Free Size Matters by Judy Astley Page B

row of curtained cubicles, half-hidden round a far corner. ‘Someone’s just having another look at him before he goes up to the theatre. I don’t think he’ll even get a pre-med.’
    Greg chuckled. ‘That’s a good thing. Keep him awayfrom all pleasurable drugs at his age. Don’t want him getting a taste for them.’
    â€˜Greg! Be serious, the poor boy’s in a lot of pain. This could have been really bad – think of peritonitis.’
    â€˜Ah Perry, met him at a party once . . . Sorry.’ Greg summoned up a scrap of sensitivity. He gently squeezed the back of Jay’s neck. ‘Just staving off the worry with a bit of misplaced flippancy. Have you seen him? Is he . . .’ Greg stopped for a moment, watching with a grimace as a nurse bustled from one of the cubicles carrying a covered kidney bowl.
    â€˜Ugh. Hospitals, doncha just love them?’ Greg turned away and shuddered.
    Jay pulled him to a row of seats close to the reception desk, a little apart from the waiting patients, where he wouldn’t feel the temptation to engage them in chat about what they were in for and some mutual faultfinding about health service policy.
    â€˜We’ve to wait here, then someone’ll come and tell us what the plan is. And then we can see him before he goes up to have the thing out.’
    â€˜Do you think he’ll want to keep it?’
    â€˜Keep it?’ Jay said. ‘Are you mad? It’s not going to get any better, it’s got to be taken out.’
    â€˜No, no I mean in a jar,’ Greg said. ‘You remember, when you were a kid, if you had your appendix out they’d give it to you to take home.’
    â€˜I hope he
doesn’t
want it.’ Jay thought about the state of Rory’s room. The carpet, the surface of which was rarely visible, was like a many-layered cake with magazines and CDs sandwiching clothes, trainers and schoolbooks. A mouse, slaughtered by Daffodil, had rotted to a skeleton among his rugby kit under the bed last summer holidays. ‘It would just end up spilling all over the floor like all those abandoned coffee cups. The cat would get it . . .’
    There was a loud groan from a teenage boy sitting within hearing range. He was a year or two older than Rory, covered in mud and wearing school sports kit, and with his arm supported in a sling made from two football socks tied together.
    â€˜Sorry!’ Jay called brightly to him and the woman accompanying him – a teacher from the school, she assumed, looking as if volunteering for hospital duty wasn’t, after all, an improvement on force-feeding quadratic equations into Year 8. The woman glared back, issuing a clear non-verbal warning that if the pain-struck lad had to overhear one more gory word she knew who she’d hold responsible for the resulting mess on the lino.
    â€˜Mr and Mrs Callendar?’ A tiny blonde doctor who, in Jay’s opinion, looked far too much like one of the pert teenage-girl finalists from
Pop Idol
to be taken seriously as any kind of professional, approached with a clipboard and an encouraging smile.
    â€˜Rory is ready to go up to theatre now? You can come up and wait if you like? Or maybe you could come back later? He’ll be a bit out of it for a while? Say two or three hours till he’s properly back with us again?’
    â€˜Um . . . we could just stay with him? Hang around till we know he’s OK?’ Jay suggested, catching the quasi-Australian question tone. She didn’t like the sound of ‘back with us’. It made the general anaesthesia sound too much like a long hike in the direction of permanent oblivion. Suppose something went wrong, suppose Rory knew as he faded, fighting, from life that his family weren’t anywhere close to him but had gone carelessly swanning off to pick up a trolley-load at Sainsbury’s, while surgeons frantically scoured the district’s blood banks for