The House Gun Read Free

weekly stint at a clinic. Doctors like herself, in private practice, were expected to meet the need in areas of the city and the once genteel white suburbs of the old time where in recent years there was an influx, a great rise in and variety of the population. She had regularly fulfilled this obligation; now conscientiousness goaded her, over what had come to a stop; she went to her clinic instead of accompanying Harald to the lawyer. Perhaps this also was to keep herself to the conviction that what had happened could not be? It was not a day to examine motives; just follow the sequence set out in an appointments register. She put on her white coat (she is a functionary, as the magistrate is hunched in his gown) and entered the institutional domain familiar to her, the steaming sterilizer with its battery of precise instruments for every task, the dancing show of efficiency of the young District Nurse with her doll’s white starched crown pinned atop her dreadlocks. Some of the patients did not have words, in English, to express what they felt disordered within them. The nurse translated when necessary, relaying the doctor’s questions, switching easily from one mother tongue to another she shared with these patients, and relaying their answers.
    The procession of flesh was laid before the doctor. It was her medium in which she worked, the abundant black thighs reluctantly parted in modesty (the nurse chaffed the women, Mama, doctor’s a woman just like you), the white hairy paps of old men under auscultation. The babies’ tender bellies slid under her palms; tears of terrible reproach bulged from their eyes when she had to
thrust the needle into the soft padding of their upper arms, where muscle had not yet developed. She did it as she performed any necessary procedure, with all her skill to avoid pain.
    Isn’t that the purpose?
    There is plenty of pain that arises from within; this woman with a tumour growing in her neck, plain to feel it under experienced fingers, and then the usual weekly procession of pensioners hobbled by arthritis.
    But the pain that comes from without—the violation of the flesh, a child is burned by an overturned pot of boiling water, or a knife is thrust. A bullet. This piercing of the flesh, the force, ram of a bullet deep into it, steel alloy that breaks bone as if shattering a teacup—she is not a surgeon but in this violent city she has watched those nuggets delved for and prised out on operating tables, they retain the streamline shape of velocity itself, there is no element in the human body that can withstand, even dent, a bullet—those who survive recall the pain differently but all accounts agree: an assault. The pain that is the product of the body itself; its malfunction is part of the self: somewhere, a mystery medical science cannot explain, the self is responsible. But this—the bullet: the pure assault of pain.
    The purpose of a doctor’s life is to defend the body against the violence of pain. She stands on the other side of the divide from those who cause it. The divide of the ultimate, between death and life.
    This body whose interior she is exploring with a plastic-gloved hand like a diviner’s instinctively led to a hidden water-source, has a foetus, three months of life inside it.
    I’m telling you true. I was never so sick with the others. Every morning, sick as a dog.
    Vomit your heart out.
    D’you think that means it’s a boy, doctor? The patient has the mock coyness women often affect towards a doctor, the consulting room is their stage with a rare chance for a little performance. Ag,
my husband’d be over the moon. But I tell him, if we don’t come through with it right this time, I don’t know about you, I’m giving up.
    The doctor obliges by laughing with her.
    We could do a simple test if you want to know the sex.
    Oh no, it’s God’s will.
    Next come a succession of the usual heart ailments