As waiting rooms go, this one is typical. It is small enough to squash twenty people in, yet large enough for each pair of knees not to knock into another pair seated opposite. Sitting in the fifth beige-tinted plastic chair from the door, I wonder idly, while on the subject of knees, whether all the others in the room are experiencing the same tremor going through their patellas.
(By way of an aside, I must admit that I learned that ‘patella’ was the name of the knee bone only by accident and not from my years as a pupil assiduously absorbing information during biology classes. ‘Patella’ was one of the clues in a cryptic crossword some years ago and I remember it all the more because the clue was so cleverly, and dare I say it, mischievously, constructed: ‘Two girls, one on each knee.’ Pat & Ella. If all biology terms were taught in the form of memorable cryptic clues, I think I’d have made the grade as a doctor. Possibly.) Anyhow, today in the waiting room in the medical clinic, it is really hard to tell what shape everyone’s knees are in from expression alone. Hard, because 16 of the others in the room have their heads bowed down, as though in silent prayer. Only, each of them is reading an article from a magazine at least two years old.
The 17th person is an elderly lady in a wheelchair. She is wearing, among other things, an expression of benign tolerance, which I am fairly certain has to do with persons number 18 and 19 in the room. They are the only two who are not seated, preferring instead to use the narrow aisle between the two rows of chairs to chase each other up and down. Which, of course, entails bumping into the others as they slide past, up and down.
They are, perhaps, eight and seven years of age, both boys. Their mother is the one nearest to the door, the lady with a brown bun on her head held in place by two garishly green plastic clips. From where I am, I can only see the cover of the magazine that has her undivided attention. A bold cobalt blue headline promises yet another exclusive on the Jolie-Pitt break up. ‘Who will get the kids?’ asks the sub-headline.
It is an irony, I know, as I watch the old woman in the wheelchair grin as the two gambolling youngsters dash past her. We all have encountered the expression ‘kids will be kids’, and the lady in the wheelchair is, obviously, ‘getting’ these kids all right.
Still, for a little while at least, their presence livens up the dour waiting room. There’s a particular weight to the silence of waiting — especially to be called in at a medical appointment where a procedure is imminent. I am here to get a somewhat painful cortisone shot injected into my troublesome heel. The last one I had stood me in good stead for two whole years. When the two children get called, they virtually skip before their mother into the inner sanctum of the clinic.
What a lovely thing is innocence and ignorance, I think. Ignorance of what must await — especially in a dentist’s chair, where the two youngsters are headed. It is, quite plainly their first experience and it is a given that the next time round, their mindset would have altered, never to be the same. My thoughts are interrupted by a pretty young nurse.
“Mrs Wakely,” she calls, waiting for the right person to look up. Mrs Wakely turns out to be the wheelchair-bound 70-year-old.
“I’m sorry,” says the nurse, “but Dr Mancini is delayed in traffic. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait a little longer for your spinal injection.”
Mrs Wakely for her part smiles cheerily back.
“It’s not a problem, darling. Tell him to take his time. I’m not exactly dying to rush in,” she says.
Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.
