Questions of Trust A Medical Romance - By Sam Archer Page 0,14

feel like home, Jake had made friends with another little boy who lived a few streets away and whose mother Chloe had got to know in the local playground, and Chloe’s own work with the Pemberham Gazette was taking off. Her first article had proved enormously popular with the paper’s readers, and the editor, Mike Sellers, had just that week offered Chloe her own fortnightly column. Thus it was that Off The Beaten Track was born. She had the first draft already bashed out and was in the process of editing it.

Jake had been subdued for the last few days. Listless and off his food, he’d been more clingy than usual, wanting to sit on Chloe’s lap when she was at her computer and proving reluctant to let her leave his room at night. She thought he might be missing some of his old friends from London, rudimentary though friendships were at his age.

When he started digging in one ear she had a look down there as best she could, then at his throat. It looked reddened. She gave him children’s paracetamol and it seemed to perk him up for a few hours, but his fractiousness returned.

On a Friday afternoon Chloe sat working while Jake had a nap in his room. She was jolted out of her musings by his wailing cry, and she raced through to find him sitting up in the dimness, clutching his neck. Drool soaked his arm and, she saw, the pillow on which he’d been resting his head.

‘Jake!’ she gasped, trying not to scare him with the terror that crept into her voice. She sat beside him, put her palm against his forehead. He was burning up. Through his tears he was trying to tell Chloe something but his voice was muffled, as though he had something in his mouth. His breath smelled bad, something she’d noticed earlier that day but had reacted to by brushing his teeth more diligently, and his breathing was laboured.

Hoisting the little boy up onto her arm, and fighting down waves of panic, Chloe dashed through to the living room and snatched up her phone from where it was lying beside her laptop.

The receptionist, whom Chloe recognised as the girl who’d been there the day she’d registered at the surgery, took down a few details, then asked Chloe to hold. Long seconds passed, dragging into a minute, two minutes. Jake slumped against Chloe’s shoulder, his eyes open but dull.

When the receptionist came back on and said, ‘Mrs Edwards?’, Chloe had to swallow back her own tears before replying.

‘Yes.’

‘Dr Carlyle says to bring Jake down to the surgery at once. Is that possible? Do you have a car?’

‘Yes.’ Chloe rang off, already snatching up her handbag and keys.

The trip took her fifteen minutes. She parked on a double-yellow line, not caring about the consequences, and tumbled Jake out of the child seat and through the door of the surgery. The waiting room was packed, as doctors’ rooms tended to be on a Friday afternoon before the weekend, but the receptionist nodded to her immediately and picked up the phone.

‘You can go straight through, Mrs Edwards,’ she said.

Chloe passed another woman coming out of Dr Carlyle’s door but barely acknowledged her. Inside, Tom Carlyle looked as he had that first day, casually professional, his sleeves rolled part of the way up his forearms. But his face this time was knitted in concern.

‘Jake,’ he said. ‘What’s up, buddy?’

He reached out to take the boy. For a moment Chloe clung to him, reluctant to let him go. But she relented, even when her son whimpered and stretched back for her.

Gently but insistently, Dr Carlyle laid Jake on the examination couch, tilting the head at an angle so that the boy was half sitting. The doctor smoothed a hand across Jake’s crimson, wet forehead.

‘Have you given him anything?’ He glanced at Chloe.

She had to try twice before her mouth would come unstuck. ‘Paracetamol, this morning,’ she managed.

Chloe watched, transfixed, as Dr Carlyle’s hands moved across her son’s throat, his face, his soft murmuring voice all the while reassuring the boy. He produced a flat orange stick with a cartoon of some sort on it and coaxed Jake into opening his mouth. Depressing the boy’s tongue and wielding a pencil torch deftly, the doctor peered down the boy’s throat.

‘Okay,’ he nodded, straightening. He patted Jake on the shoulder and winked at him. ‘Up you get.’ He looked Chloe straight in the eye.

‘We need to get him