This short story was written during late 2011 and satirizes the author's own experiences.
JOE'S
MOLE by Thomas Hoskyns Leonard
The
tiny mole on Joe's wrist suddenly expanded and began to change shape.
What
miraculous production of nature is this? pondered
the part-time plumber. It's like a tiny seashell on a
pebbly beach. Our gods move in such wonderfully comical ways. A thing
of beauty is a joy forever. May the nightingale's sing! I'll joke
about the mole creeping into my armpit during my next comedy act on
Berkeley Square.
“When
did that mole appear?” asked Dr. Fearsome, a quizzical gentleman
with a predatory, wolf-like mouth, having decided to take a blood
sample from Joe's forearm, just in case he suffered, by
sheer chance, from
some mysterious condition.
“I
only noticed
it recently,” replied Joe, through
his brain fog. “I'm more
concerned about my haemorrhoids.”
Maybe
the Epilim has got to his enzymes sooner than anticipated,
pondered the GP, sniggering behind his mask, but that's not
my responsibility. It's the shrink's. And I can't be arsked to check
him out for diabetes until I really have to.
The
GP licked his lips. “It's extremely
unlikely to be harmful, but
I'll make an appointment for
you with the Skin Clinic,
just in case.
Joe
googled ‘malignant mole’ on his kleptomaniac sister’s laptop,
the one she'd snatched during a riot in the St. Teresa
Centre along with several pairs of lace knickers. He learnt to his
dismay that suddenly appearing, shape-shifting moles often conceal
melanomas, a form of cancer that could prove fatal when allowed to
spread. Moreover, itching and hurting were two of the main symptoms.
Joe’s
mole certainly itched, and when he pressed it hurt.
“I’m
under attack,” he shrieked, as two moths whizzed by his ear and
disappeared into the carpet under the sofa.
A malignant mole could spread further deadly
cancer inside my body, realised
Joe. During the history of
humankind, our supposedly worthy God has struck down millions of his
own creations in their prime, in this and other equally cruel and
undeserved ways. So what is Heaven? Perhaps it is separation,
in the Holy Spirit, from our cynical Creator.
But how will I actually die? wondered
Joe. He remembered the nightmare that had recurred night after night
after his early retirement from B&Q.
Lying penniless and starving on Balfour St with spiders crawling over
his face; the dogs coming to eat him up; Officer Feisty Ginger Beard
yelling, “And then I’ll surround your grave with flowers, you
big, fat, lazy slob.”
Yes,
perhaps dogs would really come
and eat him up.
How
stupid, surmised Joe, I
will die an artist.
“I’ve
got two moles on my nose, Uncle Joe,” said Griselda, “Are they
pretty?”
“They’re
just big freckles, you silly girl,” said Joe. “Though they look
rather like the moles on your cheeks.”
A
fortnight later, Joe visited the Dermatology Department in the
Gumbleston Building, a decaying concrete block that survived the rest
of the old University hospital in the City Centre, which had been
converted into an empty shopping mall. He ascended to the fourth
floor in an archaic slowly moving elevator, and finally discovered
the Skin Clinic at the end of a barren corridor, beyond a sign
directing red pox patients down a specially concealed stairwell to
the basement.
Professor
Jasmine Juniper, a kindly school-marmish woman, peered
through her magnifying glass. “Now that's
an interesting mole. When did it appear?”
“Heaven only knows,” stuttered Joe, swatting
a fly on his arm, “but it’s been changing shape. It could be
alive. Is it ...er...a lymphoma?”
“No,” said Professor Juniper, with a
learned look and a gleam in her eye. “It's
in all likelihood just an awkward mole, but
it could be a
melanoma though only with the minutest of
teeny weeny probabilities. It
might be worth taking
a sample this afternoon. Dr. Hazel Hashworthy and her team will be in
the Dissection Room if you would like to hang around until five. You
won’t feel a thing.”
“Super.”
The professor glanced
at a picture of her rakish husband and four plain children, and
smiled grimly. “Perfect!
Now please take off your clothes so that I
can examine all your moles. Wow! Goodness
me! What unusual dimples.”
Joe
gulped when Dr. Hashworthy smiled and injected his forearm with local
anaesthetic.
“The
elderly patients sometimes faint now, if not later,” declared a
rumbustious
nurse, with a chortle, as she turned up the sound on Radio Five Live.
Several minutes later Dr. Hashworthy declared,
“Sample One at the ready”, and Joe was aghast to see her lifting
a mass of gooey flesh, presumably including the mole, from his
forearm and onto a tray.
“Don’t look now,” chuckled the nurse.
After taking a further messy sample, Hazel
Hashworthy stitched up the two inch wound.
“That’s neat isn’t it?” said the nurse,
clutching her
wobbling belly. “You’re lucky that your skin isn’t old and
wrinkled. Now it’ll be
best not to worry at all until you’ve heard the results of the
biopsy.”
Two
weeks later, Joe felt calm when he arrived in the Skin Clinic, but he
became quite agitated when he was required to wait for over an
hour while Professor Juniper rushed gleefully around all over the
place. However, she eventually reappeared after an amusing frolic in
the Dissection Room, and advised him that, “Our tests show that
there was a very, very, very, very, small amount of melanoma under
your mole. So we’re going to take off another very, very, very thin
layer of skin, just to make sure.”
Joe felt more and more somnolent as three weeks
past slowly by. When he visited the Dissection Room for a second
time, the surgeon was Dr. Derek Underling, a benign looking gentleman
with a round face and receding ginger hair. The surgery seemed to be
much less traumatic than before, and when Joe looked up, Dr.
Underling was working studiously at his task and looked as if he was
tuning a piano.
After
he had stitched up the wound, Dr. Underling smiled kindly and said,
“Now, I needed to stretch your remaining skin more than usual to
cover the flesh. So it looks, for the moment at least, as if a dog
has taken a bite out of your arm.”
Joe
stared in horror at the injury, and surmised that similar ‘dog
bites’ could appear all over his body should cancerous moles recur.
He thought that he felt spiders creeping up his neck and tried to
slap them away with his left hand, only to see an apparition of
Officer Feisty Ginger Beard standing at the foot of his couch.
“You won’t be eating me up, Officer,” he
shrieked. “I’ll try chemotherapy first.”
“That
rarely works,” said Dr. Underling, with a grin.
Within
a couple of days, Joe fell into lengthy periods of deep
Epilim-induced sleep, and all
his
friends and relatives, and even his church elders, seemed to have deserted him.
"If you stop taking your Epilim then you;ll only become manic again!" shrieked CPN ,
Sinead O'Seamus, "and Dr. Chipmunk will have to put you on carbamazine.".
Eight weeks later,
a couple
of worn-out social
workers
found Joe floundering on his bed covered in lice. They
sent him, raving, to the Royal Wessex in Eveningside where he was turned
over by two hefty rugby-playing orderlies and coshed
with clopixol. He died, quite mercifully, from the heart palpitations.
