The Whole Day Through by Patrick Gale Read Free Book Online Page A

own steam. So. When the nurse is through with you you’ll need to wait back in the waiting area until your results are ready. Or make an appointment to come back but it’s best we treat you today, obviously.’
    ‘Will it be long?’
    ‘Half an hour, if you’re lucky. See you later, then.’
    An earlier patient’s test results had come through while he was with Bruno. He returned to the waiting area and called for Tim. Two men stood.
    ‘Sorry,’ Ben added. ‘Tim 1972.’
    From nine-thirty until shortly before he broke for lunch, Ben examined thirty penises and eight back passages. Six of the back passages were gay, one was ‘bi-curious’ and the last was straight but so convinced something had happened on a camping trip, despite medical appearances to the contrary, that Ben referred its owner for counselling.
    All the men who consulted him were carrying one of the usual venereal infections, apart from one of the two who had been sent in for an all-clear before their new girlfriends would sleep with them. And these, depressingly, were the only ones all morning to request tests for HIV.
    People attending the GUM clinics presented a human Venn diagram that varied little from day to day except in its occasional startling particulars. One of that morning’s patients had gone down on a woman with such zeal he had managed to pick up a pubic lice infection in his eyebrows. Another had neglected his gonorrhoea for so long that the pus he was producing actually was the green of everyone’s worst imaginings rather than the usual mundane off-white.
    Genito-urinary medicine was probably the medical field with the least variety in the presenting cases and the most patients convinced that their case was especially shameful or revolting. It was the dullest, medically, but one of the richest in psychological interest. This was not his specialism of choice – his favoured area was the treatment of patients with HIV, but clinics for the two still tended to be administratively, if not physically, linked, both to save money and because, in terms of preventative medicine, they had ground in common.
    As a medical student it was virology that captivated him and he nursed dreams of devoting a career to research in the field, finding a cure to something elusive or at least the genetic key that would pave the way tosuch a breakthrough. His houseman year was spent at what was then St Stephen’s Hospital in Chelsea and he found himself assigned to the Thomas Macaulay Ward just as the first wave of London’s AIDS cases was being admitted. The shock of patients having to be treated for a syndrome for which there were then few hard and fast treatments on a ward which had to be kept locked yet even so was plagued by journalists trying to bluff their way in and photographers aiming telephoto lenses from fire escapes in search of a ghoulish scoop woke him from the long sleep of medical study and he was startled by a clinical vocation. Not even HIV research – however well paid and glamorous by comparison – could beat the fulfilment he found in battling to prolong and then to save lives in medical territory that was still drawing up its own maps.
    Chloë’s father was a heart specialist. Brutally uninquisitive, dismissive of the world beyond his operating theatres, he had never recovered from his disappointment that not one of his three children, all daughters, had proved studious enough or sufficiently scientific to follow him into medicine. Chloë was the hardest-working and had at least made it to Oxford, but he’d discounted French as a girl’s subject , at which she’d merely exclaimed, ‘Dad!’ and laughed. She won some favour with him, however, by delivering him a medical son-in-law. Though common decency prevented him saying so in public, he was disgusted at Ben’s wilfully steering his career into what he saw as a professionaldead end and at first his dismay was dutifully echoed by Chloë.
    Thanks to the examples of Hollywood