Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘He lost one of his ears to a moray eel while scuba diving on the Great Barrier Reef. Sliced clean off. He’s thinking of having the other one removed surgically. Fearful symmetry, and so on.’

  ‘And the Aboriginal gentlemen?’

  ‘They’re missing their entire continent, aren’t they? We removed it from them without the benefit of anaesthetic many years ago.’

  I bade Dr Toms good night, found my way to the upper deck and went outside. By now Millie and Lew were there seeing the last of their guests down into the ship’s tender, all except for Nanty, who I gathered had already been picked up by helicopter from the helipad on the afterdeck. I was handed a note he’d left me which I pocketed while making my own farewells to my host and hostess at the top of the companionway. Far below on the dark waters of the Solent the launch waiting alongside burbled and rocked, probably not doing much good to the various digestive systems aboard it tackling their boluses of seaweed, toasted Burmese tree pith and deep-fried Sumatran pitcher plant. A steward was standing on the floodlit grating beside it holding the end of a painter half-hitched around a stanchion, obviously waiting for me.

  ‘Touch of the squits, mate?’ Lew asked me. ‘I saw yer make a dash for it. I guess some of our tucker is a little exotic for those unaccustomed to it. Never mind, eh? Yer can chuck a sickie tomorrow.’

  Until then I had been disposed to like Lew as a hormonally challenged tycoon with an informal, even engaging style. But this sally suggested he might be one of those men who take pleasure in setting up his guests for gastronomic dares, and those who know Samper will realize he is the very last person to take on. I bridled at this implication of weakness. After all, I had eaten nothing at his table more outlandish than had I been invited around for a quiet bridge evening with Tarzan and Jane.

  ‘Not squits,’ I told him. ‘I’d forgotten I’d promised to call Max Christ during the interval – he’s conducting Don Giovanni in Vienna tonight and I thought it less rude just to slip away up here and use my mobile. He and I are supposed to be doing a book together sometime and you know how it is – schedules to be fixed well in advance. I guess that’s showbiz.’

  I stared out across the dark expanse of sea ringed with the blazing lights of the nearby town and felt satisfied I’d scored a point with this tactical fib. Lew’s world was not confined merely to his ship of amputees and he would have to be Les Patterson himself not to know who Max Christ was. Queen Neptunia, on the other hand, was looking blank. She was shivering slightly in the chill breeze despite being draped in a politically dubious fur coat out of which her polycarbonate arm with its now sluggish organisms protruded stiffly, the transparent hand still curled to receive a glass. I noticed with pleasure that she was suddenly looking old. Her own ignorance and the cold evidently irritated her because she said brusquely, ‘I’ll be at the Dorchester, Gerry. We’ll talk tomorrow night after I’ve done this bloody signing.’

  ‘Okay. I hope the book goes well.’

  ‘We ought to be saying that to you too, mate,’ said Lew warmly. ‘It’s in all our interests, isn’t it? We realize you’ve got other writing commitments, Gerry, and we might have messed you about by not yet signing on the dotted line. But don’t forget Millie got her foot in yer door long before the others. Yer can’t rely on dainty manners when there’s a queue for the dunny.’

  There is more than a hint of threat in this gem of Aussie wisdom and it almost goads me to reply quite sharply that we writers respond better to cheques through the letterbox than to feet in the dunny door. In other words, cobber, it’s going to take hard cash up front to induce me to waste any more of my time on your girlfriend’s three-limb circus. I tottered off down the companionway feeling not much like Daphne after all. She at least secured her future fortune, although at the cost of marriage under false pretences. Yet in other respects I felt our predicaments were not dissimilar. I reached the bottom and was handed down into the launch by the steward. As far as I could see he was physically intact, which only made me wonder which piece of his hidden anatomy might be missing. I rejoined my fellow guests inside, many of whom by now were queasy and impatient, except for Joan Nugent and her doggy cabal who had clearly never been seasick in their lives. During the short trip to shore she and I swapped phone numbers and once we’d landed she dropped me in her car at Southampton Central, from where I caught one of the last trains up to London. It had not been a successful evening, I reflected as I stared moodily at the black window beside me all the way to town while expelling noxious chickpea gas into the train’s upholstery. Now and again a waft came to me redolent of Nilotic vegetation rotting beneath a tropical sun. The book business was still unresolved, the ProWangs’ pills had revealed the sting in their tail and the ideological ins and outs of the Deep Blues were unfathomably footling.

