The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale Read Free Book Online

condoms?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Why not?’
    The man reddened even more. ‘We’re faithful. As a rule.’
    ‘Of course you are. And when you have sex, or make love, do you have anal intercourse?’
    ‘Usually.’
    ‘Do you penetrate him?’
    ‘No. No. He fucks me usually.’
    ‘I see. Right then, Bruno, we’d better give you a thorough checking-over. If you’d like to step in here.’
    There were tiny treatment rooms to either side, to which the nurses had independent access. Ben showedBruno into one then asked him to remove his suit and to lower his pants. He donned a pair of latex gloves and examined his penis and scrotum, gently pulling back the foreskin to check for paraphimosis and looking into the meatus to note the discharge, which was still fairly watery. He also checked for lice or scabies, or any lumps or warts. Luckily Bruno was not one of the patients – straight or gay – who became uncontrollably excited at the touch of latex or by the mere act of being examined. Ben had never quite decided how to deal with these. Obviously a polite show of indifference was called for, since anything else might prove disastrous, yet a complete lack of acknowledgement always seemed a little discourteous. Once one prodigiously well endowed patient divined his dilemma and had overcome his own embarrassment sufficiently to say,
    ‘You could always applaud.’
    As was usually the case among GUM patients, Bruno smelled strongly of soap. The countless dinner-table grillings Ben had faced about his work over the years tended to involve an assumption that his patients were unclean, and he always felt honour bound to explain that shame or a compensatory sense of decorum meant that most of them arrived for their appointments scrupulously, and recently, washed, often sporting slightly inflamed patches from where they had just been rubbing and scrubbing.
    Men at dinner parties and, less often, women wanted to know if the penises he encountered were ever spectacularly large or grotesquely small and he could honestly reassure them that most, funnily enough, were average, neither pitiful nor frightening. But occasionally he liked to shame the prurient by pointing out that men with extremely small endowments were far less likely to show up in a clinic for sexually transmitted disease since people were far less likely to sleep with them and a horror of ridicule was, in any case, quite likely to have put them off sex.
    Ben then had Bruno lie on his side on the couch and draw up his knees so that he could check internally for any abnormalities. On withdrawing his finger he glanced down to check for blood traces before discarding the gloves.
    ‘Right, Bruno. Don’t worry. Nothing sinister. Stay as you are and a nurse will come in next to take a quick swab front and back and in your mouth and to take some blood. He’ll knock first so as not to startle you. He’ll also want you to give a urine sample – you’ll be left on your own to do that, don’t worry. We’ll be checking for your urinary PCR – looking for traces of viral or bacterial activity. And the smears will let us do a pus cell count under a microscope. We’ll check you for hepatitis A and B as a matter of routine but would you like an HIV test while we’re at it? I need your legal permission for that.’
    Bruno had sat up on the edge of the couch and preserved his modesty with his shirt tails. ‘You mean like for AIDS?’
    Ben nodded. ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘No thanks.’
    ‘Certain?’
    ‘Definitely.’
    ‘Right you are. And finally if, as seems likely, you have picked up an infection we’ll obviously be able to treat you but we need to do all we can to stop the infection spreading. Is there any way you could contact or enable us to contact the girl at the conference? We could do it anonymously.’
    ‘No,’ Bruno said, worried. ‘No way. Sorry but, well, I don’t even know her name or who she works for.’
    ‘Shame. Maybe she’ll come in on the other floor under her