The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [77]
“And how old was he?” the doctor asked. “Do you remember?”
“Eighty-one, eighty-two.”
“Good,” repeated Dr Royston, checking another little box on the form in front of him. “Have you ever suffered from any of these?” he asked, holding out a clipboard. The list began with arthritis and ended eighteen lines later with tuberculosis.
He ran an eye slowly down the long list before replying. “No, none of them,” was all he said, not admitting to asthma on this occasion.
“Do you smoke?”
“Never.”
“Drink?”
“Socially—I enjoy the occasional glass of wine with dinner, but I never drink spirits.”
“Excellent,” said the doctor and checked the last of the little boxes. “Now, let’s check your height and weight. Come over here, please, Mr. Kravits, and climb onto this scale.”
The doctor had to stand on his toes in order to push the wooden marker up until it was flat across his patient’s head. “Six feet one inch,” he declared, then looked down at the scale and flicked the little weight across until it just balanced. “A hundred and seventy-nine pounds. Not bad.” He filled in two more lines of his report. “Perhaps just a little overweight.”
“Now I need a urine sample, Mr. Kravits. If you would be kind enough to take this plastic container next door, fill it about halfway up, leave it on the ledge when you’ve finished, and then come back to me.”
The doctor wrote out some more notes while his patient left the room. He returned a few moments later.
“I’ve left the container on the ledge,” was all he said.
“Good. The next thing I need is a blood sample. Could you roll up your right sleeve?” The doctor placed a rubber pad around his right bicep and pumped until the veins stood out clearly. “A tiny prick,” he said. “You’ll hardly feel a thing.” The needle went in, and he turned away as the doctor drew his blood. Dr. Royston cleaned the wound and fixed a small circular Band-Aid over the broken skin. The doctor then bent over and placed a cold stethoscope on different parts of the patient’s chest, occasionally asking him to breathe in and out.
“Good,” he kept repeating. Finally he said, “That just about wraps it up, Mr. Kravits. You’ll need to spend a few minutes down the corridor with Dr. Harvey, so she can take a chest X ray and have some fun with her electric pads, but after that you’ll be through, and you can go home to”—he checked his pad—“New Jersey. The company will be in touch in a few days, as soon as we’ve had the results.”
“Thank you, Dr. Royston,” he said as he buttoned his shirt. The doctor pressed a buzzer on his desk and the nurse reappeared and led him to another room, with a plaque on the door that read “Dr. Mary Harvey.” Dr. Harvey, a smartly dressed middle-aged woman with her gray hair cropped short, was waiting for him. She smiled at the tall, handsome man and asked him to take off his shirt again and to step up onto the platform and stand in front of the X-ray unit.
“Place your arms behind your back and breathe in. Thank you.” Next she asked him to lie down on the examining table in the corner of the room. She leaned over his chest, smeared blodges of gel on his skin, and fixed little pads to them. While he stared up at the white ceiling she flicked a switch and concentrated on a tiny television screen on the corner of her desk. Her expression gave nothing away.
After she had removed the gel with a damp cloth, she said, “You can put your shirt back on, Mr. Kravits. You are now free to leave.”
Once he was fully dressed, the young man hurried out of the building and down the steps, and ran all the way to the corner where they had parted. They hugged each other again.
“Everything go all right?”
“I think so,” he said. “They told me I’d be hearing from them in the next few days, once they’ve had the results of all their tests.”
“Thank God it hasn’t been a problem for you.”
“I only wish it weren’t for you.”
“Let’s not even think about it,” said David, holding tightly on to the one person he loved.
Marvin rang a week later to let David know that Dr. Royston had given him a clean bill of health.