Half Plus Seven

by Dan Tyte

  ‘Let’s go to the breakout room. I’ve made you a tea. Just how you like it.’

  I said nothing, but stood up and acceded. Carol smiled a mumsy smile and turned to walk to the room at the end of the open-plan floor. She had the look of a woman who had once been pretty, deep in her distant past. Never sexy or fuckable, just ‘pretty’. Like when she was fourteen, but was far too conscientious to do anything about it, staying in doing her biology homework listening to Donny Osmond when her less pretty friends had stuffed socks into their older sisters’ bras and gone uptown to suck some bouncer’s cock in return for free entry to a theme pub.

  ‘You need to see someone about it. Everyone is worried about you. Really. A cough can be a sign of much deeper problems. Are you eating well? Are you looking after yourself?’

  ‘Yes I’m eating well, Carol, thanks. I even had one of my five-a-day this morning. Amen to Minute Maid.’

  ‘Your health shouldn’t be a joke, Bill. It’s important. One of the chaps in my quiz team had a similar tickle you know. Sometimes we’d mishear important questions because of it. Turns out he had cancer. Dead now. We kept the name, “The Fab Four”, though. In memory.’

  ‘Thanks for brightening up my Monday and scaring me half to death, Carol.’

  ‘Just get it seen to, Bill. It’s important you’re well. We rely on you here.’

  It was Carol’s concern that pushed me towards the Medi-Health Centre. Well, that and the fact that I’d spat blood in the urinal earlier, but mostly Carol. The blood had been appearing sporadically in the mucus I’d hack into the bog every time I’d take a piss. Which with the amount of tea I drank, was higher than average. It’s not right for young lungs to be coughing up blood but when you’d been caning Marlboro Reds since a first sly drag behind the scout hut on your twelfth birthday, I tended to see my breathers as aged in dog years. Well worn-in. Loved, if you will. There was bound to be a bit of wear and tear every now and again, right? That’s what I kept telling myself anyway. And why I’d put off seeing anyone about it for so long. Who wants to go to a small room to have some kid you would have bullied at school give you really bad news? Not I. I hated going to the doctors. All those sick people spreading germs over each other. Sneezing kids. Whooping pensioners. Shell-suited teenage mums. Shit magazines. So when Carol talked me around, there was no way I was crossing the threshold of an NHS establishment. Each visit came with free MRSA.

  Every once in a while I’d splash out on a purchase. Generally it was upgrading to a double, but very occasionally it’d involve some hint of altruism. Like the time I bought my mum a Toby Carvery. Or the time I signed up to be a Cancer Research donor after being hounded by some white, dreadlocked mistake on my fag break and didn’t cancel my direct debit as soon as I got back to my desk. A down payment for the future I reckoned.

  This time it was a £299 comprehensive health check. I figured it was a small price to pay to stop me from thoughts of my demise. That the chest pains were just a hangover. Not the end of days. My days that is. A little MOT for little old me. I’d only spend it on fags anyway. Peace of mind. Fuck, I’d pay twice for peace of mind. The doctor would have to be Einstein crossed with Emmanuelle to give me that though. This was a good decision. If I keep telling myself I might actually believe it. Good good good.

  The Medi-Health Centre was located about seven miles across town from my office. I’d booked the pool car under the auspices of going out to meet a hot new lead and blocked out a few hours next to my name on the whiteboard which acted as a bubble-written surveillance tool on our movements.

  ‘You’re taking the car?’ asked my pod neighbour Jill. Jill spent her weekends training to be a yoga teacher despite being the least calm person I’d ever met.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘But shouldn’t you be taking this “hot new lead” out for a three course with wine?’

  ‘No. He doesn’t drink so we’re meeting at a Starbucks.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Bill, when in Rome is it? You? Not having a drink? Ha.’

  Jill emitted a piercing shrill, which managed to infer surprise and degradation all at once.

  ‘See you later, Jill. Hold all calls, yeah?’

  ‘Whatever.’

