The Doctor Is Sick Read Online Free PDF Page A

come, surely.’
    â€˜Sundays are different. You can come twice on Sunday. On Sunday there’s an extra session.’
    â€˜Oh,’ she said, ‘I’m so sorry. I should have known. It was stupid of me.’ What Edwin could not understand was that the Semite was in two places at once, moaning in tie and suit at the plywood counter, serving cheerfully in shirt-sleeves behind it. Out of this Dr Railton could make a nice quiz question. ‘How did you know I’d be here?’ she asked. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see your trouble. They’re twins, you see, Leo and Harry Stone. That’s Leo, behind the counter. They run this place, if you can call it running. AGreek tailor’s just asked me how much for the afternoon, that dark man there pinched my bottom, and there’s a sort of Englishman who dances in the most peculiar way.’
    â€˜Could you perhaps,’ asked Edwin, ‘buy me a small whisky or something?’
    â€˜Not whisky,’ said Sheila. ‘You’ve been told to lay off drink for two years. A light ale.’
    Edwin was served with a golden water tasting of soap and onions. ‘Not so good, is it?’ said Leo Stone. His baldness, Edwin noticed, was more advanced than that of his twin. His accent had a patrician overlay, as if he had sometime been a superior salesman. From the juke-box in the far corner two light American voices, of the new generation of castrati, sang of teenage love amid recorded teenage screams. Clumsy dancing began. A tattered dog arose from sleep and barked. ‘All right,’ said Harry Stone. ‘Vey won’t touch you, I can promise you vat. If one of vem was to lay a bleedin’ ’and on you I’d ’ave ’im.’ The dog yawned, comforted. Behind the counter an electric kettle suddenly sang. ‘Vere,’ said Harry Stone, ‘your dinner’s nearly ready. Just give it time to cool dahn. A lovely bullock’s ’art,’ he said to the vast moustached man. ‘Could bleedin’ near eat it myself.’ The vast man belched on a draught of beer and converted the belch into Siegfried’s horn call. He followed this with a cry of ‘Nothung! Nothung!’ and ended with a bar or two of the burning down of Valhalla. ‘Take no notice,’ said Harry Stone to Edwin. ‘Works at Covent Garden, ’e does.’ And he shook his head, his eyes frantic with pain, at the world’s folly, looking at Edwin as though they two were in a conspiracy of sanity. The bullock’s heart was pincered out of the kettle with two crown-cork bottle-openers; it steamed on the wet counter.‘You wait, Nigger,’ said Harry Stone. ‘Or, ’ere, Leo, just ’old it under ve tap.’
    A Medusa, her long coat as shabby and dusty-black as the dog’s, came up to Edwin and asked him to dance. ‘I shouldn’t really,’ said Edwin. ‘I should be in hospital really.’ But he was borne off, too much the gentleman, into the jigging crowd. He looked for Sheila, but he had become separated from her by two new drink-buyers – thin young Guardsmen, blind behind their peaks. Frantic shoving dancing went on before the golden calf of the juke-box – a man who had taken his teeth out for fun; a woman whose breasts bounced lazily up and down, out of time with the music; a Mediterranean man shaven to a matt blue; a coach-driver in his cap; a genteel woman in a raincoat, tremulous with gin; two flat-chested girls who danced woodenly together, talking German; a middle-aged blonde with a bull-dog’s face – all seemed somehow mixed in one moving mush, like pease pudding. Edwin and his partner were added to the boil, and the partner, her snake-hairs waving, was vigorous. Edwin soon found that one of his bedroom slippers had been kicked off. He danced as though guying a bent-backed old man, looking under feet, under the juke-box, into corners. It was not