‘Okay. That’s good.’
‘And I’d like to go now. Put my mind at rest.’
‘Now?’ I said, glancing at David.
‘Yes Harriet. The trouble is, once someone mentions gonorrhoea it’s hard to get it out of your head.’
‘Quite.’
‘And I’m now imagining all sorts of symptoms that I’m sure I don’t really have. Vaginal discharge and whatnot.’
I grimaced at the phone.
‘And also, if Idohave something, it’s only fair that I pass that information on to my previous sexual contacts too.’
‘Okay, Mum,’ I cut across, thinking I’d heard her say the wordsexualfar too many times already. ‘But I’m at work. I don’t finish for another four hours.’
‘Hmm. Well, the clinic will be closed then.’
There was a pause.
‘I’m not sure what you expect me to do,’ I said. ‘I can’t just leave.’
I watched as David asked the next customer to wait and turned to me. ‘Do you need to head off?’ he said quietly.
‘Tell him, yes,’ said Mum.
‘How did you manage to hear that?’ I said, momentarily distracted from the hideous scenario of asking my boss if I could leave work early to take my mum for an STD check.
‘He has a nice deep baritone,’ she said. ‘I find it easier to hear men’s voices.’
‘Funny that.’
‘Besides, my hearing is fine. It’s my vagina I’m worried about.’
An hour later, Mum and I were seated on unforgiving plastic chairs in a large waiting room, the walls of which were coveredin posters of cartoon teenagers with slogans like ‘Real Men Wear Condoms’, and I was pondering the absolute craziness of my life. I’ve thankfully never had to go to a sexual health clinic before today but if you’d asked me the most likely scenario in which I would be attending, or whom I’d be accompanying, I would not have said my mother. A friend, maybe – Farah when she first got divorced went through a bit of a prolific shagging phase – or even Layla. Even that would have been less weird than this.
Mum, however, was completely unperturbed.
‘Interesting, the variety of people you see in a place like this,’ she said, speaking far too loudly as she stared at the waiting patients.
‘Ssh,’ I said, although she had a point. All human life was there. Women with babies in pushchairs; young men shifting position in their seats (whether from discomfort in the nether regions or awkward embarrassment one couldn’t be sure); businessmen in suits; the occasional agitated individual wiping every surface down with antibacterial spray, looking as though they probably came for a full STD check every time they so much as glanced at another human being; and here and there, a person of advanced years looking slightly baffled by it all.
The rain beat down against the double-glazed doors and every now and then someone would appear from outside, looking sheepish as everyone turned in their direction, and make their way to the desk to register. We had been given a number and told to wait until we were called, much like the deli counter at Sainsbury’s – but for venereal disease rather than ham and marinated olives. Mum and I didn’t chat as we sat there waiting for her number to come up. It didn’t feel like the appropriate venue for small talk, so I switched off for a few moments and thought about the brief conversation I’d had with David this morning about Nathan.
I’d obviously returned Nathan’s book to the shelves first thing on Monday and exchanged it for the new Colston Whitehead as promised when I saw him that afternoon. Neither of us referred to the blanket or to the conversation we’d had on Saturday evening, but I was able to give Dot a bit of food, which she wolfed down readily enough. Over the weekend I’d found a bag of kibble from when I’d had Farah’s lunatic cockapoo Orinoco to stay. I’d brought it in thinking it might be useful to have a supply in the library in case Pilot got peckish but also so that we could potentially offer Dot one square meal a day for a few weeks, at least to take some financial pressure off her owner. Now, of course, the more pressing issue was what could we do to ensure that her owner had one square meal a day and ideally a bed to sleep in at the end of it.
‘I did wonder,’ said David this morning when I mentioned seeing the blankets and boxes in the car park. ‘The day he registered he couldn’t give me a contact address. I didn’t push him on it, obviously, just gave him the card.’
‘How did you enter him on the computer?’ I knew that the library IT system wouldn’t allow us to progress a registration without a valid postcode.
‘Oh, I just used my address,’ he said. ‘I do it all the time. Head office probably assume I live in a commune. Either that or I’m committing international fraud.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Come to think of it…’ he said before trailing off.
‘What?Areyou committing international fraud?’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Don’t worry. Just thinking maybe he could house-sit over Christmas, given the fact that it’s currently his registered address? It would mean I could go and see my sister – my niece is allergic to dogs, so I rarely go, and Nathan’s probably one of the only people I’d trust to look after Pilot, no offence, Hattie.’
‘That’s a brilliant idea!’ I said. ‘And no offence taken – you saw what happened when I dog-sat Orinoco.’
