You Are Dead

28

Friday 12 December

Edward Crisp said goodbye to his last patient of the week, Rob Lowe, an elderly property developer who was convinced, just as he had been on a regular basis for the past twenty-five years, that he was terminally ill.

Lowe had been one of the patients he had taken on when he had first set up this practice. Referred to him by his then GP who was retiring, the man had initially come into his office complaining of a recurrent sharp pain in his neck, which had convinced him he was suffering from cancer of the throat. Crisp had been able to calm him down by establishing that it was neck strain from tennis. Since then, there had seldom been two consecutive months when Lowe, sometimes accompanied by his wife, Julie, had not turned up in his office with a fresh imagined terminal illness manifested through some other pain in his body. Chest pains. Lumbar pains. Groin pains. Loss of appetite. Weight loss.

One day, of course, if a heart attack, a stroke, an accident or pneumonia didn’t carry him off first, Rob Lowe would be right. Almost everyone who lived long enough would eventually be diagnosed with some form of cancer. But at eighty-three, Lowe was still going strong, and his latest imaginary terminal illness, a brain tumour, causing him blurred vision, had turned out to be no more serious than a need for a cataract operation.

Crisp’s secretary, Jenni, popped her head in through the door to say goodnight, then stood in the doorway, lingering, giving him the same curious, almost expectant stare she always gave him.

‘What are you up to this weekend?’ he asked, out of politeness rather than interest.

‘Taking my niece and nephew, Star and Ashton, to Thorpe Park tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Otherwise I don’t have any plans.’ Her stare was irritating him intensely tonight. Although, at the moment, everything was irritating him. Why was the bloody woman staring at him? Was she expecting him to suddenly leap out of his chair and declare his love for her?

A handsome woman, with a classic English rose face framed by short, elegantly cut brown hair, she was a sad and slightly tragic figure. He knew all about her private life, because she had confessed to him some years ago, when he had taken her out for their traditional pre-Christmas lunch, that she had been having an affair with a married man with three children, a prominent solicitor in Brighton, who had been stringing her along for years. One day, he had promised, when his kids were old enough to understand, he would leave his wife. But Crisp had always sensed that was never going to happen.

He’d tried on more than one occasion to tell her to dump him, to join a dating agency while she was still young enough. She’d ignored his advice. But he had been right. The man’s children had long left home and the spark had faded in their relationship. All Jenni had now were her teenage niece and nephew, and she probably would not have them for much longer, once they started to date.

‘What are your plans?’ she asked.

‘Taking Smut for a long walk tomorrow. Then I’ve been invited to a dinner party in the evening with a bunch of medics. A proctologist, an oncologist, a dermatologist and an anaesthetist, with their other halves. They’re trying to fix me up with a woman.’

‘Sounds like fun!’ she said, brightly, but with a disappointed look in her eyes.

‘Huh,’ he responded, dismissively.

‘Well, call me if you need me.’

He smiled, thinly. She said the same thing every Friday evening. ‘Thanks, will do.’ In twenty years he never had. She closed the door behind her, and he sat still, alone with his troubled thoughts.

High on the list of these was his bitch wife, Sandra. She was screwing a smug, smooth plastic surgeon, Rick Maranello. A medic friend had told him the news as if doing him a favour, some months ago. It wasn’t a big surprise to him — she had gone off sex around that time — and probably longer ago, if he cared to think about it. She’d pretty well gone off it after the second of their two children had been born. But he had bigger problems on his mind than thinking about his wife in bed with a creepily narcissistic plastic surgeon.

His whole livelihood was under threat at the moment, thanks to new government regulations coming in.

Until recently, working as a sole practitioner had been an option for all family doctors in the UK. But ever since another sole practitioner, Harold Shipman, had been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing fifteen of his patients — and his true death toll, though never established, was estimated to be several hundred — regulations for GPs had been changed. For National Health family doctors revalidation had been brought in. Their practices had to be scrutinized. They had to have annual appraisals by both professionals — peers or associates — able to monitor their work — and by patients. Half had to be medics, half non-medics. As a result, almost all National Health doctors now worked in medical centres, with a number of other doctors.

Private general practitioners, like himself, were so far exempt from this, so he had been able to carry on, unhindered. But now he’d read that was about to change. All private GPs were soon to come under the same regulations.

Why?

Who were these moronic civil servants and elected creeps, who had decided, because of one bad egg a decade ago, that family doctors were no long able to be trusted? In short, he was going to have to produce printouts from large numbers of patients and from medics testifying to his abilities. How demeaning was that?

How sodding bureaucratic?

The only option would be to join a bloody medical centre of some kind. And risk his patients, whom he cared about deeply, seeing some possibly incompetent doctor when he wasn’t available, instead of the reliable locum of his choice. It was bloody ludicrous! All his patients loved him, and he loved them back. The ones at the start of their lives, the pregnant ones full of hope and joy, and the terminally ill ones who he helped through their prognosis, and cared for all the way to their final days — and then attended their funerals.

Medicine was an inexact science. No one knew this better than he did. It was an established fact that one of the most effective of all drugs was a placebo. There were many occasions when he had cured patients of a range of ailments from depression to more serious illnesses by telling them to take some long walks in the countryside or along the seafront.

Now these so-called health experts were making ludicrous demands. Calling his ethics — and every doctor’s like him — into question.

Well, fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck his wife — who was already being well fucked by Rick Maranello. Fuck his kids, arrogant, ungrateful little bastards both of them.

Fuck the world.

Because it sure as hell was fucking him.