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THE UNKINDEST CUT

Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know
what you’ve got till it’s gone.

– Joni Mitchell

When the paramedics broke down the door of the bathroom, they found Senator the Honourable Grafton Everest, Life Emeritus Professor of Lifestyles and Wellbeing at the University of Mangoland and arguably the most powerful politician in Australia, lying on the tiles with his pants around his ankles, a striped Collingwood jumper rolled up over his bulging midriff, a small mirror in his left hand, a rolled-up hand towel in his mouth and an empty syringe stuck in his small yet swollen, crimson cock.

As they loaded him into the ambulance, Grafton opened his eyes briefly, looked up at a female paramedic whose head was wreathed in a halo of light from a street lamp and whispered a single word – ‘Azrael’ – then lapsed into a coma. As the ambulance wailed its way to the hospital, the shops along the road were festooned with tinsel and holly. It was 15 December, ten days before his sixtieth birthday.

August had been the cruellest month for Grafton Everest. In that month he had achieved perhaps the greatest triumph of his lethargic life in winning a seat in the Australian Senate without so much as lifting a finger. He had not even put his Panama hat in the ring but had been nominated by parties unknown and achieved victory through a system of cascading preference deals negotiated by he-knew-not-who, though rumours were circulating of a personage called ‘The Preference Whisperer’. But before he even had time to absorb the magnitude or, perhaps more accurately, the enormity of what had happened, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Like most men of his age, despite getting up six times a night to urinate and feeling a constant pain in the groin, Grafton had avoided having any sort of test. He had preferred to attribute the constant micturition to his teetotal diet of mineral water and wrote off the perpetual knot beneath his bladder as simply the Recommended Retail Price of monogamy. Surprisingly, for over ten years, Grafton had been faithful to his wife.

This unexpected lapse into fidelity was, it must be noted, not due to any late onset of moral scruples but rather as a grudging acceptance that his days of keeping more than one woman happy at the same time were over – if indeed they had ever existed. His last sexual dalliance had occurred during his brief incumbency – now recorded in the history books as ‘The Brief Incumbency’ – as the Premier of Queensland, which Grafton always referred to as ‘Mangoland’, when he had embarked on a passionate affair with his Chief of Staff, the Head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet – an Amazonian career bureaucrat with a Doctorate in Public Administration and titanium thighs. That affair concluded when his paramour abruptly announced that she had decided to become a lesbian. Given that most of his affairs had ended under worse circumstances, ranging from litigation to the engagement of a hit man, Grafton did not take this personally but rather as a sign that he should perhaps henceforth content himself with the one woman who seemed not to mind too much having sex with him – as long as it wasn’t that often.

Thus he settled into a comfortable routine whereby he and his wife Janet had sex regularly every second Sunday afternoon, an event generally precipitated by her announcing matter-of-factly that he had just put a load of washing in the machine which would take about an hour and so she ‘might have a lie down until it’s finished’. Grafton was usually finished before the tub had filled.

Although this was a rather lean diet of sex, Grafton was prepared to settle for it since it meant no longer having to face the risk of humiliation at the hands (or mouth or other orifice) of some vigorous young woman possessed of at least medium expectations. It also gave him a reassuring sense of martyrdom. He felt that his uncomplaining acceptance of this rather abstemious arrangement went at least some way towards offsetting his numerous faults as a husband.

That is not to say that monogamy did not require some adjustment.

What Grafton missed most about clandestine affairs was the way they gave structure to his otherwise shapeless life. Regular afternoon or twice-weekly assignations with a lover had always been the fixtures around which he organised the rest of his week and he was always punctual about these liaisons. Unlike academic duties such as lecturing and tutoring, sexual rendezvous were non-optional. They were the trig points of his life, small goals he could aim towards, each one imparting just enough impetus to carry him through to the next one. They also provided a system of regular, small, palliative rewards in the same way that coffee breaks, long lunches and after-work drinks prevented others from going on shooting rampages in the workplace.

In the absence of these diversions, Grafton now found himself adrift on a timeless sea, never certain of what day it was except to know that it was still a long time till his next erotic dispensation. He tried to create regular appointments which might lend structure to his week, but everything kept changing: even the television networks constantly altered the schedule so no program was ever screened at the same time two weeks in a row. The only shred of structure was provided by his regular Saturday night talk on the Rarefax radio network, a talk which appeared, from the almost total lack of callers, to have no audience but which at least marked that he was either halfway towards, or just about to reach, his next fortnightly apportionment of sex.

What was more problematic, however, was that in order to maintain some system of regular rewards, Grafton had had no option but to replace sex with food. Already a glutton with a feral sugar addiction, he had doubled and redoubled his dependency on confectionary, consuming Mars Bars, Twix, Bounties, Picnics and Tim Tams constantly throughout the day. Consequently, he had gained so much weight that, after steadfastly resisting it for many years, he was finally forced to adopt the Mangoland fashion of wearing his shirt outside his trousers to hide the fact that he could no longer fasten his pants at the front. In time, pants with front fastenings themselves gave way to elasticised tracksuit pants for all non-professional occasions.

