The Rowing Lesson Read Online Free PDF

face. You’re just like your mother. Impatient as hell. This camera is not as good as my old one. Hang on, chaps. Let’s get those towers in the background. They look like giant tuning forks!
    You caught me squinting, the sun in my eyes.
    Carefully you put the camera back into its case. I was so small they thought I’d never grow up, you went on, My legs were like matchsticks. I’ve survived a lot of those buggers. Half of them dropped dead on the golf course.
    The river was bad this year. I only went to Ebb ’n Flow once. It was too low to get very far. Hard to believe that we used to dive off the bridge at the mouth of the lagoon. Now you’d break your bloody neck on all that sand. Remember that time you curled up in the front of the boat? That was one helluva storm. Your mother doesn’t go in the boat anymore. She never liked the water, not the way you did, or Simon. The last time he came from America, I took his girls up the river. They wore those headphones the whole time. What do you call them again?
    Walkmen.
    Betsy, don’t forget to remind me about the penicillin. Later that night, you remembered anyway, parting the giant curtain that separated our sleeping area from the rest of the loft, a big ziplock bag full of bottles and bottles of different antibiotics in your hands. Here take these. Call me in the morning.
    Dad! (I scrambled back into the jeans that I was pulling off.) I don’t want your pills. What? They’re not good enough for you? No, it’s not that, Dad. When I get sick, I try to boost my immune system. Your immune system? What bloody rubbish are you talking? What do you know about immune systems?
    You walked straight into the makeshift bathroom without knocking, straight into William who was thankfully just brushing his teeth. You handed him the bag full of pills. Compliments of the chef. Take in case of emergency. Wash down with a good Shiraz.
    William had thrown up two Sheetrock walls and a door at the back of the loft, an instant bedroom just for you. You spilled out of the little room, telling us stories, asking us to help you read a map of the city, your glasses perched on your nose, your dressing gown gaping open. Dad! You looked down and tightened the cloth belt. You’re a bloody Victorian, just like your grandmother, you scolded. William, did you know that my daughter used to be the president, secretary and treasurer of the Worcester Teetotallers’ Society?
    William’s answer was an unblinking stare over the top of the newspaper, levelled right at you. You as well! You said this with a sense of great injury. You buggers are against me, like all the rest of them. Your mother too! One day, when I’m dead you’ll be sorry. You folded your arms, chin thrust out, feet crossed at the ankles. You know how I want to go?
    I shot a look at William. This is an old one.
    I’m in my surgery and there’s a patient stretched out on the examination table. I go over, and I’m just about to put my stethoscope on his chest, when BOOM! Massive heart attack! I drop dead on the floor right next to him. No bloody hospital for me. No doctors, none of those clowns and cowboys you get these days. Jesus Christ man, they all specialize. The heart chappie doesn’t know where the abdomen is. The neurologists don’t go past the neck. Forget about the pathologists and the surgeons. They don’t know what a patient is! They’ve never been to his house, met his wife and kids, his mother-in-law, his dog— some of those dogs, man, they eat a Jew for breakfast every morning! But you know what I mean. In the old days, we used to do everything, from obstetrics to appendectomies. There weren’t all those bloody machines. You had to use the machine up here! You jab your finger at your head.
    The old chaps were expert clinicians. They knew how to take a history. They knew how to listen to a heartbeat. They weren’t painting by fucking numbers. You know what one of my patients calls me? A deaf Afrikaans woman whose