The Meaning Of A Kiss

The Meaning Of A Kisss

The good doctor, for in fact he was a good doctor, both in the care he bestowed upon his patients and in his medical ability and knowledge, was about to set off home. He had spent a pleasant few days in London attending a seminar on the modern advances and discoveries towards neurological conditions. Not that this was a specialist field for him per se, just that he always jumped at any opportunity to come to London and spend time at the galleries, enjoy some shopping, spend an evening at the theatre, anything to escape the predictability of his provincial life in a small market town.

He was standing at the stations W.H.Smith’s news stand thumbing through magazines looking for something light and frivolous to read, or stare at, or just pretend to keep him company through the two hour train journey home. The station was its usual hubbub of noise and energy with the rhythm of legs, not too dissimilar from that of the locomotions themselves, shunting suitcases this way and that, puffing the steam of cigarette smoke, propelled by piston arms and dials of watches, when out of the blue; colour, a sickly sweetness of cheap perfume, a volume of giggles. From nowhere, a blur of a girl appeared before him, grabbed him by the lapels of his overcoat and kissed him. Then laughing she danced and dissolved back into the crowd.

The girl, not particularly pretty, plain yet not unattractive, and although a little loud but still very feminine like a shouting flower had a profound effect. The girls the doctor had kissed in the past had always left him feeling disgusted with himself. He had never enjoyed the experience of kissing a girl. The taste. The smell of a girl. His own sex, on the other hand, evoked quite different emotions. Dangerous emotions, as these were not enlightened times, these were times when feelings of the heart or merely passions of desire were subject to laws of the land. This brief strange encounter had, just for a moment, like an earthquake shaken his world, and the structures of his heart trembled so greatly that for the next three or four minutes he was unable to turn away from the racks of magazines for fear of embarrassment that not even reading an essay on tenor and morticed joints in ’Woodworker’s Weekly’ could resolve.

Unable to concentrate his mind upon magazines he settled on the ‘Evening Standard’ and stumbled and collided his way through the crowd, all the time scanning unsuccessfully for the girl. He boarded his train. Throughout the two hour journey the paper remained unread. Throughout the two hour journey he could taste the girl’s lipstick on his lips, a flavour he strangely relished and every time he closed his eyes a re-enactment of the kiss took place complete with a swelling of anxiety crossed with delight and excitement for which he was glad to have the newspaper on his lap.

At the end of the train journey lay a twenty minute drive across the moors along the dark narrow country lanes he had now become accustomed to and no longer frightened him the way they used to when he first took the appointment of chief registrar at a cottage hospital. The first half of this journey was a clear run, not another car in sight, but now his progress was hampered by a slow vehicle, an over cautious driver, which built in him a sense of frustration, but he knew these roads, even in the dark. He knew that at the next junction he could race a cross a triangular patch of grass and cut across the path of the car in front. As he did so he heard a thud.

He hadn’t seen anything in front of him. There was nothing caught in his headlights. As a precaution he stopped the car, grabbed a torch from the glove box and went to investigate. He could see nothing amiss but suddenly heard a small voice full of anger.

“You bloody idiot you could have killed me.”

He projected the torch beam like a prison searchlight. “Who said that? Are you hurt?”

“Of course I’m bloody hurt you moron.”

“Where are you?”

“Careful where you stand I’m down by your feet. To be run over and trampled on by the same idiot on the same night would just be too much.”

The torch beam fell to the ground around his feet. There he was. A man, no bigger than three inches in height but fully grown with a beard and a tiny pained annoyed expression. At his side an even smaller sheep with a saddle skewed and a bewildered glaze in its eyes lay without movement.

His astonishment and incredibility was shelved as he went into automatic doctor mode.

“Where are you hurt? Are you bleeding?”

“I’m bleeding furious that’s for sure.”

“I’m a doctor.”

“What you short on work or something? I hurt all over, like I’ve been hit by a car. Oh wait…”

“Yeah look I’m really sorry. Truly I am. We can do all the incriminations and blame later, let me make sure you’re OK first.”

“Well me sheep’s all shook up, I don’t think he’s gonna be the same again, and I can’t really feel me legs to be honest and my body is really beginning to ache … no sod that, not ache. It hurts.”

“Right,” now in his doctor’s element of healing, “hold it there and don’t try and move. I’m going to find something in the car I can use as a makeshift stretcher, my hospital is just a few miles down the road I’ll examine you thoroughly there.”

He ripped the stiffened card cover from a map and gently transferred both the man and his sheep onto it, placed them on the passenger seat, used a scarf for a blanket. Foot down on the accelerator he raced to the hospital as fast as he could. Conversation with the man had ceased. This concerned him. He asked a few more questions; name, where he was from, kind of questions but there was no reply. The word URGENT hit the doctor’s brain in large capital letters.

On screeching to a halt outside the hospital the night porter and nurse, Danny, rushed out to meet them.

“I’ve an emergency here. Quick.”

Danny swung into action without assessing the situation. It was as if a muscle memory took control of his actions. He rushed inside and within seconds returned with a gurney. The little man and his sheep on a cardboard makeshift stretcher looked absurdly lost on the vast gurney. Danny looked at the doctor. The doctor looked at Danny. The patient was motionless, as far as the doctor could tell he wasn’t breathing, although he had no way of being certain and therefore no time to adapt any equipment suitable for the size of his patient. Carefully, with a soft delicate touch he puckered the tiny thin lips of the little man, gently placed his on to them and with a reserved, controlled breath blew a whisper of air into the little creature. And then again. Again. At last they could see the miniscule rise and fall of the man’s chest.

The doctor looked at Danny, a tall well built young man with blonde hair and blue eyes and wanted more than anything to kiss him. He wanted to reassure himself, after the incident earlier with the girl, that his life had not been a lie. He wanted Danny’s muscles to save his world and hold him safe; protect him from harm. And loud girls.

The two of them went into the doctor’s office to discuss what could be done to help the little man. How they could adapt equipment. The doctor started to calculate drug dosages. As they set about this the electricity crackled like a laughing witch; pulsed and discharged then flickered back to life. Rattling and discord emitted from the corridor causing books and pictures to fall around them like rain. Crashing. The world was crashing, or exploding, or imploding or shaking its self to smithereens. They couldn’t work it out. Just held on to the desk cowering, praying.

As calm settled like a sigh ebbing relief the doctor, gathering up debris from the floor, asked Danny to check on the man and his sheep suggesting that maybe it would be better to bring them into his office. Danny returned, flustered and astonished. “You’d better come at once,” he said.

The little man was sitting up, but no longer little. He was now full size with no apparent injuries. And smiling.

All three of them stared at each other with bewilderment and confusion, but from then on there was never anything little about the little man’s life. He emigrated to America, bought a big camera and travelled around taking large photographs which he blew-up to put on show in massive exhibitions.

The doctor now shares an isolated cottage with Danny with a miniature sheep as a pet. The three of them share a state of pure bliss. Some days the doctor thinks about the kiss of the girl at the railway station. He refers to it as the ‘kiss of life’, and being a doctor, he should know.