Doctor appointments always made Bitty feel ill. The room itself was ill — the green chairs, the particular smell of disinfectant over something older, the magazines from eighteen months ago that nobody had replaced because patients were not really supposed to relax.
“Bitty Ghosh?”
The receptionist pronounced it wrong, as they always did. Bitty followed her through a door and down a short corridor to Room 4, where a laminated sign read Please knock before entering and someone had drawn a smiley face over the full stop.
The doctor was young. This surprised Bitty. She had been coming to this clinic for eleven years and the doctors kept getting younger while she stayed the same age — which she knew was mathematically impossible but felt perfectly true.
“What brings you in today?”
Bitty explained. The doctor listened, or performed listening with great accuracy. She typed something. Asked Bitty to describe the sensation again. Nodded. Typed something else.
Then she said something that made Bitty go still.
Not bad news — it wasn’t that. The news was entirely routine, slightly mundane, the kind of news you forget by the time you reach the car park. But in the middle of explaining the perfectly ordinary thing, the doctor had used a word. A small word. A nothing word.
Apparently.
Her mother had used that word the same way. Not apparently as in it seems, but apparently as in the world has decided this, with a slight lift at the end, a tiny handing-over of the matter to the universe. Apparently the rain would clear by evening. Apparently the bus would come. Apparently things worked out, or they didn’t, and apparently that was fine either way.
Bitty hadn’t heard anyone else use it that way. She hadn’t realised she’d been listening for it.
“Are you all right?” the doctor asked, which was a reasonable question.
“Yes,” said Bitty. “I’m fine. I’m always fine. That was never the point.”
She walked out into the grey afternoon. The car park was exactly where she’d left it. Apparently.