Practice Makes Perfect

by Rosemary Friedman

  “What did you do to deserve that?” he asked, when I was inside. “Can neurologists do it or only general practitioners?”

  I repeated what had happened. Caroline looked askance. She opened the window and handed Watkins, who was sitting right outside it, a glass. “Celery juice with brewer’s yeast,” she said, “he must be thirsty!”

  I doubted whether he was that thirsty.

  Hank said: “Why don’t we have one like that, Pop? The kids at school would go crazy.” He looked at me. “Can I drive it up the street?”

  “You’d better ask Watkins.”

  “You must be awful rich.”

  “Oh, I am.”

  “I don’t get it?”

  “Get what?”

  “Why you moved house to that two-by-four with no back yard. Mom says…”

  “Hank!” Caroline said warningly. “Go have a look at the automobile. But don’t touch!”

  “With a car like that you could increase your practice in no time,” Faraday said.

  “I don’t want to increase my practice. I have more work to do than I can manage. Besides which I haven’t come here to talk about cars or practices. I’ve come to talk about you.”

  “Guess I’ll start fixing dinner,” Caroline said. “Prune whip or apple sauce?”

  “Apple sauce,” Faraday said.

  He wiped his face and neck with his handkerchief and I could see that he was drenched with perspiration.

  “You should be in bed,” I said, “you know perfectly well.”

  “To be absolutely honest, but don’t tell Caroline, I haven’t the strength to climb the stairs. Besides which I have to get on with my book.” He indicated the typewriter on the living-room table. “Besides which I have some rather peculiar symptoms,” he said lightheartedly, proceeding to tell me about them.

  He undoubtedly had one of the regular attacks of fever consistent with his disease. I noticed that his colour was not so good and that he was considerably thinner than when I had last seen him.

  “I’d like to take some blood,” I said.

  “I bet you would.”

  “Look, don’t make it difficult.” If there was one thing I hated it was treating my friends. Particularly when they were dying.

  He bared his arm in order to expose the vein and looked the other way. “You can’t say I haven’t got commendable veins,” he said, by way of passing time as I put the needle in.

  “Commendable.”

  There was silence for a few moments.

  “Look, leave me a drop,” Faraday said. “You must have about three and a half pints!”

  “As a matter of fact I haven’t any.”

  Faraday sighed as I withdrew the needle and the empty syringe.

  “Try the other arm.”

  “I never have the slightest trouble with the patients. I’m the best blood-taker in the district!”

  “Not to worry.” He rolled up his other shirt sleeve.

  “Look, I’m supposed to be consoling you.”

  I tried the other arm and failed to extract a single drop of blood.

  “Curious,” Faraday said. “Perhaps I’m dead already. I did want to finish my book!”

  “Stop being funny,” I said, but knew he was merely fortunately affected by the euphoria which often accompanied his disease.

  “Look,” he said, “give me the syringe and let me try.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!”

  Before I had a chance to say anything else he plunged the needle into his hand and dextrously withdrew a syringe full of blood.

  “Simple,” he said, handing it to me.

  I put the blood into a sterile bottle angrily.

  “I must have missed the vein.”

  “Not to worry.”

  “It’s rotten treating your own friends!”

  “I know.”

  “The district nurse could have done better.”

  “For God’s sake shut up!”

  “Look, you have to go to bed. You absolutely have to.”

  “I know. What about the book?”

  “Can’t you do it in bed?”

  He looked quizzically at the table. The typewriter, which must have come out of the ark, looked as if it weighed a ton.

  “I’m going to take the typewriter home with me…”

  “The hell you are…”

  “…and bring you Sylvia’s portable. It’s the lightest thing there is and you can balance it on your chest…unless you’d like a dictaphone?”

  “Can’t stand the sound of my own voice. Besides, the little monster keeps interrupting.”

  I resumed he meant Hank.

  He buttoned his cuffs and I stowed the bottle of blood away in my case, slinging the empty syringe into the waste basket.

  “Not in there, there’s a good chap,” Faraday said.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want Caroline to know…”

  “But she knows.”

  “I know she knows. I just don’t care to rub salt in the wound. She’d be upset if she found the syringe. It would be time enough for her to know if I need a blood transfusion…”

  “Who said anything about blood transfusions?”

  “You know damn well that’s why you want my red blood count.”

  It was bad enough being sick, but to be a doctor and to be sick…

  “…so just put the syringe in your pocket and don’t say anything until you get the result.”

  “I’m going to get you up to bed.”

  “Did you hear me argue?”

  It was pathetic to see Faraday thus reduced.

  I settled him into bed into which he subsided with a sigh of relief and told him I would send Watkins back with Sylvia’s typewriter.

  “Are you sure she won’t mind?”

  “As long as she has something to bash away on.”

  “I’ll remember her in my will.”

  Such remarks were no longer the slightest bit humorous.

  “Talking of wills…” Faraday was writing something on a piece of paper. “I want you to have this.”

  It was a dedication addressed to me “from your all time friend, W W Faraday”.

