replied, but there was no change in his lost, distracted expression, no flicker of the eyes away from the grimy carpet. ‘I know that. It doesn’t make it any easier for me, though.’

I suddenly discovered that my counselling skills were a tad limited; all I could find to say was, ‘No, I don’t suppose it does.’

He suddenly breathed out as if he had been holding it in for hours in some sort of personal dare; I thought for a second that he had relaxed, and that I was a natural counsellor all along, but his next words disabused me. ‘So that’s my tough shit, then.’

‘There are types of therapy you could try . . .’

His face told me what he thought of that, but just to make sure I got the message, he said, ‘I don’t think so.’

Somewhat awkwardly, I countered with, ‘Yes, well, if you haven’t seen a neurologist recently, it might be an idea to get checked up. Have you ever tried Tegretol?’

‘It gave me the shits.’

‘Ah, well, it can do that. But there are new things coming along all the time . . .’

‘No, thanks.’

It was a polite refusal but a most definite one. ‘Fair enough. Has the Mogadon helped you sleep?’

‘No.’

‘Oh . . . OK . . . Perhaps we could try something else?’

Until then he had been hunched, head down, but now he suddenly jerked his head up to stare at me, and his whole body became tense. ‘Perhaps there are some things that drugs can’t fix.’

I found myself nodding enthusiastically purely out of instinctual self-defence. ‘Absolutely.’

It was obvious that I wasn’t going to do any more good here and I had a man in Fairlands Avenue with breathing difficulties to see. I stood up. ‘I’ll be on my way, then.’

His head was back down and his posture was once again one of despair. He was mourning. Perhaps it was for his dog, perhaps it was for a life lost but still too-well remembered. He did not respond. I made my way to the door. On the bookcase to the left was a single black-and-white photograph of a group of schoolchildren, perhaps in their mid-teens. It was some sort of end-of-term class photo; they were all dressed, more or less smartly, in white shirts or blouses, dark skirts or trousers and striped ties. They were standing outside what was clearly the main building of Bensham Manor School. I wondered what connection it had with this strange, sad, angry man, but didn’t dare ask.