The Watchful Eye

by Priscilla Masters

  Daniel smothered a grin and tried to ignore Tricky, the dog, who was now snapping at his trouser leg. ‘I need to take a look,’ he said.

  The attempt at wit was wasted on his patient. ‘Not here,’ she said affronted, casting her eyes quickly up and down the street.

  He smothered another grin. ‘No, Mrs Rathbone. Not here. Down at the surgery.’

  Her eyes met his with alarm. ‘Do you need to? Is it really necessary, Doctor? Can’t you just leave me out a prescription?’

  ‘I could,’ he said slowly, ‘but if they keep on giving trouble I should…’

  Mary Rathbone’s bright eyes sparkled. ‘Will it be ready tomorrow? The prescription?’

  He gave in. ‘Yep. All right. But it’s the only one. If they carry on giving you trouble, book in to see me.’

  And now he’d reached the safety of the brass rail and curving steps which led to his own front door.

  He put his key in the lock and looked up at the house.

  The trouble with buying a property called The Yellow House, was that there was really only one colour you could paint it. Elaine had favoured a bright canary yellow which Daniel had always hated. But Elaine would have her way. ‘What do you know about colour schemes?’ she had jeered, and he had given in. But the minute she had really gone he had taken his revenge. It had been the first thing he had done – to appoint a house-painter to wash the entire house in the palest of Jersey Cream that Dulux made. Satisfactorily it had been called Lemon Cream. So he had broken no rules.

  It had been one of the few elements of satisfaction in those early days – the sight of the painter working his way around his home and watching him cover up the Canary Yellow.

  Eccleston High Street was considered to be public property. All the old buildings had Listed Building Status which meant that everyone felt they had a right to say what precise shade of yellow his home should be. Patients often commented that it should be brighter, paler, more subdued. It felt intrusive, as though both he and his house were very public property.

  Oh, he thought, suddenly impatient as he turned the key. What did it matter? What did any of it matter?

  He closed the door behind him with relief and shut out the sounds of the High Street.

  But once inside he felt an acute attack of loneliness. When Elaine and Holly had been at home his arrival had always been greeted by sounds. Sometimes Holly crying, when she had been small, a shrill shriek of pleasure when she had been older, or Classic FM, which had been Elaine’s favourite. But now, as every day, inside The Yellow House it was as hushed and quiet as a church on a Monday.

  Mrs Hubbard had been in today. He could smell the mingled scent of polish and the washing hanging up in the laundry. He could almost feel the cleanliness around him like an electric charge. Anna Hubbard was that sort of cleaner. He could sense the organisation. She would have left something out for tea and emptied the dishwasher, put away the ironing, changed his bed, polished and scrubbed. But instead of comforting him it made Daniel feel depressed. He was forty years old and alone. He and Elaine had split up two years ago and he needed a woman in his life. Not Mrs Hubbard, but someone pretty and sparkling. A girlfriend. Someone who smelt good, felt good, sounded good and tasted good. He wanted someone to walk with and talk to, to share romance and dinners out, Valentine’s and Christmas, holidays too. Even more than he wanted a girlfriend he wanted his daughter back, living with him. He missed her terribly. Everything about her. From the childhood chatter to the toys cluttering up the place, Barbie with her scrappy clothes that cost so much and My Little Pony. He missed those silly plastic bobbles she wore in her hair, which constantly fell out because her hair was too fine to hold them in, and he missed the funny little hairgrips with rabbits or teddies on, which were was always turning up in odd places like the butter dish. He even missed Barbie’s awful boyfriend, whatever his name was.

  Daniel moved through the hall, conscious of the clatter of his footsteps over the newly polished wooden floor. He went straight through into the kitchen, glancing at the kitchen table. As he’d anticipated, the house was depressingly tidy. Even his post was laid out in a neat pile. He picked it up. A Mastercard bill, electricity, council tax and a stiff, formal-looking letter from Grays & Sons, Elaine’s solicitors. More money, he thought bitterly. And what was he getting for it? Nothing. Sweet nothing. He felt a flash of resentment. For the first year after she had stalked out he had been convinced that Elaine would come to her senses and return home. But she hadn’t. And now all he got were letters and threats, each one dealing yet another mortal blow to any chance of reconciliation.

