A Good Cleanout

"So how are you Mrs Stewart?" I said to her. "I heard you weren't very well yesterday."

"Oh - it's been terrible!" this white-haired, stooped old lady declared, grasping my hand. "Terrible!"

Mrs Stewart is one of a pair - and her nickname with the bingo staff is Dopey 2. There is another, Mrs Thomson, who is Dopey 1, and the two of them are sisters in bingo. They sit beside each other, except for the evenings they've fallen out, and communicate in cackled remarks guaranteed to annoy all around them. We call their area the Dopey Zone, or - over the microphone - Zone D, for politeness. There is also a Golden Zone, where the "Golden Girls" sit - each one vying to be Blanche, and even more tragically, the "Twilight Zone" inhabited exclusively by Mad Madge, who has always "just won sixty pounds on the bandit" or who is "getting married next week, you know." Such diversions make an apparently boring job bearable, and at times even enjoyable. All good harmless fun.

"I've had a good cleanout," Mrs Stewart pressed on. "From Thursday to Sunday, with one of those - what do you call it - Annie.... Annie.... Annie...." She was rubbing her chest agitatedly.

"Get your gun?" I enquired, not entirely helpfully. "Oh you!" she laughed, grasping me even tighter. "No.... ENEMA! Thats what it was. ENEMA."

Things clicked into place. I knew what that entailed, and what it quite probably prognosed. "Oh, that's awful," I ventured. "Yes it was," she agreed. "On the toilet all the time."

I smiled, hiding my amusement at her frankness, and trying to offer empathy. "And then yesterday," she pressed on, "yesterday when I was at the hospital, they stuck something up my back passage, and that was even worse. Tests they were doing. Tests."

"Oh dear!" I said, disengaging my hand and fearing bacteria. "When do you get your results?"

"In a week," she said. "I'm sure it'll be all right."