The Bursar's Wife by E G Rodford

Author:E G Rodford [Rodford, E G]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785650031
Publisher: Titan
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

28

KAMAL’S CURRENT FLATMATE, AN IRAQI JUNIOR DOCTOR AT Addenbrooke’s, stitched up my shoulder with four of his best while I sat, stripped to the waist, the wrong way round on a chair, resting my forearms on the back. We were in Kamal’s room in a small flat over a Chinese supermarket on Mill Road. One of his walls was decorated with floor to ceiling paperbacks, one had a bed against it, the third had hooks in the wall with coat hangers on them and served as storage for his meagre wardrobe. The fourth had a desk and chair under the window and it was here that I sat looking at the ancient laptop that Kamal wrote on and gritting my teeth with every new puncture of flesh – there was no anaesthetic. Kamal supplemented his income by subletting a room in his flat to a succession of Arab medical students.

The thin man had sliced through my raincoat, jacket, shirt, vest and skin, leaving a three-inch-long gash in the lower right shoulder. Kamal was wittering on instead of refilling my glass with Jack Daniels, and he was beginning to get on my nerves. For the son of Palestinian exiles I always expected him to take a dim view of authority, or at least to be wary of it, but he had spent the last couple of hours bemoaning the fact that I hadn’t gone to the police. I’d explained that I’d come to him rather than going to Addenbrooke’s precisely because I wanted to avoid the police. Doctors were required to report knife crime and I didn’t want to risk a protracted explanation to the police of what I was doing in the Haverhill house. The woman had only to say I had forced my way in and punched her in the face. And the thin man had only to say that he was defending her from my vicious attack and for there never to have been a baseball bat. The tables would be turned on me in no time. Despite Kamal’s nagging he’d done the right thing and called in his flatmate who told me he perfected his sewing technique by practising at the kitchen table on pork skin.

“I don’t eat it myself,” he said, tugging at some thread and causing me to wince.

“Religious, eh?”

“No, I just don’t like the taste.”

He tied off the last stitch and dressed the closed wound. He told me I should get it changed tomorrow and the stitches would need to come out in a week. I thanked him and he said it was nothing. He went off with his medic’s bag; he had a night shift to get through.

“Why don’t you pour me some more of your whisky?” I said to Kamal.

“Because you’ve had enough and I have to make it last. What you need is something to eat.”

“You can’t cook and I’m not going out. How about a takeaway?” We settled on Chinese and I gave him enough of Sylvia’s money to buy food and a bottle of Jack Daniels as well as a bottle of whisky for his flatmate.

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