Read The Watchful Eye for Free Online

had slammed shut in Daniel’s face.
    Guy’s brief flirtation with explanation was over. The shutters were down.
    ‘Come back,’ Daniel urged. ‘In a month or two. You may feel different by then.’
    The minute the boy had left the room he knew he’d failed him.
    That failure discomforted him for the rest of the morning. He had tried, too clumsily, to reassure him. Before summoning the next patient, he analysed what had been said and still failed to understand how he could have handled the situation differently.
    He drew in a deep, frustrated breath and in the words of the American fast food chain, muttered, ‘Thank God it’s Friday.’
    Two octogenarians followed in fast succession, both with a plethora of complaints. Like old cars, he reflected. One system goes, you never quite fix it, then MOTs and services become ever more complicated and finally the car is no longer viable. It dies. He looked at his second elderly patient of the day, Maud Allen, eighty-six years old and still digging in her garden and growing all her own vegetables. ‘Have done since the war,’ she would bark.
    But she was slowing up, almost the last of her generation.
    ‘No arthritis,’ she bellowed, ‘thank goodness. Nasty business that – arthritis. Painful, nasty business.’
    She still wore a hat to the surgery, he noticed, a sort of pork pie, tweedy thing. And a suit which a charity shop would have refused. She must have noticed him looking at it.
    ‘Bought it in the Sixties,’ she said. ‘Quality always lasts, you know.’
    He felt her disapproval as she took in his casual jeans, shirt open at the neck. No tie, no jacket. He could almost hear her comparing him unfavourably with the senior partner he had replaced, Doctor Anthony Morgan. London-trained. Did all his own nights (fool who had no life). And his wife was –
a lady
.
    No use quoting
Little Britain
to her!
    ‘I rather think,’ she said, ‘that I needed to come to you for my thyroid check, but I can’t remember whether I had the necessary blood test.’
    ‘Let’s look,’ he said, ‘shall we?’
    She hadn’t had her thyroid levels done for almost a year so Daniel took some blood and sent it off. ‘We may need to adjust the dose,’ he warned. ‘So what I want you to do is to ring me in a week’s time and I’ll let you know.’
    She put a liver-spotted, slack-skinned hand over his and he met a pair of blue eyes still bright with humour. ‘You are good to me, Doctor,’ she said. ‘So very good.’
    His next patient was Maud Allen’s diametric opposite. Darren Clancy swaggered in, asking for anabolic steroids, like, to make him more muscly, like, and have a bit more success with the girls, like. Daniel dealt with him calmly, fighting the rising instinct to tell him to piss off. Instead he explained that anabolic steroids were potentially dangerous, illegal when prescribed for body-building, and watched the youth swagger out, swearing as he left and venting his frustration by kicking the door open.
    Daniel reflected that he should have crossed the stroppy guy off his list. Instead he’d listened calmly, been polite. What was his role in today’s society? He’d trained to treat sick people, for goodness’ sake. And now here he was, fending off patientswho were trying to rope him in to provide designer drugs to make them more attractive to the opposite sex.
    He allowed himself a quiet expletive.
    A woman was still sitting in the waiting room, staring at the floor as he passed through. He didn’t recognise her so he asked Vanessa, one of the receptionists, who she was.
    She moved away from the hatch, out of view of the woman. ‘She hasn’t got an appointment,’ she said. ‘But…’
    He glanced again at the woman. She was in her forties, sitting quietly and very still, dressed neatly in a dark, full skirt, flat pumps and a white sweater. She didn’t look agitated but perfectly composed.
    ‘She wants to see someone now,’ the receptionist said. ‘I’ve