Half Plus Seven (3 page)

‘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 too.

‘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 sorry 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.

‘Okay, Bill, let's take a look.'

I undid my belt, clumsily unzipped my trousers and poked the end of my dick out of my pants. I did not pick a good day to wear comedy boxer shorts. This probably had something to do with the fact that I never actually bought my own pants, just kind of accumulated them from open drawers or Santa Claus. Note to self: buy better pants.

It looked like a naughty schoolboy hauled up to the headmaster's office, lying prone, almost retracting into itself to hide from crimes past and soon punishable. After a cursory glance, one of her shaped eyebrows raised, motioning me back to a more dignified position.

‘Now, the Wellness Check doesn't normally include an STI test, and I'm certainly not an expert in the field but it looks like nothing to worry about to me. But I do think you should visit your GP to talk through this and your ear problem.'

Oh, the ear problem. I hadn't mentioned that, had I? Seemed a bit tame when I had a good cock story to tell.

Chapter 4

Ever been at a dinner party with an accountant? Scratch that, two accountants? Trying to outdo each other with their incessant wittering. Did you understand a word the fuckers said? Slurping about P & Ls through a minestrone soup. Yakking about ledgers, A/R and A/P over linguine. Being wan about working for the Big Five over tiramisu. Chit-chat full of their own impenetrable idioms. In PR, we saw this and we raised it to new levels of smugness.

We were forever giving colleagues a heads-up during a sit-down or a touch-base so they could get the skinny on their radar. We sprinkled our magic on cradle-to-grave strategies for new products which we'd drill down to at idea showers which gave our clients strategic staircases going forward. We'd get all our ducks in a row to stop the grass growing too long on ideas.

And then there was the low-hanging fruit. I was all about the low-hanging fruit. In case you were ever misguided enough to want to join Satan's gang, or just wanted to know enough to bluff your way to a blowjob at a PR party, stay tuned in.