The Doctor

It was worse than I feared.

"I'm sorry to tell you," said the doctor gravely, "that you have an infarction of the farty parts."

I felt faint. "Is it serious?" I asked.

"As serious as you want it to be. I could tell you amusing tales of other farty part infarctions I've treated, I could call in my receptionist to laugh at your strange appearance, or else I could put on my 'which shall we save, the chav mother or the heroin-addicted child?' face and have a go at treating it. The choice is yours."

"But why me?" I wailed. I had always kept myself clean, never ate from the bottom of the skip, drank only what I could steal, and aired my willy twice a fortnight in the vegetable aisle at Sainsbury's, just as my old nan had taught me. I'd done everything right.

The doctor was pretending to listen to his stethoscope although I could see it wasn't plugged in. Maybe it was Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or something. He lit a cigarette, sat back in his chair and put his feet on the desk, alternately puffing on his fag and picking his teeth with a hypodermic syringe.

"It's the gases that cause the problem," he elaborated. "For years your internal organs have been stewing in purest fartrogen dioxide. By now they'll be so smelly that you could hardly bear to eat yourself. Not that we GPs condone self-consumption, you understand, but we know it goes on."

Now I knew he was lying. I'd donated my internal organs years ago for transplanting into sick owls. It was all in my medical records. The RSPCA had demanded them at knifepoint and I thought giving them up would be a mark of maturity, like having a tattoo or slicing your ear off. That Vincent van Goth was so cool! By the time I'd discovered the truth the RSPCA were miles away. They'd left me with the bill for the toilet cubicle too. I had nothing but kapok and cigarette ends inside me now.

"How did they know where to strike?" I asked in a conspiratorial whisper.

The doctor was snorting a line of coke. "What was that?" he asked.

"How did they know where to strike?" I asked a little louder.

"Scare a pike?" Now he was rolling a joint.

"How did those bastards know where to fuckin' strike?" I yelled.

“Oooh, potty mouth!” commented the doctor. He looked at me quizically. “You mean you don’t know? Infections are organised on the social media these days. It was probably your twittering on Twatter that did it. Either that or they took a liking to your BookSpace profile. They’re much smaller than us, they don’t share our values, so who knows what goes on in their tiny microbial heads. They’re only trying to impress each other. When they discover dogging they usually become less virulent. You could try pushing a dog up your bum. You can get small ones these days, the size of puppies. In fact I think they are puppies. I'll write you a prescription.” He slumped forward and his head hit the desk with a sickening burp.

I tied his stethoscope around his head like an Alice band and stood back to admire the effect. Then I slammed the hypodermic into his neck and filled it with tea from my thermos. They’d never suspect, they’d just think he’d been suicided. I went missing by the fire exit, leaving behind a small fire. It comforted me to know that there was a special way for it to get out.

As I walked down the street I heard footsteps behind me but it was only the story following me to see whether I’d be doing anything else. Now for the dentist, I thought.