Rounds

Norbert

Chapter 7

Rounds

I start my rounds immediately after clinic and before lunch, but as instructed I head for Auntie’s office first, excuses at the ready. The police constable is interviewing a witness, apparently a late night dog walker. I pause outside and eavesdrop, praying I haven’t been spotted.

‘Can you describe the suspect?’ the policeman enquires.

‘He was eating a bag of crisps.’

‘What colour was the wrapper?’

‘I’m sorry, it was dark.’

‘Anything else? Height? Weight? How was he dressed?’

‘Average build and size, wearing normal clothes and a mask.’

I breathe a sigh of relief.

‘That isn’t a lot to go on, but thankyou for coming forward.’

‘I know what flavour crisps they were, if that’s any help. He offered me one. They were Oyster and Bream.’

‘Now, that is helpful.’

‘Is it?’ says Auntie. ‘How?’

‘Bream is a very smelly fish with a distinctive odour.’

‘You intend to do a breath test on every average man in Brundy, do you?’

‘There’s no need,’ says the witness. ‘I know who it was.’

‘You do?’ says the officer.

‘It was my next door neighbour, Jim.’

The policeman bangs the desk. ‘I could arrest you for wasting police time.’

‘It said on the radio to report anyone seen acting suspiciously in the hospital grounds during the hours of darkness. If eating crisps with a naked woman inside a pentangle surrounded by candles whilst wearing a goat-head mask isn’t acting suspicious then I don’t know what is.’

‘Was anything said?’

‘The woman said: “Hurry up and sacrifice me, Jim. Your naked virgin is freezing her tits off.” I thought it was suspicious cos the woman wasn’t his wife and his dagger was plastic.’

I sneak back to the lab to get my tray.

I always visit the geriatric ward before the dinner trolley arrives. Combine the smell of stale cabbage with the noisomeness of our geriatric ward and you have the post-lunch equivalent of a trench on the Somme during a gas attack on the day they have curry and beans for lunch and take their socks off to eat it. Or being locked inside that part of an abattoir where they slash cow intestines.

Taking blood from old people is no trip to Disneyland either. For one thing you have to get up close and touch them. It’s like death is trying to squirm under your skin. But at least they’re not fat. Their veins stand out like underground cables beneath a sheet of leather. Trouble is, the surrounding flesh is so shrivelled and frail the slightest contact with a needle pushes the blood vessel off at a tangent. It often takes several attempts to puncture the vein cleanly and keep it stationary, which explains why the arms of old people in hospital are covered in bruises. Ignorant relatives accuse the staff of mistreatment. The nurses blame me for incompetence. The relatives put in a complaint. One aggrieved old lady’s sister even sought me out (despite the lack of a floor line) and beat me with an umbrella. The trauma brought on my IBS and I was off sick for three days.

All our geriatric patients are long stay, too ill to be in a Rest Home without medical care. St Kylie’s is the last stop before the pearly gates. The only way out is in a corpsemobile – a metal coffin on wheels, disguised with a purple shroud bearing the advertising logo: “Sponsored by Matt Ching-Sox & Son, Funeral Directors and Quality Butchers.” Auntie, I know, never buys meat from them.

(Due to local government cuts, the mortuary at the cottage hospital has recently closed. Bodies are taken direct to the city hospital in Macarbrough. Until the dispute with Mr Ching-Sox is settled they are sent by public transport. The back seat of the 32 bus has a sign saying “Reserved for dead people”. It’s a really cheap way of doing it, as the corpses are old enough for a bus pass. It’s not as gruesome as it sounds either. We bubble wrap them.)

All of today’s four patients, in their own way, recognise me. To Agnes I am Hubert, the son who’d moved to Australia years ago and had never come back. Every time I bleed her is a joyous reunion. To play along, I affect an accent that is more Welsh than Aussie, but I try. I tell her how well the sheep farm is doing and show her pictures cut from a National Geographic of two cowboys rounding up sheep on horseback. She is so proud of how big and strong her grandsons have grown. Happily she will doze off to no doubt dream of their life on the other side of the world. When she wakes up the photos are back in the office ready for next time.

To Tommy, the oldest surviving resident, I am his kid brother, who died during the War, aged nineteen. Seeing me, his only visitor, takes him back to the sorrowful days before their parting. Tommy holds my hand and imparts wisdom and advice and gives me imaginary keepsakes and good luck charms, which I place in my labcoat pocket for safekeeping.

To Mildred, I am her husband, again long dead. Judging by the amount of abuse she hurls at me, the poor sod must have been a saint to put up with her. ‘Have you painted the shed yet?’ ‘Have you got rid of that flipping mongrel? I will not have that mangy dog in the house a day longer. Do you hear me?’ ‘Is that a clean shirt?’ ‘Get your hair cut and bring home a pound of lard if you want egg and chips for tea.’ And so on.

I don’t know who I’m supposed to be to eighty-eight-year-old Ethel, but the first time I approached her bedside she began to pull her nightie off and demanded a quickie before Ted got home. When I said it was too risky she demanded some Smarties. On the next visit I obliged. She tipped the sweets over the side of the bed and shoved the tube up her nightie. Nowadays I share the sweets with the nurses, who give her the tube and let her get on with it.

I find it strange they think it is normal for a visiting friend or relative to stick a needle in their arm, but also sad. I hate being young, unloved and unhappy. Being old, lonely, confused and forgotten must be a lot worse.

