Creative Writing Course - 1st week's homework.

Our tutor Doug, showed us a picture of a character from Venetian folklaw called The Medico della Peste (The Plague Doctor) and told us to write 200 to 500 words about whatever the image brought to mind.  Later that week, as I sat down with the intention of tackling the exercise, I got involved in Facebook chat with the daughter of an old colleague, about a doctor I stumbled across in the Medical Register when I worked in NHS administration.  His name really was as I've written and having been reminded about him I couldn't resist incorporating him into the piece.

He sat at the hotel dining table, nervously anticipating the entrance of his future mother-in-law.  His fiancée seemed to be watching the lift doors with all the trepidation that someone with a noose around their neck would watch the trapdoor.  His mother sighed and repeatedly glanced at her watch, in between tutting and rolling her eyes, as if the tardiness of their hostess was less forgivable than The Crucifixion itself.  His father, on the other hand, was calmly polishing his cutlery with all the smug, self-assuredness of someone about to be proven right, provoking Oral to fantasise about how he might use his skills as a doctor to commit the perfect patricide.

It annoyed him that at the age of twenty-nine, he was still intimidated by his father, despite having lost all respect for him on his first day at secondary school. That was when he had discovered that his name was to be a millstone around his neck for the rest of his life.  He remembered going home and asking his father why the older kids had called him names and his father had simply laughed and told him he would find out soon enough.  When eventually, one of the kinder, older girls had explained a few things to him, he had stormed home and asked how any sane parent, with the surname ‘Love’, could have decided it was a good idea to call their offspring, ‘Oral’.

Oral Love’s name had remained a curse until he left school to study medicine at Nottingham University.  The students there had been equally quick to seize the opportunities for humour that his name presented, but he soon became blasé of his new nickname Horatio.  Nonetheless, he would still feel hairs bristle whenever someone used the unexpurgated version of Horatio Fellatio.

                                                                       

He had only met his future mother-in-law on one previous occasion, and even his love for her daughter had not blinded him sufficiently to ignore that she had hit every branch as she fell from the ugly tree.  Now he was about to introduce her to his parents, and he knew that his father especially, would be eager to find something to criticise. 

When the lift’s bell rang, even Mrs Love deigned to look towards the silently opening doors.  Oral could almost hear his mother’s sharp intake of breath and his father’s stifled snigger as Mrs Cruickshank swept into the restaurant.  She was wearing a long, dark brown gown, which looked as though a hundred moles had died for its creation.  Her make-up gave her the pallor of a cadaver after his former anatomy class had finished with it, and served to exaggerate her misshapen features so she appeared even more unlovely than he remembered.  Her nose supported thick, frameless lenses, which aspired to magnify the hooked, beak-like monstrosity out of all proportion to the rest of her face.  She brandished the stick she carried more menacingly than the Medico della Peste himself, upon whom, he speculated, she had modelled her appearance.