He turned his mind back to his body. His groin was hurting more and more. His nose still ached, but he knew it wouldn’t get worse. But he had to do something about his testicles—big Jock, the doctor at Arisaig, had told them all about it, drawing a cross-section of a scrotum on the blackboard. It had caused a titter around the class of young men.

“Now, gentlemen, the balls,” Jock had boomed out in his thick Glaswegian accent. “How to deal with a kick to the balls—although as most of you appear not to have any, this won’t be a problem.”

Another laugh. Jock knew how to grab an audience’s attention.

“The most likely outcome of a kick to the balls,” Jock had continued, “is what us medical men call testicular torsion. In layman’s terms, that means a twisted bollock. Now a twisted bollock is a very bad thing, because it also twists the spermatic cord that supplies the bollock with blood. A twisted cord is a blocked cord, and with no blood, your balls wither on the vine. It only takes six hours for a bollock to die. It then gets gangrene, and then you’re in heap big trouble.”

By now, Jock’s audience had gone quiet.

“So, if anybody gives you a kick to the balls, you’ve got to act quickly. Normally, you’d be anesthetized and operated on immediately, but it’s unlikely your captors will offer you such care. So, you’ll have to untwist it yourself. Make no mistake, gentlemen, this is the single most painful thing that can happen to a man. It will hurt like the biggest buggery, and a buggery is what you’d rather be having. And even if you manage to untwist it, it still might twist again sometime in the future, which means you’ll have to untwist it all over again. In an operation, the bollock is sewn on to the inside of the scrotum to stop it ever happening again—but I don’t see any of you trying to do that.

“Now, I can see all of you are dying to know the procedure. It’s very simple. The offending globe will be swollen and sore, and will probably have risen up inside your scrotum. Take it between your fingers and your thumb and grip it very gently. By now, you will be screaming your head off. Don’t worry, it gets worse. Now, simply roll the ball ever so slightly left and right, until you can feel which way it should untwist. As you untwist it, you should notice the ball beginning to drop back down. Keep twisting until it wants to go no further, although it might be hard to tell, as any movement will cause you a lot of pain.