Doctors & Nurses

by Lucy Ellmann

  One day, Dr Lewis had four emergencies in a row! The first was a student who’d been stabbed outside a pub and had lain near by all night, semiconscious. Dr Lewis decided the stab wound was only superficial and gave the guy some dyspepsia medicine. (He died five days later – that wasn’t DYSPEPSIA, that was peritonitis!)

  Next, they went to the aid of a drunk old geezer who’d got himself run over by a truck. He was too drunk to tell Dr Lewis what was wrong with him, so Dr Lewis told him to go sleep it off and see his own GP in the morning. (But the poor fellow had EIGHTEEN BROKEN RIBS and died in the night!)

  NEXT, they landed in the middle of a yellow field of RAPE (and really SPOILT it) to see a woman in a secluded caravan. A distraught man bustled them inside, and there on the floor lay VIRGINIA, the American with the HRT scruples! This was the first time Dr Lewis had come upon one of his own patients during his Air Ambulance work, and it was quite a surprise. The husband told him Virginia had woken up that morning unable to MOVE. Her left arm and left leg both seemed to be paralysed. Also, she’d been vomiting for hours and her speech was slurred (so nobody knew that what she was trying to say right now was: ‘Get that mother-fucking asshole outta here!’).

  Virginia had had some kind of SEIZURE (brought on by HRT), but Dr Lewis liked to leave no stone unturned – especially when wearing his flight suit. He slowly tapped his dimpled chin, and combed his fingers through his hair, that stood like a field of RAPE on top of his head, while he ticked off the various diagnostic possibilities. The vomiting could be caused by food poisoning, gastroenteritis, Ménière’s disease, roundworm infection, migraine, Addison’s disease, acute labyrinthitis, diabetes, kidney trouble, hepatitis, or cancer. The general weakness on her left side: pernicious anaemia, an underactive thyroid or adrenal gland, heart failure, poliomyelitis, polymyositis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, systemic lupus erythematosus, a transient ischaemic attack, neuritis, motor neurone disease, or cancer.

  Charlie was revving the helicopter blades impatiently outside. It was time for ACTION. Dr Lewis decided it must be cancer, having suddenly remembered the lump he’d found in her breast (she had already had the mastectomy he predicted she would need – though, as it turned out, the lump was BENIGN). So he gave her some penicillin and steroids, told her to go back to the oncologist, and left her LYING ON THE FLOOR.

  Was it a BIRD, was it a PLANE? No, a doctor.

  Next, they had to escort the corpse of a six-year-old girl to hospital to await the arrival of her mother. The kid had been playing on the pavement outside her childminder’s house when a car knocked her down. She had died instantly, but the mother couldn’t be told that over the phone, so Dr Lewis had to WAIT. And WAIT! By the time the frantic mother finally made her way to the hospital, Dr Lewis had had THREE CUPS OF TEA. So, naturally, he was in the LOO. When he got out, he duly explained to the woman that her daughter was dead. She became hysterical! Dr Lewis told her death is part of life, but she wouldn’t LISTEN. You share these findings with people, discoveries made over the course of DECADES of medical practice, and they pay no attention!

  Jen was waiting for him in the field behind the surgery (he had rigged up a rudimentary LANDING PAD for himself there). He’d just rung the surgery from the helicopter to tell her he would be landing in approximately four minutes thirty seconds and sure enough, down he fluttered! As Charlie sped off to Air Ambulance HQ, Jen found herself alone in the dusk with Roger. The sight of him in his orange flight suit, luminous as a slab of WIENER SCHNITZEL, was heart-rending. Though she was just supposed to be helping him CARRY stuff, Jen felt an urgent need to be FREE and unrestricted by DUTY.

  Twisting her little upside-down nursy watch from its accustomed place on her mountainous nursy bosom, she tried to wrestle Roger to the ground! He was dumbfounded. He had always planned to acknowledge his gratitude some day for the way she’d saved his life in the fire, a token of appreciation, a BRACELET perhaps, or a new swivel chair. But as she tore wildly at his flight suit, Roger suddenly recalled how much he liked the SIZE of her: AMPLE GIRL. Jen was made for better things than just spreading Vaseline on old folks’ KNEES!

