Doctors & Nurses

by Lucy Ellmann

  Jen’s blood SPIRALS through her veins and arteries: it’s the best way to travel! Her heart and lungs are separated from her digestive organs by her diaphragm. Jen breathes rapidly, about twenty-five times a MINUTE (but still she feels out of breath!). The smallest cells in her body are PLATELETS. She’s got a million of ’em! They live about four days. Her red blood cells are DOUGHNUT-shaped, and live for four months. Her white cells live SIX months and can CREEP (her pus is full of DEAD ones that don’t creep any more). Her muscle and nerve cells are long and thin, her liver cells HEXAGONAL.

  Jen’s brain is 85% water. The left and right sides of it are bridged by a CORPUS CALLOSUM – otherwise Jen might STRANGLE herself by accident! Her putamen, part of the basal ganglia in the middle of her brain, makes it possible for Jen to ride a bike without THINKING about it (if she WANTED to ride a bike, which she DOESN’T). Her hypothalamus tells her autonomic nervous system what to do, which is quite helpful. Jen has eighty-six major nerves, along with all that tenuous, frightening stuff like motor neurones and Schwann cells and dendrites and glia and myelin sheaths, and a few nodes of Ranvier.

  Jen has olfactory BULBS, but no ADENOIDS, and she wants them back! (How dare doctors fool with your organs before you know what’s what?) She also has nine thousand taste buds (and makes good use of them!). Her tongue is triangular, and apart from her trouble with R’s, moves with extreme efficiency, thanks to her palatoglossus, styloglossus and hyoglossus muscles – you need a different muscle for everything! How BEAUTIFULLY Jen’s muscles drape her body, if you could only SEE them. Her gluteus maximus is MAGNIFICENT. Also, her adductor magnus, her rectus femoris, her gastrocnemius (calf muscle) and her brachioradialis (forearm). The muscle in Jen’s heart, her Bundle of His, is in fact hers.

  Jen has no hair on her LIP skin, but she’s got a hundred and twenty-eight thousand hairs on her head! She has hair shafts and hair FOLLICLES. Sweat glands and apocrine glands have been emitting sexual smells since she reached puberty. Her skin also has keratin and pain receptors and melanocytes that distribute pigment. She has Meissner’s corpuscles (that detect touch), Pacinian corpuscles (pressure), Ruffini corpuscles (warmth), and Krauss corpuscles (cold). Sometimes Krauss and Ruffini battle it out all day! She’s got STRETCH MARKS too, which do nobody any good. But because of her skin Jen is: WATERPROOF.

  How can a person HATE all this? But she does.

  Jen pisses five pints a day and shits up a STORM. Her shit is 75% water. It’s taken away like everybody else’s and subjected to the same shit-reduction MEASURES, but there’s so much MORE of hers. She is using up more than her fair share of NATURAL RESOURCES. She requires so much! The EARTH weighs more because Jen is here.

  When not in uniform, Jen wears CARGO PANTS, DUNGAREES really, which act as a kind of TENT for her WHOLE BODY. Never has an ass looked so big. But Jen’s ass doesn’t concern her (it’s been NUMB for years!). What Jen secretly loves is her CUNT. She’s got labia minora AND majora! Two bulbocavernous muscles, a fossa navicularis, a levator ani muscle, and a portio vaginalis uteri. Tags of skin called carunculae myrtiformes are all that’s left of Jen’s HYMEN. Her vagina’s lined with squamous epithelium – it stinks like a SQUAM CREEK OYSTER!

  Jen’s cunt is a place of untold incident and unpredictable sensation. It has been left to lie fallow for long periods, it has ATROPHIED between bouts of abuse. It has itched, farted and drooled, it has failed to DELIVER. And yet – she LOVES it! She’s charmed by its quiet steadfastness, how LEVEL it stays as she walks, her two feet stepping out ahead but her cunt following right along, like a third FOOT peeking out from under its hood of stomach flab.

  In a better world, cunts would LEAD THE WAY. The PENIS, with all its ACROBATICS, has stolen the show while the CUNT, that anarchic, amorphous, seething, seeking, salty mound of anchored flesh, is left to fester, hidden and ignored. With it women’s LUST and ANGER are hidden – until they stink to high heaven! The CUNT is the black hole of the universe that astronomers keep warning us about (BAD NEWS for the astronaut in his PRIAPIC HOOD): they have sullied the COSMOS with their CUNT-FEAR!

