BODIES WERE MY
business. Living, not dead. And on a sweltering afternoon in early July the body lying face down in front of me was an ordinary specimen. He was my twelfth patient of the day, and my back was aching, my sunny disposition just about beginning to falter. ‘How is it feeling?’ he asked as I sank my thumbs into tough fascia running alongside his spine.

‘Pretty good,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got rid of the scar tissue around L4 – the troublesome joint. You should notice a difference as soon as you stand up.’

He was a quarry worker. Often my toughest customers. They spoke very little, so I enjoyed the brief respite from the interaction that most demanded, but physically, quarry workers were hard on my hands. They have a dense bulk to their musculature, a resistance to the tissues, which requires the full weight of my upper body, directed down through my overused thumbs.

My thumbs were my instruments. Essential for every facet of my work. They were my diagnostic tools, used to detect and assess the nuances in tissue structure; my means of offering relief to a person in pain.

I had contemplated having them insured. Like Betty Grable’s legs. But I never quite did get around to it.

‘When you’ve finished with my back,’ he said, ‘if you’ve got time, would you mind having a quick look at my shoulder?’

He lifted his head, smiling regretfully, as though he really did hate to be a nuisance.

‘Not at all,’ I said brightly, masking a sigh.

I used to be a self-employed physiotherapist, and I did my utmost to take care of the needs of every single patient. If I didn’t get results, I didn’t get paid. So I worked hard to build up a busy practice.

That thing we strive for? The work–life balance? For a while I had it.

Not any more.

When there was no money left, I found myself here. Working fifty hours a week for a chain of clinics, cooped up in an airless cubicle with a production line of patients. The fruits of my labours go straight into someone else’s pocket.

I also found myself at the mercy of a practice manager named Wayne.

Wayne meant well, but his desire to get the job done correctly sometimes made him overbearing. And every so often he could also become flirtatious – though I should say that it was never to the point of harassment. But you had to be firm with him, or else his behaviour would escalate and he would begin suggesting dates. I think he was possibly a little lonely.

With the quarry worker now perched on the edge of the plinth, I knelt behind him and asked him to raise the affected arm out to his side. When he reached ninety degrees he sucked in his breath with the pain and jerked the shoulder involuntarily.

‘Supraspinatus,’ I told him.

‘Is that bad?’

‘Can be tricky. I can’t treat it properly today, though, there’s not enough time. But I’ll pop in an acupuncture needle and see if I can give you at least some relief.’

I’d studied acupuncture as a postgraduate course and while I twisted the needle back and forth, back and forth, I could hear Wayne outside in the reception area, cajoling a patient, trying to persuade her to make an appointment with one of the other clinicians.

‘I want Roz Toovey,’ she was saying to him.

‘Roz is fully booked until the middle of next week. How about Gary Muir?’ he pressed. ‘Gary has one available slot left today. He could see you in ten minutes.’

No answer.

‘Okay, what about Magdalena?’ Wayne suggested.

This was the general order of things. First, Wayne tried to palm people off with Gary, who I was pretty sure didn’t know his arse from his elbow, and, as far as I could tell, was accepted on to the degree course simply because there was a nationwide shortage of male physiotherapists at the time. Before his training, Gary had been a second-division footballer.

‘Magdalena?’ the woman asked. ‘That the German woman?’

‘Austrian,’ said Wayne.

‘She hurt me last time. I felt like I’d been hit by a bus. No, I want Roz.’

‘But,’ Wayne replied, losing patience, ‘
as I already said
, Roz is fully booked.’

I am Roz Toovey, by the way.

‘Can’t you just have a word with her?’ she said. ‘Tell her it’s Sue Mitchinson and my back’s out again? I used to be one of her regulars. I’m sure she’d fit me in, if she knew it was me. And I am in
incredible pain
. Roz is the only one who can—’

‘Hang on,’ Wayne said, irritated, and I heard footsteps heading my way.

Three sharp raps on the wood.

‘Roz, there’s a Sue Mitchinson here, wondering if you can see her.’

‘Excuse me a moment,’ I said to the patient.

I opened the door and stuck my head out.

Looking past Wayne, I cast my eyes directly over towards Sue, who upon seeing me marched across the reception area.

Before I had the chance to speak, she began to plead her case. ‘Roz, I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate. You know I wouldn’t. If you could just see me for five minutes, I’d be ever so grateful.’

Not only was I the only physiotherapist in South Lakeland apparently capable of fixing Sue, the two of us had a history.

I had a history with a lot of patients who frequented this practice, in that they all followed me from my own clinic when it folded. Most of them had been intrinsic in building up my clientele, so the reality was, I owed them.

In the beginning, I placed one small advertisement in the local press, and the second I offered people relief from their sometimes chronic pain (something other practitioners in the area weren’t always able to do), word spread. I became fully booked within a month. Of course, the trouble now was that those early patients, the ones who had been so kind in recommending me, suddenly couldn’t get appointments. And so they would resort to the You-know-I-wouldn’t-ask-unless-I-was-desperate plea.