In a strange way, it was the weight gain that saved his life. It was Janet’s fears that he was either on the verge of, or had crossed well over the border into, diabetes that sent him, vigorously protesting, to the doctor, who recommended that he also have a PSA test. On receiving the results, same said doctor immediately booked him in for a physical examination.

The urologist into whose care he had been entrusted was, appropriately and perhaps ominously, called Dr End. Grafton was asked to remove his trousers while Dr End pulled on a rubber glove which he liberally smeared with lubricant. Grafton noted with trepidation that, given the size of his hands, Dr End could have played baseball without a mitt.

‘Lean forward and rest your elbows on those pads,’ said Dr End. ‘I’m going to put my finger up your bottom.’

‘Could you put two up?’ asked Grafton.

Dr End froze. ‘Why?’ he asked.

‘I’d like a second opinion,’ said Grafton.

When Dr End remained frozen Grafton clarified. ‘It’s a joke.’

‘Oh,’ said Dr End simply, without any sense of amusement. ‘I’ve been a urologist for twenty years and no one ever said that to me before.’

He then inserted what felt like his entire forearm into Grafton’s rectum.

Grafton closed his eyes. In my beginning is my end, he thought, or rather, Doctor End is in my end, and tried to ignore what felt like someone performing calisthenics in his lower intestine.

Then suddenly, with the greatest rush of relief Grafton had ever felt in his life, the giant finger was withdrawn.

‘It has to come out,’ said Dr End.

‘Thank goodness,’ said Grafton exhaling.

‘No, I mean the prostate. It’s cancerous. Quite advanced. We have to whip it out and hope that nothing has spread to the rest of the body.’

Grafton was speechless. ‘What … what … are the … ramifications of a …?’

‘Prostatectomy? Differs,’ said Dr End neutrally, stripping off the glove and hurling it into a surgical waste bin. ‘It can result in impotence, incontinence, it’s hard to tell.’

‘Impotence and incontinence?’ muttered Grafton. ‘I’m only fifty-nine.’

‘Yes, and if we don’t remove it, you may well not make it to sixty.’

‘My God,’ said Grafton. ‘My end is in my end.’

‘Treat it like an adventure,’ said Dr End blithely. It was something he told all his patients.

When Grafton told Janet the news, it was of some comfort to him that she showed more concern than Dr End, who seemed to regard the matter as no more serious than nail fungus. Her sympathetic reaction gave him full rein to pour out his anxieties and fears.

‘What am I going to do? How can I cope with an operation? I hate hospitals,’ he whined.

‘Come on now. Don’t be a sook. It won’t be that bad,’ she said maternally.

‘That idiot urologist said, “Treat it like an adventure”!’ he exclaimed.

‘Well perhaps that’s the way to approach it,’ suggested Janet.

‘What, buy a backpack and a GPS and sell the rights to the Discovery Channel?’ responded Grafton. ‘How is it an adventure? Can I get travel insurance for it?’

Janet sat beside him and took his hand. ‘Darling, I realise you’re upset but there’s nothing to be done. If it’s to save your life, you just have to go through with it,’ she said.

Grafton scowled. There was nothing less soothing in situations like this than a bald recital of the facts.

‘Put it this way, darling,’ said Janet, patting his hand reassuringly. ‘You’ll be spending three days in your favourite place, bed. And you can eat as much as you like. I’m told the food in St Benedict’s Private is first-class.’

‘Is that right?’ responded Grafton, feeling just the tiniest glimmer of consolation though, as it turned out, the hospital food was appalling and he ended up living on bananas and chocolate bars.

The night before the operation, he and Janet had sex for what Grafton realised might well be the last time. Lee Horton, his old biology teacher and mentor, had often said to him – mysteriously, Grafton thought at the time – ‘You never know when you’ve had your last fuck.’ Now, in stark contradiction, here he was, about to have what he was all too aware might be exactly that. It took a considerable amount of oral persuasion by Janet to free his mind from these cogitations but in the end he managed to complete the act.

Lying in the dark afterwards he was struck how, for all its historical significance, this potentially final fuck, while satisfactory, did not seem remarkably different. Of course it was characteristic of sex that it always seemed to be so incredibly important before you had it and so totally unimportant afterwards. However, it also seemed that most momentous events often entailed very little sense of significance at the time they were actually happening. The last day of a job, long looked forward to, was often rather boring, and the employee just packed up and left a bit early without any fanfare or farewell. Writing the last line of a novel was not, as depicted in movies, accomplished with the author mouthing the final words ‘and tomorrow … was … another … day’, typing the final full stop with flair then ripping the page out of the typewriter and looking at it with immense satisfaction, so much as simply stopping and thinking, that’ll have to do.