  “To stick in the flyleaf of my book,” he said, “I trust you’ll buy a copy. The royalties will go to Caroline.”

  I held out the piece of paper. “Don’t be ridiculous. You can write in it yourself when it’s published!”

  “Keep it,” Faraday said, “you know perfectly well I shall not be in a position to do any such thing.”

  Sixteen

  It was one of the saddest gestures I had seen in my life. I took the slip of paper and put it in my wallet trying not to meet Faraday’s eyes.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “why death should be such an embarrassment. Especially to one who sees so much.”

  “That’s quite a different thing,” I said, “as you know very well.”

  “Look, let’s come to terms with this. I have no more than a few weeks; months at best. I’d like to be able to discuss it with you as the normal, everyday occurrence it is. I can’t if you start going all emotional on me. You are my oldest friend.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Please?” he said.

  I met his eyes, which were pleading.

  “OK. I’ll try.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  “But you’ve always been there,” I said. “Remember when you came to that dance wearing the RMO’s shoes? The night Caroline fell in love with you?”

  “What about when I fell in love with Caroline, and thought I was suffering from some fatal illness?”

  I looked at him and the moment hung in the balance.

  “And all the time it was love!” I said, a fraction of a second later. “And what about the time you did the locum for me when Sylvia and I were on honeymoon, and the time you had a thing about that Irish maid we had…”

  We were soon deep into the pleasures of reminiscence and enjoying remembrances of ou
r past lives which now came thick and fast and even more amusing in retrospect.

  “What’s so madly funny?” Caroline said, interrupting us at one point.

  We hadn’t noticed that the light was fading, so immersed had we become in our medical student days.

  “Everything,” Faraday said. “Life is one continuous joke.”

  “Hilarious,” I said, and meant it.

  “Thank you,” Faraday said, detecting my sincerity.

  Caroline said: “You may not have noticed but it’s dinner time. Sylvia rang with half a dozen more visits. They aren’t urgent and some of them are on your way home, so I suggested you stay for dinner. She was halfway through chapter one so she had no objections.”

  “What about Watkins?”

  “Watkins is in the kitchen, having wrapped himself round a pint of strawberry yoghurt, reassembling Hank’s bicycle.”

  “We were having chops,” I said wistfully.

  “Shepherd’s pie,” Caroline said.

  “In that case I’ll be happy to stay.”

  My six visits were run of the mill until I came to Maureen Clarke. Her complaint had been symptoms of flu which she did indeed have, but when I examined her was surprised to find her legs decidedly swollen. Since her pregnancy was now well advanced, this was a matter of great importance.

  “It looks as if we may have run into a little complication, Maureen,” I said. “You may have to stay in bed for a while until we clear it up. I’d like to test your urine to confirm my diagnosis. I need some albustix to do that, so I’ll just nip across to the surgery and get some.”

  “Will the baby be all right?”

  She was only a child herself, or I was getting old.

  “Absolutely. As long as you do exactly as I tell you. You have a specimen ready and I’ll be back soon.”

  I directed Watkins to the surgery. It was no trouble at all doing visits when chauffeur driven; cut down the physical effort by fifty per cent at least. I was becoming thoroughly spoiled.

  We parked behind Fred’s purple taxi. Every light in the house was on and through the open windows emerged the singular sound of what I thought as Indian music. I remembered Fred’s party.

  I saw Watkins’ face settle into a prim mask of disapproval as he appraised the orange and purple house and the noises emerging therefrom. I made for the surgery entrance, then realised that, not expecting to need it, I hadn’t brought the key.

  I had no desire to disturb Fred at his merry-making if that, despite the dirge-like music, was what it could be called, but there was no choice if I was to get the albustix.

  I rang the bell and was not surprised when nobody opened the door. I rang again, then had the ingenious idea of pushing it. It opened straight away. I would never have recognised what once had been my home. I had, of course, seen Fred’s exotic decorations, ranging from pornographic African carvings to psychedelic murals, but I had never imagined it would house the motley collection of layabouts that seemed indistinguishable almost from their surroundings.

  The stairs was like a Jacob’s ladder, only it wasn’t angels sitting on them but boys with long hair and girls with short hair, in what could only be called “gear”, because you couldn’t possibly describe it as clothes, in every hue. The immediate impression one got was of beads and tassels and flapping trousers and jackets, and fringes and boots in every colour of the rainbow. Some of them sat; some of them stood; some of them lay full length. They were smoking; I know not what. They looked at me, glassy-eyed. I suppose in my navy blue suit, white shirt, and hospital tie I looked a thing from another world. I felt decidedly out of place.

  “Where’s Fred?” I said to the general, plucking up courage.

  “Who’s Fred?”

  End of conversation.

  A boy, at least I think it was a boy, on the bottom stair, looked me straight in the face and said:

  “There is nothing in the world

  More marvellous

  Than I.

  The living, breathing miracle of I.

  The I of him;

  The I of thee;

  And, too, the I of me.”

  “I’m sure you’re absolutely right,” I said. “But I really would like to find Fred.”

