IN THE BAG

Well, I think you're suffering from stress. It can take some funny forms, you know. I have some experience of it myself. Yes.

Stress - that's what my father would have put it down to. That's probably what I would have put it down to, if it hadn't actually happened to me. Of course I was under stress. There was tradition to uphold. As far back as we cared to trace the family, we had been doctors. On the father's side, of course. Nobody seemed to ask what the mothers had been. Doctors' wives, presumably. A kind of profession in itself, I suppose, with a special skill in not minding broken promises, ruined dinners, disturbed sleep and absent husbands.

Nobody especially pushed me. I just saw the patients. The hope in their eyes. The gratitude in their faces, even after bad news. In some sense, the doctor shared their illness and their suffering with them. My grandfather had gone the whole hog and actually caught some fearfully rare disease and died of it. The patient, incidentally, survived. It had all happened while my father was away at college - in fact, it was the Long Vacation, and he was halfway across a glacier in Iceland and quite unreachable. As he often was in later life, too.

His mother, a determined lady, bought in locums and dragged in friends of her late husband to keep the practice going until her son was fully qualified and could take it over. Then she gave it all up and moved to a convenient sea-side resort. We always spent our holidays with her when I was a small child. Looking back, I don't know if it was economy or filial piety. The practice had declined a little, despite local loyalty, and my father had married young into a family without money. On the other hand, my grandmother never struck me as a particularly loving woman. Unless you believe that whom God loves, He first chastises. When I was very young, I had an accidental peep into her bedroom and saw one of those hairbrushes that seem to consist of nothing but sharp points, as if they were designed to help young fakirs practise lying on a bed of nails.

The grandmaternal lodging was not perhaps the best place for a teenager who was exhibiting the classic symptoms of depression: bowler-hat-shaped headaches, early wakening, indefinable malaise. On the other hand, it was cheap and convenient, and my father had prescribed sea air and exercise as a cure for too much time spent over books, while I had been preparing for the scholarship exams at ...oh, it doesn't matter which Oxbridge College. Of course, it did matter - it mattered terribly, because our family had always - you understand.

I walked the promenade three times a day, every day. It was a very wet November. Perhaps I hoped I would catch a chill. My grandmother never complained about drying my clothes or providing me with fresh ones. Maybe the self-punishment involved appealed to her. Moreover, she no doubt believed, like my father, that no one ever got ill through getting cold and wet. It was staying cold and wet that did the damage.

To be fair to her, though, she looked after me very well indeed, as though she almost cared. She cooked all my favourite food - except for curry, because I didn't tell her I liked that. I didn't think she'd approve. She certainly wouldn't have approved of the number of pints I needed to drink before the curry really hit the spot. I wondered why her brusque functionality had mutated into affection, and one night she revealed the reason. "You look just like Tom," she said. Pictures of my grandfather were all over the place, lurking in dark corners, at the end of passageways, often looking down from just above the normal eyeline. I mumbled into my steak and kidney pudding, and resolved to check the diagnosis at my leisure, on the way to bed.

She was right. The same dark, slightly haunted, eyes. The gaunt cheekbones.The quiff of hair. The pencil-thin moustache and bristly little beard on the chin. A forgiveable affectation in an eighteen-year old who had left school in the summer and was trying for Oxbridge.

Was it the suet in the pudding that kept me awake? Or was it something to do with my grandmother's unwonted emotion? After identifying me so clearly with her dead husband, she had insisted that I should take possession at once of his doctor's bag, which she had been keeping all these years. After all, I was going to follow in the family tradition.

The gesture was so genuine that I didn't like to protest. Or ask why she hadn't given it to my father, who would have been a more appropriate recipient. I just took it, and went to bed with my cocoa and home-made ginger biscuit. Those ginger biscuits, I may add, were something else, and very nearly justified my grandmother's existence. The cocoa was pretty good, too. But comforting as it was, it didn't send me to sleep.

I just lay there, in the semi-dark, not trying to read because I had been forbidden to by my father. "Total brain-rest," he had said. Anyway, the bulb in the bedside-light was so feeble that I couldn't have read even if I'd wanted to - a habit of my grandmother's, probably of her whole generation. A love of dimness. I began to look at my reflection in the mirror at the end of the bed. And then I realised that the face I could see wasn't mine, because there wasn't a mirror at the end of the bed. That was the way things were in my bedroom at home. But I could still see the face, and naturally I assumed it must be one of those ubiquitous portraits of Tom. Until it began to move.

It didn't come much closer - just to the foot of the bed - and as I say, the light was so weak that all I could make out was the face itself and a sort of glinting where the silver watch-chain crossed the darkness of the waistcoat. Then it began to speak.

