I once met a woman who so preferred dogs to
men that when her husband demanded that she make a choice between him and her dogs, she unhesitatingly chose his departure. It was she who told me that Dobermann (or Rottweiler, I can’t now remember which) was a German tax collector who bred a fierce race of canines to protect him on his rounds. More doctors these days ought, and need, to be dog-breeders.
She told me that she didn’t miss men, and whenever she got a little broody, she just mated some of her dogs. I’m like that with my articles. Whenever the world appears to me to be too awful to be borne, I sit down to write. Of course, I recognise that I have reached the age of serenity, when the folly of the world ought to flow over me like cream over strawberries, but the good Lord endowed me with too choleric a temperament for that. As the patients say, when they describe how their girlfriends came by a split lip, ‘It’s not me, doctor, it’s just not me.’ Well, as another patient once said to me, exhibiting a true generosity of mind, we’ve all got our right faults and our wrong faults. I shall leave it to others to decide if my graphomania is a right fault or a wrong fault.
It’s only because I write that the patients don’t make me scream. To use a phrase that I hear from them daily, my work does my head in. For example, when I asked a patient how he came by his scar as wide as the Grand Canyon (comparatively) in his upper arm, he said, ‘It was just a pub brawl with a machete.’ He made it sound like the title of a painting: still life with apples, pub brawl with machete.
I asked him about his career.
‘Well, doctor, I couldn’t keep a job down, being in prison, it was a very sad case, it was very difficult to cope with.’ It? What was the ‘it’ to which he referred? I was reminded of the bearded member of the Hassidim who once came up to me at the Wailing Wall and said, ‘Do not seek the Other, there is no Other.’ I think he meant something like ‘The Kingdom of God is within you,’ but if so, I am not sure I want to enter the Kingdom of God. That, however, is beside the point.
My next patient was a woman past her prime who had been kept thin by a diet of vodka and cigarettes (if I had any commercial sense, I’d publish Dr Dalrymple’s vodka and cigarettes diet, strictly no fats, carbohydrates or proteins).
‘My problem, doctor,’ she said, ‘is that I’m very vulnerable.’ ‘What to?’ I asked.
‘Men,’ she said. ‘I’m too easygoing with men. It always goes from men to relationships.’ Oh, that it again: if only we could eliminate it, life would be so much better, almost perfect in fact.
‘Anyone comes through my door and it’s a relationship, and as soon as he goes it’s another one.’ I looked in her wrinkled face, a face that launched a thousand sips, and thought, Treponema pallidum — syphilis to you and me.
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