St Kylie’s only other inpatients are post-natal. Like in clinic, these are mostly thumb pricks to measure haemoglobin levels. I purposely leave this visit till after lunch, timing my arrival to coincide with breastfeeding. Not that I ever see much. There is usually a baby in the way, damn them. But if I am holding the other thumb and the spare breast is exposed, I am in bunnyhorn heaven.

I am sure they think I’m a professional who’s seen it a thousand times before, and not a repressed twenty-five-year-old who’s never even kissed a woman (but longs to). A doting new mother only has eyes for her baby. She is hardly likely to notice someone in a white coat drooling at the thought of squeezing her engorged loolybells and suckling on her spare teat.

I blame the job, poor health and the cruel circumstances of my upbringing for turning a minor fixation with loolybells into an all-consuming obsession. I mean, I didn’t choose this profession. The post became available about the same time I graduated from the Brundy Academy for the Sons of Gentlefolk with the required grades for a career in biological sciences. The opportunity to get me into work and earning money encouraged Auntie to use all the influence she could muster. (I wish I had a copy of the reference she gave me. Any court in the land would have found her guilty of perjury.) The occasional glimpses of bare bosoms came as an unexpected bonus.

You may see me as a deviant, but I can assure you there is no harm in it. I am too small and puny to ever be a danger to women. Once, whilst walking in the park, I lost out to a squirrel over the ownership of a bag of peanuts (at the same time elevating these pesky rodents into my second worst phobia).

Let’s face it, I have little hope of experiencing intimacy with a woman, so masturbation is a burden I have to endure, not that I am complaining. I thoroughly enjoy it. I just wish it would last longer.

(Let’s get this straight from the start. I masturbate. I do not do a wanky. Masturbation sounds like a form of art [though to me it’s more of a contact sport against the clock] whereas doing a wanky sounds sordid, and is probably what cricketer’s get up to during the tea interval.)

Older men, I’ve heard it said, should never waste a bunnyhorn, though being married to Auntie I fear poor Nunky must have wasted thousands. Personally, I don’t see the logic in waiting till I’m old. If presented with a bunnyhorn, strike while the dick is stiff, that’s my motto. If I am favoured by the sight of a nipple, I usually lock myself in the toilet on my way back to the lab to relieve myself before the swelling subsides. As long as I am back by two for the start of the afternoon clinic, there’s no harm done.

The afternoon clinic is for general patients, usually referred for a blood test by their own doctor. A van calls about four to take the samples to the city hospital. These are refrigerated overnight, tested the next day and the results sent with the van on the afternoon run. That’s where the system usually breaks down.

Brundy is a small town with only two surgeries, but getting the right result to the right surgery is problematic. For a start, the doctors in charge are brothers, and they insist on calling their practices by the same name: Doctor Robbin-Banks and Partners. The surgeries are even situated on the same main road, but nearly a mile apart to serve both Brundy and Inmamouth. Even worse, one is at number 43 Stripplestitch Street (commonly known as strip-search as nobody can pronounce the proper name), the other at number 443. Though I meticulously place the right forms in the right envelope, some grannytickler will occasionally swap them round or simply deliver the wrong results to the wrong address. This is the level of incompetence I have to put up with day in, day out. Is it any wonder I suffer with my nerves? (Yes, I’ve got pills.)

This afternoon I have several INRs for patients on Warfarin (basically rat poison), which is given to patients after major surgery to prevent blood clots forming. There are a handful of A1Cs (a blood test for monitoring diabetes, a condition I am certain I suffer from, despite having a normal blood sugar level. I have all the symptoms, but mine must be a rare silent type). Two young lovers turn up hand in hand to provide urine samples, hers for a pregnancy test and his for a sexually transmitted disease. Oh dear!

The driver picks up the samples and hands me the results from yesterday. I’ve just about finished stuffing the right reports in the right envelopes when our resident obstetrician (fanny doctor) pokes his head round the arch.

‘Tell me, you odious little scrote, do you know what a post-coital is?’

‘Why? Don’t you?’ (You’re right. I don’t like the stuck-up grannytickler.)

(Let me explain. The most derogatory insult known to man was coined after notorious American serial killer, Hal Lucy-Nation, admitted tickling his elderly female victims with his left hand whilst strangling them with his right. He said at his trial in Sorryville, Wyrumoaning, that it was an act of kindness and that they literally died laughing. As the insult spread round the world, some adopted the phrase “left-handed grannytickler”, but this led to numerous court cases from oversensitive wrong-handed people with no sense of humour.

Though tickle in this context means kill and is an insult, it has also become a euphemism for copulation. However, as tickling for pleasure is often a prelude to sex (so I’ve read), there is little confusion. If you say to your partner, ‘I’m going to tickle you,’ they are unlikely to beg for mercy or reach for a kitchen knife in self-defence. And no one, I hope, would infer anything nasty about tickling a child or a pet.)

‘Have you ever done one before?’

‘Dozens.’ (I’ve read about them.)

‘I want you ready and waiting in my consulting room with your microscope at eight-thirty in the morning.’

‘You actually want me in the room with you?’

‘Time is of the essence, you should know that. I don’t want people running back and forth like detestable brats playing blind man’s bluff.’

He has a point. His consulting room is at the other end of clinic.

‘I’ll be there.’

Oh wow, my first post-coital and the opportunity to fulfil the ambition of a lifetime.