On the wings of her mother’s love she flies to an English university.
The mad widow Thysson pawning the family silver, possessed of a penchant for porcelain and rare English horseflesh, and putting poor Wunderkind through the treadmill of the polytechnic of Derby.
The rotting medical empire of the homeflung filly Astrid Thysson runs to a Home for the Elderly & Unwanted the wrong side of the tracks next the nuclear-rubbish-incineration-plant (dubbed by el Presidenté Bliar ‘The People’s Incineration Plant’), and a session of whining, whingeing and wailing within the whitewashed walls of the wicked.
Her Screw for the duration: Clarke. Stiff. Ohne smile. Buttocks clenched to check air escape.
Seeping from every pore the unmistakable musty aroma of men.
Saints alive, the heavenly horny hippy with the schön blue eyes, wicked smile floating the champion of a lost heart, lion’s mane of black locks, padded mauve sleeve wafting fresh love-bubbles into the ventricles, long lashes fluttering — ‘Ah, my dear Doctor.’
‘Vot do you vont?’
‘The Governor Gerbil has sent me in to probe you for drugs.’
‘Herr Gerbil?’
‘Yes.’
‘Vot ... vot are you smirking?’
‘Herbal mix. For my nerves.’
‘Please to be extenuating.’
Blue tails of a smoke-devil trail the crack’d ceiling like poison ivy.
‘How clumsy of me.’ The mauve sleeve carves the blue sea to settle a green Rastafarian — thin like a Black-Forest hat-stand — to crash the black couch with the hairiest vibes of suffering bad dreams — ‘And he’d like some drugs please.’
‘Drugs?’
‘My friend grants me power-of-a-turnip. I’ll be pulling from your fingers that nice fat pad —’
‘Please to be lookings. All talks between doctor viz privates.’ The Doctor fixes beyond the spotty boy and the Mexican bandit on the grooves of a white brick: ‘Tsch! Tsch! You naughty boy.’ She wags a fat firm Fräulein finger — ‘You are interfering viz me.’
Twinkle twinkle television star.
How turn-on good looking you are.
‘I too ham a doctor.’
‘Of vot?’
‘Alternative Sciences ...’
‘I zinc you are pulling my plinker.’
‘... Armchair Astronomy ...’
‘Bah!’
‘... The Meaning of Life ...’
‘Ze Meaning of Pooh!’
The Doctor recoils from the cold truth that with every flick of the tongue she is frosting this man from her black forest. Fur blood vamps the veins of the neck — ‘Votever you are zaying, I em not giving you ze drugs. Herr Meister Clarke, police to be showing ziz man my door. Danke schön.’
‘Yes, miss,’ (from over her shoulder).
The laziest long lashes flutter the butterflies of a locked heart — ‘My dear Doctor. Let us not quibble. Drugs are not to be taken lightly.’
A rush of hot blood to the head, she crosses her legs and with both lips quivering: ‘I zee you are vonting your pound of fish.’
The padded mauve sleeve waves airily. ‘I see leaflets ... lectures ... I see throwing wide the doors of the prison to a vast network of drugs support officers ...’
Writhing and wishing to be free of the wet spot becoming wetter the Doctor heaves two hundred pounds of pink-sponge-love-muscle — a furnace of fiery blood — squeezing leg over desk — Um ein Haar — midriff within inches — exposing white leg — darunter und darüber the door.
The cruel coil of cold cabbage climbs your nasal passage and clampets the clotted cells of the nasal ridge.
‘Stand up for yourself,’ mother is saying.
Strangely vulnerable.
Doctor Astrid Thysson forges a steamy head across the green strip of the Ones and hammers the gold nameplate. The stink kick of alcohol. Into the cradle of Hell she crashes, tummy rolling collywobbles. ‘Grubbelor, you are zaying your flap iz hallways open und I em vonting you ...’ Two hundred and fifty pounds of shot-putting muscle inflict upon the fake pine desk compound fractures. ‘... to be ejaculating ziz man from my office!’
Mean venose nose scored like the lines on a London Underground map. Curly collar shirt. Brown tie thick with stops of yellow and goat-green. Nose of a purple lizard a nonce away from the ripe picture of Anglo-Saxon health her medical books portray as the norm.
‘Look, lady. This is Britain. Great Britain. We’re civilised. If we find ourselves in trouble it’s dogs, Riot Squad or we plug ’em into the Mains.’
‘You are holding ze vong stick …’
‘Let the men wait. They’ll live. I need to grill you over your budget cuts.’
‘… But I em having ziss man …’
‘Have you been giving the men plasters again?’
‘… sin my office … harum … Jason Knees …’
The purple apoplectic head primed with the powderkeg of hatred.
‘… Knees iz zaying you are zerching ze drugs ...’
‘Mmmm. Home Office very keen on drugs sneeze days, Doctor.’
‘... Knees iz phoning ze press ...’
Red eyeballs rotate the rotten apples of a one-armed bandit.
‘... Knees iz covering you in ze glory, yes? ...’
Blunkett blocking her passage to base camp.
‘... I zinc Knees iz having much of your English spunk.’
Paralysis seizing the purple-headed Governor by the throat. Faint exhalation of life from the lungs.
The Doctor beats a tactical retreat two minutes before, by her best calculation, the onset of heart attack.
Bouncing Blunkett a doodlebomb the Doctor glides the gleaming floor.
Damn.
A very un-British escape.
Whitewashed walls. Closing in. Closing in. Out loud she curses. Be more decisive. Like mother.
Ein. Zwei. Drei.
Who’s been sitting in my chair?
Four vats of her favourite heavy-duty vitamin pills and four bears the forest have fled.
***
Never invite an existentialist to one of your parties. Existentialists suck the air from your house like a vacuum pump. And the food. They are largely of the view the worst moment for the world was when Johnny Logan won the Eurovision Song Contest with What’s Another Year? Which proves they are a rotten unreliable bunch. The same applies to academics. Most academics wear sandals, go pot-holing for fun, insist you call them Catherine or Colin, and smoke tofu. A hangover from their student days.
The country’s smallest and smelliest university is Lower Springwood where Le Professeur Imaginaire has been seen in the flesh less often than Le Loch Ness Monster.
Bizarrely, pass marks of the students have risen astronomically since the big-banging of the country’s favourite space-head blancmange-brain.
But street-cred remains buoyant.
The National Board for the Correction of Students decrees Lower Springwood not a proper university. Downgraded because of its lack of lessons. Facilities. Learning.
Leanings toward anarchy.
And failure to grasp the basic blocks of English.
Though rated higher than Nottingham or Manchester.
A yellow armoured bus drops you out front of the gun turrets. By the barracks. Of the Riot Squad. And the kennels. Of the dogs. With big gnashers. Dripping bullets of saliva as they gaze upon the corpus delicti of students.