And since his mind was never far from the topic of food, Grafton also wondered about prisoners on death row eating their last meal which, according to popular myth, was anything they wanted. Did the fact of it being their last meal make it taste better or was it, in the end, just another meal? Did the condemned man sit there chewing and think, I thought lobster would taste better. Bugger. I should have ordered the pie.

A week after his surgery Grafton sat on the edge of the bath, staring at his penis in a hand mirror, a manoeuvre necessitated by the fact that his stomach occluded any direct view. The organ was not unlike a carrot that had been left in the fridge too long and had shrunk to the size of a jalapeno. He caressed it a little and found that its sense of touch was not totally diminished but strangely altered. The sensation felt oddly neutral, as if he were stroking his elbow. That slight tingle, the sense of specialness as if some deep-seated mechanism were stirring in response, was absent. It was like turning the key in a car with an absolutely flat battery.

Janet bustled into the bathroom to brush her hair prior to going out. Grafton continued to examine the limp organ from different angles.

‘How’s it going, darling,’ she said encouragingly. ‘Any luck?’

‘I’m not sure. There’s no pain but it feels … different. I’m not sure whether it works or not. We might have to … test it.’

‘Well, I’ve got the Knitters now,’ said Janet, putting on a quick dab of lipstick. ‘And then I’ve got to pick up Lee-Anne from rehearsal. But perhaps at about … ten o’clock we could try it out,’ she said, as if they were discussing a new ceiling fan.

‘Yes. That would be … good,’ said Grafton.

‘Right. Bye,’ she said cheerily and whisked out of the bathroom. Grafton pulled up his tracksuit pants and went downstairs to the kitchen to eat some leftovers.

Janet was the President of the Optimal Fibre Network, a body devoted to knitting, though not knitting as Grafton knew it. Knitting was, it turned out, no longer a process of producing comfy winter clothes but, rather, Art. The group had embarked on a program of covering public buildings with their creations. In 2004 they had knitted a giant snood for the Sydney Opera House and seven years later encased the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a gargantuan tea cosy featuring motifs of kangaroos, boomerangs and cockatoos. That work had won the FIFA – Federation for International Fibre Art – World Cup. Now the group was planning their most ambitious plan to date – to cover Uluru with a huge beanie in the colours of the Aboriginal flag. Since that project involved the coordination of several thousand knitters and almost thirty per cent of the Australian wool clip, Janet spent many evenings at meetings.

Their daughter Lee-Anne, now twenty-nine, having completed her PhD in Pole Dancing (Hons) at Hugh Hefner University in Southern California, had returned home committed to Making a Difference. The political causes to which she was committed included but were by no means limited to: the unconscionable persecution of motor cycle gangs by the Mangoland Government, the right of everyone to have their own individual and unique gender and the threat to human existence posed by Crustal Sliding. She was developing a spectacular live show where these, and other themes, would be interwoven in a performance involving pole dancing, fire twirling, puppetry and multimedia to be staged spontaneously in public spaces, in full defiance of fascistic council ordinances and restrictions – weather permitting.

Grafton eschewed the healthy stir-fry that Janet had left in the fridge and scooped himself a large bowl of chocolate ice-cream and took it to the couch. Their dog Maddie, a West Highland Terrier, trotted in and sat watching Grafton eat, occasionally running her tongue around the edge of her mouth.

On the TV, an ABC political commentator was discussing some of the Imps (Independents and Minor Parties, as they had been christened) who had been elected to the Senate in the last poll and the policies they had brought with them. The Orgasm Party, an outgrowth of the Orgasm and Orgonics Research Organisation (www.org.org.org), was committed to reviving the theories of Wilhelm Reich and maintained that all the world’s energy demands could be met by harnessing the orgone, a mystical force that pervaded the universe and was released by orgasms.

Worth a try, thought Grafton.

Less appealing were the policies of the Involuntary Euthanasia Party which proposed that one in ten people suffering from an incapacitating condition, including old age, should be painlessly put to sleep through a lottery system. This, they argued, was no worse than military conscription and, given that living and dying were a matter of chance anyway, all they were doing was slightly altering the odds, as a bookmaker might do, in return for billions of dollars in savings. The senator from this party had apparently been elected because the ‘In’ of ‘Involuntary’ had been printed only faintly on the ballot paper.

At the end of the segment the commentators solemnly predicted that, regardless of these parties’ policies, over the next few weeks the major parties would be seeking to do deals with them.