  The pool car would have been better off being driven into a pool, being as it was the culmination of the collective shitty nick-nacks of the retards I had the displeasure of working with. You really did never know what you were going to find. On this occasion, which while unique was symptomatic of every time I got behind the wheel, my tan brogues stuck to a cluster of diet bar wrappers (Carol’s) while a Best of Sting CD sat at a right angle on the ledge above the glove compartment (Pete’s). I daren’t open the glove compartment. This was often for the best.

  As I drove across town, thoughts danced as clumsily as teenagers pilled up on their first half in my head. I was about to enter a situation which presented the very real possibility of bad news, a situation that I usually avoided at all costs in preference of the laissez-faire of social comatose, either through work, love, life or drink. What if this doctor told me, no doubt in an ‘I’m-a-£300-an-hour-concerned-friend’ kind of way, that ‘I’m sorry Mr McDare, but you’re fucked’. I couldn’t really complain, could I? I’ve been caning it like there’s no tomorrow ever since I could remember because it didn’t really seem like there was much else to do. But what if there was no tomorrow? Would anyone care? Would I care? Sure, people would be surprised (not shocked), supportive and look at me with the same pitying, superior eyes normally reserved for the skinny, fly-ridden Africans on the give-us-your-money adverts. But secretly, deep down, they’d be hoping the same as me – that this sorry excuse for an existence could be over so they could get back to their soap operas, their goofy kids, their new kitchen appliances and the new restaurant in town, without having to give a thought to someone who maybe, just maybe, didn’t want the life they thought they were meant to be living.

  Chapter 3

  The waiting room at the Medi-Health Centre was everything the NHS one was not. It was a different kind of sickening. With a slight whiff of potpourri rising through the usual air of sterility, peach ceramics and carpeted walls, it gave the impression of an early 1990s leisure centre run under the firm but fair stewardship of a second-favourite aunt. Pan-pipe interpretations of hits of the 1960s hung in the air. It was the kind of muzak I’d imagine was played in the great glass elevator that greeted you when you’d snuffed it, the chimes of ‘Hey Jude’ leaving you unsure whether the lift was going up to heaven or down to hell.

  ‘Mr McDare. Your Medi-Health Wellness Check is ready to commence. Would you like to follow me?’ said an effeminate in dark chinos and a green Medi-Health embroidered polo shirt, whose name badge said ‘Leo’ but you could bet your last smoke went by ‘Cleo’ at some ketamine cave every Friday.

  ‘Sure.’

  So follow him I did, down a corridor decorated with pictures of active, happy-looking fuckers, into the heart of the muzak. We stopped outside a door marked ‘Consultation Room’ and the queen knocked twice, smiled and almost curtseyed before sliding back from whence we’d come.

  ‘Do come in,’ said a voice, husky as hell. Immediately all thoughts of slow, painful death evaporated – I entered the room to be faced with a lithe, late-30s, brunette knockout. She looked like the kind of girl who in a parallel universe I’d have been happy to take home to meet my mother. Non-conventionally attractive, no doubt intelligent, with a spoonful of sinfulness piled to the top for my own good measure. I imagine we’d laugh in all the right places at her dinner table talk of the patient who came in that day with a model aeroplane stuck to his hand, and as conversation turned to the relative merits of Swiss and Austrian ski resorts, her size seven heels would tease the inside of my trouser-leg under the table, promising another hot, sweaty night of animalistic feasting in the master bedroom of our paid-for-in-cash suburban town house.

  ‘I’m Dr Linda Taylor but you can call me Linda. Dr Linda.’ Fuck, she was feisty t
oo.

  ‘What we’re going to do this morning…’ She paused as she rechecked her computer screen for my name. ‘…Mr McDare.’

  ‘Bill, please.’

  ‘…Bill, is run a series of painless procedures to paint a holistic picture of your health and well-being. Think of it as an MOT for the body. And if our motor cars are deserving of an annual check-up, we here at the Medi-Health Centre are of the mind that the body – the most important machine of all – is certainly worth a once-over too.’

  ‘Certainly Linda… Dr Linda.’

  ‘Right then, Bill, in order for you to get the most out of your assessment, it’s important that we have an open and honest dialogue so I can consider all the information in my overall recommendations. Are we agreed to being open and honest with each other?’

