Chapter Twenty-Four
‘Hattie, there’s a call for you,’ Colin said, his head appearing around the corner of the stacks. ‘David took it but said I’m faster, so he sent me to find you.’ He took a gulp of air after having evidently rushed to get me.
‘A call?’ I patted my pocket for my phone before remembering that I was wearing another annoyingly pocketless dress. ‘On my mobile?’
‘No, at the main desk,’ he said importantly.
‘Gosh,’ I said, rising from my crouched position with a creak. ‘I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that phone actually ring.’
‘It does,’ said Colin. ‘I just heard it. It made me jump when I was scanning Mrs Catherine Foster’s books.’
‘Right,’ I followed him back to the desk.
‘Found her,’ said Colin. David had the receiver to his ear and was laughing at something the person on the other end of the line was saying as he beckoned me over.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I always prefer a landline too, truth be told…’ He nodded. ‘Yes, exactly! Anyway, here she is.’ He handed me the phone, and I gave him a quizzical look.
‘Hello,’ I said.
‘Harriet,’ said my mother briskly. ‘About time.’
‘Well, sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m working. You’ve called me on the library phone.’
‘Yes, I realise that. You weren’t answering your mobile.’
‘Sorry, it’s in the office. I haven’t got any pockets.’ I paused, wondering why I was apologising. ‘Are you okay? Has something happened? Is it Layla?’
‘No, no, no. Nothing like that. Don’t panic.’
‘So, what is it, Mum?’ I said, my heart rate returning to normal. ‘It’s just I think this phone is only really supposed to be used for library-related matters – or emergencies. Not for a general chat.’
‘Well, it is something of an emergency,’ she said crossly. ‘And I rather wanted your help. The thing is, I think I might have gonorrhoea.’
‘Gonorrhoea?!’ I said, far too loudly for a library environment.
David raised his eyebrows a tiny fraction and I mouthed an apology at him and the customer he was serving as I attempted to retreat around a corner.
The problem was that the phone reception started to cut out as soon as I was more than a metre away from the docking port so I couldn’t escape entirely.
‘Why do you think that?’ I asked a little more quietly.
‘Sorry dear, I can’t hear you?’
‘Why. Do. You. Think. That?’ I said, enunciating each word as distinctly as possible.
‘I had a phone call from Armando.’
‘Armando?’ I said, racking my brain. ‘The retired chef?’
‘Yes, him. Turns out he has it. And the clinic told him to inform all previous sexual partners.’
‘But I thought you just went out for dinner with him a few times?’
‘Well, dinner and a drink, and one thing leads to another, you know… Anyway…’ She was brisk again. ‘I need to go to the sexual health clinic, and I’d like you to come with me.’
‘Have you, uhm, have you got an appointment?’ I said faintly, trying to focus on practicalities to stop myself shouting sexual health clinic in front of the small queue of people now waiting to check their books out.
‘No. It’s a drop-in apparently. I’ve checked online. You just turn up. All very casual.’
‘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 I do have 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 word sexual far 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 covered in 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? Are you 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.’
We didn’t really have a chance to discuss it further because once we’d gone through the morning deliveries and emails, Anita had arrived and needed help setting up in the reading room, but I was hopeful that David’s plan had the potential to solve two festive problems in one go.
In the waiting room I let myself drift off into a daydream of Nathan running some sort of home for abandoned dogs (from David’s house, which may or may not have been feasible) where he met and fell in love with a nice young woman in a Fair Isle jumper who wanted to adopt a Staffordshire border terrier with one eye – and then concluded that I have been watching too many Hallmark Christmas movies.
After about an hour of waiting, a weary-looking man in crumpled cotton scrubs emerged from one of the clinical rooms with a clipboard and called Mum’s number. I went to get up from my seat and was immediately admonished.
‘You don’t need to come in to see the doctor with me, Harriet,’ she said, a cross expression on her face. ‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Okay, sorry,’ I said, sitting back down. ‘I just thought… you’d said you wanted a bit of support?’
‘Not in the examination room!’
‘Right, fair point. Well, I’ll be here,’ I said, pointing to my chair. ‘As requested.’
I reopened my paperback in an emphatic fashion to indicate my annoyance.
She was making it sound as though I’d asked to be here today.
But I was hugely relieved not to be going into the examination room with her.
Aside from finding most hospital environments low-key terrifying, the last thing I wanted was to have to listen to Mum recounting the number of times she’d had unprotected sex over the past few months or indeed, the type of sex she’d had.
I suspected the policy in this clinic was that no question was deemed too personal or intimate and I had no intention of being present when my mother inevitably chose to bare all.