Sex and Death by Sarah Hall Read Free Book Online Page B

the toilet – pass a bowel motion , was how her GP liked to put it – without being in excruciating pain from the delightfully named anal fissure that had made its presence known when her baby was two weeks old.
    If Selene had to summarise what she had learned so far from the experience of the fissure (as she and her husband referred toit, so often that it was like the third partner in their marriage), it would be this. That the ultimate taboo, perhaps the only one still remaining in modern Australian culture, was to talk openly about your toilet life. Toilet humour was okay, in certain prescribed situations. But the moment Selene began to share the real, lived experience of her current toilet issues with close friends – helplessly, because she didn’t really want to be sharing these details, yet she was so consumed by them that she felt inauthentic in her friendships if she didn’t – she could see the desperate look in her friends’ eyes as they pretended it was normal, while silently willing her to stop. It seemed to her no coincidence that it was Captain Cook who had introduced the word ‘taboo’ into modern English usage, stealing it, along with much else, from the Tongans, whose word tabu had indicated something set apart, forbidden.
    How could it be that this minuscule split in a fibre of her body to which she’d never given much thought could set her apart from the rest of the teeming human life on the planet? Even from her husband, who had been nothing but compassionate. She could not help resenting his carefree attitude, disappearing into the bathroom for five tranquil minutes before leaving for work, not paying any more heed to this act of emptying his bowels than to any of his other ablutions.
    It was a new low point when she said to him one morning as he exited the bathroom, the flush audible, ‘I’m so jealous of you.’ What on earth did she expect, for him to make the sacrificial offering of a live animal to the toilet each time in acknowledgement of his body’s privilege in being free of pain?
    He embraced her in sympathy, kissed the sleeping baby and left their flat to jog for the bus. Selene was left standing outside the bathroom looking with dread at the still warm toilet seat, knowing she had to face the day’s first anguish. Time slowed. At least the baby was asleep, she counselled herself. Once before she had endured the agony with him strapped to her chest in theBjorn, her tears of pain – and every time, there were tears – dropping onto his pulsing fontanelle.
    Afterwards, she sat in a hot bath, and then applied the battery of useless creams whose names left nothing to the imagination (Proctosedyl, Rectinol) that she was using in a last-ditch attempt to avoid some kind of surgical intervention. The day before, at her appointment with the specialist, after she had curled up on her side on the examining table, he’d announced apologetically that the Botox injection hadn’t worked to release the muscle spasm. It was a pity about the taboo, which she was trying harder to observe after one too many pleading looks from interlocutors, because ever since she’d had the Botox injected she’d been coming up with great one-liners she couldn’t use: ‘You think my forehead looks good? You should see my sphincter!’ Thank the Pope the injection had been covered by the public hospital or it would have cost thousands to render her anus wrinkle-free. And it hadn’t even done the trick.
    The specialist had said she would need to have a lateral sphincterotomy under general anaesthetic within a few weeks if there was no improvement. She’d come home straight away and Googled it, and discovered that, for some bizarre reason, which not even medical professionals could explain, if you made a second cut in the internal sphincter – which had gone into spasm because of the fissure – it sometimes released, and