Читать книгу Fitting In - Colin Thompson - Страница 46

But the days in bed didn’t come entirely without a price. Doctor Vinter, with his thick German accent, was called. He would take my temperature and hold my thin wrist in his great red hands to feel my pulse. Then I’d have to sit up and lift my pyjama jacket and vest and say ‘ninety-nine’ while he tapped my chest and listened to my breathing. And that was all fine until we got to the bit I dreaded. As soon as the doctor said ‘open wide’, I felt myself beginning to heave, and the tight grip of dizzy fear, like my nightmares, clutched my throat and starved my breath. It was the same every time, I was going to suffocate to death and no one seemed to care.

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ my mother would snap as the doctor pushed a flat stick the size of a cricket bat into my mouth and told me to say ‘aaahhh’.

I was about to choke to death.

I knew I was.

I could feel my whole life tied up in a terrifying knot that was suffocating me while mother kept telling me not to be a baby.

The doctor decided I was a sickly child and left a bottle of chloromycetin tablets.

My mother ushered the old man out of the room with reverent gestures, reserved for doctors and vicars, while I hurried back into my dreams as quickly as I could.

Every four months there were trips to the dentist for ‘a checkup’. This was worse than the doctor. My mother took me to a large Victorian house on Ealing Common, large still rooms with tall ceilings and potted plants, large chairs and a large man with large hands who lifted me into a large chair in a large room where the air stood perfectly still. The drill was like a twisted reject from a Frankenstein movie, a tangle of peeling chrome pulley wheels and cables racing round as the rasping bit bored into my teeth like a tiny road drill. There were no injections to kill the pain in those days.

My mother sat at the back of the room and said, ‘Don’t be such a baby.’

Thank you, Mummy. I feel better now, happy in the knowledge that Baby Jesus is looking down on me and will keep me safe.

First there was the painless bit, a loud noise that went right through me, shaking every part of my body. Then there was the fire, scalding pain that seemed as if it would never end, sharp cutting lines that went right through every nerve.

‘There we are,’ says the dentist. ‘That wasn’t so bad, was it?’