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thousand
times to a thousand other patients who now had to wait the obligatory fifteen minutes
with their sleeves up. Elena smiled in return and sat in a chair next to the disused
fireplace.
    At one end of the mantelpiece was a small plastic stand displaying brochures about
allergy and at the other end, incongruously, a child’s rattle. Two chairs down from
Elena was a low table with magazines; she picked one up and sat down again. Against
the wall beside the receptionist’s high counter—sitting down you could only see the
top of her head—was a tank with tropical fish swimming lazily around inside, the
water bubbling softly through the filter. On a chair against the other wall was the
only other person in the room, an old man with his sleeve up like her. He smiled
when she glanced at him, and looked down at the arm he was cradling like it was broken,
as if to say: You have one too. Elena gave him a brief smile, then to avoid having
any more to do with him, she started flicking through her magazine.
    The fifteen minutes seemed to go on forever. There was a clock above the receptionist’s
head and for the first five minutes Elena kept glancing at it, then down at her forearm,
trying to make in her own way some connection between the sweeping second hand and
the click-click of the minute hand and the slower, more subtle, changes going on
under her skin. But it soon became a pointless game: the seconds swept by and the
scratches on her arm above the black writing describing all those things in nature
that might make your life a misery registered no change at all. She flicked again
through the magazine until she found something to look at, creased the spine and
gave all her attention to the pictures.
    It was a design magazine, and the article was about houses built in exotic locations:
in a rainforest with a living area built into the canopy, on the side of a hill overlooking
the sea with a roof covered by sand and dune grass, and, finally, a house blended
into the rock of Sydney Harbour to the extent of actually having a boulder in the
living room and a deck built into a craggy outcrop over the water. The owners, said
the article, loved food and wine, and the dining-room table at which they entertained
was long and curved ‘like the beach below’, set with baskets of fruit and mini pumpkins
and gourds. A sculpture hung above it, a crayfish basket holding seafood carved
out of driftwood. Elena was so absorbed with the pictures of this house and the people
who must have lived in it that for a moment she didn’t notice the receptionist calling
her or, for that matter, O’Breen himself, waiting at the door to his room. The doctor
is ready, said the receptionist. You can come in now, said O’Breen.
    Back in the consulting room Elena sat down while O’Breen brought his chair from around
the other side of his desk, settled himself next to her and took her arm in his hands.
He had red, flaky patches on his scalp. He was looking at the scratches, first from
a distance then up close with a magnifying thing that he put over his eye. It took
him a long time to say: No. Elena wasn’t sure what he meant. She kept looking at
his bald patch while he looked at her arm. No, he said, again, lifting his head and
taking off the magnifying thing, nothing there at all. You are at one with Nature,
Elena, he said, in a funny, pompous voice, and he pushed himself away.
    The little drops I put on your arm, Elena, contained distilled quantities of the
substance you see on the label. For example, Mouse. I get them from Spokane, Washington.
No-one else does them here. If you were allergic to, say, Mouse, said O’Breen, your
skin would come up in a little welt, like a mosquito bite, where I scratched it.
The marks in black pen tell me what I have put where and in this case all of them
describe common allergens, things we find in the natural world: animals, plants and
so on. You’d be surprised how many people are allergic to Mother Nature. He