11

‘Thomas McDonnell,’ the doctor called. A long streak of piss with a miserable face, he hovered in the waiting-room doorway.

‘That’s me,’ the Traveller said.

The doctor nodded and walked away. The Traveller followed him. He’d used the Community Hospital in Armagh before, and the name Thomas McDonnell. They had a man of that moniker in the system somewhere, and health care was free up here, so the Traveller had no compunction about using it.

Except the Accident and Emergency doctors were always so fucking miserable. He’d had a broken right hand treated in the A&E at Craigavon once. A boxer’s fracture, they called it. He swore blind he hadn’t got it by punching some poor bastard’s face in, but they didn’t believe him. He could see the contempt on every single person who treated him that night. All except that little auxiliary nurse. The night hadn’t been a total loss in the end.

This doctor was no more affable than the rest of them as he examined the Traveller’s eye. It had streamed all last night, keeping him awake as he lay in the back of the Mercedes, and he couldn’t stop squinting and blinking as he drove north this morning.

‘What happened?’ the doctor asked.

‘Got something in my eye,’ the Traveller said. ‘Hurts like fuck.’

The doctor bristled. The Traveller noticed the little pin in the shape of a fish on the doctor’s lapel. Jesus, he was a God-botherer.

‘How did it get there?’ the doctor asked.

‘Don’t know,’ the Traveller said.

The doctor sighed. ‘Head back.’

Before the Traveller knew what was happening, the doctor squeezed some orange stuff out of a little tube into his eye.

‘Fuck’s sake,’ the Traveller said, blinking.

The doctor sighed again. ‘It’s just to help me see better. Let’s have a look.’

He pushed back the Traveller’s upper eyelid and shone a light in. ‘Hmm,’ the doctor said. The mint on his breath masked something sourer.

‘What?’ the Traveller asked.

‘There’s a foreign body under the upper lid, looks like a little fragment of wood, and you’ve a minor corneal abrasion. The nurse will irrigate the eye to remove the object and apply some antibiotic ointment.’

‘Nurse?’ the Traveller asked.

‘Mm-hmm,’ the doctor said.

‘No, you do it,’ the Traveller said.

The doctor released the Traveller’s eyelid. ‘No need,’ he said. ‘It’s quite simple. She’ll just pour a bit of saline solution into the eye to flush it out and apply an antibiotic ointment to stop any infection. The abrasion will heal in a few days.’

‘You do it,’ the Traveller repeated. He grimaced as whatever the doctor had put in his eye found its way to the back of his throat.

‘Really, there’s no need. It’ll only take a—’

‘You’re the doctor, you fucking do it,’ the Traveller said. ‘It’s my fucking eye. It needs a doctor. I’m not having some blade just out of school poking at it. You do it.’

The doctor did his best to look authoritative. ‘Please moderate your language, Mr McDonnell. Nurse Barnes is a skilled and experienced A&E nurse. She’s done this a thousand times. And I’m not sure she’d appreciate being called a “blade”.’

The Traveller lowered his feet to the floor. ‘You do it,’ he said.

‘Honestly, there’s—’

The Traveller stepped closer, the doctor’s ear within biting distance, and whispered, ‘You. Fucking. Do it.’

The doctor’s voice quivered. ‘Mr McDonnell, we won’t tolerate abusive behaviour in this—’

The Traveller seized the back of the doctor’s scrawny neck in his left hand, and pinched his windpipe between the fingers and thumb of his right.

‘Are you going to do it?’

The doctor staggered back, taking the Traveller with him. A swivel chair tipped and fell to the floor. The doctor swiped a pen holder, scattering its contents across his desk. He made choked ‘Ack!’ noises as his face reddened.

‘Are you going to do it?’

A scream came from behind. The Traveller twisted towards the voice, the doctor’s throat still in his grip. The nurse in the doorway screamed again.

‘Fuck,’ the Traveller said.

He kicked the doctor’s feet from under him and ran.