A Taste
A short story inspired by of all thing the Anti Virus vaccination.
It’s very well organised, jolly even, the waiting area set up excusively for us oldies waiting for our anti Covid injection. If you can be jolly that is, hiding behind your mask, sitting separated from the people on either side by empty red crossed chairs. So I wait to be called. Young people in green overalls are patrolling , chatting between themselves and engaging in good natured banter with the people on the other side of the area who have had their turn and are now waiting for the labels on their hands to say that they can go. . .
. . . I am five years old, sitting on another chair, in the corridor outside the classroom, dangling my feet, feeling the cold plastic of the seat on the backs of my legs, and looking at my new Clarkes sandals; new for my birthday. I count the petals in the little flowers cut out of the leather. I love my sandals. I count the coats hanging on the pegs. I hope my mum will come but she doesn’t. Why did she sign the letter for them to do this to me? None of the other mums signed the letter. It was only me they called out of the classroom. I don’t know what is going to happen to me.
She wears a lot of lipstick and a white coat, the school doctor. Doctors don’t wear white coats. Doctors wear real clothes and smell of tobacco like my dad. My mum only wears lipstick when she’s going out somewhere. How can she be a doctor? Doctors don’t tell lies. She said it wouldn’t hurt and it did. I can taste the smell of it – the purple stuff she poured onto the cotton wool and rubbed into my arm before she stuck the needle into me.
Where is my mum? Why doesn’t she come?
Afterwards it was dinner-time. Every mouthful tasted of that purple stuff. The lettuce, the tomatoes, the meat – everything. And it was really hard not to cry. I had to keep my face stiff, and not speak much, even to Maxine, and she’s my best friend.
When playtime was over the doctor fetched all the others and stuck the needle into them, even though they hadn’t got the letters. But it didn’t make me feel any better. The taste was there in my mouth; and the scar was there now, not in my arm, inside me, the feeling of being left all alone. . .
. . . This one really hasn’t hurt. The nurse even fished in her handbag and offered me a sweet. Kind. Now I sit and wait for my label to permit me to go, sit alone, isolated by the two crossed chairs beside me. On my own, but I am used to it now.