At that time – about seven years ago – I worked for a different employer, and lived in a smaller city up in the hills west of here. It was a small family-owned firm and I was actually almost the one in full charge, though my job title was only of manager. The owner was an invalid, his wife spent all her time taking care of him, and their daughter, though she was officially the director, spent most of her time spreading her legs for a succession of so-called boyfriends whose only “connection” with her seemed to be that of their penises with her vagina. And the rest of the time she spent making my life miserable, just to prove to herself that she was in charge and knew it.

There was literally not a moment of the working day that I was free of the threat that she might suddenly drop by to “check the accounts”, or issue some pointless orders as to what we should do (inevitably countermanding my own), and then blaming me when things went belly-up, as they inevitably would. Since she does not play any kind of major role in this story, and since to this day just thinking of her fills me with contempt and disgust, I’m not going to bother inventing a name for her. You can think of her as the Bitch.

One evening, I recall, I had just got home to the little flat I rented (a much smaller affair than the one I own now), stripped naked as usual, and was actually in the bath when she called on my mobile. I hadn’t yet then thought of assigning a ringtone to her (a mistake I remedied speedily afterwards), and ordered me to drive to the airport. According to her, an important business contact was supposed to arrive by a late flight, and he needed to be met, dined, and escorted to his hotel.

Now not only was I on my own, and not company, time, I knew – since I bloody well ran the place – that there was no “important business contact” expected. I wanted to tell her to shove it and collect him herself if she wanted to. But if I had, I would have been looking for a new job before the week was out, and I wasn’t ready to look for one right then. Not yet.

(Later I realised what had happened. The Bitch had invited one of her boyfriends from out of town to visit her, but forgotten that she’d already fixed up a tryst with one of her other boyfriends for the night in question. So she fobbed him off with some excuse – probably that she had to be out of town on work, a sudden emergency, don’t you know – and sent me to pick him up.)

It was a winter night, cold and rainy, and the airport was quite the most cheerless I have ever seen in my entire life. And after waiting for a solid hour the plane was diverted to another city until the morning due to weather, so I had to drive back again, thoroughly chilled, out of humour, and ready to punch the Bitch right in the clitoris if she called again. Fortunately she didn’t, also proving said “business contact” was nothing of the sort.

That was what working for the Bitch was like.

Then one day I developed a pain in my tummy. I thought I was developing an ulcer or maybe cancer (do not attempt self-diagnosis from medical websites, people!), and when I couldn’t bear it any longer I decided to visit a gastroenterologist. I didn’t know any gastroenterologists, and in the end I just picked one online, because there was a photo of him on his website, and he looked sympathetic, while the rest were hard-faced women or men who looked like elderly bloodhounds with dyspepsia that they didn’t know how to cure.

Let me call him Dylan, because I can’t conceive of another name further from his real one. When I called him to make an appointment he told me to come over right away – “I wouldn’t want you to get second thoughts, would I?” – and told me that since his nurse had taken an unexpected day off, I should bring along someone if I felt I needed a chaperone. I did not need a chaperone, so I went alone.

Dylan’s office was on the ground floor of a commercial building, between a furniture dealership and a hardware store. I must have gone past this building many times without knowing he was there – the only announcement he deigned to make to the world was a small bronze-coloured plate with his name and degrees. The waiting room was empty. When I entered he opened the inner door to the consulting room and invited me right in.

Dylan was fairly tall, well built, probably a year or two older than me, with a shaved head and a clipped goatee. He had a friendly smile and an accent which I couldn’t identify; later I discovered that he’d spent his childhood abroad and his accent was leavened by that of the country he’d grown up in. He checked my blood pressure and temperature, asked a few questions, and then asked me to get on his examination table.

“Naked?” I asked, just to lighten the atmosphere. ”I thought medical examinations were always done naked.”

“Well, perhaps I’m not a doctor then,” he said with a grin. “For now, just take your top off.” He didn’t need to ask if I had a bra on. I’m a built girl, and I’d be jiggling all over if I hadn’t been wearing one. He bent over my stomach, prodding and poking and asking if it hurt, and then he stepped back and looked at me with a slightly strange expression on his face.

“Are you sleeping well?” he asked.

“Well…” to be honest, the Bitch had been invading my dreams of late. “Not always.”

“And have you also been getting pain in your jaws in the morning, when you wake up?”

For a moment I goggled at him. I had absolutely been getting pain in my jaw joints when I woke, but it went away when I got up and I had forgotten it. “Well,” I asked, “what is it? How long have I got left to live?”

He grinned again. “It’s not terminal, except in that life is a fatal disease. Since I have nothing much to do today – as you can see, I’m not exactly overburdened with patients – can I take you out to lunch? We can discuss your case over some food.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be unethical or something, going out with your patients?”

“I won’t tell if you don’t.”

So we went out to a restaurant nearby. It had a faux Afghan decor, I recall, done up like a cross between a village hut and a cave, and the doorman wore a beard, turban, and what’s known as an “Afghani suit”. But the food – I assume it was supposed to be authentically Afghan, I’ve never had any – was surprisingly good; flat bread so thin as to be almost translucent, mutton swimming in butter and spices, and sherbets of rose water over crushed ice.

After we’d eaten for a while, Dylan sat back and stared at me until I was compelled to look up and into his eyes. “Do you feel a bit better now? Relaxed?”

I blinked. “I suppose. Why that question in particular?”

“Because, Juliana, you don’t really have anything physically wrong with you. I could of course order a lot of highly expensive tests – ultrasounds and CT scans, endoscopy, you name it- but though they’d cost your insurance company a pretty penny, I can tell you they’d be a waste of time. There isn’t anything wrong with you except stress.”

I took a quick gulp of sherbet and he waited until I’d finished choking.

“I’m right, aren’t I?