Synopsis

Family doctor Charlie Knight is in his late thirties, still playing tennis against the same people every Friday night. Still jogging the same streets every morning. Still treating the same patients every day—fixing the high blood pressure and arthritic knees of folks who’ve known him since he was a kid. But Charlie has a secret plan to escape. A plan to live the life he wants, even if the woman he was meant to do it with has left him behind.

But then Genevieve Longstaff comes back to their hometown, just as something extraordinary happens. Charlie begins to have a vision of the exact number of days a person has left until they die.

Charlie believes it’s a gift. It certainly seems like one—after all, he’s using it to help his patients, family and friends make the most of their to mend relationships, to travel, to retire. But this gift comes with awful consequences, and soon Charlie realizes there are things he doesn’t want to know—especially about the woman he still loves.

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Excerpt

Charlie Knight hadn’t expected an old lady’s arthritic ankles to consume his final moments. But he also hadn’t expected the extraordinary pressure that was building and swelling inside his head, so obviously his expectations counted for little.

He stumbled back, colliding hard with his own desk. A jar toppled over, and a rainbow of jelly beans cascaded to the floor. Charlie barely noticed.

Edna Bradley looked up at him, startled.

“Doctor?”

Charlie didn’t answer. He couldn’t. His skull felt entirely too small for his brain, for the pressure that was growing there, that had barreled out of nowhere and was now—­certainly—­going to end his life while an eighty-­four-­year-­old woman patiently held out a papery-­skinned foot for him to examine.

“Charlie? Are you all right?”

He leaned against the edge of his desk and tried to focus.

If this was happening to somebody else—­what would you do?

If it was Edna. Or his dad. Or a stranger on a plane, with that urgent call for any doctors on board to please make themselves known to the cabin crew. That had happened once, and when Charlie had stood up, the other passengers had actually cheered.

Nobody was cheering today.

And worst of all, he couldn’t see an answer, couldn’t find space in his mind to think, and the only space left was occupied by a white-­hot rage that this, this, was going to be the end of him. That he’d be taken out by some almighty brain explosion, just when he was about to do something big. Something spectacular. That his life was playing out like a cop movie, the ones he watched with his dad, the ones where the detective would turn to his partner and declare he was buying a yacht once they solved one last case. From that second on, the hero was guaranteed to take a bullet in the chest. Denied that peaceful retirement, and getting a blaze of glory instead.

But that’s not it at all, Charlie thought desperately, angrily, as the pressure expanded and squeezed; his head felt set to burst open. I’m not winding down. I’m just getting started.

And for it to happen in front of one of his favorite patients too. One who’d known him since he was six; one who brought shortbread biscuits to every appointment and still dressed up for the occasion.

He stared at Edna, but then he stared past her, because something else was happening to the cozy little office. And this was something he could see.

A poster on the wall—­a colorful diagram of the respiratory system—­was changing, dimming slightly. So was the one next to it, the digestive tract. And the next, a full cross section of the body’s muscles. The next one too. All of them. The pictures were fading.

No, not fading.

They were draining.

The colors oozed out like someone had pulled a plug from a bath. The spongy pink lungs and the yellow stomach acid turned a dull, lifeless gray.

Charlie didn’t want to look. The colors slipping out and dripping away to nowhere at all turned his stomach up and over. He wanted to close his eyes but just couldn’t bring himself to do it, because now he was looking at the floor, and that was different too. The bright colored jelly beans resembled tiny gray kidneys, the blues and greens and reds having bled to monochrome. A light gray here, a darker charcoal there.

Edna’s voice cut through.

“Charlie? What’s wrong, dear?”

It was like looking at a black-­and-­white photo of his patient, wearing a flowery blouse that Charlie knew had once been colorful and cheery. Cheeks that were rosy with spots of blusher a shade too bright, now with just a faint shadow to mark where the color used to be.

Everything was gray.

And still that squeezing against the inside of his skull, with one more element to it now: something shifting and swirling behind his eyes. It was an aneurysm, or a clot, or a tumor, something built for bursting and hurting and killing.

There was something inside that swirling, shifting pressure. Something hiding, trying to push through.

He reached for Edna, only to find her hand already resting on his arm. And that angry, indignant corner of his mind that insisted it wasn’t his time yet made way for a burst of sheer gratitude that of all people to be with him at the end it would be her. A brief flash of Edna—­Mrs. Bradley—­standing in front of a classroom, in front of a tiny Charlie Knight, amidst a sea of innocent, curious faces. He put his hand on hers and held tight as the memory vanished, crushed by the awful, consuming pressure.

A moan filled the room, a low, guttural groan, and he knew it was coming from him, and he just didn’t care because the thing in his head was building, squeezing against his eyes and his brain, straining against the walls of his skull, and he knew this was it.

Then it stopped.

The noise continued until Charlie closed his gaping mouth—­with an effort, it seemed, for his mind felt detached from the rest of him. Then the room was silent.

Edna was staring at him, glasses askew, her own mouth hanging open.

Charlie blinked slowly. Deliberately. Still trying to connect the brain to the body it normally controlled.

“Lord above, he’s having a stroke,” Edna blurted, and put that gnarled hand on the arm of her chair, pushing herself unsteadily, painfully to her feet.

