I saw him the first time when I’d just got off the school bus. It was his first day. He got out of his low-slung sports car and took a box off the back seat. Some of the papers from the top of the box blew away and I caught them for him.
I blushed when I gave them back to him. He winked at me. He’s got really sparkly eyes and he’s quite young. He’s tall and dark. Slim. Every girl’s romantic dream?
Well, that’s what it seemed like when I got back to St Catherine’s. They’d all heard about the new doctor at St Kilda’s health Centre.
“I’m getting my mummy to make an appointment with him,” said Deborah McShay. “About the pain I keep getting in my back. In my lower back, so that I’ll have to take a lot of my clothes off.”
“Pain in the arse, more like,” said Kitty McGivern. “I wonder if he’s into plastic surgery. You could ask him for a boob job.”
“I don’t need that,” replied Deborah. “But maybe young Fyonnah here….”
She was right. Flat-chested or what? I’d watched all the other girls in my class spread and bloom and if it wasn’t for my long hair and the St Catherine’s floor-length skirt…. I could be taken for a bloke. I wore a bra but I didn’t really need it. I did have periods but they were light and irregular.
Then.
It’s different now.
After Talbot.
It makes me laugh to think of the way they all trooped in to see him, with excuse after excuse.
I was too shy to do that, back then.
And it was so bizarre the way I did eventually get to be treated by him.
It’s funny. None of them know the truth about Talbot. It is I, shy Fyonnah McBride, who knows the whole story.
I’m not shy now, though. Not after Talbot.
