He was too young for this, too young-arrogant to take a … shall we say seasoned?, patient’s word for it and too young-vulnerable to touch and see the lifelong damage suffered by some. He bent his head over the phone and talked as I looked at the familiar posters warning me about Aids, smoking, fatty foods, cholesterol, heart disease. I always wondered why there were never any posters warning the unwary about heartbreak.

While the locum talked on the phone, I dunked my pain-free left hand into the pocket of my donkey jacket and drew out my green malachite worrystone, rubbing it with my hard, callus ed thumb, an action so thoughtless, so practised, I was surprised to find it between my fingers when I reached out to take the locum’s note. Ambidexterity is a boon and my right thumb and forefinger snapped up the stone and began to worry it.

Hyacinth gave me my worrystone: she danced out of a crowd, kissed me and slid a small, gold-wrapped present into my pocket. Later, back in my room, I pulled it from my pocket, wrinkled and squashed. I tore off the paper and there it was, small and tombstone-shaped, with a slight polished indentation. Wrapped round it was a note, written in sloping capital letters: ‘GOOD LUCK SPECIALI I THINK MAYBE YOULL NEED THIS ONCE IN A WILEI’ I showed my mother the stone and she turned it in her hands as I undressed, carefully sliding the jeans over my scarred, white legs.

‘What is it?’ I asked, hopping from foot to foot.

It's a worrystone, she wrote.

Already she was working it between her fingers, mindlessly.

You rub it when you worry, rub it like this. Her thumb slipped back and forth over the indent.

I read Hyacinth’s note again. ‘What’s a wile? Why does it only happen once?’

My mother looked at me and smiled her half-smile.

It happens a lot more than once in a lifetime.

I go back into the waiting room at the doctor’s and Sonja looks up from a magazine. We walk out together, her arm threading through mine.

‘Well?’

‘I have to go to St Michael’s. It’s nothing, but the guy was a locum and he panicked.’ I smile down at her in reassurance. ‘He called them and they’re expecting me.’

Sonja drives me there and I persuade her to go home, go to work. I do, after all, know my way around the ENT clinic, can walk it in my sleep. I make to get out of the car and Sonja grabs the sleeve of my jacket, pulling me round to kiss my mouth. She tugs my beard and mouths, ‘G’luck, Special,’ and smiles. My heart soars, electricity crackling across my pacemaker. For a moment she looks like the Sonja I met at King’s College, the Sonja I have lived with for twenty years. She drives off, waving through the open window until she turns a corner.

Dr Laws, the registrar, ushers me straight into his surgery and examines my ears, his mouth pursed, his bifocals glinting. ‘It’s a mild infection, John. Nothing to worry about.’ He writes a prescription and hands it to me. I begin to stand but he touches my hand and motions for me to sit. He takes off his glasses and folds them, pinches the bridge of his nose, then looks directly at me, stern and forbidding, reminding me of the Eye Man in Tommy’s all those years ago.