Free Capital by John Lanchester

‘No Mobile Phones’ sign, which was so awful it was almost funny – it still made her feel self-conscious. There was also the fact that the whole reason she had come to see the doctor in the first place was because of these funny dizzy spells, her ‘turns’ as she called them – she had had several more since that time in the newsagent’s, though mercifully all the subsequent episodes had been at home, which was one blessing, and never when shewas on the stairs, which was another. But twisting her neck every minute or two was starting to make her feel funny and the last thing she wanted was to keel over here in the surgery. And all to save the doctor the ten seconds’ effort involved in getting up, walking to the door, and calling out the patient’s name – not going over and actually addressing the patient, of course, since there was no chance the doctor would have any sense of who they were. In the last half an hour – the half an hour since her appointment was scheduled to start – Miss Linda Wong, Mr Denton Matarato, Miss Shoonua Barkshire, Mr T. Khan, and Master Cosmo Dent had gone through to see their doctors, but Petunia was still sitting there. She had long since finished the copy of the
Daily Mail
she’d found on the table beside her and was agonising over whether it would be bad manners to fill in the quick crossword in a communal newspaper; she rather thought it was.
    Although Petunia was not a grumbler and a complainer-about-modern-life – Albert had done enough for both of them, for several lifetimes – there was nothing much about her doctor’s that she liked. For one thing, she did not like that it wasn’t really her doctor at all – there wasn’t such a person as ‘her’ GP. In the last twenty years, though she had at one time or another seen more or less every doctor at the practice, she had never seen the same doctor twice in a row. There was something diminishing and impersonal about that and it certainly did not reduce the amount of time that the doctor would spend looking at the computer screen and reading about her, as opposed to looking at her and listening to what she had to say. Petunia disliked feeling such an alien, such an exotic, sitting here in the surgery, where everyone was in Lycra, or crop tops, or T-shirts, or texting, or nodding to just-audible music, or wearing headscarves (two women) or in full concealing hijab (one) or speaking Eastern European languages to each other or over their mobiles. We’re all in this together: Petunia was the right age for that once to have been a very important idea, a defining idea, about what it meant to be British. Was it still true? Were they in it together? Could she look around the surgery and truthfully say that?
    Finally, finally, ‘Ms Petuna How’ came up on the board. Close enough. Petunia carefully got to her feet – that was something she wasmore and more wary about now – and moved through. She could feel people looking at her, never her favourite sensation. A man moved his legs out of the way to let her through but the fact that he did it without looking up from his newspaper or in any other way acknowledging her presence made it even ruder than ignoring her would have been. Albert would have had something to say to him.
    The doctor’s door was open. When Petunia knocked to let him know she was there, he said, ‘Hi! Come in,’ while reading something on his computer screen. She went in and sat down. He turned towards her, smiling, and she knew what he was going to say:
    ‘Petunia, what can I do for you today?’
    Dr Canseca, this was. Petunia had had him a couple of times before. His name was Latin but he wasn’t, not in any way you could notice: he had fair hair combed sideways and always wore a tie and pale V-neck sweaters which looked as though they were made of cashmere, even though the surgery was never underheated and often boiling. If pressed, on the basis of appearances, Petunia would have put his age at