"It explains the symptoms of neo-pallidum syphilis and how to best deal with them. It includes the standard advice that you probably already know about such as avoiding sexual contact to restrict the further spread of the disease and what other symptoms you should look out for. What it will probably not make especially clear is that there is currently no known cure and that you may well have to live with the affects of this infection for the rest of your life. It also specifies your possible likelihood of mortality."
"Likelihood of what? I wasn't expecting to live forever anyway."
"This strain will make that even less likely," said the doctor glumly.
Well fuck that, thought Olive as she wandered out of the surgery past the winding queue. Like her, none of the other patients had the steady income required to pay insurance premiums for health care. Most were elderly, young or disabled. Few were employed, although even those lucky ones were unlikely to be able to afford medical attention that wasn't provided by charity. And the state of their health wouldn't be accepted as a reason for not being able to work. Employers were choosy about who they employed, so anyone who was prone to sickness or took a day or more off work would soon return to the ranks of the even more destitute unemployed.
Olive was a self-employed woman, of course. Or at least that's how she'd characterise herself if there was ever another government census of the sort that used to happen once every ten years. In practice, it meant that she let men fuck her for money. She supplemented this core income by petty theft, drug-dealing and begging. And whether she had the clap or something more serious, as long as she could give her johns a blowjob or a handjob, she had no choice but to do so. Fuck the advice about holding back on the fanny. If a john wanted to fuck her and he had the readies: well, that was what she'd allow him to do, rubber or no rubber.
Even so, Olive resisted the temptation of dropping the freshly printed health advice into the nearest recycle bin. Even if she couldn't find a use for the paper to roll a spliff or through which to snort a line, there was some stuff on the kind of clap she'd got that she might want to read about. If nothing else, it'd give her an idea of what to expect if the doctor wasn't just spinning a line and she really was suffering from something incurable. But then there was once a time when they said that AIDS was incurable and, from what she'd last heard, that was still just no longer true. Perhaps they'd find a cure for all the new strains of clap just like they used to do when Olive was a kid and it was her mum who'd turn the occasional trick. Olive was determined to continue fucking even if her twat was weeping with sores, warts and pus. There was always some miracle wonder-cure that the drug companies could make a fucking bomb from. That sort of business never went insolvent, unlike all the others that had gone bust over the years.
Olive was true to her intentions. She found the time to turn a trick or two along Streatham Hill near the railway station before she returned home to the dilapidated squat on Ullswater Road. In only a couple of hours she scored nearly a grand from three blowjobs and an alley-way fuck. That'd be enough to keep her in hamburgers, kebabs and crack for a day or so.
"So what's the verdict?" asked Yana, her room-mate and occasional lover when Olive had persuaded her to unpadlock the bedroom door. "It weren't nothing serious, was it?"
"It wasn't Goat Flu or Rat Fever or shit like that," said Olive, referring to the contagions attracting most attention from the media at the moment. "It was just the clap again."
"Again!" echoed Yana. "That's no big fucking deal, is it? It's just goes with the job, don't it? Nothing to get in a sweat about."
"Well, fuck it," said Olive who didn't want to get anxious about what the doctor had said. "I've got some crystals. You got any shit?"
"Yeah, dope, snow and, best of all, some GHB."
"I ain't had that in a while."
"I found a new source."
"Cool."
