a little, so he turned to the housekeeper.
‘You understand about confidentiality?’
She nodded but did not speak.
‘No, I mean you really understand?’
She nodded again. He had planned to do a version of the confidentiality bollocking he gave people, about how they were not allowed to say anything to anyone, ever. The housekeeper was so blank and seemed so indifferent, not in an incompetent am-I-bovvered? way but as if her real being was deeply buried somewhere else, that he lost the impetus to go on with it. It was a bit like losing an erection. Too bad. Mickey liked the confidentiality bollocking, because it gave a sense of importance and drama to the work; and the fact was, there was something glamorous about even the mundane aspects of Premier League football. Checking the supply of loo rolls: because a Premiership player was involved, it was important and interesting. Mickey knew plenty of things that people were desperate to know – most of them variations on the theme of ‘what is X really like?’ – as if there were a special category of knowledge called ‘really likeness’ – as if it were somehow the ultimate question.
‘It seems to be OK,’ he told the cleaner. She nodded again. Obviously this was Nod at Mickey Day. Well, two can nod. So he nodded back and headed for the door. There were a couple of bits of post, which he picked up on the way out – an electricity bill and a card which said ‘We Want What You Have’. Mickey had a flash of divorce-paranoia – Dinah’s brief was out to get him! – and then realised it was actually to do with 27 Pepys Road, because the other side of the card was a photo of the front door. This, Mickey thought, was almost certainly something to do with a newspaper staking out the house; maybe it was something specifically to do with the African kid. There were rumours that he’d been poached from Arsenal, or something. Maybe this was loopy Arsenal fans threatening the kid or trying to spook him. Bugger! Mickey thought that the last thing he needed today, as his phone started vibrating again, was a tricky what-should-I-do?
He was wrong about that. Something else turned out to be the last thing he needed. When Mickey came out onto the street he found that his car had been ticketed and clamped.
10
Two weeks before Christmas, Petunia sat in her doctor’s surgery, waiting for her name to appear on the electronic screen behind her. It was a Monday, and the surgery was even busier than usual. There were no seats available facing the screen, so every time she heard the beep indicating that another patient was summoned, she had to turn and look and see if her turn had come.
Petunia didn’t much like that she had to do that. When her name came up she would get up and go through to see her doctor and then everyone would know that she was Mrs Petunia Howe, whether she wanted them to know who she was or not, and her name would then stay up there until the next name came up in lights on the board. She was no spring chicken and to turn her neck enough to see she had to swivel the whole top half of her body, and although every other person in the facing-away seats was doing this too, including the ones who were listening to earphones and talking on their mobiles – two of the people doing that were sitting directly beneath a ‘No Mobile Phones’ sign, which was so awful it was almost funny – it still made her feel self-conscious. There was also the fact that the whole reason she had come to see the doctor in the first place was because of these funny dizzy spells, her ‘turns’ as she called them – she had had several more since that time in the newsagent’s, though mercifully all the subsequent episodes had been at home, which was one blessing, and never when she was on the stairs, which was another. But twisting her neck every minute or two was starting to make her feel funny and the last thing she wanted was to keel over here in the surgery. And all to save the doctor the ten seconds’ effort involved in getting up, walking to the door, and calling out the patient’s name – not going over and actually addressing the patient, of course, since there was no chance the doctor would have any sense of who they were. In the last half an hour – the half an hour since her appointment was scheduled to start – Miss Linda Wong, Mr Denton Matarato, Miss Shoonua Barkshire, Mr T. Khan, and Master Cosmo Dent had gone through to see their doctors, but Petunia was still sitting there. She had long since finished the copy of the
Although Petunia was not a grumbler and a complainer-about-modern-life – Albert had done enough for both of them, for several lifetimes – there was nothing much about her doctor’s that she liked. For one thing, she did not like that it wasn’t really her doctor at all – there wasn’t such a person as ‘her’ GP. In the last twenty years, though she had at one time or another seen more or less every doctor at the practice, she had never seen the same doctor twice in a row. There was something diminishing and impersonal about that and it certainly did not reduce the amount of time that the doctor would spend looking at the computer screen and reading about her, as opposed to looking at her and listening to what she had to say. Petunia disliked feeling such an alien, such an exotic, sitting here in the surgery, where everyone was in Lycra, or crop tops, or T-shirts, or texting, or nodding to just-audible music, or wearing headscarves (two women) or in full concealing hijab (one) or speaking Eastern European languages to each other or over their mobiles. We’re all in this together: Petunia was the right age for that once to have been a very important idea, a defining idea, about what it meant to be British. Was it still true? Were they in it together? Could she look around the surgery and truthfully say that?
Finally, finally, ‘Ms Petuna How’ came up on the board. Close enough. Petunia carefully got to her feet – that was something she was more and more wary about now – and moved through. She could feel people looking at her, never her favourite sensation. A man moved his legs out of the way to let her through but the fact that he did it without looking up from his newspaper or in any other way acknowledging her presence made it even ruder than ignoring her would have been. Albert would have had something to say to him.
The doctor’s door was open. When Petunia knocked to let him know he was there, he said, ‘Hi! Come in,’ while reading something on his computer screen. She went in and sat down. He turned towards her, smiling, and she knew what he was going to say:
‘Petunia, what can I do for you today?’
Dr Canseca, this was. Petunia had had him a couple of times before. His name was Latin but he wasn’t, not in any way you could notice: he had fair hair combed sideways and always wore a tie and pale V-neck sweaters which looked as though they were made of cashmere, even though the surgery was never underheated and often boiling. If pressed, on the basis of appearances, Petunia would have put his age at about seventeen, though she supposed he must be thirty or so.
She began to describe her symptoms, the dizziness and fainting and general sense of being under the weather, and after she had spoken for about fifteen seconds, during which time he was nodding and making encouraging noises, Dr Canseca turned to his keyboard and, still nodding, began to type. Petunia had worked as a secretary in her youth and it was interesting how things had changed so that the person doing the typing was now the more important one.
Petunia came to the end of saying what was wrong and stopped talking. The doctor typed on in silence for a minute.
‘Any weakness on one side or the other? Funny tingling feelings?’
Petunia shook her head. Dr Canseca asked some more questions. Then he asked if he could take Petunia’s blood pressure and listen to her chest. She had dreaded this but had also prepared for it by wearing, under her coat and jacket and cardigan, a blouse which was easy to unbutton. She took off the various layers and was suddenly glad of the overheated room. Funny to think her breasts had once been her prize asset. Her skin felt as if it wanted to goose-bump and mottle, but did not. Should have asked for a woman doctor, she thought – but asking for things at the doctor’s did not come naturally to Petunia, she was the wrong type and wrong age. Dr Canseca did not ask her to take her top off but instead slid the stethoscope up inside her blouse. The metal was freezing of course but at least she still had her top on. She breathed in and out, her breaths sounding a little rackety and thready even to her. Then the doctor took her blood pressure. Then he took it again. Then he sat looking at his computer screen for a little while.
‘You’re not on any medication, are you?’ It wasn’t really a question so Petunia didn’t answer. He began typing. While he did that Petunia read the poster behind his head, about safe sex. There were also posters about the different health risks you could be exposed to travelling to far-off parts of the world. Then he turned to