  He tried to get his arms around her but COULDN’T. So instead he fled with her back to the surgery, her white nursy hat bouncing on her head. Down the stairs they hurried, ass over heel and arsy-versy, to Jen’s bedroom, where Roger tied her to the bed. Then he attached himself by the straps of his flight suit to a pulley on the ceiling that Jen had never noticed before. He had astonishing CONTROL of this device: he could raise and lower himself over Jen with great rapidity, and a certain rigidity, keeping up a steady rhythm. Jen became the rudimentary LANDING PAD for his touch-downs! Pinioned and helpless, she stared up at his orange-tinted face as he bungee-jumped all over her, wanting only to envelop him further.

  To achieve greater accuracy, he grabbed her breasts. These were usually immune to all sensation, but Dr Lewis’s antics resulted in hitherto unknown twinges in Jen’s viscerals. He rose and fell like a COLOSSUS over the desert that was Jen, journeying over her land masses, copping a feel of her pyramids. Her PARAMETERS were less definable: Jen had always felt like an AMORPHOUS BLOB (and she WAS one).

  There were SHARP MOMENTS in all this for Jen. Sometimes Dr Lewis’s cleft CHIN, with its five o’clock shadow, grazed her cheek (TWO CENTIMETRES AT FIVE O’CLOCK), or her undergarments snagged on some bit of plastic on his orange-wrapped thighs. But these were only INKLINGS of the torments to come.

  A Shaky Affairs

  Thus Dr Lewis and Jen embarked on a shaky affair! These doctor–nurse things are always complicated because your lovemaking can so easily be interrupted by PATIENTS and their frequent need to DIE or have BABIES or a STROKE. Always there is duty.

  And yet, anyone peeking through the surgery windows early in the morning might have caught a glimpse of Dr Lewis lying NAKED on a trolley, with a sheet draped across his middle and his legs wide open. But those weren’t Dr Lewis’s legs, they were JEN’S! She would be under the sheet with Dr Lewis’s COCK down her throat, while the trolley slowly rolled them across the floor.

  During quiet periods during the working day, they would take their steaming hot cups of tea or coffee downstairs and play: DOCTORS & NURSES! He would poke her with all the instruments in his medical bag; she would take his penis’s blood pressure, using her special tight-fitting children’s cuff, or give him rectal examinations that swept him off his feet. Sometimes he CATHETERISED her and filled her bladder with SALINE solution (?) – they made use of all kinds of equipment in their amorosities. They injected each other with uppers, downers, amyl nitrate and all the other aphrodisiacs mentioned in footnotes in the BMJ. He rubbed that ASS of hers until the building shook! (Francine had to realign the pictures of water mills in the waiting room – she thought there must be volcanic activity in the area.)

  When his bollocking of her backside got the better of him, Dr Lewis would tie Jen to the bed and LEAVE her while he saw a few patients! As soon as he got a chance, he’d rush down, SAW OFF Jen’s clothing with a scalpel, squeeze her breasts, and rush OUT again, tucking his erection away as he ran! TWENTY MINUTES might elapse before he dashed back and FUCKED her, coming almost immediately from the excitement of DELAY. Had he known how unerotic all this was for JEN – well, he still would have done it.

  SHARP MOMENTS. It isn’t always easy being involved with a DOCTOR, a doctor consumed by DUTY. His aloofness still troubled her, as did the FOOTBALL. He still hadn’t RECOGNISED her either – perhaps he never would! He also liked visiting a nearby MOTOR MUSEUM a lot, housed in an old army hangar. It was FREEZING in there! He and Jen were usually the only visitors, breathing steam all over the classic cars, or the antique petrol cans and tin ads for oil and tyres. Jen put up with a LOT in that hangar.

  She understood of course that Roger couldn’t be with her ALWAYS. He was crucial to the community. And then there were his KIDS. Jen couldn’t tell if Edward and Adele were particularly fine examples or not, but she resented them. Because of thos
e mangy kids Jen was never allowed to visit Roger upstairs. He wanted to keep their affair SACRED and SECRET for a while. Jen had many SEPARATIONS to endure.

  Yet Roger had true feelings for Jen. He had noticed, for instance, that Jen’s ass, stiffened, could be wrapped in a PUDDING CLOTH and set on fire! Doused with brandy, her ass took on an ELEMENTAL air, making it seem patriotic and festive!

  But it was her collection of HANDBAGS that really stirred him. It was like a HAREM in there! Dr Lewis had previously been IMMUNE to handbags, quelled, even a little REPELLED by them. They were WOMEN’S stuff: degenerate and dirty. Of course he’d noticed that some were more LIKEABLE than others, some softer, some sturdy, some so BULKY there was no adequate division between the world inside the bag and the world OUTSIDE. But he had always been perturbed by their inviolability and alienness, their dubious function and contents, hiding secret things like money and love letters and items designed for soaking LIQUIDS up. You never really know WHAT’S in a handbag.

