Pulse

sexy but complicated girl whom I sometimes couldn’t read, especially at the moment. Jake asked, in an even more roundabout way, if I realised that she’d come on to him in the kitchen when he was round to supper three weeks previously. I told him he was just misreading her friendly manner. That ’s why she’s a psychopath, he replied.
    But Jake often called people psychopaths when they were simply more focused than he was, so I didn’t take it too much amiss, and a couple of weeks later Janice and I were back together. In that first rush of renewed sex and excitement andtruthfulness, I nearly told her what Jake had said, but thought better of it. Instead, I asked if she’d ever thought of going off with someone else, and she said yes, for about thirty seconds, so I gave her marks for honesty and asked who, and she said no one I knew, and I accepted that, and not long afterwards we got engaged.
    I said to my mother, ‘You do like Janice, don’t you?’
    ‘Of course I do. As long as she makes you happy.’
    ‘That sounds … conditional.’
    ‘Well, it is. It would be. A mother’s love is unconditional. A mother-in-law’s love is conditional. That’s how it’s always been.’
    ‘So if she made me unhappy?’
    My mother didn’t reply.
    ‘And if I made her unhappy?’
    She smiled. ‘I’d put you across my knee.’
    As it turned out, we almost didn’t get to the wedding. We each postponed once, and even got an official warning from Jake about discussing heavy stuff while out running. When I put it off Janice said it was really because I was scared to commit. When she put it off it was because she wasn’t sure about marrying someone who was scared to commit. So somehow it was my fault both times.
    One of my father’s bridge partners suggested acupuncture. Apparently it had done wonders for the fellow’s sciatica.
    ‘But you don’t believe in that stuff, Dad.’
    ‘I’ll believe in it if it cures me,’ he replied.
    ‘But you’re a rationalist, like me.’
    ‘We don’t have a monopoly of knowledge in the West. Other countries know things too.’
    ‘Sure,’ I agreed. But I felt a kind of alarm, as if things were slipping. We need our parents to remain constant, don’t we? And all the more so when we’re grown up ourselves.
    ‘Do you remember – no, you’d’ve been too young – those photos of Chinese patients having open-heart surgery? All they had by way of anaesthetic was acupuncture and a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book .’
    ‘What chance those photos were complete fakes?’
    ‘Why should they be?’
    ‘Mao worship. Proof of the superiority of the Chinese way. Also, if it worked, keeping down medical costs.’
    ‘You see, you said if it worked .’
    ‘I didn’t mean it.’
    ‘You’re too cynical, son.’
    ‘You’re not cynical enough, Dad.’
    He went to this … whatever acupuncturists call their surgery or clinic, in a house on the other side of town. Mrs Rose wore a white smock, like a nurse or dentist; she was fortyish and sensible-looking, Dad told us. She listened to his story, took his medical details, asked if he suffered from constipation, and explained the principles of Chinese acupuncture. Then she left the room while he stripped to his underpants and lay down under a paper sheet with a blanket on top of it.
    ‘It was all very professional,’ he reported. ‘She starts by taking your pulses. In Chinese medicine there are six, three on each side. But the ones on the left wrist are more important because they’re for the major organs – heart, liver and kidneys.’
    I didn’t say anything – just felt my alarm growing. And I expect my father read my mood.
    ‘I said to Mrs Rose, “I’d better warn you, I’m a bit sceptical”, and she said that didn’t matter because acupuncture works whether you believe in it or not.’
    Except presumably it takes longer with sceptics and so costs more money. I didn’t say this either. Instead I let Dad tell us how Mrs Rose measured his back and marked it up with a felt-tip pen, then put little piles of stuff on his skinand set light to them, and he had to sing out when he felt the heat, and she’d pick them off him. Then there was more measurement and felt-pen markings, and she began sticking needles in him. It was all very hygienic and she dropped the used needles into a sharps box.
    At the end of the hour she left the room, he put his clothes back on and paid her fifty-five pounds. Then he went off to the