  He eyed the answerphone warily. One message flashing. Ever hopeful, he pressed play.

  His mother’s voice filled the kitchen.

  ‘Danny. Danny, dear. How are you?’ she cooed. ‘Why don’t you ring? What are you doing with yourself? I hope you’re eating properly and managing…’ a pause, ‘everything. Don’t forget, if you’re lonely or need someone to take care of you, I can always come to stay.’

  He almost shuddered.

  Forty years old and his mother was offering to move in. It wasn’t the image he had of himself. Hardly the gay bachelor.

  In spite of his low mood he smiled. Now that would set the patients talking.

  He pressed the delete button on the answering machine then sank down on a kitchen chair, swamped by the loneliness which threatened to engulf him. His future stretched ahead like an empty motorway on a dreary day. Bleak and empty, lonely; watching Holly grow up from afar and his mother fussing over him as though he was a three-year-old.

  He leafed through the Staffordshire Newsletter, found the Lonely Hearts column and grimaced at an advert for an ‘Eccleston man’. How was he to meet anyone else? Everyone he knew round here was one of his patients. And to make any sort of advance was not only taboo but would have him hauled up in front of the General Medical Council. A vision of Vanda Struel’s grubby white thong appeared in front of his eyes, as though warning him that there would be no chance for him locally. Speed dating? He didn’t think he could go through with that. Maybe the web. There were plenty of websites for men like him, men who were desperate for a bit of female company.

  But now he had evoked the vision of Vanda his mind wandered laterally. What was her game? What was she up to with her silent little tot with the ever-licking tongue?

  He sighed.

  Mrs Hubbard had left out one of her specialities – Ploughman’s. Stilton cheese, chopped with apple. He didn’t want it. He rang the Indian takeaway, the Darv Chini. This was one of the perks of being a local doctor. They’d deliver for free. After all, they’d said, he’d delivered their youngest.

  Hah hah hah. The laughter had rung right the way around the restaurant, which was actually more like a small parlour.

  He faced another evening at home – alone with a curry.

  Maybe he should get a dog or a cat. Elaine had hated the thought, forbidding him even to think about it. He seemed to hear her shrill voice still echoing around the kitchen. ‘You’re not, Daniel Gregory, so you can just forget about it. I’m not having some mucky animal mess this place up. Anyway, they smell.’

  He sighed and blamed his mother. Always fussing over him while Elaine had watched, a sneer curling her mouth into scorn for the mothered boy.

  Thank goodness Holly was coming for the weekend.

  Chapter Three

  Friday, 14th April

  They wanted hormones.

  It was the magic word, the panacea for all that was wrong with their lives. Lack of hormones.

  He looked at the girl in front of him. It was April, for goodness’ sake. The weather had not warmed up yet. Even so, she was wearing a skimpy T-shirt with no sleeves. In fact hardly anything over the shoulders except what he knew from the Sunday papers were called ‘Spaghetti straps’. No bra. And Chelsea Emmanuel was, to put it mildly, well endowed in spite of her fourteen years – just.

  She crossed her legs. She had smothered them ba
dly with fake tan. He could see brown-orange streaks around her knees and ankles, dirty goose bumps and a distinct tidemark on the front of her arms near her wrists.

  ‘I need the pill,’ she said defiantly.

  Daniel sighed.

  In 1983 a lady called Victoria Gillick (mother of ten children) challenged a High Court ruling which allowed doctors to prescribe the contraceptive pill to the under-sixteens without the consent of a parent. Since then, in acknowledgment of the focus and clarification she appealed for on the subject, family doctors abide by something called the Gillick Ruling. This allows them to prescribe the pill for contraceptive reasons provided the girl is ‘Gillick competent’, i.e. that she understands the full significance of the act of sexual intercourse and is not being coerced or manipulated. The doctor should still try to persuade the girl to discuss the wider implications of indulging in sexual intercourse at such a young age, but a teenage pregnancy is the result no one wants. Chelsea Emmanuel appeared inappropriate to Daniel.

  ‘Are you actually having intercourse?’

