Sorrow and Bliss(59)

‘It’s like when you go down into the Tube and the sky is blue, and when you come out, it’s pouring with rain.’

For a moment he waited as though there might have been more, then said those were interesting and very helpful descriptions.

I bit my thumbnail, then looked down at it for a second and peeled off a part that hadn’t torn completely. ‘Mainly, it’s like weather. Even if you see it coming, you can’t do anything about it. It’s going to come either way.’

‘Brain weather, as it were?’

‘I suppose. Yes.’

Robert said, ‘I’m very sorry for you. It sounds like it has been hard for a long time.’ I nodded, biting my nail again. ‘I wonder, has anyone ever mentioned —— to you, Martha?’

I moved my hand and said no, thank goodness. ‘It’s the only one I haven’t got, or been told I have. Although actually,’ I recalled as I spoke, ‘when I was maybe eighteen, one did say, a Scottish doctor said he couldn’t rule it out but my mother told him she could. She said the only thing it made me do was cry all the time; that I wasn’t a complete nutcase who thinks she’s Boudicca and that God talks to her through her orthodontia.’

‘No, of course. But may I say,’ he paused briefly, ‘the sort of symptoms your mother described, in such vivid terms, only exist in the popular imagination. Actual symptoms might include –’ Robert named a dozen.

I had been starting to feel uncomfortably hot and now my throat felt like someone had stuffed a rag down it. I swallowed. ‘I don’t really want —— though,’ I said and felt stupid, then rude.

He said, ‘I quite understand. As a condition —— is not well understood and undeniably, within the general public, it carries somewhat of a –’

‘Why do you think it’s that?’

‘Because typically it begins with –’ a little bomb going off in your brain when you’re seventeen. ‘And you will have been given –’ Robert listed every medication I had ever taken, all the familiar and long-forgotten names, then told me the clinical reasons why they would not have worked, worked poorly or made me much worse.

I swallowed again as the tears that had been an ache behind my eyes since he said it sounds like it has been hard for a long time began to spill down my face. Robert picked up a box of tissues and because it turned out to be empty, he took out his own handkerchief and passed it across the distance of carpet between us. I wiped my face and wondered who ironed this man’s handkerchiefs for him.

I asked him why no one else had thought of it, apart from the Scottish doctor who wasn’t even sure.

‘I would say it’s because you’ve been managing it so well, for many years.’

I could not stop crying because the only thing I thought I had managed well was being a difficult, too-sensitive person. Robert got up and poured me a glass of water. I made myself sit up straight and say thank you. I drank half of it, then said —— out loud to see what it felt like, applying that word to myself.

He returned to his chair, smoothed out his tie and said, ‘That’s my sense, yes.’

‘Well.’ I breathed in slowly and out again. ‘Hopefully it’s just the twenty-four-hour kind.’

Robert smiled. ‘I hear it’s been going around. Would you be interested to try what I generally prescribe for that, Martha? It tends to be very effective.’

I said alright and quietly looked out the window at the Victorian buildings on the other side of Harley Street while he began my prescription. They were so beautiful. I did not know if they had been built for sick people. I didn’t think so much trouble would have been taken if they had been. I turned back to Robert saying, ‘You’ll have to pardon the speed of my typing. I had a contretemps with a tomato.’ I asked him if he’d needed stitches. As he loaded the printer, he said a half a dozen in fact.

At the end, we came together at the door and Robert said he would look forward to seeing me again in six weeks. I wanted to say something more than thank you but all I said was, ‘You are a nice person’ in a way that embarrassed us both, and after shaking hands again, I turned and walked quickly back to the waiting room.

The receptionist took my payment and said, ‘That turned into a double appointment but it seems the doctor has put it through as a single.’

I asked her if that was rare. She said very.

*

Outside, I put on my coat against a wet mist and walked slowly towards the chemist on Wigmore Street. Part way, I stopped in the middle of the footpath and got out my phone. A man coming towards me on a scooter had to swerve out of the way. He said fuckssake watch it. I stepped back into the doorway of a closed-down restaurant and Googled ——, clicking on an American medical website that presents all its information in quiz format, or as articles with headings that read like a supermarket women’s magazine if you imagine them with exclamation marks. Ingrid used it before Hamish blocked it on her browser because, she told me, literally whatever symptoms you put in, you always have cancer.

I sat down on the step and scrolled down.

——: Symptoms, Treatments and More!

——: Myths and Facts!

Living with ——? Nine Foods to Avoid!

I wished my sister was with me, to take my phone and pretend to read on. Easy Weeknight Meals for People with ——! Five Weeks to a Flat Stomach for —— Havers. Think You’ve Got ——? It’s Probably Just Cancer!