Pip. Freya North

Чтение книги онлайн.

      SEVEN

      Zac has had no further dreams, wet or otherwise, featuring Pip. Which is just as well, really. Firstly, it wouldn’t have been fair on Juliana, who Zac has been seeing for a good few weeks now. Secondly, it would have made it just a little more awkward and loaded when, the next time they did meet, Pip was to run her fingers through his hair, fondling his ears in the process.

      Dr Pippity frequently ruffles the hair or tweaks the ears of patients’ parents and siblings. She’s been trained to. It’s part of her job. It serves a twofold purpose. It’s another way of eliciting laughter from the sick child, plus an important part of a clown doctor’s work is to treat the family of the patients because they’re often suffering, too. Clown doctors aim to lighten the load; to help diminish the burden carried by patients and their families in some small way, however temporarily. A minute spent grinning, laughing even, is a veritable tonic. It is also a minute when pain subsides and worry is sidetracked.

      However, Pip has never had her handling of a parent backfire. Sure, sometimes her jokes and tricks have fallen flat – the parent perhaps feels awkward or reluctant due to desperately concealed stress and worry. But the patient has always enjoyed the tomfoolery and Pip knows, and the parent knows, that that’s what matters. For Pip, though, to be hit on by the father of a patient, in front of the mother, too, is a situation wholly unexpected and for which she’s had no specific training.

      June, Tom’s mother, hadn’t intended to come to the hospital that day. She was up to her eyes preparing for her wedding that weekend and Zac had said he’d take Tom for his appointment.

      ‘It’s guilt,’ Zac had teased her gently, when she had phoned to say that she’d come to the hospital. ‘You running off on some glorious Caribbean honeymoon, leaving your son behind to fend for himself.’

      ‘Bastard!’ June had cursed in her defence, but fondly. ‘He’s not fending for himself, he’s staying with you!’

      Zac gave a sharp intake of breath. ‘Dicey,’ he warned, ‘leaving him with me – well, that’ll be fending for himself, all right.’

      ‘You are a sod,’ June laughed, ‘and anyway, you cad – it’s not as if you ever took me on a sumptuous honeymoon.’

      ‘Well,’ said Zac, ‘that’s because I never married you.’

      ‘Bastard in capital letters,’ June jested. ‘I’d’ve declined even if you had asked me on bended knee with a rose between your teeth and a fuck-off diamond ring. I’m late. We’ll see you in Out-patients at 3.00.’

       I didn’t ask her to marry me. It didn’t cross my mind. Or hers. And, if I had, she’d have said ‘no’ anyway and thought me insane. It wasn’t an issue. The only issue was to be good parents to a child born to two people who were strong friends and had been having good sex for quite a while.

      Zac, wouldn’t most people define the ultimate relationship to be one where friendship and good sex prevail?

      Now, yes. At my age now – yes. Though the two never seem to go hand in hand nowadays – not that I’m complaining. Juliana is fabulous in bed, but neither of us is pursuing this even for friendship, let alone intimacy. And lovely lovely Lisa – one of my closest friends but the thought of screwing her verges on incest. Or take Pru – the two occasions we’ve been to bed were pretty nondescript, yet we have a great laugh together, getting drunk, talking rubbish. So that’s why my life wants for nothing. I have great friends. And I have fantastic sex. But it’s horses for courses in my book. I’d rather have an enviable stable of different steeds and a choice of, er, mount, than only the one horse, just the one all-rounder.

      You’re talking a string of spirited fillies versus just the one old nag?

       No. I’m not. That makes me sound a cynic and a cad and I’m neither. June and I were young and impetuous and full of those ideologies that, in your twenties, you formulate and think are the answer to life itself. We had an on-off relationship for a long time. She actually fell pregnant during a time we weren’t officially seeing each other. It was a casual one-nighter, like we were prone to have in those days. But our philosophy – then as now – was that we could be awesome parents and great friends and simply not live together as Man and Wife, or Girlfriend and Boyfriend, or He and She, full stop.

      And it works?

       You ask Tom. Just you ask him.

      Out-patients. June and Zac sat with Tom, looking like a very normal family. Except for the fact that the topic of conversation between the three of them was June’s imminent wedding.

      ‘Mum is worried СКАЧАТЬ