  Chelsea took a long, cuddish chew at her gum, dropped her eyelashes and crossed and uncrossed her legs without regard to his view of her knickers. ‘Yeah,’ she said, challenge in every fibre of her attitude.

  ‘I have to point out,’ Daniel said, reason making his voice smooth and unthreatening, ‘that it is, strictly speaking, against the law. You’re only fourteen.’

  She leant forward which gave him a full view of her cleavage. ‘So?’ She rolled her eyes towards the ceiling and he had a sudden glimpse of what it must be like to be the father of a precocious teenage daughter. He gave an involuntary shudder. Not Holly. Please never Holly.

  ‘How old’s your boyfriend?’

  ‘Nearly twenty,’ she said. ‘If I don’t get the pill off you I’ll get pregnant, won’t I?’

  Probably.

  It was the lesser of two evils.

  ‘I’ll just check your blood pressure.’

  He felt vaguely uncomfortable as he Velcroed the cuff around her arm. She’d turned her heavily painted face towards him, eyelashes fluttering like a bad actress in a Thirties ‘B’ movie.

  He drew in a deep breath.

  ‘Perfect blood pressure,’ he said. ‘Do you smoke?’

  The government paid him to ask questions like these. Cynically he had decided years ago that they concentrated on targets intended to prove the impossible – that the nation was getting healthier.

  He tapped the script into the computer, giving her a two months’ supply of oral contraceptive, ripped it off the printer, signed it, instructed her how and when to take it, how long she would need to use ‘additional cover’ for and told her to return to the practice nurse ‘for a check’ before they ran out.

  She stood up, uncomfortably close to his desk, legs apart. He noticed all her imperfections – the irregular teeth, the chipped nail varnish, the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with that of fried food and a nasty, musky perfume, the dark roots of hair striped and straightened into submission, and the incessant, noisy, open-mouthed gum-chewing.

  ‘I’d much rather come back to see you,’ she said.

  It made his flesh creep.

  ‘It’s unnecessary for you to come back to see me,’ he said stiffly. ‘The nurses do the pill checks.’

  ‘Don’t much like your nurse,’ she said. ‘She’s a bit of an old bag.’

  He could feel anger rise up inside him. Marie Westbrook, their full-time practice nurse, was in her thirties and anything but an old bag. In his opinion she was an attractive, intelligent and professional woman.

  ‘Come on a Wednesday and see Stella in that case.’

  He just wanted her to go.

  Chelsea shrugged.

  ‘If you like.’

  Daniel was already looking into the computer screen, typing in the consultation. He was always glad his mother had insisted he have piano lessons though it had seemed ‘sissy’ at the time. The deft skill in his fingers had easily transferred to mastery of the QWERTY keyboard.

  He felt a sense of relief when the door finally closed behind Chelsea Emmanuel.

  Seconds later he was pressing the key which would move the Next Patient sign across the VDU in the patients’ waiting room.

  Gone were the days when a doctor had bobbed in and out of the waiting area to summon his patient, running the gauntlet of people angry at the waiting time extending with every one of them who wanted more than their allocated ten minutes.

  Guy Malkin was his next patient. An odd misfit of a boy. Not entirely his own fault. Guy had Marfan’s Syndrome, a disease of the connective tissue, which accounted for some of his oddness: long, spidery fingers, hyper-extending joints, arms that dangled at his side as long as an ape’s. He sat down awkwardly, untidy, all bony limbs, fidgety hands and knees that constantly bounced up and down nervously. Guy was long and skinny, with hunched shoulders. Today he was wearing ill-fitting jeans, huge and too long for him so the flares formed puddles at his feet. The jeans were grubby and worn with a rip, which afforded Daniel a glimpse of a very narrow knee. Guy’s eyes were looking all around the room, everywhere but at him. How old was he, Daniel wondered? Fifteen? The computer screen insisted seventeen.

  Daniel smiled encouragingly at the gauche youth but the smile seemed to have the effect of making the youth shrink.

  Daniel was aware that the time was ticking away.

  He needed to hurry him along.

  ‘What can I do for you, Guy?’