  ‘Yes, Dr Linda,’ I said, thinking how I’d like to see her open and honest.

  ‘To begin I’d like you to give me a brief overview of how you see your current state of health and why you’ve come in to see us at the Medi-Health Centre today.’

  ‘Well, I guess I’ve been feeling a little rundown recently and, I don’t know, just a heck of a lot older than I used to be. ’

  ‘We’re all getting older, Bill and, as we do, we need to look after our bodies more than perhaps we used to back in our more youthful days. Tell me, what symptoms are causing you to feel this way?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. Palpitations, sweats, dry mouth, headaches, panic attacks, a cough…’

  She tapped this into her computer

  ‘Does the cough produce a mucus?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘And what colour is this product?’

  ‘Depends really. Sometimes yellowy-green, sometimes greeny-yellow, sometimes with blood.’

  ‘Do you smoke, Bill?’

  She needn’t have asked. My fingers were the colour of a Simpson.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How many a day?’

  ‘Ten,’ I lied. ‘But I am trying to quit.’

  ‘Good. You should. ’ She was sterner now.

  ‘And how many units of alcohol do you drink a week?’

  Who the fuck kept tabs on how many ‘units’ of alcohol they drank a night, let alone a week?

  ‘What’s the recommended intake?’ I asked.

  ‘Around 21 units a week,’ Dr Linda replied.

  I did the old trick of halving it and adding seven. This was the way you worked out the age of the youngest piece of ass you could tap. Twenty-two for me. Imagine what you could do with that. Back to the task in hand, Bill.

  ‘You know, about seventeen, eighteen,’ I lied again. This whole open and honest thing really wasn’t working out.

  ‘And how regularly do you exercise?’

  No calling me ‘Bill’ now, definitely sterner. Disapproving, almost. Christ, if she knew the half of it.

  ‘If I’m being open and honest, a lot less than I used to since I twisted my knee at five-a-side last year. I do try and run twice a week at a lunchtime though.’

  ‘Okay, thanks, Bill. What I’d like you to do next is to take your shoes off. Just leave them under my desk here, and step onto the weighing scale over by the wall there.’

  Slowly but surely I was losing my clothes. We were getting there.

  I stepped onto the scales and a digital display read 70 kg. I sounded like an import of marching powder.

  She jotted the figures down, this time on a notepad.

  ‘Okay, if you could step from the scales over to the wall there, we’ll measure you up.’

  She measured me (6 ft – just), again took a note and led me to what seemed like a higher, less comfortable shrink’s couch.

  ‘If you’d be so kind to lie back on here, Bill, I’ll explain to you how we’re going to use the measurements we’ve just taken. We’re going to work out your body mass index, or BMI, which is a statistical measure of body weight based on the height and weight readings we just took. It’s a widely used diagnostic that you’ve probably heard of and is used to estimate a healthy body weight, something which is essential to the Medi-Health Wellness Check.’

  I nodded, turning the corners of my mouth up in agreement. They didn’t miss a chance for a brand namecheck.

  She tapped some figures into the keyboard again and rapped her black polished fingernails against the rich oak desk while she waited for the machine to whirr into work. As the screen slowly changed, she surveyed the information and swallowed. The rap of the fingernails came to a halt.

  ‘Okay, Bill, it’s telling me that your BMI is 20.9, which is just about healthy, but not necessarily just about right, for a man of your shape and size. A healthy weight is perceived to be between 70 kg and 82 kg, and as you’ll have gathered, you sail close to the wind at the lower end of the spectrum. From this I can safely ascertain two things: one, you’re not eating enough, and two, when you do eat, you’re not eating the right kind of foods.’ She emphasised the word ‘right’ a little too strongly.

  My head dropped slightly in shameful recognition reminiscent of the time when as a 14-year-old boy my mum caught me with my jeans around my ankles and the TV tuned to the Home Shopping Network’s Summer Special Swimwear show. This time I didn’t have to pull my pants up, but lifted my shirt as Dr Linda talked me through the next procedure.

  ‘I’m going to attach a series of little receptors to your skin which will send a small painless electrical impulse through your body, providing a reading of your heart’s activity on the small screens here.’