  All Jen really wants to TALK about is her cunt. This is what MOST women want to talk about. There’s a deep insincerity and sadness amongst women because they DON’T talk about their cunts (except to complain about thrush or menstruation, or to describe CHILDBIRTH in exquisite detail). The cunt is UNMENTIONABLE. It’s been forced underground. Substitutes have had to be found. Women do their hair in HONOUR of their cunts. They parade new clothes in SERVICE to their cunts. They accentuate their eyes (dark and glistening and hairy), their mouths (pink and wet), in IMITATION of their cunts. The cunt is their PURPOSE.

  And they were once so proud!

  I Have A Job!

  Jen has been through all the diminishment of moving, of seeing her junk reduced to compact units measured by the cubic centimetre. It’s like seeing your own COFFIN. Cardboard boxes attest your expendability, your flexibility, your lack of significance in the world: YOU ARE EPHEMERAL. The shame then, to see grown men struggling up the stairs with your piano!

  JEN has no piano (she only ever played the CLARINET, and that not very well). What Jen has are BOXES, so many boxes! She alone knows what’s IN them. They have been packed resentfully and with care. But there’s no time to UNPACK them now. Jen has to go to WORK. It’s her first day! Jen has a job. People say this – ‘I HAVE A JOB’ – as if nobody ELSE has a job. But almost every other dumb cluck in the WORLD has a job. BIG DEAL.

  Emerging from her den at eight in the morning, Jen found only Francine in the surgery. Francine had just settled down to a nice steaming hot cup of tea, and was deflecting the few phone calls coming in while fucking with her nails (BITING them mostly). She was caked in all the accoutrements of BEAUTY: beauty products. She looked like a BEAUTICIAN, Jen’s least favourite profession. BARBIE DOLLS: they think they OWN beauty. Francine’s elaborate amount of make-up signalled at least a close ACQUAINTANCE with beauticians that Jen could never share.

  Eyeing Francine therefore with apprehension, Jen asked, ‘Where’s Dr Lewis?’

  ‘Upstairs,’ Francine replied blandly.

  ‘What’s he doing up there?’

  ‘He LIVES there – didn’t you KNOW? Yeah, he lives in the attic.’

  ‘With his, uh, WIFE?’ asked Jen tensely.

  ‘Oh, no. She left him a few years back. He got the kids, though.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yeah, Edward and Adele. But they shouldn’t bother you much. They’re not allowed in here.’

  Kids? Jen had turned a little green. Francine was watching her change colour. To thwart her, Jen asked to be shown to her office. Francine got up a little grudgingly from her swivel chair (because of her nice hot cup of TEA), and took Jen down the corridor (fifteen) to a dark room full of old milk crates, golf clubs, British Medical Journals, a year’s supply of substandard toilet paper, and several wheelchairs in need of repair. Was JEN supposed to repair them? She was about to ask, when Francine pointed languidly at a row of filing cabinets that lined the wall. She looked like a magician’s Lovely Assistant drawing the audience’s attention to her boss’s interminable SCARF trick. Jen didn’t at first take in the SIGNIFICANCE of the filing-cabinet gesture, but Francine soon explained that the filing cabinets were all in a muddle and it was Jen’s duty to sort them out.

  No one since MONICA LEWINSKY could have been less in the mood for filing. Jen had never understood a single filing SYSTEM. Her first MINUTE on the job, and already her total INCOMPETENCE had been revealed (and to a BEAUTICIAN!). For fear that Francine might run off and tell tales to Dr Lewis behind her back, Jen bustled her out of the room and, after an hour-long SULK, set to work.

  Soon she was AWASH in paper. Folders cast their contents all over the room. The flood of paper neared the ceiling and threatened to ENGULF her: Jen was drowning in a RURAL BACKWATER! She needed the BREASTSTROKE just to get across the room to the cups of tea and coffee Francine kept bringing. These too needed filing
! There were so many miscellaneous mugs lined up on the windowsill – some humorous (‘Trust me, I’m a quack’), some dour (‘BMJ – Read it Today’, or ‘it’s all go with smithklineglaxo’), it was hard to tell which was the newest, fullest, and steamiest, without NUMBERING them.

  For DAYS she filed and refiled and defiled (and reviled) pieces of paper Dr Lewis had amassed during just a few years in this rural backwater, reams of unpaginated patients’ records and death certificates, questionnaires that patients had been forced to answer for no good reason, official complaints made by patients to the General Medical Council, tea-stained (or tear-stained?) ripostes sent by Dr Lewis to the General Medical Council, formal declarations of Dr Lewis’s blamelessness sent back from the General Medical Council, recipes and postcards from patients, birthday and Xmas cards, photos of patients on holiday, articles torn from magazines on various subjects (medicine, cars, exotic foreign travel, massage parlours), and several free drug samples, long past their foist-by dates (Jen pocketed these).

