Fraser took off his pyjama trousers in front of the mirror, and stared at the place where his balls used to be. They produced too much testosterone, that’s what his specialist had said. They had to go. Bilateral orchiectomy, they called it. But that wasn’t what it was. It was gelding. They’d turned Fraser Burns Abbott into a eunuch.
He studied the body that had so betrayed him. His body used to be a mere thing, like any other thing. Something to be pushed, to be used and abused as required. Its deadly mutiny took him by surprise. It was testosterone that fed the cancer, that gave it the energy to metastasise, to escape his diseased prostate gland and launch an imperial army of invading cells. He could feel them in his bones. Now, without its life-giving hormone, the tumour had shrunk, relieving Fraser’s backache overnight. It was a temporary reprieve. Sooner or later, the frustrated cancer cells would evolve, discover new ways to rob his ravaged body of nourishment, resume their deadly duplication. But right now he was close to pain-free. Just a dull lumbar ache that never let him forget. It gave Fraser great satisfaction to know that when he died, so would the cancer.
Fraser stepped into the shower. Steady, hot and strong, no water-saving rose for him. He fingered his empty sac and wondered again about prostheses. His surgeon wanted to put implants in his scrotum, ‘to maintain a natural appearance’. But what was the point? There were no women in his life, no lovers. And since becoming impotent, there weren’t likely to be any. Make no mistake, he still had desires. The mind was the seat of desire, he knew that now, and there was nothing wrong with his mind. If anything, his thinking had acquired an extra clarity since the surgery, like he’d emerged from some sort of mental fog. No sign of the depression his doctors had warned of. But physical sex was finished. Fraser was a realist. The old credentials didn’t stack up, and no amount of desire could change that.
Fraser dried himself and dressed in one of the interchangeable suits that hung in his vast walk-in wardrobe. More of a suite, really, with chairs and mirrors and two dressing tables. One half of the space still contained Charlotte’s things. Her clothes, her shoes, her eighteen-year-old scarves – as if any minute she might walk back in the door. There was more than enough room to keep the clothes, and it brought him some comfort to see them there. Fraser looked in the mirror again, pleased with his hair. That was one advantage to the surgery – he’d never go bald. The thought helped him overlook the fact that the suit was too big for his shrinking frame.
Fraser began his drive to Hobart, thoughts skipping ahead to his lunch appointment with Premier Kate Logan. What would his old friend say, he wondered, when he told her?