Amazing Disgrace (22 page)

‘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:

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.’