Free Another Kind of Country by Kevin Brophy Page B

curling edges of ancient pages peeping like dry leaves from broken mouths. He ran his finger along a line of files and they crackled like dead foliage. His father’s history was typed in these files, he knew, each page signed off with his father’s indecipherable scrawl. So many hours, so many days. So many weeks and years spent in the rooms upstairs where his father treated his women patients. He wondered how his father could endure it.
    He looked in the smallkitchen at the back of the ground floor. Mrs Oliphant’s advice about a hot cup of tea came back to him but Patrick thought he couldn’t be bothered. He wondered how much longer his father would be with Mrs Whatever-her-name-was.
    There was no sound from upstairs. The house seemed settled in its own silence. He looked into Waiting Room No. 1, then Waiting Room No. 2 on the other side of the hallway. Both rooms were identical: flower-print curtains, beige carpet, stiff-backed dining-room chairs ranged along the walls. No copies of
Reveille
or
Titbits
here:
Country Life
,
Horse & Hound
and other assorted glossies were neatly arranged on the mahogany tables in Dr Roger Miller’s non-National Health waiting rooms. Two such rooms were required, Patrick had heard his father explain, because his patients sometimes wished to wait alone, in the privacy they were paying for.
    Patrick peeped between the window curtains, saw the sheen of his father’s Jaguar at the side of the house. He watched the rain bounce off the polished bodywork like useless pellets.
    The house seemed to creak and yaw in the rain. What could be keeping his father? Maybe Mrs What’s-her-name had left quietly while he had been daydreaming in the kitchen. Maybe his father was merely scrawling his spidery notes on more pages for Mrs Oliphant to file away on her crowded shelves.
    At the foot of the staircase in the hallway he stood listening. Only the whispering silence of the house came down to him. He climbed three steps, four, and stopped to listen. Still silence. He went higher until he could just see over the edge of the landing. Between the carved railings of the balustrade he could see that a sliver of light shone from the edge of the door to his father’s room.
    Light but no sound. Surely his fatherwas just scrawling away at his notes.
    Afterwards he would never be able to explain to himself why he tiptoed up the carpeted staircase. He would remember only that his heart was pounding, as if in his teenage heart he already knew that what awaited him at the top of the darkened stairs would forever change his life.
    He stood listening on the landing. A low moaning of someone in pain came from the consulting room. He edged closer to the door. The door was barely ajar but the knife edge of light was enough for him to see inside.
    Mrs What’s-her-name, beehive hair a collapsed mess, was propped up against the raised head of the doctor’s consulting couch. Naked from the waist up, her small white breasts seemed to stare accusingly at Patrick. Dr Roger Miller stood beside the couch, one hand cradling Mrs What’s-her-name’s left breast. His other hand was stroking the woman’s inner thigh. Her thighs were marble pillars of whiteness framed between her brown stocking tops and her white skirt pushed up around her waist.
    Patrick could barely breathe.
    He saw his father’s hand push upwards between the white thighs towards the brown mossy thatch. The white thighs stirred, spread themselves.
    The woman moaned.
    This is not real. Move.
    But his feet refusedto budge. In a moment, he knew, he would scream.
    He didn’t. He watched the woman’s hand fumble, saw the white hand emerge from his father’s trousers, heard his father moan.
    Move. Or vomit and then faint into your own sick.
    He moved, somehow without sound.
    The moaning was louder, more hurried as he picked up his schoolbag at the bottom of the stairs and let himself out quietly into the night. Fear and panic drove him at full tilt through the