Ah, Bathsheba, it’s not the same as your elegant surgery is it? There your private patients can have their teeth removed to Vivaldi and enjoy twenty minutes’ rest on a reclining sofa. Your flowers are delivered fresh every day and you serve only the most aromatic herbal teas. Against your white coat, their heads on your breast, no-one fears the needle and syringe. I came to you for a crown and you offered me a kingdom. Unfortunately I could only take possession between five and seven, weekdays, and the odd weekend when he was away playing football.

My name was called.

‘Have I got it?’

The nurse looked at me the way you do a flat tyre and said, ‘No.’

Then she started filling out a form and told me to come back in three months.

‘What for?’

‘Sexually transmitted diseases are not normally an isolated problem. If your habits are such that you have caught it once it’s likely that you will catch it again.’ She paused. ‘We are creatures of habit.’

‘I haven’t caught it, any of it.’

She opened the door. ‘Three months will be sufficient.’

Sufficient for what? I walked down the corridor past SURGERY and MOTHER AND BABY and OUTPATIENTS THIS WAY. It’s a feature of the Clap Clinic that it’s situated well out of the way of proper deserving patients. Its labyrinthian cunning means that the user will have to ask at least five times how to get there. Although I lowered my voice, particularly in deference to MOTHER AND BABY, I was returned no such courtesy. ‘Venereal Disease? Down the end turn right turn left straight on through the gates past the lift up the stairs down the corridor round the corner, through the swing doors and there you are,’ yelled the male nurse, carefully stopping his trolley-load of dirty sheets on my foot … ‘You did say VENEREAL?’

Yes I did, and I said it again to the junior doctor rakishly swinging his stethoscope at the OUTPATIENTS. ‘Clap Clinic? No problem, you’re not more than five minutes away by wheelchair.’ He pealed with laughter like a posse of ice-cream vans and pointed in the direction of the incinerator chute. ‘That’s the quickest way. Good luck.’

Maybe it’s my face. Maybe I look like a doormat today. I feel like one.

On the way out I bought myself a large bunch of flowers.

‘Visiting someone?’ said the girl, her voice going up at the corners like a hospital sandwich. She was bored to death, having to be nice, jammed behind the ferns, her right hand dripping with green water.

‘Yes, myself. I want to find out how I am.’

She raised her eyebrows and squeaked, ‘You all right?’

‘I shall be,’ I said, throwing her a carnation.

At home, I put the flowers in a vase, changed the sheets and got into bed. ‘What did Bathsheba ever give me but a perfect set of teeth?’

‘All the better to eat you with,’ said the Wolf.