Eight o’clock on a cold and frosty Sunday morning and my boy is driving me to the NHS emergency dentist. My boy’s seven-seater Toyota Previa cost him £300 and it’s turned out to be a reliable and comfortable old bus, though ‘very thirsty’ as he puts it. He’s proud of it, and seems pleased to be of service to his old man in his hour of need, in spite of the early start.
These days the only opportunity we have to talk is like this, in the car, when he’s running me somewhere. At his home, with five kids under eight charging around, the racket and the chaos make conversation impossible. All we can do there is shout short, panic-stricken sentences to one another like soldiers on a battlefield overrun by the enemy. In his bus we can talk for a change.
The journey takes 45 minutes each way. We are heading inland from the coast. On cold mornings like this the warming effect of the sea on the land is apparent. Two miles inland and the muddy fields are suddenly blanketed with frost. Five and we’re driving through a winter wonderland. On the underside of the passenger-side sun visor there is a little vanity mirror with a light that comes on when the covering flap is pulled down. Every now and again, I pull down this flap, lean forward and study the swollen side of my face in this mirror, fascinated by my grotesque appearance.
So how are you, I say? What’s the latest? My boy tells me about a new young doctor who has arrived at the health centre. Presumably, a new doctor is headline news on the social-housing estate where he lives. This new young doctor is putting everyone’s backs up by refusing them drugs.
My boy gives two examples of the new doctor’s spoilsport attitude. Last week his partner’s brother, who lives alone in a nearby flat, drank six litres of supermarket cider then tried to drown himself in the river. It was a serious suicide attempt by all accounts, including his own. He was drifting face-down in the water when he was spotted from a passing fishing boat, hauled out and revived. He spent a night and a day in hospital, then returned to his flat, where he resumed his unemployed life as though nothing had happened, except that he couldn’t sleep at night.
So he made an appointment to see a doctor, was allotted the new one, went to see him, and asked for sleeping tablets. The doctor refused. My boy’s partner’s brother begged him. They were for sleeping, he said, not dying. The doctor was intransigent. My boy’s partner’s brother called him a f***ing idiot and stalked out.
Example two was Ron, an old man who my boy likes to talk to about cars. (My boy likes old men. Old, say-it-as-it-is working-class men especially. He greatly respects them and at the same time thinks they are funny.) Ron has had a throat cancer removed but still smokes 40 a day. He went to the see this new young doctor to complain of feeling tired and breathless. According to Ron, this new young doctor sat back in his chair, eyed him ironically, then said, ‘Well, just look at you! You’re fat.’ Admittedly, Ron has gone up to 19 stone lately, laughed my boy, so the doctor did have a point. Ron took umbrage. He told the doctor to go f**k himself, struggled to get up out of the chair, and waddled out.
In recent weeks I’d noticed, or thought I’d noticed, a coolness in my boy’s manner towards me, a failure to meet my eye. I had been troubled by it. Then, the last time we’d spoken on the phone, I’d tackled him about it. All he had to do was tell me what it was that was irritating or upsetting him and I’d alter it, I’d said. I could be a bore and a bigot sometimes, I knew it, I said. But all he had to do was point out where I was going wrong and I’d mend my ways. ‘Mend my ways’ had been my exact words, I remember. Seeing my boy laughing as he quoted the doctor’s diagnosis of Ron’s condition, and Ron’s furious reaction, made me realise that he’d put aside whatever it was, and that we were good friends once again.
The emergency dentist’s car park was white with frost. My boy had been there before. He walked with me to show me where the door was, then lit a fag and wandered away to smoke it. The reception handed me a consent form and a Biro.
I ticked ‘no’ for every question, except ‘Are you taking any prescription medicines?’. Here I ticked ‘yes’ and beside the tick wrote, ‘Paracetamol, Aspirin, Co-dydramol, Co-proxamol, Codeine and Ibuprofen.’
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