  And so …

  And so to this mid-morning cup of overpriced coffee in Marylebone High Street and falling prey to familiar doomy thoughts about the inane things we do to earn our brief living in this madhouse. Nor are my thoughts any the less doomy for having booked myself a consultation with a doctor in Beaumont Street at two o’clock this afternoon: a man this time, but at least a specialist. Since my own doctor is hundreds of miles away in Italy I was reduced to asking Derek before he left for work this morning for the name of a reliable local practitioner. Over the years he has had ample opportunity to form close, often hurried, links with the medical profession and it was a source of much pleasure for him to winkle out of me sufficient humiliating detail in order to select the likeliest expert from his card index. So I shall be seeing a Mr Benjy Birnbaum at two, a man Derek assures me has performed prodigies of surgery on the reproductive organs of many a world leader in the nearby Wimpole Clinic.

  ‘One wouldn’t have thought his case load could be all that heavy. It’s a pretty specialized field.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Derek darkly. ‘Darling Antoine and he used to work in tandem’ – this being a reference to his defunct proctologist. ‘Front bottoms and back bottoms. Below-the-belt surgery has profited vastly from the fashion for studs and infibulation, you know. They’re always going septic. Things get wrenched off, too, or caught in Hoovers. Amazing the things people do to themselves. One of Benjy’s patients took an angle grinder to a cock ring he couldn’t get off. They had to transplant flesh fro––’

  ‘This is breakfast,’ I interrupted sternly. ‘I don’t wish to know.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not always gruesome,’ the puckish manicurist persisted as he made toast for us in his bacterial kitchenette. ‘Benjy once had to embed a diamond in an Arab’s knob. The Arab later lost it to a hooker in Shepherd Market who faded into the dawn before he discovered it was missing. A whole carat, apparently.’

  ‘Lucky girl.’

  ‘Boy, I think. Contrary to popular wisdom, it sometimes pays to be a sucker. The Arab threatened to sue, claiming Benjy hadn’t embedded the diamond securely enough, but he backed off when he thought about the publicity his case would generate. Not the sort of thing you’d want your folks in Riyadh reading about over their mint tea. Anyway, Benjy will sort you out in a jiff. Deftest blade in the business.’

  I winced. ‘And not cheap, no doubt?’

  ‘Not actually cheap, no. But then, how much is it worth to you?’ And with that Derek sailed off down to Jermyn Street leaving me prey to nameless panic, as no doubt he’d intended, the merry little ghoul. Ours is a curious relationship. You never fully plumb a friend’s warped sense of humour until you find yourself having to ask him a delicate favour. Scrabbling in my pocket for enough cash to pay the patisserie’s exorbitant bill my fingers now encounter last night’s forgotten note from Nanty. I open it and find it’s written in juvenile capitals and somewhat in the style of a text message. It is to this that the art of writing has sunk after a few thousand years of literacy: the pidgin remnants of a once mellifluous and precise method of human communication:

  GD TO C U MATE. NOW IVE RECOVRD R PRJECT IS LIVE AGAIN N W
E SHD TALK SOONEST. CALL ME TOMORO. MOB # SAME AS B4 NANTY

  This style is as much affectation as practical, owing nearly everything to the fashionable whimsy that the world has moved on from the days of pen and ink, not to mention syntax and grammar. Nanty once gave me some perfectly literate notes he had himself handwritten towards his own autobiography and although they were hardly stylish they were expressive and showed a concern for accuracy. I find it ironic that the more people bang on about the vital importance of communication, the more slipshod its modes become. Utopia would be if everyone suddenly held their tongues and allowed a blessed silence to fall upon the earth. It would soon be appreciated that the world would be a better place entirely without communication, where nation didn’t speak unto nation and the inanities of daily domestic discourse were stilled. And if that meant G. Samper would be out of a job, so much the better. Well, if I survive the ministrations of Mr Benjy Birnbaum I will maybe call Nanty later.

