‘How are you, Mrs Cortenza?’ I say, when the wheezing has subsided sufficiently to make conversation seem feasible. She shakes her head. She is not good.

I look at my notes. ‘How were the pills I gave you last time?’ She shakes her head again. They were not good.

‘And are you sleeping?’ She is not sleeping. Her sleep is not good. Nothing is good. I look at her for as long as I can without embarrassment, and then stare at my notes intently, as if there might be something in them that will solve not only Mrs Cortenza’s problems, but the problems of all the world.

And suddenly I realize that at home I have something which has worked for somebody, and if I am any kind of a doctor then I am compelled to try it. I call David, and ask him to bring GoodNews down to the surgery.

‘You have to pay him,’ he says.

‘Out of what? My mystical healing budget?’

‘I don’t care. But you’re not to take advantage of him.’

‘How about this: he treats Mrs Cortenza, and we don’t charge him for board and lodging. Or for electricity. Or for general inconvenience.’

‘You’re not taking him down there every day.’

‘I won’t need to bring him down here every day. I am a perfectly competent doctor, you know. I have managed to prescribe the occasional effective antibiotic.’ But even as I am saying this, I am making a list of my other recidivists. Just imagine: a working life without Mr Arthurs! Or Mrs McBride! Or Barmy Brian Beech, as we call him here, with no affection whatsoever!

GoodNews arrives within fifteen minutes, a quarter-hour which seems as long but no longer than my usual consultations with Mrs Cortenza, but which I am happy to curtail. I get some funny looks from reception, but no vocal objections from anyone.

Mrs Cortenza stares at GoodNews’s eyebrow-brooches with naked hostility.

‘Hello, love,’ says GoodNews. ‘You’re a smasher, aren’t you? What’s your name?’

She continues to stare.

‘This is Mrs Cortenza.’

‘Not that name. Her proper name. Her first name.’

I don’t have a clue, of course. How would I know? I’ve only been seeing her for five years. I scrabble through my notes.

‘Maria.’

‘Maria,’ says GoodNews, and then he says it again, this time in an exaggerated, all-purpose European accent. ‘Marrrrriaaaaa. What are we going to do about Maria, eh? You know that song? West Side Story?’

‘That’s The Sound of Music,’ I tell him. ‘The West Side Story one is different.’ I wonder for a moment whether this will be my only demonstration of expertise throughout the entire consultation.

‘So you’ve had two songs written about you?’ says GoodNews. ‘I’m not surprised. Lovely girl like you.’

Mrs Cortenza smiles shyly. I want to throttle her for being so gullible.

‘So what needs doing here? How can we get Maria dancing again?’

‘She’s got chronic inflammation around most of her joints. Hips, knees. A lot of back pain.’

‘Is she sad?’

‘I should think so, with that lot.’

‘No, I mean, like, mentally.’

‘Is she mentally sad? You mean, sad in her mind as opposed to sad in her knees?’

‘Yeah, all right, I’m not as good at talking as you, Dr Smartypants. But let’s see which one of us can do something for her.’

‘Why, does she have to be unhappy before you can treat her?’

‘It helps if I can really key into that stuff, yeah.’

‘Are you sad, Mrs Cortenza?’ I ask her.

She looks at me. ‘Sad? Sadness?’ Neither her hearing nor her English is perfect, and so it is difficult to know which of these difficulties is responsible for the confusion.

‘Yes. Sadness.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she says, with the relish only the old can bring to such a subject. ‘Very, very sad.’

‘Why?’ says GoodNews.

‘Too many things,’ she says. She gestures at her clothes—she has worn black ever since I have known her—and her eyes fill with tears. ‘My husband,’ she says. ‘My sister. My mother. My father. Too many things.’ One doesn’t want to feel unsympathetic, and it is certainly unhelpful to be prescriptive about grief, but one wonders whether Mrs Cortenza should maybe have come to terms with being an orphan by now. ‘My son,’ she continues.

‘Your son’s dead?’

‘No, no, not dead. Very bad. He move to Archway. He never call me.’

‘Is that enough sadness?’ I ask GoodNews. I didn’t know we had to key into sadness, and suddenly the idea of GoodNews seeing Barmy Brian is a little less attractive. I would imagine that there is a lot of sadness hidden away somewhere in Barmy Brian, and not all of it would be easy to listen to.

‘That all makes sense,’ says GoodNews. ‘I can feel most of that. Explain to her that I will need to touch her shoulders, neck and head.’

‘I understand,’ says Mrs Cortenza, somewhat affronted.

‘Is that OK?’ I ask her.

‘OK. Yes.’

GoodNews sits opposite her and closes his eyes for a while; then he gets up, stands behind her and starts to massage her scalp. He whispers while he’s doing it, but I can’t make out anything he’s saying.

‘Very hot!’ Mrs Cortenza says suddenly.

‘That’s good,’ says GoodNews. ‘The hotter the better. Things are happening.’

He’s right. Things are happening. Maybe it’s just the momentary intensity of the experience, maybe it’s just the collective concentration, but it seems to me that the room has become warmer, much warmer, and for a moment it seems to become brighter, too. I don’t want to feel this heat, and I don’t want to notice how the wattage of the one bulb in the ceiling seems to have increased from its dim forty to a dazzling one hundred; feeling and seeing these things seems akin to feeling and seeing a whole lot of other, more complicated things, and I’d really rather not, if you don’t mind. So I shall forget about them, as best I can.

What will prove more difficult to forget is this: after a few minutes of gentle massage and attendant ambient disturbance, Mrs Cortenza stands up, stretches herself gingerly and says to GoodNews, ‘Thank you. Is much better now. Much much better.’ And she nods to me—I may be paranoid, but the nod seems quite cool, a way of telling me how negligible her problems were, and how easy to fix if I had any kind of expertise—and walks out at about five times the speed she walked in.

‘So,’ I say. ‘You can cure old age. Well done. Hurrah for you. There should be a few quid in that somewhere.’

‘Nah, she’s not cured,’ says GoodNews. ‘Of course she’s not cured. Her body’s fucked. But life will be much better for her.’ I can see that he’s pleased, genuinely pleased—not for himself, but for Mrs Cortenza, and I feel small and petty and hopeless.

‘You can tell me now,’ I say before he leaves. ‘The children aren’t here. What’s the secret?’

‘I don’t know what the secret is. That wasn’t what I couldn’t tell you.’

‘So tell me what you couldn’t tell me.’

‘Drugs.’

‘What do you mean, drugs? Drugs what?’

‘That’s how it started. E. That’s what I think, anyway. I was doing loads, and it was all that “I love you, you’re my friend” stuff in clubs every Friday night, and… I’m like one of those American comic-book guys. Spiderman and all them. It changed my molecular make-up. Gave me superpowers.’

‘Ecstasy gave you superpowers.’

‘I reckon.’ He shrugs. ‘Weird, innit? I mean, there’s you at university and all that finding out about, like, your thigh-bone’s connected to your knee-bone or whatever you do there. And there’s me down the clubs dropping a few. And we’ve come out at the same place. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I still think there’s a place for what you do.’

‘Thank you. That’s very generous of you.’

‘No, no problem. I’ll see you back at the ranch.’

Later, I sit watching Molly in the bath, looking for and failing to find any traces of her eczema.