‘Sue, I can’t,’ I said firmly. ‘I have to collect George from after-school club, and I’ve been late twice already this week.’

Without pausing to think, she shot back, ‘What if I was to ring my mother and get
her
to pick up George?’

I didn’t know Sue’s mother. Never met the woman. Neither had George.

‘We’re over in Hawkshead now,’ I said, as tactfully as I could. ‘So that’s not really doable.’

Sue screwed up her face as she tried frantically to come up with a solution that might work, just as Wayne looked on with the beginnings of agitation. It could irk him something terrible that patients insisted upon seeing me and wouldn’t be palmed off with the likes of Gary. It made it impossible for Wayne to balance the appointment schedule. And what we ended up with was me working myself into a stupor, whilst Gary twiddled his thumbs in reception.

Generally, Gary spent this free time chatting to Wayne, discussing the Premier League and the merits of Puma King football boots. Both of them saying ‘absolutely’ a lot.

‘How about you give me five minutes? Five minutes or less,’ said Sue, in one last-ditch attempt.

‘Okay, five minutes,’ I said, beaten. ‘But you’ll have to wait. I have another patient in straight after this one and I’m running late.’

Sue wasn’t listening. She was already hurrying away to take her seat in the waiting area before anyone had the chance to change their minds.

‘Did you call that insurance guy?’ Wayne asked.

‘What? No, sorry. Slipped my mind again.’

Wayne sighed dramatically, rolled his eyes and spoke in the way one would when reprimanding a small child. ‘Get it sorted, Roz. Everyone else has had their assessments.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Without that assessment, you’re not fully protected. The clinic
is not fully protected
, unless—’

‘I’ll do it. Promise. As soon as I’ve got a free minute. Listen, Wayne,’ I said, stepping out of the treatment room and closing the door behind me so the patient couldn’t hear what I was about to ask, ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a small advance on my wage, is there? It’s just things are really tight right at the minute, and I’m not sure I can make it till next Friday.’

He tilted his head to one side and looked at me with mild reproach. ‘I told you this before, Roz,’ he said gently. ‘The company cannot make exceptions. Not even for you. I wish there was something I could do but, honestly, my hands are tied.’ And with that he walked away.

As I finished off with the quarry worker I could hear Wayne informing Sue in reception, his voice now loud and dictatorial, that she must pay for the treatment session up front, and
in full
, regardless of the duration.

He was in the habit of doing this when he’d found himself overruled on a matter of limited importance, and today was no different.

When I started out on my own, years ago, I remember being terribly worried about whether I could make the business work or not. At the time, I voiced these concerns to one of my first patients, Keith Hollinghurst, and he had this to say: ‘Those that have to make it work, do. Those that don’t, don’t.’

To this day, he has always remained scornful of people who play at running a business; not grasping what it actually takes to turn a profit year in, year out. ‘Nine out of ten companies fail,’ he would tell me. ‘Make sure yours is the one that doesn’t.’

Keith Hollinghurst was old school. He ran a scrap-metal firm. He was never without a wad of rolled-up twenties in his pocket, and was not backward at coming forward. Keith continued on as my patient and, while he lay face down now, his hairy back peppered with acupuncture needles, I listened to him rant about the general incompetence of South Lakeland district council, and as he relayed conversations he’d had with various jobsworths – who, naturally, he’d put in their rightful places. I would chip in, oohing and ahhing, asking the odd question to give the impression of being attentive. Then I pulled the needles out of Keith’s skin and asked him to turn over, face up, so I could manipulate his lower back – by levering his leg across the front of his body. He obliged, and as I propped a pillow beneath his head, I caught sight of the large, dried urine stain on his Y-fronts.

‘I’ve got a proposition for you when you’ve done with my back,’ he said, blinking rapidly.

‘I’m not watching you masturbate, Keith.’

He’d suggested this more than once.

He kept silent as I levered his leg over, asking him to take a breath in, then a breath out, as I pushed down hard and listened for the tell-tale click.

Patients think this is the sound of an intervertebral disc being pushed back into place. It’s not. It’s either the sound of two joint surfaces distracting, coming apart – the gas coming out of its solution to give rise to a popping noise – or, more commonly, and in this instance, it’s the sound of adhesions tearing around the joint.

But I go along with the disc idea because it’s easier.

Other things I go along with are 1. the fact that anyone who has visited an osteopath will claim to have one leg longer than the other, 2. the irritating assumption that blind physiotherapists have healing powers on a par with Jesus Christ himself and 3. the false claim made by all middle-aged women to have a very high pain threshold.

‘Look,’ said Keith, ‘I know you’re short of cash. I know you’re on your own with that kiddie. I’ll give you an extra sixty quid in your hand
right now
if you do it. You don’t even have to come anywhere near me. And I’ll be fast.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Remember what I said to you when you first started out?’

BOOK: The Mistake I Made

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