The Throwback

'Of course not,' said Jessica who had watched the doctor's throes with some concern, 'we're always kissing and cuddling.'

'Kissing and cuddling,' said Dr Ma

'More?' said Jessica. 'What more?'

Dr Ma

'You don't do anything else in bed?'

'Well, we go to sleep of course,' said Jessica.

'Dear Lord,' murmured the doctor, 'you go to sleep! And you do absolutely nothing else?'

'Lockhart snores,' said Jessica, thinking hard, 'but I can't think of anything else in particular.'

Across the desk Dr Ma

'And has no one ever explained where babies come from?' he asked, lapsing into that nursery whimsy that seemed to emanate from Mrs Flawse.

'Storks,' said Jessica bluntly.

'Stalks?' echoed the doctor, whose own stalk was playing him up again.

'Or herons. I forget which. They bring them in their beaks.'

'Beaks?' gurgled the doctor, now definitely back in the nursery.

'In little cradles of cloth,' continued Jessica, oblivious of the effect she was having. 'They have these little cradles of cloth and they carry them in their beaks. Surely you've seen pictures of them. And their mummies are ever so pleased. Is something the matter?'

But Dr Ma

'Mrs Flawse, dear Mrs Flawse,' he whimpered when the crisis was past, 'if you'll just leave your telephone number… Better still, would you mind if I had a word with your husband, Lock-prick…'

'Hart,' said Jessica, 'Lockhart. You want him to come and see you?'

Dr Ma

'Just ask him to come and see me, will you? Excuse me for not rising. You know the way out.'

Jessica went out and made an appointment for Lockhart. In the consulting-room Dr Ma

But if Mrs Flawse had been a disturbing if pleasurable patient, her husband was even more disturbing and definitely not pleasurable. From the start he had eyed the doctor with dangerous suspicion brought on by Jessica's account of Dr Ma

'Are you suggesting,' said Lockhart with a grimness that made one of the more awful Aztec gods look positively amiable, 'that I should intrude what you have chosen to call my penis into the person of my wife and that this intrusion should take place through the orifice between her legs?'

Dr Ma

'Which orifice,' continued Lockhart more ferociously than ever, 'being too small will then split and cause her pain and suffering and…'

'Only temporarily,' said Dr Ma

'Object?' snarled Lockhart and grabbed the doctor by the tie. 'If you think for one moment I'm going to let you touch my wife with your foul John Willie-'

'Not my John Willie, Mr Flawse,' gurgled the strangulated doctor, 'with a scalpel.'

It was an unwise suggestion. As Lockhart's grip tightened Dr Ma

'You come near my wife with a scalpel,' he said, 'and I'll gut you like a dead rabbit and have your balls for breakfast.'

Dr Ma

'You do,' said Lockhart. 'Very plain, not to say downright ugly.'

'That's as may be,' continued the doctor. 'Now in the course of your adolescence you must at one time or another have noticed that your pen… John Willie gave you pleasurable sensations.'

'I suppose you could say that,' said Lockhart grudgingly. 'At night.'

'Precisely,' said the doctor. 'At night you had wet dreams.'

Lockhart admitted that he had had dreams and that the results had sometimes been wet.

'Good,' said the doctor, 'now we're getting somewhere. And in those dreams were you not conscious of an overwhelming desire for women?'

'No,' said Lockhart, 'I most certainly wasn't.'

Dr Ma

'Would you mind telling me what you did dream about?'

Lockhart consulted his memory for a moment. 'Sheep,' he said finally.

'Sheep?' said Dr Ma

'Well, I don't know about the wet part,' said Lockhart, 'but I certainly dreamt about sheep a lot.'-

'And did you do anything to these sheep you dreamt about?'

'Shot them,' said Lockhart bluntly.

Dr Ma

'I shot them anyway,' said Lockhart. 'Wasn't anything much else to shoot so I took to potting them at fifteen hundred yards.'

'Potting them?' said the doctor slipping paediatrically. 'You potted sheep at fifteen hundred yards? Isn't that a bit difficult?'

'Well, you've got to aim up and off a bit, but at that range they've got a ru

'Yes, I suppose they do,'- said the doctor, who wished he had. 'And having potted them you then had spontaneous emissions about them?'

Lockhart studied him with concern now mixed with his disgust. 'I don't know what the hell you're talking about,' he said. 'First you fiddle with my wife and then you ask me here and start talking about fucking sheep…'

Dr Ma

'Did I?' said Lockhart who had picked up the six-letter word from Mr Treyer who used it frequently in its seven-letter variety when speaking to or about Lockhart. It was usually suffixed by idiot.

'Well, you should know,' said Dr Ma

'I may have done,' said Lockhart, who didn't. 'Anyway afterwards we had them for di

Dr Ma

'Mr Flawse,' he said determined to change the subject, 'what you did or did not do with sheep is beside the point. Your wife consulted me because she said you were concerned about her menstrual discharge…'

'I was concerned about her bleeding,' said Lockhart.

'Quite so, her monthly period. We call it menstruation.'

'I call it bloody horrible,' said Lockhart. 'And worrying.'

So did Dr Ma

'Lady,' said Lockhart irritably.

'Lady what?'

'Don't call my wife a woman. She is a lady, a radiant, beautiful, angelic-'

Dr Ma