Second opinion
I WAS walking along my road the other day when I slid and nearly fell over. I saw that I had slipped on a used condom, cast off on to the pavement. It was an even more unpleasant sensation than that of having trodden on chewing-gum or dog shit. I was aware, of course, that the English nowadays derive their dis- gusting sustenance exclusively in the street, for is not an Englishman's street his dining-room? Latterly it is his bed- room as well.
In future, I shall look down at the pavement as I walk, like the young women who are forced on pain of a beat- ing to do so by their jealous lovers who wish them to see no male form but their own. I shall avoid used condoms like income tax.
Round here, prostitution is the biggest industry, except for burglary and child care. The children and the child-carers are the offspring of prostitutes and the burglars are their boyfriends and the fathers of the children and child-carers. Talk about keeping it in the family! Indi- an shopkeepers are indiscriminate employers by comparison.
The prostitutes offer a 24-hour service, like my hospital's emergency department. Apparently there are customers even at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning, assuming that supply does not arise where there is no demand. I must say that the prostitutes around here look about as sexually allur- ing as a chainsaw, which only goes to prove how desperately vital the service they provide must be. They look as though they have emerged from a canvas by Otto Dix or a drawing by Georg Grosz, their flesh having been eaten by spirochaetes or dissolved by cocaine. They go straight from their 14th birthday to their 53rd, without passing through any of the intervening years. They wear skimpy clothes, no matter what the temperature, and their flesh is as white as a corpse's on the mortuary slab.
A patient of mine, who lives nearby, told me that the local pimps have threat- ened him because they think he is a police informer, since he goes for a run every night but never accepts a solicitation. What other explanation could there be for such abstemiousness? If the pimps only knew! They could shop the midnight jog- ger to the Social, as it is affectionately known by its esteemed clientele, because he is supposed to be off sick with severe arthritis — in his knees, of course.
I noticed that the prostitutes were out in force one day last week when I arrived at my hospital to find a knot of police in the emergency department. They had brought in a young man with a gash in his scalp that required a number of stitches. He had been trying to strangle his father, who, in self-defence, hit him over the head with the broken bottle that always comes to hand in the best-regulat- ed homes. The police had been called and had arrested the son.
The scalp wound was sewn up and I said to the policemen that they could take him off to the station now.
`What about his condition?' one of the policemen asked indignantly.
`What condition?' I asked.
`Well, he's violent, isn't he?'
Theodore Dalrymple
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