The Throwback

But Dr Mannet was holding his head in his hands and staring at a prescription pad. He had shot his bolt again.

'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 Mannet nodded feebly. He had always previously disapproved of the permissive society but just at that moment he had to admit that there were things to be said in its favour.

'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 Mannet worked feverishly on his trousers and donned a white lab coat to cover the havoc Jessica had provoked.

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 Mannet's poking and prodding and general gynaecological curiosity. By the time Dr Mannet had spoken for five minutes the suspicion had gone and the danger doubled.

'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 Mannet nodded. 'More or less,' he muttered, 'though I wouldn't put it quite like that.'

'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 Mannet, 'and if you object I can always make a slight incision myself.'

'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 Mannet turned from puce to purple and was passing to black when Lockhart released his grip and hurled him back into his chair.

'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 Mannet tried to get his voice back while considering this awful end. 'Mr Flawse,' he whispered finally, 'if you will just bear with me a moment. The purpose of what I call your penis and what you prefer to regard as your John Willie is not solely to pass water. I hope I make myself plain.'

'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 Mannet shook his head carefully to rid himself of the feeling that he was dealing with some violent and wholly unconscious homosexual who having turned nasty once might turn murderous a second time. He trod warily.

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

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

'Sheep?' said Dr Mannet faintly. 'You had wet dreams about sheep?'

'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 Mannet's sense of unreality grew alarmingly. 'You shot sheep in your sleep,' he said with involuntary alliteration. 'Is that what you're slaying…, saying?'

'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 running chance.'

'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 Mannet seized on the expression. 'Ah,' he said, heading for bestiality, 'so having shot sheep you fucked them?'

'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 Mannet.

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

Dr Mannet shuddered. Much more of these appalling revelations and he would be in need of therapy himself.

'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 Mannet but he took pains not to say so. 'Now the tacts are simply these. Every woman-'

'Lady,' said Lockhart irritably.

'Lady what?'

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

Dr Mannet forgot himself. More particularly he forgot Lock-hart's propensity for violence. 'Never mind all that,' he snapped. 'Any woman who can bring herself to live with a man who openly admits a preference for fucking sheep has got to be an angel, never mind the radiant or beautiful…'

'I mind,' said Lockhart and brought the outburst to a sudden end.

Dr Mannet remembered himself. 'All right, given that Mrs Flawse is a lady it is nevertheless true that as a lady she naturally produces an ovum every month and this ovum descends her Fallopian tubes and unless it is fertilized it passes out in the form of…'

He ground to a halt. Lockhart had gone Aztec again.

'What do you mean fertilized?' he snarled.

Dr Mannet tried to think of some way of explaining the process of fertilizing an ovum without causing further offence. 'What you do,' he said with an unnatural calm, 'is you put your pen… Jesus… your John Willie into her vagina and… Dear God.' He gave up in despair and rose from his chair.

So did Lockhart. 'There you go again,' he shouted. 'First you talk about dunging my wife and now you're on about shoving my John Willie-'

'Dung?' screamed the doctor backing into a corner. 'Who said anything about dung?'

'Dung's fertilizer,' bawled Lockhart. 'Dig it and dung it. That is what we do in our kitchen garden and if you think…'

But Dr Mannet was past thought. All he wanted to do was obey his instincts and get the hell out of his consulting-room before this sheep-obsessed maniac laid hands on him again. 'Nurse, nurse,' he screamed as Lockhart strode towards him. 'For God's sake…' But Lockhart's fury had abated.

'Call yourself a doctor,' he snapped and went out the door. Dr Mannet sank back into his chair and called his partner. By the time he had prescribed himself thirty milligrams of Valium washed down with vodka and was able to put his words into coherent order he was determined to strike Mr and Mrs Flawse off his books for ever.

'Don't let either of them into the waiting-room ever again,' he told the nurse. 'On pain of death.'