The slippery game of outward love. Part 1

“Have you brought your yellow slip with you?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your yellow slip? Have you brought it with you?”

“I uh..”

Two small lenses looked up from a monitor whilst the hands continued their seamless tapping across a keyboard.
“Your yellow slip? You should have received one in the post?” The lenses reflected the glare of the strip lighting back into Alice’s eyes giving the receptionist the appearance of a large doughy mountain atop which someone had placed two computer screens. Her glossed lips parted creating a chasm in the hillside allowing a bloated pink Gollum to flick out for a moment then retreat back to the warm moistness of her mouth. “If you haven’t got one you’ll need to fill out one of these while you wait.” The glasses held their fluorescent stair whilst her hand swished deftly below the desk to return flourishing another yellow form.

“Thank you” Alice tried to give a grateful smile but the woman’s gaze had already returned to more vital work on the monitor.

“Would you by any chance have a...”

The hand flicked to a pot then held up a black Biro.

“...pen that I could borrow? Thank you so much”

“The nurse will call for you shortly.”

Alice took the form and the pen to a rectangle of chairs on the other side of the windowless room.

“I’m too young to be here” she thought, looking at the frail and elderly bodies that occupied most of the seats. There were two ways out of the room. The first was back through the swing doors and along an endless green corridor populated by strange little pieces of pseudo art, giving the place the air a hotel corridor (a very long and rather grim hotel corridor interspersed with cheery signs like ‘Oncolology’ and ‘Vascular Unit’). The corridor then lead past a chapel and the flower shop and out through sliding doors to clean fresh super-bug-free air. The other doors from the room were wedged open and led on to a yellowish more nicotine-like corridor off which fed eight or nine numbered doors. Here art had been dispensed with as had the illusion that anyone was going to have an enjoyable stay, instead were banks of leaflets and hand wash dispensers. The nearest door swung open and a short young Asian man with a round face and large glasses stumbled into the corridor carrying a wedge of manila files. He stopped to talk to a nurse and the top file began a graceful slide to the floor. As one, both consultant and nurse noticed the impending disaster and tried to make a quick grab for it but when the consultant’s hand jerked to save the top file the rest of the pile lost their balance and they too began to slip from their places. Alice watched as the two medics began a strange flailing dance together that came to a final, inevitable conclusion of them both kneeling on the floor collecting papers.

“Great” thought Alice “Mr Dhoni is an imbecile, and his nurse is not much better.”

She filled in the form, which took 7 minutes. Checked her email - 30 seconds. Picked up an old ‘Hello!’ and feasted guiltily on the lives and the wives of the rich and famous - 6 minutes. Picked up a rather urgent leaflet that read: 

DO YOU SMOKE?

- no 

DO YOU HAVE CORONARY HEAR DISEASE?

- no 

THEN THIS LEAFLET IS FOR YOU! 

- but not actually.

“Alice Khan?” The inept nurse stood in the doorway smiling aimlessly at the rectangle of chairs. Here we go. Alice waved to let her know that she was the lucky winner and headed for consulting room number 7. 

And there she waited; hidden behind a curtain, in semi nudity, confidently assured by the nurse that Mr Dhoni would be with her shortly.

“Oh! Mrs Khan?” The “Kh” was soft and the accent sleek, but with a note of surprise - she, a white woman, was not what he had expected. She looked up.

“Oh! Mr Dhoni?”   Where was the bumbling consultant she had seen in the corridor? A tall figure in an exquisite suit stood in front of her. His face was long and handsome with deep brown eyes, and fine arching eyebrows, his hair a neat short crop of silvery grey.He was not what she had expected either. 

She smiled broadly and slid off the bed for her legs to be examined. He asked a few brief questions, she gave long stumbling answers. His hands were smooth and cool on her thighs. He told her that he would operate and then explained how. She winced inwardly and outwardly which brought an almost smile to his lips. And then he was gone. She dressed and went back out into the nicotine corridor. The nurse looked up as Alice said goodbye, but he had disappeared behind another door, to another patient and another examination.

“We’ll be in touch” smiled the nurse.

As Manjit Dhoni spoke his notes into the Dictaphone that afternoon he felt his voice catch at the start of her name and wondered if his secretary would pick up on this minor prosodic error. He smiled wryly to himself - a red-haired woman with a thing for Asian men - where had he met one of those before? For a brief moment Karen’s face and the sound of her laughter exploded in his head. But Alice Khan was not the first attractive woman to come under his knife and she wasn’t going to be the last. He remembered that glint of triumph in her eyes after his fleeting smile but he had been punctilious - quick to diagnose and quick to leave; a professional, who kept a clear boundary between his work and his private life. Manjit kept an imaginary stamp that he mentally placed on the covers of certain patents’ files. It read simply ‘CAUTION!’ With some satisfaction he now visualised placing that stamp across the cover of Alice’s file; she was, and would remain, just another patient. One more pair of legs, to be treated with professional courtesy, care and indifference, to be forgotten about like all the rest. But yet in that one cerebral act of splashing her file with imagined scarlet stains he knew deep down that he had forever marked this woman out as different.