Further Confessions of a GP

After five minutes of yelling and banging on the door, I was on the verge of giving up and hoping he was simply out rather than lying dead somewhere inside. I knocked on his next-door neighbour’s door, who helpfully told me that she was fairly sure he hadn’t been out in days, so I returned for a few last desperate shouts through the letter box.

‘IF YOU DON’T LET ME IN I’M GOING TO HAVE TO BREAK THE DOOR DOWN.’

This last-ditch attempt to persuade Mr Goodson to open the door was an empty threat. I really didn’t have the strength or inclination to break down a front door, but just as I was ready to give up and go back to the surgery, I thought I heard some stirring from within the house. I kneeled down again on the doorstep to peer through the letter box and to my surprise this time I saw a pair of eyes staring straight back at me.

‘You can’t come in,’ he told me calmly. ‘You’re contaminated.’

‘Er, I don’t think I am,’ I answered feebly, suddenly a bit thrown that I was having this bizarre conversation through a letter box.

‘Yes you are,’ Mr Goodson responded confidently. ‘What do you want anyway?’

‘I’m Dr Daniels, your GP. Your niece called me. She’s worried about you.’

‘She’s contaminated too. I tried to warn her but she wouldn’t listen.’

‘Can I just come in for a chat?’

‘You’ll need to decontaminate first. Hold on.’

With that, Mr Goodson stood up and shuffled away from the door. Some moments later a nearly empty and very old bottle of Johnson’s baby oil was pushed out through the letter box and landed at my feet.

‘The electromagnetic rays can’t get through this. It repels them,’ he explained.

Looking at the grubby bottle, I wondered how far I should go along with Mr Goodson’s delusions. I tried rationally suggesting that I had already washed my hands carefully before leaving the surgery, but Mr Goodson made it very clear that this wouldn’t be sufficient. There was a limit to the amount of time that I was prepared to spend shouting through a door while getting drenched by a November downpour, so I gave in and picked up the bottle of baby oil. I made a show of rubbing some of the lotion over my hands while Mr Goodson watched me suspiciously through the letter box.

‘Right, I’m all, erm… decontaminated now.’

‘Your face isn’t. That needs doing too.’

I looked down at the grubby-looking bottle and wondered at its age. Did I really want to rub this stuff on to my face? Johnson’s baby oil is harmless enough, but I couldn’t be entirely sure that, in his paranoia, Mr Goodson hadn’t added less savoury ingredients to the bottle. I stood for a few moments, trying to come up with a better method of gaining entry than smearing this stuff on my face, but when nothing came to mind I reluctantly rubbed the cream over my face, and to my relief I heard the clunk of his front door unlocking.

Once inside I was amazed that Mr Goodson really thought that some sort of contamination was going to arise from the outside world rather than from the filthy state of the interior. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but once they had I was greeted by a stark and miserable sight. Mr Goodson himself was in a terrible state. He had clearly once been a tall man but now he was hunched over and his ragged looking shirt and trousers were baggy on his bony frame. The floor was a bare lino, sticky with grime, and the walls were brown from the tar staining of decades of cigarette smoke. Plates of half-eaten meals and empty food packaging were piled high in one corner of the living room and an awful stench of what smelled like sour milk seeped into the pit of my stomach making me want to gag. All his windows were blocked out by rows of tin foil and empty egg boxes, which were crudely Sellotaped to the glass in what I could only imagine was another attempt by Mr Goodson to deflect the electromagnetic forces he so feared.

‘Do you have a computer, Doctor?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘You need to get rid of it right away. They’re sending messages through it.’

‘What, like emails?’

Mr Goodson looked at me blankly and I could see that the concept of an email was completely alien to him; we stood in silence for a few moments, with Mr Goodson shuffling around me, his suspicious gaze fixed on my face. Having made such an effort to gain entry to his house, now that I was in, I felt at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I had successfully confirmed that Mr Goodson was alive and also that he was floridly paranoid and delusional. He was clearly very suspicious of me, so my next step was going to be tricky. I decided I needed to try to gain his trust, but cordial small talk has never really been something I’m any good at.

‘So, how have you been?’ I asked with false brightness.

‘I’m just trying to stay alive, Doctor.’

‘Yes, erm, aren’t we all…? Pretty bloody awful weather, isn’t it?’

‘Water helps conduct the radiation. It can spread in rain water.’

The small talk wasn’t really getting me very far, so I decided to try to address the elephant in the room.