“Okay there?” asked the doctor, “For a moment, you looked like you were in a trance...”
There was no time to explain. These vaccination appointments are seconds long; you queue up, you walk in, before you can pass the time of day, your t-shirt’s rolled up, your left arm’s jabbed, and you’re on your way back into the sunshine.
There were fewer people than last time. No queue of 40-somethings milling around the cones, just a small handful giving their details to the volunteers under the green gazebos. I went straight to the front of the queue.
It’s been 9 weeks since my first dose of Oxford Astra-Zeneca. Back then, I’d texted my sisters to let them know I’d been vaccinated, but this time it all felt much more run-of-the-mill, more like simply getting the flu jab, I suppose. I didn’t feel they’d particularly be interested. I took my paperwork into the building, queued at the door, then waited for the volunteer inside to send me to whichever room was next free.
Moments later, the doctor (he was quite obviously a doctor by the way) looked at me walking into room number 4, and had said,
“Okay there? For a moment you looked like you were in a trance.”
I’d been transfixed by a picture on the wall. I didn’t say anything, but that picture made me stop in my tracks - because it’s a picture that seems to have been following me round for most of my life.
It’s a dove in flight, left to right. It carries an olive branch in its mouth, and it’s at the centre of a pattern of radial beams that extend to the edges of the frame like rays of sunlight. Each beam is slightly reflective, like translucent glass I suppose, giving the whole thing the impression of a textured mirror. The dove too, is sort of textured, so it looks three dimensional to touch, though all of this is behind glass of course, so you’d not be able to tell. The dove and its rays are then encircled in a portrait oval surround, which I think is sort of silvery, and the frame, at least most times I’ve seen it, is usually a tarnished gold.
And there it was. Not in my granny’s house in Cheshire in the early 1980s, not in our house above the stairs, where it lived for years, not in that random Chinese takeaway I went to once, or even in the rented room my friends once lived in. It was there in the doctor’s surgery, looking me in the face while I got my second dose of Oxford Astra-Zeneca.
I guess there must have been hundreds of these things in the 70s (that looks like around the time they’d be popular) and there are a few reproductions still knocking about.
It reminds me of that old theory that a series of house fires were once caused by a painting - the ‘crying boy’ painting. Weird, every house that burned down had had the same painting up, they used to say. Must be demon-possessed. Or perhaps everyone just had that same painting, like they also had light switches and ageing fuse boxes.
Anyway, there really was no time to explain. I was on my way down the road, the sun bursting through the summer sky, my jacket slung over my shoulder.
It could just have been God’s way of reminding me that peace has settled over my life, and that everything will be alright. If so, I can go along with that.
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