WARNING: SOME STORIES MAY CONTAIN DISTURBING SCENES
Mrs Abraham confirmed it. A sweet, elderly lady of seventy, she had seen the boy go into the surgery just after it had opened. ‘Yes,’ she said, stood in the street with her shopping bag and blue rinse, ‘he was about fourteen with blonde hair and glasses and he was waiting when they opened the door.’ But the problem was, no one had seen him come out.
‘Thankyou,’ said Detective Constable Lucy Spinks, becoming increasingly worried about the boy. After all, he had only gone to the surgery for a repeat prescription for his hay fever. But that was many hours ago, now. And she began to suspect the receptionist was lying when she said he had picked up the prescription and left. It’s time, she decided, to interview the doctors themselves. One of them, she surmised, just had to know something.
Dr Coker was the first GP she interviewed. Walking into his office, DC Spinks sat down and perused the doctor closely. And as the questions escaped her lips, she couldn’t help but notice his erratic behaviour, suspicious mind, and the gaping hole in his nose which made his nostrils form into one. Eventually having his office searched, cocaine was found in abundance and the doctor was arrested as a snorter.
Deciding that Dr Coker could well have abducted the boy, she did, nonetheless decide to interview the other doctors. And the next on the list was the little, moustachioed Dr Hister. Walking into his office, she couldn’t help but notice the jars on the shelves, filled with various items such as fingers, thumbs, shards of skin and eyeballs. This, and the swastika he wore on his arm, immediately alerted DC Spinks to the fact that he could well be a Neo-Nazi medical experimenter. And despite the boy’s blonde hair, a further van was called for to cart the bad doctor away.
Next on the list was kindly old Dr Skinner. And she was equally horrified to walk into HIS office only to be assaulted by the pungent aroma of decaying flesh. Quickly opening drawer after drawer, she identified a plethora of body bits, dripping and oozing all over the place. Deciding Dr Skinner was a serial killer, a third van was called for and the bad doctor was carted off to gaol. Which left only one doctor to be interviewed; Dr Venusian.
As she walked into his office DC Spinks was immediately taken by the doctor’s small stature, floppy ears and bug-eyes. Immediately suspecting him of being an extraterrestrial spy and abductor, she drew her asp as if to arrest him. Sensing danger, the little doctor jabbered away, momentarily, in a funny tongue before floating through his window to a re-materialised flying saucer, whereupon he disappeared inside, hovered above the ground before heading out of the galaxy at thousands of times the speed of light.
DC Spinks sighed at the adventures of her morning. Having arrested a crack head with psychotic tendencies, a Neo-Nazi butcher, a serial killer, and nearly arresting her first alien, she was nonetheless dissatisfied for she had not found the boy, and had realised, too, that the Blairite reforms of the NHS had a long way to go yet. However, eager to carry on her investigation, she called in two JCBs and builders by the bucket load to systematically pull the surgery apart and go on searching for the boy down to the foundations.
They were half way through this task when she heard a commotion outside. Running out, she was presented to a rather ruffled, embarrassed boy of about fourteen with blonde hair and glasses. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the good detective. ‘I’m afraid I got lost.’
© Anthony North, May 2002
See Fiction Page on Blogroll for more short stories
The middleclass in the UK are the most crooked area of society. According to a Keele University report two thirds admitted offences such as tax evasion and inflating insurance claims.
Large parts of the UK are underwater again as rivers burst their banks. Even a reservoir is in fear of breaking, threatening to send water flowing down a valley, deluging villages and a power station.
Ricky sat on the wall in the playground and said: ‘My Dad’s cleared off.’
The UK government is toying with the idea of screening 40 – 70 year olds with the aim of giving anti-cholesterol wonder drugs to anyone with the slightest possibility of heart problems in the future.
So it has been and gone again. Glastonbury, that marvelous festival of mud and fortitude. I only watched it on TV – I like my comforts these days. But I felt I was there – in a clean sort of way. And as the wife freaked out to Kaiser Chiefs, the spirit lived on.
Dragons and China go hand in hand. When China is quiet, the Dragon sleeps. But when the Dragon awakes, the world trembles. And as China continues to open two new power stations a week, the dragon’s fire certainly has a new slant.
I recently read this little gem on an Allison Pearson column in the Daily Mail. Stiff Upper Hippie. A modern variation on the ‘stiff upper lip’ of the archetypal Brit, it acknowledges that we’ve moved on, taken on board counter culture.