  What screens? I hadn’t noticed any screens. But sure enough there they were to my right hand side, six previously ignored little boxes, looking for all the world like monitors from prototype computers, ready to tell of a murmur or a shudder or an altogether tick-tock-stop. The inanimate took on evil tendencies. The waves rose and fell and fell and rose and rose and fell while Dr Linda’s face remained impassive and access to her emotions impossible. She didn’t give the ‘Oh fuck, another one bites the dust’ look I would have been prone to in a position of such delicately-poised importance, but perhaps they devoted whole semesters to poker facing at medical school.

  ‘Fine. You can pull the receptors off now. It might smart a little. I’d do it but I don’t think it bodes well for my tip if I inflict too much pain on my patients.’

  She’d made a joke.

  ‘Some people like pain.’ I squirmed as I said it, pulling the sticky plaster off hard and fast in punishment, thus proving the validity of my embarrassed slip.

  Dr Linda ignored my quip and carried on with her business of being a £300 an hour private doctor. I’d have paid her double for a shag and taken half as long.

  ‘You can put your shirt back on now. Unless you’d like to walk bare-chested around the centre, that is. I’m going to send you for a chest X-ray. Now, this doesn’t normally form part of the Wellness Check but I think in the circumstances, with your smoking habit and incidence of blood production, it wouldn’t do any harm to check you out more closely. A very important area, Bill.’

  She directed me back out along the corridor to a desk where a middle-aged matronly type greeted me and showed me to some firm but comfortable seats and a coffee table of up-to-date magazines. I sat down.

  A fucking chest X-ray? So this is it then. The all or nothing. The now or not-lucky-enough-to-be-never. It was like sitting in the queue at the passport office for hell. I’d only ever had an X-ray once before in my life. I’d been playing kiss chase in the school playground with some of the girls from the year above. I think I was about six or seven at the time. When I say I was playing, I mean really that they were playing, I was just trying my darnedest to join in as it beat playing marbles with my sick-down-their-nylon-sweaters, barely comprehensible male contemporaries. Remarkably, one of my peers had managed to bag himself a girlfriend. I happened to be chasing hot on her heels. How was I to know? Relationships tended to last for the length of a school day back then, which to be fair was longer than the lion’s share of my so
rry situations. It must have been his baseball pitch which attracted the skirt in my sights to her pre-pubescent partner, as the little fucker picked up a huge glass marble and launched it right at my head. I caught sight of it just as it cracked me on the cheekbone and the rest of the next hour passed in a fuzz of heat, sweat and memory loss. A bit like my first pill. But we’ll get to that another time.

  Before I had a chance to look at the latest copy of GQ and find out where I’d been going wrong, my name was called out by a Doogie Howser lookalike and in I went. Again I took my shirt off, but this time put my chest up against the cold metal of a flat surface while the boy left the vicinity and clicked his buzzer like a teenager on a ‘Bring Your Son To Work Day’ who had been charged with moving the PowerPoint forward on Daddy’s big pitch. The radiation lurched towards my insides.

  After a short wait I was sent back in to see Dr Linda who reassured me that all was fine enough with my vital organs, before lecturing me on the slow but irrevocable damage my devil-may-care lifestyle was having on my inward and outward glint. She saw people like me every day apparently. Guilt-ridden fuckers who, after internal debate on infernal affairs, came in at the seventh sign of spit with blood. The next visit, and the one after that, wouldn’t have such an easy outcome apparently.

  What-fucking-ever. School’s out for summer.

  ‘Was there anything else, Bill?’

  There was one more thing before the bell rang.

  Deep breath.

  ‘There was something… but it’s a little bit sensitive.’

  ‘Go on, Bill…’

  ‘Well… there’s been a little spot on the end of my… my… penis for a while now and I thought you might be able to take a look at it.’

  It’d been a long time since I’d done this without been liquored up. She filled the expectant pause with a professionalism not seen since the African prostitute I’d been bought as a twenty-first birthday present in Hamburg. I hoped the endgame wasn’t the same. I may be hauled in front of the authorities if so.