This was followed by a report on Mangoland’s new laws targeting criminal motorcycle gangs, the same laws that Lee-Anne was designing her live show to protest against – amongst other things. The ubiquitous civil rights spokesperson, Casey O’Hara, appeared outside the Brisbane Law Courts protesting that the legislation was a clear threat to civil liberties. ‘The government claims these laws are aimed at criminal gangs but they could potentially be used to detain any citizen who shoots someone in a public place, extorts money or synthesises crystal meth in their garage.’ There was accompanying vision of protestors marching with placards accusing the Mangoland government of acting like Nazis. Oddly enough, many of the protestors were in bikie regalia that featured, apparently without any sense of irony, swastikas.

This was followed by QED, the national broadcaster’s political version of cage-fighting, a program in which politicians joined other luminaries such as rock singers and poets to discuss serious issues. On this night the program was focused on the issue of Crustal Sliding and featured environmentalist Tom Flummery summarily castigating both the major political parties for their lack of action on Tectonic Change.

‘You have to understand that continents are not fixed in place, they move; they are like rafts floating on the Earth’s mantle. Vibration from trucks and cars braking, planes landing, blasting in mines, even jogging, shakes the rocks, reduces the friction and further accelerates that movement. Unless we take action now to stop mining and reduce vibrations, by the end of this century the Great Barrier Reef will be pushed off the continental shelf into the deep ocean and New Zealanders will be coming to Australia over a land bridge.’

Grafton mused that this would probably prompt New Zealanders to secretly accelerate the process.

A senior geologist then came on to say that continental drift has been occurring for billions of years and there was no evidence that it was increasing or that it constituted a threat. He was immediately howled down by members of the audience, some of whom were carrying pitchforks, who accused him of being a Crustal Sliding Denier and a pawn of Big Coal, Big Iron and Big Sport.

Fruit was just starting to be thrown when Janet and Lee-Anne arrived home. Lee-Anne was over the moon because she had found an ‘angel’ prepared to finance her stage production and disappeared upstairs to text twelve hundred friends.

Grafton took his bowl back to the kitchen, with Maddie, true to her species, dogging his footsteps. ‘No!’ said Grafton firmly. ‘You can’t have chocolate! Bad for you. Dogs can die from eating chocolate.’ Maddie simply stared up at him as if waiting for him to suggest an alternative but, since there was none forthcoming, plodded back to the dining room and slumped down, her chin resting on the rung of a chair.

Grafton lingered in the kitchen until Janet entered and then, adopting an air of forced casualness, said somewhat artificially, ‘Well, I think I’ll go up to bed.’

‘I’ll be up shortly,’ said Janet.

Grafton trudged up the stairs to the bedroom where he changed into his black-and-white Collingwood pyjamas, performed his ablutions and then lay on the giant-sized bed. He waited for what seemed like an interminable time while Janet cleaned up his ice-cream bowl, wiped down the kitchen, pushed chairs straight, said something to the dog and then came upstairs to the ensuite where she cleansed, creamed, brushed, flossed and gargled for what seemed like an hour. Grafton felt as if he was in a doctor’s waiting room except there were no magazines. Eventually she came into the bedroom, removed her robe and lay beside him bed.

‘You know, whatever the situation is, it doesn’t worry me, you understand?’ she said.

‘Yes. Sure,’ said Grafton, not really believing this.

Janet smiled at him reassuringly and then commenced a delicate examination of the organ in question. ‘It looks normal,’ she said and touched it lightly. ‘Can you feel that?’

‘A bit,’ he said.

‘What about this? Does that hurt at all?’ she said, continuing to test various parts of the appendage. Eventually Grafton terminated what was starting to feel like a forensic examination. ‘It feels totally normal. It’s just that nothing is happening!’

‘Alright,’ said Janet, ‘let’s up the ante and see what happens.’ And she leant down and set to work. Unfortunately, despite Janet’s best efforts at oral persuasion, and there was certainly nothing lacking in her skills in that area, after a very long ten minutes there had been no response. ‘Sorry, darling,’ she said, flexing her tired jaw. ‘I think I’ve lost my touch.’

‘It’s not you,’ grumbled Grafton. ‘It’s that damned doctor. The bastard’s made me impotent!’

‘You’ve always been impotent, my darling,’ sighed Janet. ‘Just not in your penis. And even it always needed a lot of help. Maybe the operation has just brought your genitals into line with the rest of you.’

Grafton was morose. ‘Then what use am I to you? I suppose I could always satisfy you orally.’

‘No thanks,’ said Janet putting on her reading glasses and picking up a large book. ‘That only gets me wanting the real thing. There’s nothing more frustrating than foreplay without any actual play. I’m much happier not being aroused in the first place.’ Then, seeing the look of devastation on Grafton’s face, ‘Darling, you’ve only just had the operation. Give it a chance. It might come back in time.’

As Grafton lay awake staring at the ceiling he was sure there must be some way to shock his cock back to normality – and he was going to find it.