  But now, staring up at the handbags amid the stink of Jen’s pussy, as she lay like a DEAD FISH beside him in the bed (trying, through total IMMOBILITY, to keep her flab from flopping), Roger became entranced by the variety of colour and shape that is available in the handbag universe. Each bag seemed to have a different PERSONALITY. It was like having a big bunch of front and back BOTTOMS pinned to the wall, awaiting his every whim!

  He was fascinated by their presence in the BUILDING, and seduced by their insistent call! While Jen was out on her rounds (changing bandages, taking blood pressure, emptying bedpans, administering laxatives and enemas, weighing babies, kicking cats: her Health Visits), Dr Lewis was drawn to the basement to handle those HANDBAGS, to fondle and molest them, burying his face in them, sometimes his whole head! He became quite a CONNOISSEUR.

  After a bout of these clandestine intimacies, he would retreat upstairs and swivel in his swivel chair, dreaming of being a great diagnostician like Dr Kildare, or a neurosurgeon like Ben Casey. His RIGHT to be one or the other! He was certainly HANDSOME enough.

  The Veil

  It was a perfect match!! They were happy only when together – and they were hardly ever apart! There was no END to their caresses, nor to the tenderness they felt for each other. Utter acceptance, utter devotion, utter need, utter hope. FOR EVER. The life-giving warmth of two bodies touching, the softness of skin against skin, of breath and murmuring.

  It was a symbiosis that really WORKED, for Jen at least. She became accustomed to the constant contact, protection, sympathy and love. Their connection was Jen’s LIFE BLOOD, the biggest and best thing in the world! Such passion must be MUTUAL, no? No.

  Held in her mother’s strong grasp, against her mother’s warm chest, it never occurred to Jen that the same big arms could be used for SHOVING or ABANDONING. But then there came the fateful day when Jen’s mother decided, OUT OF THE BLUE, that it was time for Jen to learn to have a regular afternoon nap. A nap, scheduled and timed! Jen didn’t want or need this nap, she just wanted to be with her MOTHER, but her mother put her in her cot and left her there! Jen cried and cried in her sky-blue bedroom, receiving no reply, no consolation, not even an instant COOKIE. She was just some sort of PARCEL that could be put down and FORGOTTEN about! She was NOTHING to her mother. Jen sat looking through the bars of her cot at the door to her room, then up at the blank blue walls, and cried until she conked out (and had her nap after all). She woke to face another stint in the world, but a world that had changed, turned on her, turned sour. A world full of BETRAYAL.

  Birds are making a lot of noise as Jen trudges through the gorge, but she doesn’t notice them (we are a poor audience for birds). After her Health Visits, nursing here, nursing there, Jen skives in the gorge. Roger won’t mind. Busy man. Jen is trying to LIKE herself, for Roger’s sake: she’s RUSHING the process a little in fact! Take a Break says no one can like you unless you like yourself. This seems most UNJUST, and EXTREMELY inconvenient for JEN. She’s got to try to like herself QUICK, before Roger REALISES she DOESN’T like herself and, as a result, goes OFF her!

  But it ain’t EASY, with her puckered, pockmarked breasts, her monotonous voice, her tangled thicket of hair and fungal irregularities and rickety knees and all those CATS she’s kicked. Jen has worn herself OUT with the two main difficulties in life: disliking oneself and being disliked by others. She’s now pretty much BEYOND heartbreak: she can only PECK at love. She circles and re-circles her ROGER, poking about for his regurgitated CRUMBS.

  Jen sits down on a mossy bank. The grass around her is covered with tiny blue, yellow and white flowers, and iridescent dew. Flies flit about, all trying to sit on the same warm sunny white leaf: it’s like MUSICAL CHAIRS down there! But Jen doesn’t notice. Nature is LOST on Jen. There’s a VEIL between Jen and the outside world that stops her SEEING things, a veil of BETRAYAL. Pink horse chestnut trees and dark-blue hills hover over her IN VAIN. They mean NOTHING to her. Jen is like some giant CYCLOPS, one-eyed and numb, a crushed, crouched creature hiding in a corner of her own LIFE. Even her NAME is crushed, a small crumpled HANKY of a name, strangely curtailed. She feels DISINHERITED: the world doesn’t BELONG to her, nor she to it. The world never seems real to Jen unless she’s EATING a bit of it.

