William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

Morgan closed the book and thought he could actually hear the blood draining from his face. He leant against a nearby wall and felt a tremor of blind fear run through his body. With shaking hands he re-inserted the thick volume back in its slot in the medical section. The book was called Sexually Transmitted Diseases .

He had decided not to go into the office until after his appointment with Murray. An agonizing tear-jerking session above his toilet bowl this morning had forcibly reminded him of his condition and, also, he wasn’t at all keen to confront Fanshawe. There was no telling what Priscilla might have related to her parents about the previous night. As a result he had killed time over a lengthy but morose breakfast during which he had made up his mind to face facts and be ruthlessly honest with himself. To this end he had driven up to the university bookshop to see what details he could establish about his ailment. After hovering around the medical section for a while, making sure no one was watching him, he had found the book he wanted and had uneasily opened its shiny, copiously illustrated pages.

He now gazed sightlessly out at the bright sunlit piazza of the administrative block which was visible through the windows at this side of the bookshop. His head was a glossy catalogue of frightful images, a rotten putrefying grocer’s filled with deliquescing cucumbers, split tomatoes, rancid sprouts, slime-ravaged lettuces. Crumbling noses, perforated palates, grotesquely swollen limbs danced in front of his eyes like images from some carnival for the terminally ill. His ears rang with some of the most foul, potent nomenclature he’d ever encountered: ‘Teeming treponemes’, ‘purulent meatus’, ‘macules’, ‘pustules’, trichomonasvaginilus, gmnuloma iguinale, bejel, venereal warts, Candida albicans —the bleak, muscular terminology of medicine.

Unthinkingly he touched the blackhead in a nostril cleft, traced the contours of his mouth with his tongue, checked the torsion of his knee joints. There had been an entire lurid chapter on vicious tropical strains. His eyes caught words like ‘chancroid’, ‘giant herpes’, ‘phagedenic lesions’. There were bizarre afflictions called ‘pinta’, ‘crab-yaws’ and, with horrific aptness, ‘loath’. A severe tic established itself in his right cheek and his eyes watered as he read on in despairing astonishment. How, he wondered, could such things exist? What dreadful plight had brought these hopeless mutations before the lab-technician’s lens? How, even, did they haul their friable, exuding and bloated bodies from place to place? He swallowed, trying to coax his drought-stricken saliva glands into action. He looked down at his stocky frame, sent out cautious messages, twitching feet and fingers. He seemed to sense electric current surging down the branching neurones, the capillaries faithfully irrigating the out-of-condition muscles and tissues, the tendons and cartilege pinning the frail armature of his body together. Don’t give up on me, he silently beseeched, hold up a bit longer, he pleaded, don’t fall apart. He promised his body he’d keep fit, eat high-fibre foods, treat it well, cosset and cherish its individual parts. He’d become an athletic, Vegan monk, he swore — anything to avoid joining the shiny spot-lit wrecks in the medical illustrations. Anything .

♦

He felt tremulous and abashed as he timidly knocked on Murray’s door half an hour later. Murray looked up from his desk as he entered and said good morning. He was writing something on a sheet of paper.

‘Won’t be a minute,’ he said. Morgan wondered how Murray intended breaking it to him: whether he would do it gently, leading up to the grim prognosis, or deliver it as a no-nonsense broadside.

‘We did a culture on the specimen you gave us,’ Murray said, signing his name at the bottom of the piece of paper. He looked up with a brief smile on his face. ‘Many urino-genital infections turn out to be non-gonococcal, but, as I told you last night, yours hasn’t.’

‘How,’ Morgan cleared his throat to bring his voice down from piping falsetto. ‘How…serious is it? I mean, have you the facilities out here to deal with such cases? You see I’m worried about whether I’ll have to be flown home.’ He swallowed. ‘And what about my…f-f-face…and the rest of my body?’

Murray scrutinized the blurred hieroglyphics on his blotting pad. Oh Jesus, Morgan thought, he can’t look me in the eye.

‘You’ve been reading books, haven’t you?’ Murray said resignedly.

‘I’ve been what? Books?…Well, I may have glanced…’

‘Let me do the diagnosing, Mr Leafy. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief.’

Morgan resented the patronizing tone in Murray’s voice. ‘One’s naturally concerned…to know. The worst, I mean.’

Murray looked at him intently. ‘A few cc’s of penicillin, Mr Leafy, and three weeks quarantine.’

‘Quarantine! What do you mean? Isolation?’

‘No, I mean going without sex. Abstinence.’

‘That’s all?’ Morgan questioned, sudden relief mingled with an obscure sense of being somehow cheated. ‘An injection and…only three weeks?’

Murray raised his eyebrows in mild amusement. ‘Two injections actually, just to make sure. Why, what were you expecting? Sulphur baths and amputation?’

Morgan felt foolish, an emotion he was coming to associate with Murray more and more. ‘Well,’ he said reproachfully. ‘One has no idea.’

‘Precisely,’ Murray said with some force. ‘We get on average three or four cases of non-specific sexual diseases a day. And not all of them among the students or the workers. We inject a lot of penicillin into senior staff.’ Murray’s voice was studiously neutral but Morgan felt he was automatically being classed with a gang of mental defectives. Now that the prospect of a lingering piecemeal death had receded he found Murray was beginning to get on his nerves yet again.

‘I need a few facts,’ Murray said, and took up his pen. ‘First the names of your sexual partners over the last two months.’

‘Is that absolutely necessary?’

‘The law requires it.’

‘Oh. I see. Well, there’s only been one.’ He spoke Hazel’s name with some venom, thinking how close he had come to adding a second. Murray asked her age and address.

‘Now,’ he said briskly. ‘Have you and, ah, your partner indulged in oral or anal sex?’

‘Good God!’ Morgan said, reddening. ‘This is absurd. You’re not doing research, are you? What do you need to know that for?’

Murray’s features hardened. ‘She could get oral or rectal ulcers, Mr Leafy — if it’s not treated.’ Morgan gulped and muttered oral in a chastened tone of voice. He’d never thought about the other alternative. ‘Right,’ Murray went on. ‘I have to pass her name and this information on to the Ademola clinic in town. It might be better if you personally made sure she went along there. She must be treated too, obviously, and her other sexual partners traced.’ He smiled grimly.

‘There aren’t any other sexual partners,’ Morgan said righteously but without much confidence. He thought for a moment or two. ‘Listen, Dr Murray,’ he said. ‘Do I, ah, need to get involved in this any further. I mean go to the clinic — have my name passed along. There is my…my position here to consider — it could prove a little embarrassing. Couldn’t we on this occasion forego the absolute letter…?’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Leafy,’ Murray interrupted unsympath-etically. ‘It takes two to tango, as they say, and I’m afraid it’s unwise to give too much thought to embarrassment under these circumstances. Why should you get treatment you’d deny…?’