  He was unprepared for the look of panic which froze the boy’s face. Eyes wide, mouth a frightened ‘O’, sweat glistening his forehead, a blotchy, embarrassing rash spreading across his face and down his neck.

  ‘Guy?’ he prompted gently.

  ‘I don’t think I’m normal, Doctor.’

  The million dollar question. What is normal? Guy had Marfan’s.

  ‘We-ell,’ he began, but Guy interrupted – almost impatiently.

  ‘I don’t mean the Marfan’s, Doctor.’

  ‘Then in what way?’

  The eyes lifted – just for a second then fell away again.

  ‘Sexually, I mean,’ he muttered to the floor.

  Daniel smiled at the youth and deliberately veered away from sounding patronising. ‘I wish I had a pound for every seventeen-year-old who thinks he’s abnormal sexually,’ he said casually, trying to convey the message that this was no unusual encounter, that the youth was not that dreadful word – different.

  Guy swallowed and seemed unable to continue.

  Gently Daniel repeated his question. ‘In what way, Guy?’

  ‘I find it…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I can’t…I’ve never been with a girl but I want to. I know the girl I want and she wants me. I can tell.’

  For all of us there is a match. However strange, unique or unusual, there is someone. For Guy Malkin, for him.

  The eyes crept back up towards him.

  ‘You know?’

  It came out all of a rush then. ‘Can I have some Viagra?’

  Daniel was taken aback. A seventeen-year-old virgin asking for the designer sex drug? To prescribe him this would set him up for life, always dependent on a drug to ensure normal activity.

  But how could he explain this in ten minutes?

  ‘You’ve never been with a girl?’

  More dropping of the head together with a firm shake.

  Daniel tried to make a joke of it. ‘So what are you planning to do when you’ve swallowed a load of Viagra?’

  A shrug.

  It was scary.

  ‘Look, Guy,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll tell you what. Just go out with girls normally. Don’t think too much about sex. Make friends of them.’ He grinned at him. ‘Most blokes of your age tell whopping big lies about it anyway. Half of them are in the same boat as you. They haven’t done it. What’s more – they’re scared of it. You don’t need a drug. Just let it happen in your own time.’

  ‘You don’t un
derstand, Doc.’ Guy was desperate. ‘I really need to be with a girl normally. Otherwise…’

  Daniel caught the note of panic in the youth’s face. It alarmed him.

  ‘What don’t I understand, Guy? Why is this need so…’

  Guy pressed his lips together, started to hyperventilate with rapid, deep sucking breaths, shot desperate glances towards the door. ‘I got to go, Doc.’ He was already out of his seat.

  And what was called the ‘window of opportunity’ had slammed shut in Daniel’s face.

  Guy’s brief flirtation with explanation was over. The shutters were down.

  ‘Come back,’ Daniel urged. ‘In a month or two. You may feel different by then.’

  The minute the boy had left the room he knew he’d failed him.

  That failure discomforted him for the rest of the morning. He had tried, too clumsily, to reassure him. Before summoning the next patient, he analysed what had been said and still failed to understand how he could have handled the situation differently.

  He drew in a deep, frustrated breath and in the words of the American fast food chain, muttered, ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’

  Two octogenarians followed in fast succession, both with a plethora of complaints. Like old cars, he reflected. One system goes, you never quite fix it, then MOTs and services become ever more complicated and finally the car is no longer viable. It dies. He looked at his second elderly patient of the day, Maud Allen, eighty-six years old and still digging in her garden and growing all her own vegetables. ‘Have done since the war,’ she would bark.

  But she was slowing up, almost the last of her generation.

  ‘No arthritis,’ she bellowed, ‘thank goodness. Nasty business that – arthritis. Painful, nasty business.’

  She still wore a hat to the surgery, he noticed, a sort of pork pie, tweedy thing. And a suit which a charity shop would have refused. She must have noticed him looking at it.

  ‘Bought it in the Sixties,’ she said. ‘Quality always lasts, you know.’

  He felt her disapproval as she took in his casual jeans, shirt open at the neck. No tie, no jacket. He could almost hear her comparing him unfavourably with the senior partner he had replaced, Doctor Anthony Morgan. London-trained. Did all his own nights (fool who had no life). And his wife was – a lady.