33. FISHES IN THE SEA

Greendale goes for a test to determine whether he's sterile or not

Greendale had never felt as nervous as this is his entire life.

Ursula had been for a medical examination to try and determine why it was they were finding it impossible to produce another child even though his own impotence problems had been overcome by a very special and somewhat magical tonic given them by Griselda Entwhistle, a villager with a reputation for, above other things, witchcraft. Neither of them believed the latter: it was, so far as they were concerned, the kind of rumour that can easily grow from nothing in a village like Swanspottle. And anyway, her tonic had done the job in the most miraculous of miraculous ways.

Therefore Greendale had to conclude that the problem lay with him, and it made him squirm to think of it.

Nervously he’d seen Doctor Blegg who had asked him a few very personal questions, the answers to which had made him want to run away and bury his head in whatever he could find suitable for burying heads in. And Doctor Blegg had concluded that there didn’t seem to be much wrong from the kind of examination he could do, and Greendale was given a reference to a clinic in Brumpton.

And here he was at that clinic. And, being the sort to imagine all kinds of dreadful things that might be done in a torrid room to him by pretty young nurses who had no right, in his mind, to venture anywhere near the bits of him to do with the fertilisation of human females, he hovered and hung about before plucking up a huge amount of courage and walking in.

The pretty young nurse morphed into a harridan with a bald patch and whiskers growing in great profusion out of a mole on her cheek and the torrid room became rather cool.

He handed the letter to the harridan, and she already had him marked on a list which she consulted through bottle-bottom spectacles while half a dozen other clients or patients, he wasn’t quite sure what they were, looked on curiously.

“Mr Blocksley?” she asked after a full (and very lengthy) minute’s perusal of her list, “this is you, isn’t it? You’re having trouble down below?”

He knew where down below was, and squirmed again. And this time it was a powerful squirm that made his entire body vibrate as he admitted that yes, he might be having trouble down below.

“It’s a simple procedure,” she barked at him as she handed him a small glass dish with a plastic cover, “you take this, young man, and bring me a specimen.”

A specimen, but what of… “What of?” he asked, aware that he must seem simple-minded to the extreme. But was he to provide some urine? Maybe a few drops from which could be determined his problem, if he had one? Or … the alternative filled him with dread. How to get it… the question formed and reformed in his mind.

He suddenly didn’t think he did have a problem, though. He still, with three quarters of his mind, believed the difficulty lay with Ursula even though she had been tested and checked and given the all-clear. Anyway, he didn’t really like to think of it. He knew (and so did the lovely Ursula) that on the many occasions they did a certain thing, all heated and passionate, had relations as she put it as blandly as only she could, that a vast quantity of something warm and fluid surged from him. It was working, wasn’t it? The fluid was there. He could feel it as it left him. The sensation flooded through him as if every nerve and muscle in his body was urging it on its way. It was working all right.

“I think I’m all right,” he said to the harridan.

“Of course you do,” she barked, “it’s what all you men think! You’ve got the bits and pieces so they must work and anything that goes wrong must be because of the woman! Oh, I’ve heard it times many! Now all you have to go, dear, is take this little plastic container, go behind that curtain over there where you’ll find a seat and all luxuries, if you know what I mean, and produce a specimen. And do it as quickly as you can. Nurse Keppel is off soon, and the little blighters won’t live until next week...”

Wait a moment… can it be… “Nurse Keppel?” he asked, weakly. “Is that the nurse who … you know ….”

“Who will count the little blighters, yes, that’s the expert, doesn’t take long, you know, got a microscope in the laboratory, and in moments, mere moments, you can get a diagnosis...”

“Nurse Keppel...” he moaned, and retired behind the curtain into the cubicle in which he found the promised seat, a table and a small pile of magazines.

He’d known a nurse Keppel almost twenty years ago, and she’d been a bit of an elderly battle-axe back then. He’d been wounded and in need of fairly intense treatment, what with a badly broken hip and a small problem with his private parts. She’d known all about that. He shivered as he remembered that she, an elderly woman, had actually had to touch him down there…

He tried to push all thoughts of Nurse Keppel out of his mind because, surely, she had been too old back then to still be working in the field of medicine.

He put the little glass receptacle onto the table and picked up a magazine from the pile that had been left there, no doubt, to help him occupy any spare moments he may have, and he thumbed through it.

And he couldn’t believe his eyes.

The magazine comprised almost completely of pictures. Photographs, in colour. Of ladies. But what ladies, and they were all of them as near to being naked as they could be and in his innocence he’d never seen a magazine like this. There’d been a monochrome one he’d had way back, but all the important feminine parts had been smudged over, weren’t there… But thus was in colour and nothing had been smudged out...

“Good grief!” he muttered, unable to believe the evidence of what his eyes were clearly seeing.

Now he knew what he was supposed to be doing, and what was meant when the harridan had referred to a specimen. And he could do it. He knew he could. Easy-peasy he thought as he turned the page

“Is this what you asked for?” he asked the receptionist/harridan, holding the small glass container towards her, with its plastic lid firmly in place.

“That wasn’t hard, then, was it?” she murmured, and the half dozen other patients in there nodded approvingly when she said, in the kind of voice that indicated she may have said it a thousand times before, “but I’ll bet it was, wasn’t it?”

He mumbled an anonymous sort of nothing sound as the harridan cackled to herself, shuffled off her seat and disappeared round the back with a curt wait there as she went.

He waited for several minutes. There was a continued muted cackling from the rear where, no doubt, Nurse Keppel had her office. It was as if some huge joke, some mightily funny scene was being enacted out of sight of the patients.

Then, in a male voice, “Greendale Blocksley” called someone and a young man with a winning smile appeared.

“I’m Nurse Keppel...” he said, introducing himself.

“Oh … a man...” stammered Greendale, and the sudden feeling of relief was enormous.

“Of course! Would you come this way, please...”

He followed the nurse, the male nurse, into a small laboratory and up to a microscope.

“Take a peek in there and what do you see?” invited the unexpectedly male nurse.

He bent down and peered into the microscope and then looked back up.

“It’s… I don’t know what I’m looking for...” he muttered, helplessly.

“There’s nothing,” said the nurse, “not a single blighter alive. I’ve never seen anything so dead! You could produce a gallon and still not have a living blighter! No, I’m sorry to say this, it must cause you infinite grief, but you’re totally sterile! There are no little fishes in the sea, none whatsoever!”

© Peter Rogerson 12.08.18