Half Plus Seven Read Online Free Page A

shameful recognition reminiscent of the time when as a 14-year-old boy my mum caught me with my jeans around my ankles and the TV tuned to the Home Shopping Network’s Summer Special Swimwear show. This time I didn’t have to pull my pants up, but lifted my shirt as Dr Linda talked me through the next procedure.
    â€˜I’m going to attach a series of little receptors to your skin which will send a small painless electrical impulse through your body, providing a reading of your heart’s activity on the small screens here.’
    What screens? I hadn’t noticed any screens. But sure enough there they were to my right hand side, six previously ignored little boxes, looking for all the world like monitors from prototype computers, ready to tell of a murmur or a shudder or an altogether tick-tock-stop. The inanimate took on evil tendencies. The waves rose and fell and fell and rose and rose and fell while Dr Linda’s face remained impassive and access to her emotions impossible. She didn’t give the ‘Oh fuck, another one bites the dust’ look I would have been prone to in a position of such delicately-poised importance, but perhaps they devoted whole semesters to poker facing at medical school.
    â€˜Fine. You can pull the receptors off now. It might smart a little. I’d do it but I don’t think it bodes well for my tip if I inflict too much pain on my patients.’
    She’d made a joke.
    â€˜Some people like pain.’ I squirmed as I said it, pulling the sticky plaster off hard and fast in punishment, thus proving the validity of my embarrassed slip.
    Dr Linda ignored my quip and carried on with her business of being a £300 an hour private doctor. I’d have paid her double for a shag and taken half as long.
    â€˜You can put your shirt back on now. Unless you’d like to walk bare-chested around the centre, that is. I’m going to send you for a chest X-ray. Now, this doesn’t normally form part of the Wellness Check but I think in the circumstances, with your smoking habit and incidence of blood production, it wouldn’t do any harm to check you out more closely. A very important area, Bill.’
    She directed me back out along the corridor to a desk where a middle-aged matronly type greeted me and showed me to some firm but comfortable seats and a coffee table of up-to-date magazines. I sat down.
    A fucking chest X-ray? So this is it then. The all or nothing. The now or not-lucky-enough-to-be-never. It was like sitting in the queue at the passport office for hell. I’d only ever had an X-ray once before in my life. I’d been playing kiss chase in the school playground with some of the girls from the year above. I think I was about six or seven at the time. When I say I was playing, I mean really that they were playing, I was just trying my darnedest to join in as it beat playing marbles with my sick-down-their-nylon-sweaters, barely comprehensible male contemporaries. Remarkably, one of my peers had managed to bag himself a girlfriend. I happened to be chasing hot on her heels. How was I to know? Relationships tended to last for the length of a school day back then, which to be fair was longer than the lion’s share of my sorry situations. It must have been his baseball pitch which attracted the skirt in my sights to her pre-pubescent partner, as the little fucker picked up a huge glass marble and launched it right at my head. I caught sight of it just as it cracked me on the cheekbone and the rest of the next hour passed in a fuzz of heat, sweat and memory loss. A bit like my first pill. But we’ll get to that another time.
    Before I had a chance to look at the latest copy of GQ and find out where I’d been going wrong, my name was called out by a Doogie Howser lookalike and in I went. Again I took my shirt off, but this time put my chest up against the cold metal of a flat surface while the boy left the vicinity and clicked his