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Her nails were painted a deep glossy red.

We had travelled a long way from home. To be here at last in this curved corridor with its amber veins threading through the walls felt like a pilgrimage of sorts, a last chance. For years, an increasing number of medical professionals in the UK had been groping in the dark for a diagnosis, puzzled, lost, humbled, resigned. This had to be the final journey and I think my mother knew that, too. A male voice shouted something in Spanish. The nurse pushed the heavy door open and then beckoned to me to wheel Rose into the room, as if to say, She is all yours.

Dr Gómez. The orthopaedic consultant I had researched so thoroughly for months on end. He looked like he was in his early sixties, his hair was mostly silver but with a startling pure white streak running across the left side of his head. He wore a pinstripe suit, his hands were tanned, his eyes blue and alert.

‘Thank you, Nurse Sunshine,’ he said to the nurse, as if it were normal for an eminent doctor who specialized in musculoskeletal conditions to name his staff after the weather. She was still holding the door open, as if her thoughts had wandered off to roam on the Sierra Nevada.

He raised his voice and repeated in Spanish, ‘Gracias, Enfermera Luz del Sol.’

This time she shut the door. I could hear the cracking sound of her heels on the floor, first at an even pace and then suddenly faster. She had started to run. The echo of her heels remained in my mind long after she had left the room.

Dr Gómez spoke English with an American accent.

‘Please. How can I help you?’

Rose looked baffled. ‘Well, that is exactly what I want you to tell me.’

When Dr Gómez smiled, his two front teeth were entirely covered with gold. They reminded me of the teeth on a human male skull we studied in the first year of my anthropology degree, the task being to guess his diet. The teeth were full of cavities so it was likely he had chewed on tough grain. On further scrutiny of the skull, I discovered that a small square of linen had been stuffed into the larger cavity. It had been soaked in cedar oil to ease the pain and stop infection.

Dr Gómez’s tone was vaguely friendly and vaguely formal. ‘I have been looking at your notes, Mrs Papastergiadis. You were a librarian for some years?’

‘Yes. I retired early because of my health.’

‘Did you want to stop working?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you did not retire because of your health?’

‘It was a combination of circumstances.’

‘I see.’ He looked neither bored nor interested.

‘My duties were to catalogue, index and classify the books,’ she said.

He nodded and turned his gaze to his computer screen. While we waited for his attention, I looked around the consulting room. It was sparsely furnished. A basin. A bed on wheels that could be lowered or raised, a silver lamp placed near it.

A cabinet filled with leather-bound books stood behind his desk. And then I saw something looking at me. Its eyes were bright and curious. A small grey stuffed monkey was crouching in a glass box on a shelf halfway up the wall. Its eyes were fixed on its human brothers and sisters in an eternal frozen stare.

‘Mrs Papastergiadis, I see that your first name is Rose.’

‘Yes.’

He had pronounced Papastergiadis as easily as if he were saying Joan Smith.

‘May I refer to you now as Rose?’

‘Yes, you may. It is my name, after all. My daughter calls me Rose and I see no reason why you should not do the same.’

Dr Gómez smiled at me. ‘You call your mother Rose?’

It was the second time I had been asked this question in three days.

‘Yes,’ I said quickly, as if it was of no importance. ‘Can we ask how we should address you, Dr Gómez?’

‘Certainly. I am a consultant, so I am Mr Gómez. But that is too formal so I will not be offended if you just refer to me as Gómez.’

‘Ah. That is useful to know.’ My mother lifted her arm to check that the hairpin in her chignon was still in place.

‘And you are just sixty-four years old, Mrs Papastergiadis?’

Had he forgotten he’d been granted permission to call his new patient by her first name?

‘Sixty-four and flagging.’

‘So you were thirty-nine when you birthed your daughter?’

Rose coughed as if to clear her throat and then nodded and coughed again. Gómez started to cough too. He cleared his throat and ran his fingers through the white streak in his hair. Rose moved her right leg and then she groaned. Gómez moved his left leg and then he groaned.

I was not sure if he was mimicking her or mocking her. If they were having a conversation in groans, coughs and sighs, I wondered whether they understood each other.

‘It is a pleasure to welcome you to my clinic, Rose.’

He held out his hand. My mother leaned forward as if to shake it but then suddenly decided not to. His hand was stuck in the air. Obviously, their non-verbal conversation had not elicited her trust.

‘Sofia, get me a tissue,’ she said.

I passed her a tissue and shook Gómez’s hand on behalf of my mother. Her arm is my arm.

‘And you are Ms Papastergiadis?’ He emphasized the ‘Ms’ so it sounded like Mizzzzzz.

‘Sofia is my only daughter.’

‘Do you have sons?’

‘As I said, she is my only.’

‘Rose.’ He smiled. ‘I think you are going to sneeze soon. Is there pollen in the air today? Or something?’

‘Pollen?’ Rose looked offended. ‘We are in a desert landscape. There are no flowers as I know them.’

Gómez mimicked looking offended, too. ‘Later I will take you for a tour of our gardens so you can see flowers as you do not know them. Purple sea lavender, jujube shrubs with their magnificent thorny branches, Phoenician junipers and various scrubland plants imported for your pleasure from near Tabernas.’

He walked towards her wheelchair, kneeled at her feet and stared into her eyes. She started to sneeze. ‘Get me another tissue, Sofia.’

I obliged. She now had two tissues, one in each hand.

‘I always get a pain in my left arm after I sneeze,’ she said. ‘It’s a sharp, tearing pain. I have to hold my arm until the sneeze is over.’

‘Where is the pain?’

‘The inside of my elbow.’

‘Thank you. We will conduct a full neurological examination, including a cranial-nerve examination.’

‘And I have chronic knuckle pain in my left hand.’

In response, he wiggled the fingers of his left hand in the direction of the monkey, as if encouraging it to do the same.

After a while he turned to me. ‘I can just see the resemblance. But you, Mizz Papastergiadis, are darker. Your skin is sallow. Your hair is nearly black. Your mother’s hair is light brown. Your nose is longer than hers. Your eyes are brown. Your mother’s eyes are blue, like my own eyes.’

‘My father is Greek but I was born in Britain.’

I wasn’t sure if having sallow skin was an insult or a compliment.

‘Then you are like me,’ he said. ‘My father is Spanish, my mother is American. I grew up in Boston.’

‘Like my laptop. It was designed in America and made in China.’

‘Yes, identity is always difficult to guarantee, Mizz Papastergiadis.’

‘I am from near Hull, Yorkshire,’ Rose suddenly announced, as if she felt left out.

When Gómez reached for my mother’s right foot, she gave it to him as if it were a gift. He started to press her toes with his thumb and forefinger, watched by myself and the monkey in the glass box. His thumb moved to her ankle. ‘This bone is the talus. And before that I was pressing the phalanges. Can you feel my fingers?’