The Doctor Is Sick Read Online Free Page B

cold in their bedroom slippers. He had a perverse longing for the sick warmth he had just left.
    â€˜You might try just down there,’ said Charlie, pointing to the end of the grey street. ‘A lot of them go there at throwing-out time. A club, you might call it. They have no members, only customers. It won’t be long before the law gets on to them. If you go there, don’t stay too long. Look good, won’t it, you a sick man picked up by the law for illegal boozing. And in carpet slippers.”
    â€˜I’ll try there.’
    â€˜All right, but watch out. Now I’m going back to this spaghetti. Very hard to eat. Italian stuff it is.’ He returned to the restaurant with a cross look. Edwin walked down the street, passing dim Indian restaurants that, he knew,should smell of turmeric but seemed instead to smell of size. He came to a corner, a shop of no name, its single shop-window opaque with blue paint, its door, the same blue with khaki panels, ajar. The passage floor, he saw as he gingerly entered, was littered with bits of old racing editions, fag-packets, a doll’s torso, a flabby ball, dirt. Two doors on the left wall were padlocked. Another led to buried noise and music. Uneasy Edwin went towards this and opened it. In a blast of heat the noise rose up the cellar stair-well, warming the cold damp cellar-smell which, to Edwin, was curiously flowery. Unsafe precipitous stairs led to the ultimate door. Should he knock? No, said the door, opening violently. A wet-mouthed corner-boy in a turquoise sweater with the name, in stitched yellow on the chest, of J UD, was ejected with noise and protest. Edwin pressed to the wall.
    â€˜Try vat once more,’ said a youngish Semite in an old suit, ‘and you won’t just be frown aht. You’ll ave certain fings done to you first. Fings vat will ensure you won’t try vat sort of fing no more. Not only ’ere,’ he promised, ‘but everywhere.’ He was growing untidily bald; his chocolate-brown double-breasted, sagging at the bosom, bagged at the knees. He began to push the corner-boy by the rump up the stairs. The boy snarled street words. The Semite, sad-eyed, raised chin and arm for a back-hander.
    â€˜Bleedin’ plice,’ said the boy. ‘Lot of old bags.’ No whit daunted, he whistled his way up, each step resounding like a thumped herring-box. The Semite said to Edwin:
    â€˜Vat’s what you get. I’ve ruined vis place lettin’ yobbos like vat one in. It’s me who’s ruined vis place and nobody else.’ Sadly, and with a remnant of ancestral Levantine courtliness, he ushered Edwin in. A vast man in stripedsweatshirt and snake-clasp belt stood facing them, beer in hand, very still, like a turn of human statuary Edwin had come to see. ‘I’d have done that,’ he said, ‘if you’d asked, but you never asked.’ He had small not unhandsome moustached features set, as print in some expensive edition, in a face with wide margins. Edwin looked for her over the heads of, in the gaps between, far uglier men and dishevelled women: though one trim drunken middle-aged woman in a smart hat twirled sedately to the music, her partner a glass of Guinness. The Semite shook his head in sorrow, his brown eyes full of sadness. ‘Ve fings we get in ’ere,’ he said. ‘I ’ate vis place,’ he said, with bitter Mosaic passion, ‘I’ate it like I’ve never ’ated anyfing else.’
    Edwin got to the bar, pushing, excusing himself, and there was Sheila, smart in her green costume. She opened her shocked eyes wide as, into him, relief pumped rapidly. ‘Darling,’ she cried, holding out wide a cigarette and a gin-glass. ‘You’ve escaped,’ she said. ‘They’ve taken your shoes,’ she said, missing nothing.
    â€˜You didn’t come,’ said Edwin. ‘I was worried.’
    â€˜But it’s tonight I