Room Nine

The stethoscope was cold, and Doctor Nunu warmed it by breathing on it, the way you would warm a child’s hands, and then put it on my back anyway.

“Breathe in,” she said.

I breathed in.

The polyclinic on our street has one doctor for our district, on the second floor, room nine, between the vaccination room and a door that says only DO NOT. I had come about a pain on the left side, four centimetres under where a heart would go. I had brought a sheet of paper with three possible causes on it, in order, each with a percentage.

She had read it in the corridor while I took my coat off. She had sighed at the percentages.

“Who wrote this?”

“I did. On the bus.”

“And these numbers?”

“Those I did on the stairs.”

Now she was listening to my back, and the room was very quiet, and I went on holding the breath. She moved the stethoscope a little to the right. I held it. She moved it down. I held it. Somewhere in the corridor a grandmother told another grandmother that she had been fourteenth in the queue since eight o’clock and was now, somehow, sixteenth.

Doctor Nunu looked up.

“You can breathe out.”

“Sorry,” I said, and did. “You didn’t say how long.”

“Nobody ever needs telling.” She looked at me over her glasses for one second longer than a doctor looks at a patient, and then she wrote something on her card, and I would give a great deal to know what.

She pressed my side. “Here?”

“A little to the left.”

“Here?”

“That’s it. Exactly that.”

She sat down and took her phone out of the drawer, which I did not expect. She had a news story open. Microsoft’s machine, she said, had been put in Science that morning: it got the diagnosis right in eighty cases of a hundred, from emergency records, and the doctors got forty-seven.

“Forty-seven,” she said. “I’ve been doing this thirty-one years.”

“It read files,” I said. “It didn’t press anybody’s side.”

“It doesn’t have sixteen grandmothers in the corridor, either.” She put the phone back in the drawer and shut it, as if it might hear the rest. “Half the cost, it says. I’m already half the cost. Ask the ministry.”

Then she gave me the diagnosis. I carry my bag on the left shoulder. Always the left, every day, with the laptop in it, and the laptop is heavy, and that is all. Move the bag.

“That wasn’t on my list,” I said.

“No. It was on your shoulder.”

She did not charge me anything. On the way out she asked, as if it were nothing, whether I had a cough, and I said no, and she said, “Good. Some people breathe more than they need to. You breathe less,” and opened the door for the next grandmother before I could ask whether that was a diagnosis too.

I moved the bag to the right shoulder on the stairs. By the bus stop the pain had gone, or moved with the bag; I am still working out which.

The machine is right four times in five. Nunu was right once, and she needed only one finger and a strong dislike of my percentages.