Out of the Blue

The respected Dr Attrill settled back into his first-class seat on a train heading to Waterloo.

He adjusted his spectacles, opened his briefcase and drew out a copy of the Times. As he was closing the case he caught sight of the small parcel wrapped in plain brown paper and felt uneasy.

Dr Attrill had been attending a medical conference in Plymouth. The subject matter was obscure and he found the coffee and cold buffet more enjoyable than anything else. The main reason he had gone was to get away from the humdrum existence of the surgery and the city, and the conference had presented him with the right opportunity.

“A nice break in Devon,” he thought, “and I could even look up dear old James.”

Dr James Peabody and Dr Norman Attrill had been medical students together thirty years previously but their paths had not crossed since.

Dr Peabody had remained in the same small country practice in a sleepy Devon village for all that time and life had stood still.

Norman Attrill had been surprised at the change in his friend. He naturally expected some ageing; a little loss of hair, a paunch and double chin, however, there was a wild look in James Peabody’s eyes. Norman put it down to the recent divorce.

Not until they had finished a bottle of whisky did Dr Peabody venture to say casually “Have you seen any interesting videos recently Norman?”

This seemed a rather strange question out of the blue, but Norman replied “Well I did watch one not long ago. It was called ‘How to create a cardboard Zen garden in suburbia’.”

James Peabody frowned and twiddled with his tie. “That’s not quite what I meant old boy. I mean REALLY interesting videos.”

“You’ve lost me,” replied Dr Attrill.

James Peabody fixed him with a look. “Doctors and nurses and that sort of thing… Remember our med school days?”

Dr Attrill blanched. Memories long buried were returning with frightening vigour. A particular evening flashed before his eyes when three nurses had been smuggled into the hospital flat that he and James shared with a fellow student who came from a long lineage of Sheiks. “I seem to recall that Mustafa had a cine projector which we used to aim at one of the walls, and he managed to obtain some, well, rather exotic films,” he said nervously.

“I think you’re getting my drift now,” said James Peabody draining his glass and reaching for another bottle.

“You don’t mean,” muttered Norman Attrill. “Where on earth did you get…?’

“Best not ask old boy,” said Peabody with a knowing look and tapping his nose. “Amazing how a divorce can liberate one.”

An hour later Norman Attrill was seeing the world in a whole new light. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and other childhood tales would never be the same, and he was not sure how he would be able to read them to his grandchildren again. They had been depicted in a rather outrageous adult format that he was not likely to forget.

In a moment of generosity as Norman was leaving Dr Peabody thrust the video wrapped in plain brown paper into his hands.

“Here you are,” he said. “This will cheer your life in dark and boring days. Lift your spirits when patients are driving you mad. So much more fulfilling than ‘How to create a cardboard Zen garden in suburbia’.”

That is how the brown paper package came to be in Dr Attrill’s briefcase as he sped back to London courtesy of South West trains. Home to his wife Prunella, a very proper sort of woman.

Sitting alone in his compartment, Norman noticed two uniformed policemen board the train at Yeovil Junction.

Suddenly his imagination began to run wild and it was as if the brown paper package, hidden amongst his medical notes on ‘How to Treat Constipation’, had become a time bomb.

“What if they do a search,” he panicked. “Suppose they open my briefcase?” This was irrational thinking, but then he was suffering from a horrendous hangover coupled with a guilty conscience.

“What would Prunella say if the video comes to light, What would my patients say and worst of all there is my mother.”

Norman’s mother may have been 97 but even now she could instil a terror that had remained for all his 58 years and would no doubt reach from beyond the grave.

He felt hot under the collar, his mouth was dry. A pillar of society, member of the local council, he wrote a medical column for the local paper. “I’ve been happy to air my views on chilblains, stiff necks and heavy breathing…” he stopped suddenly.

“No, wait not heavy breathing. I mean shortness of breath.” Heavy breathing was what he was doing now.

Glancing nervously out of the compartment and satisfying himself that no one was watching, he forced the window open, heart-pounding, and flung the brown paper package into the air. It disappeared over a hedgerow somewhere in deepest Dorset.