  Apprehensively, I present myself slightly early at the doctor’s address. I should like to be able to report that the great man’s waiting room is crowded with a mysteriously varied clientele including an archbishop, a veiled female newscaster and a small boy listlessly turning the pages of Country Life. In fact the room is empty of sufferers unless one counts a tank of tropical fish over by the window. On the walls are the usual framed diplomas and qualifications supposed to reassure nervous patients that their intimate parts will be in good hands. Mr Birnbaum seems to have qualified at an inordinate number of medical schools in Switzerland, Israel, South Africa, the United States and here in London, where the Royal College of Reconstructive Surgery was pleased to elect him a Fellow in 1991. Moving to the end of a row of framed citations I note that the Ethical Latex Forum thanked Mr Birnbaum most warmly for his keynote address to their Fourth International Congress in Denver, 2002.

  I move over to the fish tank where the surgeon’s set designer has recommended the Pirate Treasure scenario. From the copper helmet of an old-fashioned diver ascends the stream of bubbles that keep the water oxygenated. The diver is bent over a treasure chest he has found, its lid conveniently open and its freight of jewels and doubloons cascading across the aquarium’s gravel bed. The plastic timbers of a pirate galleon protrude from behind some nearby rocks. Bent over as he is, the diver is unaware that he is about to receive a jolly rogering from a swordfish with an evil glint in its painted eye. Disposed about this mise-en-scène are the tank’s living denizens, whose doleful lethargy suggests they have lately found the joke wearing thin. Ob, they comment disdainfully. Ob, ob, ob. At this moment a stout woman comes in to lead the way to her employer’s next-door consulting room so that I don’t get lost.

  As I enter I nervously note a trolley pushed against the wall and covered in crisp paper, screens on wheels and white net curtains to deter the prying eyes of Beaumont Street. Also many shelves of books. As with lawyers, I’m never quite sure what the thinking is behind these showy professional libraries. Are they meant to be the outward and visible sign of the erudition long embedded in the practitioner’s capacious brain? If so, I’m unreassured. One has only to look back to student days to realize the hopelessness of trying to recall even a single verse of Thomas Hardy or A. E. Housman, which is why one needs to invent them. Or are the tomes meant to represent a ready reference library so that the expert is never stumped by a case? (‘Why don’t we see what those acknowledged authorities Pratchett and Finkel have to say, h’m?’)

  ‘Ethical latex?’ I query, hearing the door close behind me.

  ‘Ah, I’ve often wondered if anyone ever reads those things.’

  ‘Wonder no more.’

  We shake hands. Benjy Birnbaum is short and round and disconcertingly wearing a white nylon overall as though for protection against sudden squalls of urine. He is also wearing rimless spectacles with thick, perfectly round lenses. ‘Wonderful to see you, Mr Samper. I gather this is at rather short notice. What seems to be the trouble?’

  ‘There’s no “seems” about it.’ I start my doleful tale which I have been rehearsing ever since leaving the patisserie. I thought some harmless massaging of the facts might spare a few of my blushes.

  ‘You say your motivation was medical science,’ Mr Birn-baum observes at the end. ‘Are you by any chance a scientist? Or medical?’

  ‘No, no. I’m a writer. Occasionally I’m asked to do some scientific journalism, and this present mishap is due to my foolishly over-zealous attempt to find out what really lies behind those internet advertisements about penile enlargement. Do they work? Are they dangerous? I was asked to look into it for one of the Sunday magazines.’

  ‘One of the Sunday magazines, I see. As for what really lies behind the advertisements, I should have thought the profit motive would be a satisfactory explanation.’

  ‘Of course,’ I agree, a bit rattled by the ease with which this little doughball has undercut the glaring plausibility of my story. ‘Profit – that’s obvious. I really meant what lies behind that, in a larger sense. Are twenty-first-century men more worried about the size of their penises than their twentieth-century counterparts were, and if so, why? Is it due to the now ubiquitous pornographic imagery that might make some men feel inadequate? Or could it be that these days boys and young men seldom see each other naked, as they used to in the days of National Service and single-sex boarding schools, and consequently have less awareness of what constitutes a normally-sized cock?’ This is more like it. Once I start ad-libbing like this I feel confident and inventive, knowing I can keep going indefinitely. Benjy Birnbaum listens impassively.

  ‘You realized the risk you were taking?’

  ‘I suppose I could paint myself in heroic colours, like a Morgan Spurlock living on McDonald’s hamburgers for a month,’ I say. ‘But to be honest I didn’t believe these pills contained anything harmful, if anything at all. I assumed the whole thing was a straightforward con: overpriced placebos with exoticsounding ingredients that are completely inert, plus the patient’s desire to believe, which would no doubt be reflected in his measurements, even if minutely.’

