Jake's Thing
Kingsley Amis
First published in 1978
To Pat Kavanagh
1—This Is It
"When did you first notice something was wrong?"
"Well, notice, it must be five or six weeks, I could give you the date if I had to. But then as soon as I did notice I realised something had been wrong much further back than that."
"How much further back?"
"Oh..... A year? Year and a half?"
"About the time your other trouble started to become acute, in fact."
"Yes. There must be a link."
By way of answer the doctor gave a quiet sigh. His patient, a round-faced bespectacled man called Jake Richardson, was left to wonder whether this meant that the link was all too grimly real, that only a fool would suppose one existed or that the task of explanation seemed altogether daunting. Jake didn't wonder for long. To have gone on doing so would have been to concede the doctor (Curnow by name) too much importance. When asked why he persistently went to a man he had so little time for, Jake would say that disliking your GP was a good insurance against getting dependent on him.
Now Dr Curnow shook his head a few times and swallowed. In the end he said, "There's nothing I can do for you."
"Oh, but surely you must have a—"
"No. The only way is for me to send you to someone."
"That was rather what I—"
"Excuse me a second, would you, please?"
Funny how it's got ruder to say please than not, Jake thought to himself as the doctor began to turn slowly through a small leather-bound book on his desk. He seemed to find its contents of unusual interest, even novelty. One page in particular absorbed his attention for longer than would have been necessary if he had been doing no more than reading the whole of it with care. After this interval he lifted his head abruptly and looked Jake straight in the eye for a quarter of a minute or so. Then he returned his gaze to the book before him, keeping it fixed there while he reached for his telephone. It had buttons instead of a dial.
"Dr Rosenberg? Dr Curnow here." This information was enough to provoke a considerable speech from the other end, though Jake couldn't make out anything of what was said. "I have a patient you might be able to do something for," said Curnow at last. "I have him here in the room with me. Name of Richardson, J. C. Richardson..... Well, you'll remember the Mr Pickering I sent to you last autumn..... Oh did he, I'm sorry to hear that..... Yes, I'm afraid so...." What Curnow heard next made him stare at Jake again but more consideringly, look him over rather than look at him. "Certainly not. No question of anything like that...." Curnow's face changed, except for the direction and quality of his stare, and he started nodding emphatically. "Oh yes, very much so..... Yes, the perfect description..... Oh really? You will? .... I'll ask him." Curnow arranged an appointment for the following week, listened with a grave, responsible expression to a final passage of words from far (from not all that far, actually, just a couple of hundred yards up Harley Street) and rang off.
"A very able man, Dr Rosenberg. Very able."
"Good," said Jake. "Rosenberg. Presumably he's some sort of—"
"Would you excuse me a second, please?" Curnow lifted a switch on what he no doubt called his intercom, which had started to hum hoarsely. "Yes, what is it?"
"Sheikh Qarmat bin Ezzat el Sha'ket is here," said a version of a girl's voice.
"Bring him in in thirty seconds precisely and cash as he leaves of course," said Curnow, getting up. "Well, Mr Richardson, you'll be letting me know how things go. Insides behaving themselves?"
"Oh, mustn't complain."
"That's right. No pain in the abdomen?"
"Just a twinge or so, nothing out of the way."
"Urine satisfactorily pale?"
"Yes thank you."
"Faeces satisfactorily dark?"
"Yes."
"What about the haemorrhoids?"
"You mean piles. I haven't got piles," said Jake truthfully. "I don't have them."
The doctor chuckled and shrugged his shoulders, tolerant of his patient's nervous or whimsical avoidance of the topic. "Getting plenty of exercise?"
"I thought I was supposed to take it easy."
"Mild exercise. Walking. Gardening. Didn't you say you gardened?"
"Yes I did. I do."
"Keep on with it. It can't fail to do you good. Whatever's wrong with you."
"Thank you, Dr Curnow."
In the hall the man of the East, clad quite as if he had just arrived from there, without even time to freshen up after the journey, was approaching across a carpet that looked as if it had once taken a similar course: no doubt the gift of some grateful emir or caliph. The receptionist, a girl of twenty or twenty-five, was in attendance. Jake noticed that her breasts were either remarkably large or got up to seem so by a professional. He tried to reckon the chances of Curnow's knowing which and felt downcast for a moment, because any chance at all was too much. But almost at once he cheered up again: between the front door and that of the waiting-room there moved a fellow-patient he had seen at least once before under this roof, moved with new and extreme labour, one leg straight and stiff, the other bent and stiff. Teach him, thought Jake. Not me yet, he also thought.
As one who did what doctors said while still rather looking down on them, he decided to walk to Warren Street and catch a 127 bus instead of taking a taxi. That in any case wouldn't have been as easy as winking in this area. No sooner had one black, brown or yellow person, or group of such, been set down on the pavement than Americans, Germans, Spaniards were taken up and vice versa. It was just after four o'clock on a fine afternoon early in April. Jake lengthened his stride and crossed the road in front of a double-parked car, large, black and with CD plates. An unmistakable witch doctor, in equally manifest need of outside help, was doing his best to alight from it.
Portland Place turned out to be easily as full of north-bound vehicles, most of them cars, as might have been expected at this hour on Wednesday in Holy Week, no less so than it would doubtless turn out to be on 23rd December or, this year, more likely 22nd. Despite their intermittent and slow progress, Jake waited for the lights to change before he left the kerb. He had made this a rule ever since a momentously near miss by a motorbike the previous year. The traffic going the other way was much lighter but no faster, thanks to some extensive road works with nobody working on them.
By contrast, though not altogether by contrast, Euston Road resembled a motor-racing track, or a network of such. Jake felt some relief at reaching the northern side undamaged. He waved and smiled cheerily at an old friend he couldn't have named for the moment and the old friend, who had just come out of Thames Television House, waved and smiled cheerily back a couple of seconds before Jake realised he wasn't an old friend but the chap who played the superintendent in that police series. Oh Christ, thought Jake; still, the bugger must get a lot of that.
Half an hour later, having been carried up through Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Hampstead, Jake got off the 127 at the stop outside the Orris Park National Westminster Bank. He was about to start the five-minute walk to his house when his eye fell on the window of Winesteals Ltd and an ill-written notice that nevertheless clearly proclaimed Crazy Cuts: 10p in the £ off everything this week only. He hesitated only a moment. He had brought himself to go and see his doctor, he had responsibly taken a bit of exercise, he had saved something like £1.20 by not taking a taxi home, and he was fed up with Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry) every night of his life. Into the shop he darted and over to the French corner. Côtes de Nuits Villages 1971 at £2.05 less presumably 20-1/2p? Beaune Clos de la Mousse 1972 at..... To hell with it: Château Talbot 1967 at £4.09 less whatever the fuck. On his way to what people probably meant by the check-out he noticed a pile of boxes of liqueur chocolates and hesitated again, longer this time. £2.17, but that wasn't what was at stake. In the end he took a box.