  At lunchtime every day, Jen would take her cheese sandwiches across the road to a bench under some trees and sit looking up at the surgery. She hadn’t seen Dr Lewis since she’d started the job, though she’d heard his voice in the corridor (sixteen) occasionally, yelling at patients or Francine. He and Francine both seemed to disappear at lunchtime. Possibly TOGETHER. The thought filled Jen with unfathomable fury and despair.

  The building that housed the surgery was a malevolent-looking structure, Gothic in intent, covered with turrets, widow’s walks, and shutters that banged angrily in the wind. Jen often felt someone was STARING at her from one of the dark windows – it gave her the HEEBIE-JEEBIES (but then Jen ALWAYS felt someone was staring at her!). She had hoped that Francine would offer to give her a TOUR some time, but now she didn’t WANT her to. Francine was a MURDERER, TORTURER, SLAVE-DRIVER. She was a ROMAN EMPEROR (Jen had read some Suetonius). She felt like WHOPPING Francine on the BUTT with that big greasy HANDBAG of hers, which Jen assumed to be full of foundation, concealer, mascara, lipstick, tweezers, emery boards, hairspray, travel irons, curling tongs, silicon BREAST IMPLANTS, stiletto-heel repair kits, beauty mags, cheek sparkles and PINK PLASTIC HAIR-CLIPS, as BARBIE’s handbag would be. Any minute now Francine would start offering Jen beauty tips, and then Jen would have to KILL her. I am going to have to kill you now.

  Beauty tips are always imminent for Jen. Nobody can quite BELIEVE anyone DARES look like Jen. That meandering flesh, the flesh of AGES, flesh of LEGEND, a SAHARA DESERT of flesh, were it all to be laid out in front of you end to end. A BROKEN landscape, a land of controversy and dispute, shaped by fire, flood, famine and feud (FOOD), its surface scarred, mottled, and punctured by CHASMS and suppurating sores. And yet, inside that blunt and bloated body is a mind that WORKS (sort of) – PLEASING to find in there something lithe and light that can leap and land on narrow ledges, a mind made wild by its own ideas!

  Was she BORN angry? Nobody knows. What FEEDS her anger? MARS BARS? Maybe just having to proceed across the earth on THOSE LIMBS, and pay for things with shaky dimpled hands, sneered at by generation after generation of little sneering BOY.

  Jen is like the FAT GIRL at school you befriend because she’s fatter than YOU. You consider yourself KIND and want to score kindness POINTS, as well as securing a friend for life in the form of the FAT GIRL. She clings to you and you easily fall into the habit of letting her tag along after school to watch you smooch and smoke. It’s all very HARMONIOUS until the day she turns on you and BLASTS you with your own REPULSIVENESS, suddenly revealing herself to be a MEZZO SOPRANO or GENIUS of some kind. When you believed she was truly pathetic and befriended her basically ON CONDITION she was pathetic. Afterwards you seek out other fat girls in a vague attempt to make amends until you finally give up, get a dog, and overfeed IT.

  Coelacanth & Chips

  It’s like a day in CHILDHOOD before you realised everything SUCKS. There are BIRDS, BEES, and carpets of blue PETALS beneath blue bushes. SMALL carpets. DOOR-MATS really. But it’s all WASTED on Jen! She rarely notices nature. There’s a VEIL between Jen and the outside world that stops her seeing things. Instead, she is thinking about CARRIER BAGS. Jen is upset by the fact that everyone in the world now knows what a carrier bag looks like when it’s full to bursting. MILLIONS OF YEARS of evolution have come to THIS: group awareness of the properties of PLASTIC. Most of the stuff we know, we don’t NEED to know. Most of the stuff we know, we’d be happier NOT knowing.

  To cheer herself up after work, Jen is on her way to the FISH SHOP. She wants FISH, and plenty of it! She has not tried the village fish shop yet. It looks like a lousy fish shop. In the window they have a few ancient crabs and pickled herring, and some beat-up plastic GRASS. But Jen is in the mood for fish. So she storms into the fish shop and is immediately confronted by two scary staring girls, painstakingly beautified. BEATIFIED. But how scary can they be, girls who smell of fish all day? Jen ploughs on with her plan and, looking one of the fish girls in the eye, asks if they have any cheap fish for CATS (her customary gambit in fish shops).

  The fish girl just stares back at her, but not at Jen’s face, at her FEET. OK, OK, I know, my socks have slipped down and are now bunched up inside my shoes, leaving my feet half bare, yes, YES? What am I supposed to DO, bend over right here and now and pull my socks up? Maybe you’d like me to kiss YOUR feet while I’m at it? I came in here for FISH – I didn’t realise I was entering a fucking FASHION INSTITUTE.