  Benjy Birnbaum sighs. ‘It’s funny how often magazines commission these surveys nowadays. I’ve had several writers come in here and give much the same account. Odd how I never seem to see any of their articles in print. No doubt I read the wrong newspapers. I must say I’m impressed by the collective bravery of you journalists in offering yourselves as guinea pigs in a public cause. Well, do please come over here and lie down and we’ll have a look-see. Pity you’ve finished the course. We might have had an analysis made of one of those pills. Orchic substances, you say.’

  I have the feeling I’ve already been stripped naked even before I climb onto the trolley and numbly unzip. I’m not wearing corduroy today, having discovered some small spatters of cooked vegetation adhering here and there. The awful Debra was right and the suit will have to be cleaned. Instead, I have chosen a lyrical pair of slacks by His Majesty in fawn mohair-and-denim mixture. We’re talking a serious sum of money here, which may or may not be the right impression to convey in a private surgery in the Harley Street area. It could cut both ways. I watch as Benjy Birnbaum goes to a sinister-looking dispenser on the wall and sticks a hand into its brightly lit aperture. There is the gulping noise of a vacuum being released and then he repeats the operation with the other hand. Only when he returns to the trolley can I see that his hands are now covered by a nearly invisible film of latex, quite possibly of an ethical bent. Only a faint ring the colour of a rubber band around each wrist gives the game away.

  ‘I suppose one could use that gadget to fit a condom,’ I say.

  ‘Just relax.’

  It’s strange how one can’t watch a doctor examining one’s own body. Or I can’t, at any rate. Just as I did last night while Steffi Toms was giving my veal the once-over, I stare off sideways at yet another row of books as though my body no longer has anything to do with me. Handbook of Vascular Anastomosis; The Dysfunctional Penis by Mur
ray G. Intrilogator; The Beyondness of Healing, published by an outfit called The Mystical Rose Center For Sexual Unfolding; Dicktionary. Dicktionary?? A fat, coffee table-sized volume with a …

  ‘Cough, please.’

  … peculiar colophon on its spine.

  ‘Again. Good.’ He gives my veal a valedictory pat. ‘I think we can be pretty sure there’s no permanent damage to the perioticular ostracon. And your melinges are sound, at any rate.’

  ‘In layman’s terms, that will be five hundred guineas?’

  ‘Ah, guineas. The dear, dead days. I’d like to do a blood test to be certain, however. I suspect these pills may temporarily have screwed up your hormonal system. Yes, yes, you can get up now. Mm, guineas.’ He returns to his desk. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Just about to turn forty.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I mean fifty. Did I say forty? Truth to tell, I’ve been a bit thrown by last night. I was quite worried for a while as you can imagine.’ It has taken a rotund Jewish surgeon in my pay to expose an entirely harmless deception that goes back at least, well, ten years. This is cruel and humiliating. It is something I was hoping to keep from my readers and myself alike, let alone from Adrian, who now seems to recede on the far side of a gulf of years. Suddenly everything looks bleaker, even slightly pathetic. Brace up, Samper. Get a grip. Beaumont Street’s Hippocratic answer to the Pillsbury Doughboy is breaking out syringes and vials from sterile packaging. ‘I notice you have a book over there called Dicktionary. That big volume.’

  ‘Oh, that. I need hardly say it comes from California, like the spiritual twaddle next to it. Yes, the Mapplethorpe Press. There’s not a word of text in it. Just clench your fist? That’s it. No, entirely pictures. Thousands of photographs. And do you know, no, hold still, it’s a good vein and we’ll take another twenty while we’re at it, I’ve found it quite as valuable as most medical textbooks. Just press that hard for a minute or two and I’ll stick a bit of plaster over it. We don’t want to get our nice shirt all messed up. We’ll have some results – what time is it now, two-thirty? – by this time tomorrow. And then we’ll know how to proceed. But for now I think you haven’t too much to worry about. I would recommend some form of erotic eventuality in the next twenty-four hours, preferably leading to climax. That way we’ll know if you’re draining normally. If not, call me immediately and find a flight of stairs to climb. Virginia in the office will give you my various numbers and deal with the paperwork. I’ll see you again tomorrow.’