Staring At The Light by Frances Fyfield

obviously
     under the impression that this was the end of the road. He held a folded, blood-soaked tea-towel over his mouth.
    Sarah Fortune was patting his shoulder, beaming anxiously at William. ‘Hallo,’ she said calmly, as if she had not seen him
     in a while and this was an everyday occurrence. ‘I found this in my office so I thought I’d better bring him here. He won’t
     let go of me, anyhow.’ The young man was holding the clothin one hand and using the other to clutch at Sarah’s coat. His face was runnelled with tears. William put his palm to the
     boy’s forehead. This
was
still a boy: William regarded thirty as the threshold of the martyrdoms of adulthood and anything below that as boyhood.
     His hands were ice-cool from the plaster; the skin of the boy’s forehead searingly hot.
    ‘He’ll only say that he collided with a tree,’ Sarah said helpfully and incredulously. ‘Maybe a lovers’ tiff. And he won’t
     go to hospital.’
    Gently, William prised away the tea-cloth. It was decorated with yellow roses, now red. He murmured to the young man as if
     he were a child, ‘There there, there there,’ thinking, as he uncovered the teeth and curled back the blood-filled lower lip,
     to see the cut, that this was exactly the playground injury he might have expected to see in a child who had run hard and
     crashed into a wall; the sort of injury incurred when there was no time to flinch and exactly the kind his three-year-old
     patient might acquire soon.
    ‘Accident and emergency,’ he said firmly.
    ‘Neuuuuugh!’ The boy began to thrash in the chair, turning his head back and forth, pulling on the coat he still held in his
     hand. At least he hadn’t broken his jaw: it was only teeth and shock. Only.
    They moved him to the surgery proper. William noticed the filthy mark of a bloody palm on the fresh paint of the walls
en route
. He sighed. ‘What’s his name? What does he do?’
    ‘Andrew. Not the most promising lawyer. Brawler, by the looks of things.’ She smoothed the lank hairaway from Andrew’s forehead, smiled at him reassuringly, the smile negating the lack of compliment in the softly spoken words.
She doesn’t even like him
, William thought.
Why doesn’t she ever walk away
?
    ‘Look in his wallet. Any prescriptions, notes about medication, stuff like that?’
    ‘Nope. Mid-twenties, belongs to a squash club. Fit as a flea. Gay. If you do the wrong thing, I’ll make sure he doesn’t sue
     you.’
    ‘Thanks a lot.’
    Don’t pass the needle over the face. This one needed restraint, he did not belong here – and when William tried to get inside
     that mouth the boy vomited. One of those. Make him comfortable; sedate him; calm him. That will be all for now. A lot of fresh
     blood on the shirt … How had she got him here without stopping the traffic? He felt a guilty relief that he was still wearing
     gloves. He also felt a brief surge of irritation against Sarah Fortune – her, outside, making arrangements on
his
phone, doing it
again
. Creating mayhem. Bringing the unpredictable off the streets and into his life. How did she do it? Why? What had he done
     to deserve it, with his quiet life? The boy’s eyes were wide with fright. William touched him gently.
There, there, there
.
    William Dalrymple was afraid of the dentist himself. It gave him a terrible empathy, and
There, there, there
, was all he could ever say.
    It was eleven in the morning. Sarah should be elsewhere, profitably – or at least accountably – employed.She did not want to think about what frightened version of the truth she had been told.
Don’t tell anyone, don’t tell, I’ll lose my job … please
. If he did not tell her more, she was not going to insist as a condition of helping him. Help was not a conditional thing.
     She did not need to know which frustrated loner had punched Andrew in the mouth. It did not matter.
    Sarah walked with the speed of a racer, crossing Oxford Street and diving into