Tucking it between my legs, like a dog in disgrace, I got into the bath and lay back. The ceiling was slightly cracked in the corner. A house-proud spider worked on its translucent web. Eat a fly or something, I told it; be symbolic.
For goodness’ sake, I had had only one real infection. The rest was temporary scares and growing neurosis about my private parts – parts (it bore pointing out) that had come to enjoy greater privacy over recent months. Now I looked at them only when I had to, and even then covertly, as if I were a queen and they were someone else’s. Any spot or abrasion, even when I knew perfectly well it was a zip-scar or the remains of some tortured blackhead, meant going through the routine. It meant working it over. It meant waiting for the one-by-one elimination of my senses. It meant another trip to the local library, another afternoon browsing pinkly through medical dictionaries, ship’s doctor’s manuals.
Let it just try anything when I had a pee and Christ would I show it who was boss. I washed, got out, slipped a towel over my shoulder – had a pee. I couldn’t tell whether it hurt or not. So I worked it over anyway, and good.
Normal procedure: I flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing chinese-burn – a last attempt to tempt out a drop of that most dreaded commodity, discharge. None was forthcoming. It looked at me as if bullied, picked-on. Cautiously at first, I applied a nailbrush to the helmet. I combed, with the rigour of an orphan matron, my pubic hairs. I swabbed my balls with after-shave. Perhaps a pipe-cleaner, steeped in Dettol ?
I experienced thrilling self-pity. ‘What will that mind of yours get up to next?’ I said, recognizing the self-congratulation behind this thought and the self-congratulation behind that recognition and the self-congratulation behind recognizing that recognition.
Steady on. What’s so great about going mad ?
But even that was pretty arresting. Even that, come on now, was a pretty arresting thing for a nineteen-year-old boy to have thought.
‘Yes. Very. One somehow gathers these responsibilities – or they seem to somehow gather on you. Because affection is a cumulative thing. People go on as if it were purely chemical. But it’s not. How could it be ? You just do feel fond of people you’ve known for a long time.’
They get dependent on you and you start taking them for granted. And then maybe you think it’s the safest thing. And you start worrying about how they’re going to get on without you, and about you getting along without them.’
‘But that’s the trap. Worrying about being without them is a cop-out. And you mustn’t let yourself get hustled into a false position.’ My use of the split-infinitive and the hippie colouring of my speech were attributable in part to Rachel’s hippie satchel – one of those tasselled, ropey-looking nosebags -which, or so she claimed, was made entirely from natural fibres and dyes (i.e. snot, hair, ear-muck). I had remarked on how nice it looked.
‘Yes. That’s the trouble.’
I felt the pre-pass flush come over me. After all, here she was, sitting on my bed and talking to me without any real sign of dislike. Over lunch at the Tea Centre, my sympathy vis-avis DeForest had been so discreet, my manner so genial, so … right, my invitation to ‘forget school’, to ‘live a little’, so relaxed, so unpushy, that – here she was, sitting on my bed.
Fortunately, my room was in a state of red alert nowadays and Rachel’s telephone call hadn’t caught me with my pants down.
She had said matter-of-factly that she was fine and that DeForest wasn’t going to be at school that day and that perhaps it would be ‘a good thing’ if we met for lunch and ‘had a chat’. Her blandness had frightened me at first. I didn’t like that ‘chat’. There was something honestly all for the best about it. But I, as cool as you like, had not contacted her since Nanny Sunday; so the initiative was mine.