However, on the following Friday or thereabouts I woke up to find that someone had squeezed a family-size tube of pus all over my pyjama bottoms. A toxic wet dream ? On visiting the bathroom I found also that I was peeing lava. Palpably, something was up. To deal with the first symptom I fixed up a sort of nozzle over my helmet with a wad of Kleenex and an elastic band. To ameliorate the second, I took care always to use the narrow downstairs lavatory, where, with palms pressed flat against the walls, like Samson between the pillars of the Philistine temple, I would part company with angry half-pints of piss, pus, blood – you name it.
Then I wondered what to do.
Obviously, I could never sleep with anybody again, but (God knew) that would be no deprivation. I thought I might as well get cured. Yet Pepita was of foreign extraction and this meant that I would have to go to Madagascar or somewhere to get it treated. ‘Ah. Congo Clap,’ the doctor would say through his teeth. ‘Witch Doctor Umbutu Kabuki’s your man – the only man, as a matter of fact. You turn left off the Zambesi, second tributary, third hut on your right. Offer him these brightly coloured beads…”
All weekend I cried, beat my head against the bathroom door, thought of ways of committing suicide, ran off into the woods and screamed as loud as I could, considered lopping off my rig with a razor-blade, slept in a nettle-bed of nerves. I half wanted to tell my father; I knew he wouldn’t mind, but it would have disgusted me to have his efficient sympathy.
On the Monday, after six hours of incognito leprosy at school, I had a coffee in George’s with Geoffrey. Via girls, Durex, promiscuity, I brought the subject up – quite hypothetically, of course. Geoffrey thinks he knows all about this sort of thing because his father’s a doctor. When I asked about the cure his reply was therefore vehement:
‘It’s hell, apparently. They stuff stuff up your arse to sort of … bring it on. Then they bung this needle-thin umbrella down your cock and press a button that fans it out. Then, then, they yank it out, really hard.’ He made a tugging gesture with his spoon.
‘What, they give you an anaesthetic first?’
‘No. No point. It’s too sensitive. Don’t be silly, man. Anyway, you’ve got to be able to get a rise first before they can get it in. Obviously. Then they wrench it out, and all the scabs and crap come out with it.’ He sipped his coffee. ‘You usually faint.’
‘Jesus Christ. How long before you can screw again?’
‘Not sure. Six months, a year. At least six months. With regular treatment.’
Nothing of the kind, needless to say: just two jabs of penicillin up the bum and much humiliation at the local clinic.
Then I wrote to Pepita. Did I write to Pepita. I still have the reply somewhere. My letter was savaged by the caretaker’s corgi; the addressee’s name was unintelligible so the headmistress opened it and was most put out by the contents. (The letter was one of my polemical best, strong on imagery.) Pepita was chucked out on her ear, a letter sent to the parents, etc.; this all struck me as perfectly right and proper at the time. Pepi told the story in her answer – a forgivable attempt to square the moral blame – ending with the claim that she ‘had never mean’t so as to give it to’ me. (Love that ‘mean’t’.) I later discovered that she had given it to half Oxford, too; her personal hygiene was evidently so flexible that the symptoms had slipped by unnoticed for an entire term.
What now, though? What now? I went down to my room, locking the door for some reason, and lay on the bed in the dark.
There was nothing to worry about. Geoffrey knew a queer doctor in Chelsea who was always keen to deal with such maladies. He had fixed Geoffrey up only last month. Geoffrey had caught some rather complicated NSU off that Swede. The Swede – significantly, it seemed to me – had had a scar like a giant’s fly-zip right down the middle of her stomach. Geoffrey said that he had gone through with it out of pure altruism, and I believe him. (Erections, as we all know, come to the teenager on a plate.) He had done it because he did not wish to hurt her feelings. There was a moral there. The doc had charged him five guineas; I could borrow that from Norm. It might postpone Rachel, it might mean a couple of weeks off the booze, it certainly would mean a hellish afternoon, but otherwise there was absolutely nothing to worry about.