  An ANIMAL takes on its environment, considers it real and worthy of investigation! Jen sees her environment as something that needs to be DEFEATED. What does JEN have in common with a bird singing its heart out in a chosen tree? Nothing.

  Animals aren’t pussy-footing around about life, feeling VAGUE about stuff, waiting for something to HAPPEN. It’s already happening, and it’s IMPORTANT. For bugs, for birds, life is for real, EVERY TIME! Jen has SUSPENDED her life somewhere, coldly cast it aside. She has CRUSHED love, companionship, crushed everything in her path with ANGER. She has bandaged every HURT with anger, filled her every waking moment with it.

  She has perfected the art of being UNREACHABLE: people treat her like she’s in a WHEELCHAIR, and she treats them the same way! She has HIDDEN herself in nursing, not just as a form of ATONEMENT but as an infinite resource, a bottomless pit, of ANGER (towards patients). She has tried to atone for her mother’s death by never being happy, never being loved, never GIVING love, never being beautiful or successful or even competent, never being LIKED, never being part of the world.

  ANIMALS aren’t afraid of love. They love without shame, BRAVELY. Animals know everything they need to know. A sea urchin at three days old is everything it’s going to be! A chiton at TWO days old. No one blames a CHITON for its mother’s death. A chiton doesn’t blame itself.

  ‘Nice walk?’ asks Roger when Jen wanders into the consulting room. ‘How are they all, our noble patients?’

  ‘Stable,’ Jen replies. ‘But they all seem to think they’d get better a lot faster if they went to Thailand or BELIZE and learnt to DIVE. Why does everybody have to go to BELIZE?’

  This is a sore point, since Roger too wants to go to Belize! Roger is APPALLED by Jen’s indifference to Belize.

  ‘You old stickin-the-mud!’ he says, grabbing her ass and pulling her on to his lap. ‘You’d better just stay here then, hadn’t you, forever.’

  Jen tries to imagine this ‘forever’. She has forever expected to DIE, or be KILLED! She has forever expected to be deprived of what she WANTS. She has forever assumed herself to be an OUTCAST.

  The swivel chair, under their combined weight, starts to roll across the floor at frightening speed. Roger puts out a foot to stop it, but too violently: they both fall off. Practically BURIED under her, Roger breathlessly cries out, ‘Marry me!’

  ‘Eh?’

  But it’s TRUE: Roger wants to marry Jen! It makes perfect sense to ROGER, for he can think of nothing worse than being parted from those HANDBAGS of hers. He’s determined to make HONEST BAGS of them all!

  A Sunny Scene

  A sunny scene up to now, was it not? Handbags, helicopters, steady incomes, docile patients, well-fed bellies, sideburns cropped with care. GOOD-LOOKING PEO
PLE going about their lawful business in an organised manner, everything running PRETTY DAMN SMOOTHLY.

  But what if getting together is about the WORST THING this pair could do? What if it’s bad for the WORLD? Doctor–nurse books never pause to consider whether romance is really such a GOOD thing. We’re all so KEEN on it, so sure where we stand when two people of opposite sex, with leisure time and no apparent impediments, flop into bed. Millions of years, millions of matings, have encouraged us to find such conjunctions SWEET, harmless, moving, IMPORTANT. Poets have exhausted themselves crooning about it, novelists too (it’s MUCH more exhausting writing a novel). We’re trained from birth to CELEBRATE love, to sing, dance, drink, think and FUCK in its honour.

  But what if it’s NOT so nice? What if, given overpopulation and the nature of the species in general, human sexual love is actually pointless, evil, embarrassing, depressing and DOOMED? And what if the whole purpose of love affairs is not what it SEEMS, the intense, narcissistic and sentimental APPRECIATION of someone else – but instead, the usual end result: deciding the beloved STINKS? What if we’re biologically programmed to UNDERVALUE each other? What if it’s DISGUST, not love, that makes the world go round? Maybe evolution favours creatures that never get too happy, for that might make them wild and reckless, unreliable as reticules for GENES, which is all we are.

  O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

  Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

  May who ne’er hung there.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  The Wedding Plans

  Can there be anything more preposterous than a lavish wedding? WHY must fornication be recognised in this way? Just DOING it should be reward enough!