What this blog is really for

(The lies fantastical about what I have done, or more precisely what I have not done, grow legs and run all over the internet. I give up trying to fight 'em all. They's like Triffids: topple one and there's always another one spitting poison and rattling its sticks. I have made my defence here and there and everywhere... and those that lie, even when it is proved beyond any reasonable doubt that they lie, just stay silent about the lies, as if they have never been, and proceed with another line of attack. I have been so wrapped up in my defence that I have been in danger of forgetting what this blog is really for... so here's another Port Brokeferry piece. We are nearing the end of Tuesday in Port Brokeferry.)

DOCTOR KERR AND THE SILLINESS OF AGE

It is warm in the room. Doctor Kerr is asleep in his chair again. His hands lie curled together in his lap and a clean page of paper is in front of him on the desk. He has left his fountain pen uncapped, ready to write. Marjory replaces the lid, the small click of it sounding sharper in the silence of the surgery.

On the other side of the door, the waiting room is empty. She saw to the last patient herself. A small splinter in the thumb. Had been there for several days so that it was swollen and angry. Marjory was once a nurse. She knew what to do. No need for the doctor, she thought. No need to wake him for that.

He looks like a child when he sleeps. That what she thinks. It makes her smile seeing Doctor Kerr there. She listens to the slow rise and fall of his breath. Counts the seconds between. It is somehow reassuring.

She quietly puts the desk into some sort of order. Makes sure everything is filed away as it should be. She creeps around the room, not wanting to wake him just yet. It is a quarter to five. Fifteen minutes more and the clock will chime and he will say he wasn’t asleep really. Then she will bring him a cup of tea and a plate of digestive biscuits.

They will sit together at the close of business, Marjory like a patient on the other side of the desk. Only, Marjory will be asking him how he is and how his day has been. She will not tell Doctor Kerr about the boy Finlay and the splinter in his thumb. She has written it up in his record and that is enough.

Doctor Kerr lives on his own. Has several rooms at the back of the house where his surgery is. Marjory stays on three nights of the week and cooks for him, makes sure that he is eating properly. She does a bit of cleaning, too, though that is not something they have agreed upon. On Saturday afternoons she picks him up in her morris traveller and they drive to someplace different for lunch and a walk. The walks are easier each year and shorter too. He does not use his stick on these walks, even though Marjory keeps one in the back of her car. Instead he leans on her arm, pretends he is supporting her.

They talk sometimes, on their walks. Marjory doesn’t mention retirement anymore. It only makes him cross and silent and he lets go of her arm then. Instead they talk about the weather and Marjory’s grandchildren and things that are in the news. Though his interest in things beyond where they are is less and less these days.

There was a time, years past, when on one such walk Doctor Kerr stopped and kissed Marjory on the lips. It was a silly moment. He was already old and it was the silliness of his age. That’s what she thought. They have never talked about it and Marjory is glad that they haven’t.