  “We are surrounded by water,” my friend said.

  “Well, that’s just the point. I mean I have to get into the surgery so that I can test some.”

  He brightened up at this and offered me whatever it was he was smoking.

  When I drew back from accepting it he said:

  “In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us is not, forever a stranger and alone?”

  “I couldn’t really say, actually,” I said, pushing back the proferred smoke. “Not without giving the matter a great deal of thought.”

  He shrugged. “You need a female to groove with?”

  “No. I just want to find Fred.”

  He nodded with understanding.

  “I’m Fred.” A voice from halfway up the stairs with a ginger beard to his chest said.

  I sighed.

  “Wrong number, man,” my friend said. He called up the stairs. “Maiden with or without a head required immediately for sexual dalliance.”

  Nobody spoke.

  “You might do better upstairs, man.”

  I looked at the stairs, solid with people, if you could call them that. “What am I supposed to do, fly?”

  “You got the message, man!”

  A creature from the top stair rolled over the bodies and lay motionless on the floor.

  No one looked at him, let alone offered assistance.

  “Busted for horse,” someone said.

  I could see I was getting nowhere. I shoved and sidestepped my way into what had once been our sitting-room. There was now neither sitting nor standing room. The air was thick with something. The music I had heard was coming from one corner where a girl in a sari, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, sat on a cushion playing a sitar. I looked round for Fred and was about to move on when his voice from the depths said:

  “Vide the head-shrinker, the champion of all kooks. What ails you, my friends? Oedipus complex, homosexuality, penis envy, castration anxiety, sibling rivalry…there is a cure for everything and for everything there is a cure. My colleague here believes that Freud invented them. But has he read the Good Book? There you will find such tales of incest, sodomy, sibling rivalry, mutilation and murder as to make your ego stand upon its end. He thinks he has discovered perverse sex and cannibalism, but what about the Bard…?”

  “Fred!” I said.

  “…no thing is sacred. From a pencil to a cigar, a cane to a totem pole, the Washington Monument to Cleopatra’s needle…” He stood up and looked around at his audience. “Which one of you is afraid, man? Of spiders or swimming pools, people or pussy willows? Which one of you has no secret, hidden desire to shave his head, hoard old newspapers, sleep at the foot of the bed? Which one of you is normal? Stand up and be counted.”

  I had made up my mind not to get involved but could not allow this to pass. When the laughter had died down I said:

  “They laughed at Copernicus and Columbus and Darwin and Van Gogh and the Wright brothers, anyone with new ideas…”

  “New ideas, man!” Fred said. “Your daddy ever tell you of Hippocrates, Plato, Aristotle? You know what’s the trouble with you, man? You want to play God. You want power, man, power. Well, power won’t help man, only to kill innocent people all over the world. We’re civilised, man. We don’t crucify slaves, man, and string them up along the Appian Way, we just shoot little children to pieces in Vietnam! You don’t need power, man, you need…”

  “Love!” I said, sighing.

  “You got the message, man; he got the message.”

  “Well, at the moment, apart from the message, I wou
ld like the keys to the surgery. If it’s not too much trouble. I’m sorry to disturb your fun and games…”

  Fred stepped over the bodies and put his arm round me.

  “You’re welcome, man. In this house everyone is welcome…”

  He propelled me through the dining room and towards the surgery, leaning heavily upon me. I wondered if he was going to be fit for work in the morning. The scene in what once had been a nice, ordinary, suburban dining room, in which we were accustomed to eat our nice, ordinary, suburban meals, was a replica of that in the sitting-room. There was one exception. At the sight of it I stopped dead in my tracks. Beneath the window seat, cross-legged on the floor, dressed in some kind of orange robes and surrounded by long-haired admirers, was Sylvia.

  “Sylvia!” I said.

  “Who is Sylvia?” somebody sang.

  “Sylvia!”

  She smiled and waved two fingers at me from across the room.

  “Sylvia, come here at once!”

  The smile froze. She turned her back on me deliberately and went on talking.

  “She’s occupied, man,” Fred said.

  “You mind your own business and open the surgery door before I kick it open. I’ve wasted enough time with these lunatics.”

  “Harsh words, man.”

  “They’ll get even harsher if you don’t hurry up.”

  “Fred’s looking for the key, man.” He was searching amongst his motley garments.

  “Look, Fred…!”

  He held the key in front of my face. I snatched it from him and disappeared into the cool smoke-less air of the surgery. It was like stepping into sanity from a madhouse. Looking around at the business-like order I couldn’t believe that such utter chaos prevailed in the house on the other side of the door. Chaos and depravity, amongst which my own wife was sitting as large as life. I found the albustix and kicking the cupboard door shut savagely, let myself out through the waiting-room door.

  I had wasted enough time. I had promised Maureen Clarke that I would come straight back and she would be wondering what had happened to me.

  I had been so long that Watkins appeared to have gone to sleep in the driving seat of the Rolls. I opened the door to wake him and he slid out in a neat heap on the pavement.