Category: Fantasy Publisher: Wings ePress
ISBN-10: 1613095511
Type: Fiction
Pages: 216
Copyright: 1 February 2021
ISBN-13: 9781613095515
Love should come with a health warning.
Doctor Quentin Trimble’s inveterate hypochondria renders his temporary suspension from work—and relegation to “gardening duty”—all but inevitable. As he struggles to adjust to his new routine, the fairy Fion appears in Quentin’s toolshed, ushering him into a world of life-changing possibilities, and making him the catalyst for a series of adventures involving his family, his colleagues and a motley crew of strangers, which unfold against the backdrop of a pandemic of global magnitude. Underpinning the story’s entire fabric is a quirky take on romance whose tongue-in-cheek tone belies a serious appreciation of the redeeming power of love.
Excerpt
At around seven p.m. on an evening several weeks BC (Before Coronavirus) Doctors Andy Crane and Sandra Normington were sitting in a consulting room of their GP surgery sipping tea and mulling over the day’s events, prime amongst them the enforced absence on “gardening leave” of their colleague Doctor Quentin Trimble.
“Any idea why?” Sandra asked Andy. “All sounds a bit mysterious to me.”
“Rumours abounding,” said Andy popping a Propranolol after a long day trying to distinguish the truly sick from the fantasists and malingerers.
“Best guess?”
Andy grinned. “Heard the one about the Collie who was relieved of his duties for worrying sheep?”
Sandra shook her head and rolled her eyes. Andy and his lame jokes!
“Know why?”
Sandra sighed. “No.”
Andy chuckled at the upcoming punch line. “For creeping up behind them and whispering ‘mint sauce’ in their ears.”
Even Sandra couldn’t resist a smirk. “Which has what to do with Quentin?” she said when the smirking was over.
“Because that, in the view of management as I understand it, is the official reason for him having been given the temporary shove.”
“For worrying sheep?”
Andy hoisted an eyebrow, unsure whether Sandra was being funny or just plain silly. It was hard to tell with these Merseyside girls.
“Not sheep, Sandra, patients,” he said wrecking what was left of his joke.
Sandra frowned. “Ah. Worrying them how?”
“By exaggerating their conditions. By recoiling from them saying things to like ‘eeue, yuck, nasty, that looks sinister’ when all he was looking at was a wart, then packing them off to histopathology for a biopsy.”
“Sensible preventative medicine?” said Sandra.
“Not when ten times out of ten the results came back benign. Not when our histopathologist pals started wondering how come their precious resources were being wasted on faux cases and whether a review of our practice might be in order. Plus unsurprisingly there were the complaints from the patients, some of whom had been so worried they developed cancer-phobia syndromes and had to be prescribed expensive long-term anxiolytics. Little wonder management got twitchy.”
“Mmm, medical ethics eh?”
“Quite, and with them funding or the potential lack of it if the case were ever to hit the social or real media. Just imagine the blogs and posts about the ‘crazed medic of Battersea terrifies sick people.’ Anyway, anyway, that seems to be why our friend Quentin got sent home to cultivate his garden. I always thought there was something a bit off about him.
“And he went without protest.”
“So far as I know. Probably not left with much choice in the circs. He’ll be offered help though.”
“Of what kind?”
Andy shrugged. “Advice about how to stop tormenting patients, a spot of CBT, or a dose of good old Freud, who knows? Maybe there’s some underlying problem needing attention. Now how would you fancy popping around the corner for a quick snifter? It’s been a tricky sort of a day.”
“Sorry, not today. It’s a hair-washing evening.”
“Some other time then,” muttered Andy as had become the norm in these circumstances. His most ardent current ambition was to remove Sandra’s clothes and give her what he reckoned a thorough medical examination but there was that bloody hair-washing excuse yet again. How many girls in Battersea had cleaner hair than Sandra Normington? None reckoned Andy Crane, who shrugged, set down his teacup and, theatrically round-shouldered, slowly took his customarily frustrated leave.
“Possibly,” Sandra called after him, tantalizingly leaving the door to future assignations if not open at least ajar.
It really was high time Doc Sandra Normington finally made up her mind about whether or not she wanted anything of an emotional kind to develop with Doc Andy Crane or not, and she knew it. The playing-hard-to-get routine was running more than a little thin for both of them.
~*~
Andy Crane was right in his diagnosis of Quentin Trimble being beset by “some underlying problem” however, because since his only-child early adolescence Quentin had been what the French dramatist Molière termed a malade imaginaire, which translates literally as “imaginary invalid,” hypochondriac in more normal parlance. Any tiny aberration from what he considered the norm, of which there were thousands, and Quentin became convinced he was at death’s door. His major medical obsession was one of any number of cancers although on the psychological front OCD, bi-polarity and all manner of manias also featured prominently, including an abiding fear of pandemics which peculiar mindset was however never recognized by his parents. The very last thing on earth his consultant neurosurgeon father Doc/”Mister” Frederick Trimble and, under her husband’s fierce insistence, his gynaecologist mother Doc Antoinette Trimble were about to admit was to having raised a defective child.