  STILL staring at Jen’s feet, the fish girl walks over to the fridge, cold store, CHILL THING. It can’t be a FREEZER because the fish in there still seems to be MALLEABLE! Yiiggghhhh! Malleable. It reminds Jen of that woman kissing her stuffed coelacanth. Were its lips once malleable?

  The fish girl seems to be LIMPING. So maybe she takes a PERSONAL INTEREST in feet? But that doesn’t give her the right to stare so pointedly at MY feet. Maybe I don’t WANT to be reminded of my SOCK problem all day. Maybe I want to be left in PEACE with my sock problem.

  The girl hands over a small bag of whitish fish and says, ‘Three pounds.’

  ‘THREE POUNDS!?’ exclaims Jen. ‘Even if I had a cat, even if I had a cat I LIKED, I wouldn’t pay that!’ But in the end she hands over the dough, her hard-earned dough, taking care not to let the fish girl see her FINGER STUMP (the remains of the finger Jen caught in a car door when she was eleven). Don’t want to give the creep anything ELSE to stare at! After all, could there be any better proof of INCOMPETENCE than a FINGER STUMP? Almost EVERYBODY has all their fingers! What must the DOCTOR have thought, who had to stitch me up? THIS CHILD IS AN INCOMPETENT, doesn’t deserve good workmanship. Great STUMP, doc, thanks. Oh, and a wonky fingernail to go with it? PAY RISE FOR YOU.

  Jen wants a whole COELACANTH now, all three FEET of it, blue-green scales and malleable sky-blue flesh quickly disappearing into her grey, flabby face. Jen never had a CAT, never had anything! Jen’s life has been macabre, and it has made her melodramatic. She goes back to the flat and cooks her fish and a big load of OVEN FRIES to go with it.

  SECRET EATING, the curse of all fat people. Eating normal amounts of PERMISSIBLE stuff in public (by the time you’re THIS fat, that’s only salad) while in private you eat all the BAD stuff, the stuff that should probably NEVER be eaten and therefore MUST be eaten, the fat person’s CIVIC DUTY to syphon it all up, in revenge against the beauteous, the muscular, the moderate, the mincing, mediocre moralists, food experts and food ADJUDICATORS, the herbalists, nutritionists, misery-guts, spoilsports and PARTY-POOPERS.

  Just THINK of all the cake and candy and ice cream and LUXURY MILK SHAKES and pizza and popcorn and Popsicles and potato snacks and chocolate brownies and macaroni cheese and tuna fish AU GRATIN that must be, IS, consumed in secret hidy-holes and hell-holes to compensate for all the HOLLOW eating performances of life, the whole eating CHARADE that life is! There’s nothing BENIGN about secret eating, nothing jolly. It’s OBSCENE, subversive, damn near CRIMINAL, and rightly kept undergrou
nd.

  Her RIGHT to be fat, her own BUSINESS if she no longer wants to be TOUCHED. Betrayals have formed her. Hungry for a place in the world, Jen eats. Hungry for contentment, containment, a little CONTINUITY, Jen eats. Hungry for sex, sedation, satisfactory SUNSETS, she eats. Hungry for beauty, grace, the GOOD things in life, MOSS, maroon, marbled halls, Italy, zebras, the moon, blue-green, Saturn, snow, peat fires, Fridays, autumn leaves, watery places and La Traviata, she eats. Hungry for CHEAP THRILLS, or the end of the world, she eats. Hungry for a mother’s love, or the love of a good PSYCHOTHERAPIST, she eats. Hungry merely to be FILLED for once, fuelled for LIFE, Jen eats, she eats the food of TWENTY MEN (but why should MEN get it all?) and still it drains out of her and she needs MORE. She eats for the world, for the starving in Africa, and for herself alone, the many selves of her, the one she was yesterday and the one she’ll have to be tomorrow. These selves stretch back in a long jagged line to her INFANT self: a fat baby.

  A fat baby, left to roll around for hours on the rough fabric of the seat of an empty compartment after her mother jumped from the train – until Jen finally fell on her head and someone found her mewling and drooling on the floor. For this event, Jen has always felt vaguely BLAMED. She drove her own mother to suicide, drove her CRAZY. Jen has been trying to make amends ever since, by NEVER BEING HAPPY.

  Through rape, secret eating, and emotional havoc, through being RIGHT and forever IGNORED, through being scorned and sneered and sniggered at, Jen has become the embodiment of female RAGE, a real STINKER, the eau de cologne of female MURK. For this she deserves awards, FOLLOWERS! Female rage, all twisted up into a barrelling CROISSANT of centrifugal force, is worthy of RESPECT.

  In the ABSENCE of adulation, she wanks. Today, to her favourite fantasy of the RUSSIAN GUY ON THE TRAIN: