Jackpot Jack: A London Farce - страница 6

Jack emerged from the doctor’s room with his leg encased in the plaster cast that he thought resembled nothing so much as a hefty, off-white cricket bat. He hopped awkwardly into the corridor, a veritable parade of the infirm and the fidgety, and cast about for a soul to engage. The silence was a heavy blanket, stifling and unbearable. He needed to verbalise, to pontificate, to generally air his frankly rather nonsensical views on… well, anything.

Finally, his eye landed upon a gentleman leaning heavily on a walking stick, his face etched with the kind of weary resignation one often finds on the faces of pigeons in Trafalgar Square. Here, Jack thought, was an audience, however captive.

“Remarkable, isn't it?” Jack proclaimed, his voice a tad too loud for the confined space. “The wonders of modern medicine! Just yesterday, I was practically crippled. Today? Well, I'm practically crippled differently! It's a miracle, I tell you, a blessed miracle!” He beamed, the picture of optimism despite his precarious one-legged stance.

The gentleman with a walking stick merely raised a weary eyebrow. “Indeed,” he mumbled, his voice as dry as a forgotten biscuit.

Jack, undeterred, continued his monologue. “Although…” He paused, his brow furrowing as a scandalous thought, like a mischievous gremlin, began to tickle his brain. “Although, one does wonder, doesn't one? Is it truly a miracle, or… is it all a charade? A cunning scheme to bleed us dry, orchestrated by people in white coats with stethoscopes dangling like hypnotist's pendulums!” The thought bloomed in his mind, a monstrous, albeit ridiculous, flower.

He leaned closer to the man, lowering his voice conspiratorially, though not quite low enough. “I mean, what if they're all at it, the whole lot of 'em? Exaggerating ailments, prescribing unnecessary treatments… extortion, pure and simple!”

However, what came out of his mouth next was rather profound. He straightened up, his eyes gleaming with righteous indignation. “What we need is to lock up these doctors who take bribes!”

The gentleman blinked. “If you jail all the doctors who take bribes, who will be left to treat us?”

Jack recoiled, his face a mask of utter horror. The world suddenly seemed to tilt on its axis. He hadn't considered that! The abyss of doctor-lessness opened up before him, a horrifying vista of untreated ailments and galloping diseases.

He stared at the man, then, in a moment of epiphany, a solution so blindingly obvious it made him feel quite faint.”'I know!” he declared, his voice filled with sudden and utterly misplaced conviction. “I shall simply never be ill again! That's it! Genius, pure genius!”

And with that, Jack puffed out his chest and, forgetting entirely about his cumbersome cast, attempted to stride confidently down the corridor. He promptly lost his balance, flailing wildly before crashing into a nearby trolley laden with bedpans, creating a cacophony of clattering porcelain and startled cries. But even as he lay sprawled amongst the debris, a beatific smile remained plastered on his face. He was, after all, a genius. Or so he thought.

Jack was in a state of positively radiant self-satisfaction. An idea, a veritable Archimedean lever of thought, had taken root in his brain, promising to shift the very foundations of… well, something undoubtedly impressive. He practically glowed with the genius of it all. This glow, however, was rudely interrupted by a rumbling, a grumbling complaint from the depths of his very being. His stomach, a notoriously unreliable barometer of his intellectual fervour, declared a state of emergency. He hadn't eaten a thing all morning, lost as he was in the labyrinthine corridors of his own brilliance!