"It's in the bag," it said. I was so preoccupied with myself and the exams I had to take, that I thought this was a simple prophecy of reassurance. I'd have expected a ghost to be a little more formal in linguistic expression, but it was all being kept within the family, so perhaps it didn't matter. Then I saw he was nodding at something beside me. "The bag," he said, "the bag. There's a note in the bag."

Without getting out of bed, I opened it and rummaged. "I'm sorry," I said, "I can't find anything - and even if I could, I don't think I could read it in this light."

"Then I'll have to tell you. Face to face. Writing it down was always a coward's way. Still - maybe that's what I am."

He had raised his head a little and his sunken eyes were catching a little of the light. They struck me as very dark and very sad.

"Surgery had run on and on. It was late summer, the evenings beginning to draw in, and no one had put on the light in the waiting room. Well - everyone knew my wife didn't like wasting electricity. The bulb was so feeble it wouldn't have made much difference even if someone had flicked the switch. The whole house was still. I knew what that meant. My wife had made the dinner and served it and it was waiting in the oven for me. She would probably be in bed. Possibly even asleep. No reproach. Just absence.

"Only one patient left, a huddled shape in the darkest corner of the waiting room. 'Do come in, then,' I said. 'I don't always wait to be asked,' was the reply. I thought that was a bit funny, especially as he didn't move at all. Then he said, 'You look as though you've had enough.' I laughed, you know. It was so true. But it wasn't the kind of thing my patients ever said to me. They only ever talked about themselves. I couldn't quite get over one of them worrying about me. 'I can still manage one more,' I said. 'There will always be one more,' he said, 'and then one more after that. They'll never stop coming, you know. And in the long run, they'll all die. And so will you. You can't do anything about it. So why bother?'

"I was very tired. I'd had a difficult birth, an all-night job, earlier in the week, and a couple of night-calls, and I hadn't been sleeping well - but I still wasn't going to take that kind of talk from a patient of mine. 'I don't recall seeing you here before,' I said, up on my high horse, 'but if that's what you really think, then I shall most certainly have you taken off my list.' He laughed - it was a hollow, rumbling, chesty kind of laugh - and lifted his head towards me, which had been sunk on his chest. 'You may not have seen me before,' he said, 'but I've certainly been here, many, many times.' He didn't have a face. He had a white skull. It was Death. But as I went towards him, there was only a gathering of shadows in the corner of the waiting-room where he had sat.

"I went back to my desk, sat down and thought it through. I was insured - quite a recent and quite a generous policy. All the usual exclusions, of course. As with pontoon, the odds are stacked in favour of the bank. However, that very week I had come across an obscure illness in one of my patients - fatal, unless treated, but not painful. The terminal stage could be accelerated by the wrong medication - and that medication was commonly prescribed for the symptoms of the disease. Fortunately, I had always had a habit of self-prescribing. I didn't want to have any of my colleagues blamed for my death. Half the blood sample had gone to the laboratory, and the report had confirmed my diagnosis. I injected the second half into myself. Then I sat down and wrote a note for my son, telling him what I'd done and why."

"He never got it," I said, quite forgetting to be frightened that I was talking to my dead grandfather. He didn't seem to want to scare me. Maybe he couldn't help using his best bedside manner.

"It was in the bag," he repeated, "in the bag...in the bag..." And his face melted away, as the early morning sunshine filled the space on the blank wall where I thought I'd seen it.

From then on, the weather improved and the thrice-daily promenades on the promenade seemed to be serving their purpose. I slept well, woke late, and ate even more of my grandmother's cooking. I had gone through the bag in detail in the early-morning light and found a crumpled piece of paper at the bottom of it, but chemicals leaking from three or four poorly stoppered bottles had rendered any writing completely illegible. Nonetheless, I had made my decision, and viewed the approaching examinations with equanimity.

A couple of days before Christmas, the telegram came. Actually, there were two of them - one addressed to my father. I pointedly ignored both, but he immediately opened his and let out a great sigh of relief.

"It's in the bag," he said. "In the bag." He was too preoccupied with his own happiness to bother looking at me, otherwise he would have seen how white my face had gone. "You've got your place - old Pinkie's fixed it - though he says your exams really weren't up to scratch - but he felt he had to let you in, because he knew your grandfather."

Obviously not well enough, I thought, but I kept the thought to myself.

Oh, yes, I qualified. Took some prizes, too, on the way, because after all I ought to have sailed through those exams. And this is my father's practice. As it was my grandfather's. But I've changed some things. I don't prescribe for myself. I have a strict appointment system and I call the patients in by name through this intercom - I don't go out and get them - you never know who may be sitting out there. And finally: I always stop for dinner.

Goodnight. Please see yourself out.

Mike Rogers

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