Charlie blinked again and the color was back, solid and clear and there, as though it had always been. The spilled jelly beans were bright and sharp against the clean floor. The embroidered flowers around the buttonholes of Edna’s blouse were purple again, and the handle on her walking stick once more a faded navy blue. The arteries on the posters high on the wall, dull gray a moment ago, now a deep crimson. As they were supposed to be.

Charlie assessed himself, his brain now functioning at something near full capacity, and made two quick conclusions.

The first was that he felt completely normal.

The second was that something had definitely happened.

“Edna. Are you okay?” Charlie asked his patient. She was standing, grabbing for her stick without taking her eyes off Charlie.

“Am I okay?” she replied. “Of course I’m fine, Charlie. I’m getting you some help.”

He shook his head and strode to the window, sliding it up with ease. Fresh air would help. Maybe it was a gas leak, making them see funny things.

“Edna, slow down.” He took her arm and guided her back into the chair. “You need to take it easy. What did you see?”

“Lord, you hit the desk hard. Lucky you didn’t break a hip.”

“Not that. The room.” He gestured around his office, at the examination bed, the blood pressure cuff, at the posters, all in full color. “How it went kind of dark. Like a cloud in front of the sun, right? All gray.”

Edna pushed her glasses back up on her nose and peered at Charlie.

“It didn’t turn gray?” Charlie asked again.

Not for her, apparently. And as relieved as Charlie was that Marwick Family Clinic hadn’t sprung a carbon monoxide leak, the alternative was troubling. Because it must be something bad.

Something that affected only him. And something—­even a little something—­could be enough to disrupt his plans.

A deep breath.

“Let me take another look at your foot, Edna,” he said, and she tried to wave him away, as though her creaky old ankles were the least of anyone’s concerns now.

“Doc, I would’ve said you’re too young for a stroke, but my great-­nephew had one last winter and he’s younger than you. He’s only forty-­one.”

“Edna, I’m thirty-­eight. It wasn’t a stroke. I’m fine.”

I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine.

Maybe if he said it enough times, he’d believe it.

“Really, Doc. Just thirty-­eight,” Edna repeated, with a flicker of a wicked smile. “And going silver already.”

Charlie grinned. She was letting him off the hook. Trusting his judgment, perhaps, or just letting him believe what he needed to.

I’m fine.

“Let’s see that ankle.” He swept aside a cluster of jelly beans with his shoe and squatted down again.

Where he’d been when it started.

But this time, nothing happened.

The arthritis in both ankles was worse: a steady, painful progression that he could do little to stop. Then he shone a light in Edna’s eyes, checked a suspicious spot on her arm, updated her blood pressure medication, and had a chat about the sudden onset of summer.

“Cicadas have started again,” Edna remarked, looking toward the open window. “They’re a bit early.”

Charlie knew it too, and almost hated himself for it. For knowing it was at least a couple of weeks too soon for that buzzing drone to descend on Marwick. For knowing what normal was. He’d loved that noise once; it was the soundtrack of every summer he could remember.

Now it made him restless.

Almost, Charlie, he told himself. Count the days.

“You’re all set, Edna.” Except for the delicate part. “You don’t need to mention me spilling the jelly beans to anybody, do you? Or anything else. It was just an accident. I’m fine.”

“You keep my secrets, Doc,” she said. “I’ll keep yours.”

He smiled gratefully, though he suspected Edna Bradley had a few secrets she didn’t share with her doctor.

Suppose it goes both ways then.

“If I see Mum, I’ll tell her you said hello.” He picked up the Tupperware container that had somehow survived the carnage on his desk. “And thanks for the shortbread.”

Charlie helped Edna to the door, only stopping there because she shooed him off. He closed it behind her and pressed his ear to the wood, listening for her cane tapping toward reception. She wouldn’t say anything, he knew that. But if she did, the receptionists would have to tell the boss, and then MaryAnn would ask him what was going on and he’d have to explain what had happened.

Which was what, exactly?

Charlie had witnessed the colors run out and the room go gray. And he’d felt that awful pressure inside his head, a balloon inflating in a shoebox.

And once the color vanished, and his head was about to burst, he’d seen something else: something moving and shifting and turning in his mind like smoke.

But that wasn’t quite right. He didn’t see it, he felt it. A sensation right behind his eyes, so close that he could almost see it.

Something that made no sense at all, because why would a number be appearing in his head?

It made no sense, but it happened. He was sure of it: as sure as he was of the jelly beans on his floor or the dusting of silver hair that Edna had gleefully pointed out among the brown. What he’d felt emerge from the pressure in his skull was a number. Just a small one—­a single digit—­and suddenly Charlie scrabbled on his desk for a pen, desperate to get it out of his brain.

He wrote the number 4 and circled it, expecting to feel better now that he’d cleared it from his mind.

But the relief didn’t come. In its place was a growing sense that something was very, very wrong.

Something that might just stand in the way of his grand escape, from the place where everybody knew him, where they brought him biscuits and asked after his parents and where he knew exactly when the cicadas were supposed to start their drone.

He only needed six weeks.

But six weeks could be a lifetime.

About the Author

MICHAEL THOMPSON spent fifteen years working in the Australian media, where he won multiple awards for radio and journalism. His time is now divided between writing books and podcasting from his home in Sydney, where he lives with his wife and two children. All the Perfect Days is his second novel. Michael’s first book, How to Be Remembered, was published internationally in 2023, translated into seven languages, and is currently being adapted into a film.