“Nothing wrong with the lad and as we professionals we should know,” they would tell his teachers on parents’ evenings when told Quentin refused point blank to join in any sports activities in case he got injured and insisted on a special desk at the back of the class isolated from the other pupils lest they should sneeze, cough, or infect him with otherwise undetectable germs. With hindsight Quentin might have been seen as some sort of oracle of Covid-19 but, as noted, that nasty little bug was still some way off in the future.
“Won’t play with the other kids in the playground. Won’t go into the playground without a special mask on,” said assistant head Muriel Coppell on one such occasion. “And keeps muttering the names of diseases. You’re not telling me that’s normal.”
Doc Frederick shrugged nonchalantly. “He’s a hypersensitive chappie, that’s all. Probably destined to become a brilliant brain surgeon.”
“Reads all the time,” Doc Antoinette interjected mock proudly.
“Literature?” asked Coppell. “Novels, plays, poetry and so on.”
Doc Frederick winced. “Literature? Good God no. We have an extensive library of medical and psychoanalytical texts at home and Quentin spends hours poring over those. Doesn’t he, Tonie?”
“Hours,” Antoinette confirmed meekly. “Probably already knows better than most practitioners the names, symptoms, procedures, and outcomes of a whole range of physical and mental conditions,” she added, sticking to Doc Frederick’s script for the occasion.
Muriel nodded as little tumblers began to fall into place. “I see,” she said, smiling wanly.
“So don’t you go telling us our business,” Doc Frederick intoned, standing and dusting himself down while Doc Antoinette did the same before they both stalked out of the room.
It was as the result of such parental confrontations with his teachers that between the ages of twelve and fifteen Quentin Trimble attended nine different schools until Doc Frederick reckoned enough was enough and his precious, gifted son would in future be home-taught by either Doc Antoinette or the occasional thoroughly brainwashed tutor. All of which meant that by the age of eighteen Quentin knew nothing at all of the regular school curriculum, had made no teenage friends to hang out with, had never fallen in love, had no soccer team to support, and no rock ‘n’ roll band to worship but was possessed of an albeit dodgy brain now crammed brimful with a greater awareness of ailments and afflictions than most medical school graduates. It was this qualification despite the total absence of all others that enabled Doc/Mister Frederick Trimble to pull rank over the admissions team at University College Hospital London and ensure his son got the education he fully deserved.
So it was that Quentin Trimble spent the next eight years happily learning of even more diseases to be frightened of before graduating with distinction but little or no trust in medicine’s power to heal either him or the conditions that freaked him.
Talk about “some underlying problem.”
Teaser:
Quentin ventured into the potting shed to be greeted by a small white-bearded person sprawled on a heap of smelly brown sacks of horse dung presumably left by the previous tenant.
“Hi there, Quentin, wondered how long it would take you to find me,” he said. “I’m Fion. Pleasetameetcha.”
“What the…?” said Quentin.
“Am I? An elf but you’ll get used to it. Need a hand at all? The mower’s over there in the corner,” said Fion, jerking a thumb in the direction of the corner in question.
Quentin peered back and forth between the elf and the mower. “Thanks.”
“No problemo. I’ll show you how it works if you want. It’s one of those old-fashioned ones without a motor, so you’ll have to push it. And don’t forget to fix the tray on before you go a-mowing.”
“Okay.”
“Here, we’ll get it out and I’ll show you how,” said Fion rolling off his sacks and hopping over to the rusty old machine.
“Right. Thanks again,” said Quentin following in his wake.
You will be wondering how and why Quentin Trimble accepted without apparent demur the presence of an elf in his garden shed. After all most of us would have blanched a bit or run away in fright, wouldn’t we? Well the answer is this: despite never apparently having read any literary fiction during his education only ever medical and psychoanalytical tomes Quentin had over the years, secretly under the bedclothes at night with a torch, digested with immense pleasure a dusty pile of books about faerie folk he’d found buried in the depths of an old cupboard. And these were not just kiddies’ stories, they were proper analyses of faerie lore for grown ups with lists and pictures of different types of the creatures, the sorts of clothes they wore, their customs, and the places they were most likely to be found. It was in this way that Quentin became as firm, if covert, a believer in the existence of the Little People as he was in the evils of human diseases. And where was he most likely to encounter one? At the bottom of his garden, that was where.
*********************************************
The book was first triggered by a relatively unambitious aim: depicting the potentially farcical situation revolving around a hypochondriacal doctor. Current circumstances prompted me to extend my purview to the global medical crisis. At the same time, I became increasingly drawn to the idea of exploring different facets of ‘romance” from an unconventional perspective. Gradually, and largely unbeknownst to me, the three ideas began to coalesce. The Showdown in Wollongong is the result of this serendipitous intermingling.
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