Hot Breath

by Sarah Harrison

  The door opened a chink. ‘Did you not know one of your trip switches is up the spout?’ asked Declan.

  ‘No, I didn’t know that. Declan, why is nothing working?’

  ‘I turned everything off, so I did!’ He was triumphant.

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘If your trip switch isn’t working and something plays up you’re going to get a bloddy great bang.’

  I rose and went over to him. I could give Declan about four inches. ‘But Declan, my typewriter’s not working. I can’t get on.’

  He bridled. ‘No more can I, the focking strimmer’s dead.’

  ‘There are shears and a stepladder in the yard.’

  Declan’s eyes narrowed. ‘ What’s the ladder like?’

  ‘Long, with rungs.’

  ‘If the ladder’s not high enough, it’s a deathtrap, so it is. If I fall and break me back, and me with no insurance, who’ll care for the wife and kiddies?’

  This did not seem the right moment to remind Declan that he was fiddling the DHSS hand over fist. I could think of no possible answer to his question which did not sound either defensive or callous.

  ‘I’ll show you the ladder. In the meantime, would you please turn the electricity back on?’

  He did so. I then escorted him to the shed and furnished him with shears and ladder. Bearing in mind his gloomy prognosis I phoned the electricity board and arranged for an engineer to come out at vast expense after five the same evening.

  Considerably energised by this confrontation, I pounded on: Maria had been keenly aware, since arriving at Kersey, of her lowly status as a dependent relative. Her Hawkhurst cousins were infinitely wealthier, more cultured and better looking (she thought) than she. In particular she felt that her eldest cousin, Richard Hawkhurst, despised her. Those ice-blue eyes assessed her with a surgeon’s delicate accuracy.

  I halted. Another anachronism? I doubted that surgeons of the period were noted for either delicacy or accuracy. For some reason I pictured a flagon of small beer and a gore-bedewed meat cleaver.

  At this moment there was a bellow from the garden. I looked out of the window to see Declan, at the foot of the ladder, turning round and round on the spot with his right hand clamped beneath his left armpit, trumpeting and bowing like a wounded elephant engaged in some obscure rite of courtship, or the marking out of territory.

  I flung up the window. ‘Declan! Are you all right?’

  ‘Mother of God, I cot meself! I’m bleeding!’

  On the way downstairs, I glanced at my watch: ten forty-five. If I put my foot down I could get Declan to the surgery at Basset Parva. But by the time I’d done so the morning would be gone, and with it my chance of advancing Maria’s story.

  So it was with extreme briskness that I bathed Declan’s wound at the kitchen sink—he had sliced the flap of skin between the thumb and forefinger—bound it up with cotton wool and elastic bandage, and drove him at speed the two and a half miles to Basset Parva.

  At the surgery, the receptionist said: ‘You’re late, really. Surgery’s over.’

  ‘I’m bleeding, woman!’ said Declan.

  ‘He should see a doctor,’ I affirmed. The receptionist peered over the counter at the blood-soaked cotton wool.

  ‘It looks like an Outpatients job to me,’ she commented.

  ‘But the hospital’s miles, and I’m supposed to be working. I’d like to save myself the trip if possible.’

  She looked pained. ‘ There’s only Dr Ghikas here now,’ she said. ‘But I’ll ring through and find out if he’ll see you. If you’ll just take a seat.’ Dr Ghikas was of Greek extraction, and new to the practice. I had not met him, but as Declan and I sat down, with a flatulent sound, on the red vinyl banquette, it appeared his reputation had gone before him.

  ‘Da Greek doctor!’ exploded Declan in a squeaky stage whisper. He might have been referring to Charles Manson. ‘I’m boggered if I’ll be patched up by any focking Greek!’

  ‘Declan,’ I said. ‘Shut up.’

  The receptionist put down the internal phone and addressd us.

  ‘Dr Ghikas will see you. Patient’s name?’

  ‘Mr O’Connell,’ I supplied, nanny-like.

  ‘Initial?’

  ‘D.’

  ‘CD,’ corrected Declan. So he had secrets.

  ‘Address?’

  ‘20 Bog’s Gap, Basset Magna,’ he growled.

  ‘Are you registered with this practice, Mr O’Connell?’

  ‘I’m a patient of Dr Salmon.’ Declan named the senior partner. ‘And the wife and kiddies too.’

  ‘Thank you!’ the receptionist chimed like a doorbell.

  Declan folded his arms. The under-arm area of his shirt was stained crimson where he’d sandwiched his injured hand, and this had the effect of making him appear to sweat blood. I experienced the sweet sensation of having Declan on toast.

  I jiggled the knife a bit. ‘I’m sure Dr Ghikas is first-rate,’ I opined. ‘After all, the Hippocratic oath derives from—’

  ‘You’re responsible, so you are!’ snarled Declan, poking my bicep with a corny finger. ‘If the Greek’s an incompetent!’

  ‘Mr O’Connell, would you step this way please?’

  I accompanied Declan, less from solicitude than a desire to watch him squirm. We crossed the narrow passage to Dr Ghikas’s consulting room. There were three doctors in the Basset Parva practice, and their respective rooms accurately reflected the pecking order. Dr Salmon (respected elder statesman) occupied a spacious apartment at the rear, complete with tropical fish and access to parking; Dr Donleavy (a whizz with women’s plumbing) had the room next door to the waiting room; and Dr Ghikas (the lowest form of medical life) presided over a crepuscular cell between the pharmacy and the loo.

  I chivvied Declan before me like a sheepdog driving a cantankerous ram to market. Dr Ghikas was washing his hands at a basin in a corner. I saw a tall fair-haired, rangy figure, dressed in an English tweed suit of the type only to be found in Paris. The metal earpieces of his stethoscope rested on the back of his neck like the hands of a clinging woman.

  Drying his hands, he turned to face us. And sentenced me, with a single polite smile, to the lubricious purgatory from which I was not, for the foreseeable future, to emerge.

  Chapter Two

  Of course, I was ripe for it. Thirty-five, fit and solvent, with children at school and the sweet scent of freedom in my nostrils: more or less a textbook case.

  When George had said that he was off to build a leisure centre for the oil sheikhs for a year, my first reaction was that the children and I would go too. My second was that we wouldn’t. First of all, and quite idly, the prospect of twelve months off the marital leash was not abhorrent to me. I pictured myself like some hard-working dray horse from the streets of London, taken to the country for a brief spell and rolling on the greensward with its legs in the air. But I had no idea then what an accurate picture this would turn out to be. Secondly, a bored, introspective community of venal expatriots banged up in some concrete oasis in the desert struck me as the milieu least likely to be attended by the literary muse. It was hard enough conjuring up the quickening manhoods and heaving bosoms of Merrie Englande in the rural peace of Basset Magna, let alone in a country where women had no freedom, drink was outlawed and the outlook was uniformly arid. Thirdly (and I finally managed an altruistic impulse) it would be an upheaval for the children. Gareth was thirteen and Clara nearly twelve, crucial ages educationally speaking, when it would be much better not to disturb them.

  The three of us would enjoy a kind of sabbatical from George’s improving influence. I would work, and have frequent recourse to convenience food, and allow the children to watch too much television. But my husband’s vanity has always been a healthy plant. He was convinced that I would pine without the physical and emotional nourishment which only he, his erotic skills and his BMW could provide. And the children, he foresaw, would run riot without his naturally authoritative super
vision. He overlooked the fact that in his absence I would be able to rant at them like a fishwife with the additional advantage of looking the part. Practically speaking I had Declan to keep Mother Nature in check, and an address book stuffed with the names of Little Men, that ghostly army of jobbing plumbers, electricians, glaziers, joiners and sweeps, who ensure that life continues, even in the absence of the paterfamilias.

  I also had a charperson, in the form of Damon. As an amanuensis, Damon was a curate’s egg, and the parts that were good were not immediately apparent since he was an outstanding unprepossessing youth.

  Damon had been sent to me through the good offices of a new job creation scheme for unemployed teenagers in the Basset area. The scheme was officially entitled Jobs Incorporated, but had been dubbed JINX by its dissatisfied patrons, who were legion. From the local market town of Basset Regis the Mohicans, glam rockers, punks and New Wave mods spread in all directions like an unhealthy rash, body-popping their way into the homes of an unsuspecting citizenry, pulling up rose bushes, rotivating croquet lawns, painting over keyholes and allowing pedigree bitches to be screwed by passing mongrels. Against the hail of complaints which rattled down on the JINX office, its well-intentioned supremos could only offer assurances of youthful fulfilment, which was small consolation to a householder standing amid the smoking ruins of his largest single investment.

  Damon had come into my employ after five years at the local comprehensive (that now attended by Gareth) where he had gained CSEs in Home Economics and, mysteriously, German. While these may have qualified him to be manager of the Munich Hilton, they in no way fitted him for private domestic service. His first job for me—intended at the time, to use his own phrase, to be just ‘a one-off gig’—had been the laying of some vinyl flooring in the utility room. He had taken a very long time, but the flooring had been laid, with just one small tumulus near the freezer where Damon had sealed a Scotch egg for ever to the floor. This episode neatly typified Damon’s qualities as a worker: he was slow and painstaking, but his few mistakes were crucial. In appearance he was short, almost dwarfish for sixteen, with stoat-like features and a bad skin. Where others of his age went about like exotic parakeets, with day-glo crests of hair and multicoloured tattoos, Damon’s head was crowned with a Brylcreemed toque of an almost solid consistency, more like the result of topiary than combing, and his sartorial tastes ran to tracksuit trousers and an army surplus sweater. He aspired to running his own disco—he deserved the Queen’s Award for the ambition least likely to succeed—and to this end he was saving the pittance I was allowed to pay him.

  So I had Damon, Declan and the Little Men. I had two children entering the forbidden foothills of puberty. And I elected to stay at home. But now, as if to pay me out for my complacency, here was Dr Constantine Ghikas. In the antiseptic gloom of his Basset Parva consulting room stood the fly in my ointment, the spanner (oh delicious thought) in my works … the Greek in my marital woodpile.

  In response to his urbane: ‘Now what can I do for you?’ I was strongly tempted to answer: ‘Doctor, doctor, I’m suffering from an uncontrollable urge to tie your wrists with your stethoscope, to wrap my legs around your waist and impale myself on your Hellenic column …’

  What I actually said was: ‘Doctor, this is Mr O’Connell who helps me in the garden. He’s cut himself on the shears.’

  ‘I’m bleeding!’ growled Declan. ‘I’m soaked with it!’

  He held out his injured hand, but Dr Ghikas had spotted the blood in his armpit and darted forward to inspect it, thinking perhaps that Declan had plunged the shears into his left lung. Lifting Declan’s arm he peered enthusiastically at the rancid excess, smothering the grimace which momentarily contorted his features when his patient’s foetid body odours hit home.

  ‘Not there!’ trumpeted Declan, nearly sandwiching the doctor’s handsome aquiline nose between arm and chest. It occurred to me that one human being with BO might, without too much difficulty, inflict a slow and lingering death on another in just this way.

  Dr Ghikas removed my ad hoc dressing from Declan’s hand and examined the wound. His eyelashes were like thick, burnished awnings shielding unsuspecting females from the full cerulean allure of his eyes. The lashes were in piquant contrast to the otherwise rather ascetic cast of his features. His hands, holding Declan’s calloused paw, were large, and elegant, and squeaky-clean.

  ‘It’s not serious,’ he said, lifting the awnings and treating me to a blast from those heavenly eyes. ‘The fleshy areas are always messy.’ Ignoring Declan’s expression of near-homicidal indignation, he went on, ‘You did a good job. I’ll just give you an anti-tetanus jab, Mr O’Connell, and you’ll be right as rain.’

  Declan shuddered seismically. ‘Mother of God, da needle …’ he quavered prayerfully.

  I saw, with grim satisfaction, that Declan was phobic about injections. As Dr Ghikas prepared a syringe I licked my lips, both with lust, and with relish at the prospect of the needle penetrating Declan’s bristly and shrinking flesh.

  Dr Ghikas returned, swabbed and punctured. With a faint glottal popping sound Declan fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  Dr Ghikas and I both had Declan’s blood, literally, on our hands. We stared apprehensively at one another across his inert form, like a couple of conspirators after a murder.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ remarked the doctor, breaking the spell in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘He seemed such a tough character.’

  ‘He is, normally,’ I said, ‘but you seem to have found his Achilles heel.’

  Dr Ghikas stepped over Declan’s legs, discarded the syringe, and washed his hands again at the sink. Then he came back and crouched down by his recumbent patient.

  ‘Please would you give me a hand?’ he asked.

  Together we hauled Declan—an unlikely Cupid—into a sitting position, and pressed his head down between his knees. The doctor’s hand and mine touched where they lay on his stubbly neck.

  Declan regained consciousness with ferocious suddenness. One moment he was a bundle of dirty washing, the next his head was up and pivoting wildly as he tried to get his bearings.

  ‘Where am I?’ he bellowed, his perturbation giving fresh zest to the cliché.

  ‘It’s all right, Mr O’Connell,’ said Dr Ghikas, helping him to his feet and then to a chair. ‘Plenty of people don’t like injections. I’ll get you some water.’

  As Dr Ghikas changed the dressing, I caught Declan’s eye, and saw there first the wild surmise, then the despairing realisation, that I had seen him at his lowest ebb.

  When we were done, Declan scurried with indecent haste back into the waiting room, but I was in no such hurry.

  ‘It was good of you to see us,’ I said. ‘I hope we haven’t delayed you too much.’

  ‘No, no, not at all. You did the right thing.’ Dr Ghikas held the door for me. ‘By the way, I must ask, aren’t you Mrs Blair, our local author?’

  ‘I suppose I must be.’ This was a gratifying development. Not only did he know that I wrote, but that I coped with grisly accidents, too.

  ‘My mother loves your books,’ he said.

  ‘I’m so glad. It’s always nice to hear of a satisfied customer.’ With truly spine-chilling facility, I added: ‘A surprising number of men read them too, you know, but they usually say it’s their wives who bought them.’

  ‘Well, I don’t have a wife,’ he replied obligingly. ‘But if I did I’m quite sure that yours are the sort of books that would stop dinners getting cooked and socks getting darned.’

  I decided to overlook this charmingly chauvinistic view of the wifely role, and to concentrate on the good news: he was single. No matter that I wasn’t. I seemed to have left my conscience somewhere on the back of Declan’s neck, where our hands had touched. I beamed. After all, he was Greek.

  Declan was standing with his back to us, staring furiously at a coloured chart designed to assist in the early detection of breast lumps. The receptionist was watering the p
lants.

  ‘Yes,’ went on Dr Ghikas, warming to his theme, ‘my mother’s read lots of them. In fact, I wonder—would you consider it a frightful imposition if I brought a copy of your latest one over for you to sign?’

  ‘Not at all!’ I waved an insoucient hand. ‘Do you know where I am?’

  ‘I believe I do.’ He gave me a look which could only be described as collusive. ‘I think I’ve seen you out jogging.’

  Better and better, my image was rounding out nicely. ‘Yes, you may have done,’ I replied, ‘I go most days. But I’ll just give you my address.’ I took one of my posh calling cards out of my bag, grateful at last that I’d taken George’s advice and had them printed.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Dr Ghikas, putting the card in his breast pocket. ‘I’ll drop in then.’

  I took Declan home after that. So great was my sense of well-being that I even loaded his horrid mantis-like bicycle on to my roof rack. Bog’s Gap was at the other side of the village, less than a mile away, so the mere fact of my driving him there was enough to underline his extreme feebleness. And I pressed home my advantage with a continuous stream of cheerful, patronising chat along ‘ you-should-put-your-feet-up-for-the-rest-of-the-day’ lines.

  At number twenty I reached the front door before him and described to his wife—a woman limp and pale as a net curtain—exactly what had occurred, in graphic detail.

  I returned to the car buoyant in the knowledge that I had provided Mrs O’Connell with the wherewithal to subdue Declan, for perhaps the only time in their married life.

  When I got home I poured myself a glass of wine and took it into the garden. I sat in the sun in a deckchair and Fluffy and Spot, anticipating the opening of their respective tins, took up positions on either side of me, like bookends.

  How odd that I should earn my living, and a handsome one at that, from describing females bouleversées by passion, but only at this late and unexpected stage be experiencing it myself. From the moment I had clapped eyes on Dr Constantine Ghikas there was no doubt that my every relevant orifice was gaping shamelessly open, ready to gobble him up like a venus flytrap at the first touch. So sudden and violent had my reaction been, that I still felt like two quite separate people in one skin, one of them a scribbling housewife and mother, the other a slavering post-pill predator who could eat family doctors for breakfast.