Walking with Ghosts

after having finished doing it with a guy you thought you liked right up to that moment.
    ‘Great,’ she said, managing to sound not quite so fazed as she felt. J.D. was lying back on the headrest of the bed. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and there was a neat and sizeable dent in the bridge of his nose. His hands were clasped over his white stomach. He was smiling.
    ‘Like clockwork?’ he said.
    Marie connected with his eyes. ‘Well, no, actually. Not like clockwork at all. Just the opposite.’
    J.D. shook his head and broadened his smile. ‘It was OK, was it?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Thing is, Marie, my old didgeridoo down there doesn’t work like it ought to.’
    She moved closer to him, placed a hand on his arm. ‘Well, it did fine this time. A girl couldn’t have asked for more.’
    ‘No. You don’t understand. It’s prosthetic.’
    ‘Prosthetic? Artificial?’ She could feel her eyes getting wider, and could do nothing to stop them. Her heart put in an extra beat, then another one, and eventually went into a flutter. ‘Jesus, you mean—?’
    ‘Well, no, not quite. I mean it is still there, it’s just that it doesn’t work without help.’
    Marie took deep breaths, calmed herself down, hung on to those words: It is still there. So that was OK, then, wasn’t it? If it was still there, then she hadn’t just been entered by something else. Something he’d strapped on specifically f0r the job.
    ‘You understand what I mean when I say prosthetic?’ J.D asked.
    She nodded. ‘I’m a trained nurse. It means artificial.’
    ‘Yes. But in this case it’s an implant.’
    ‘Not a transplant?’
    J.D. smiled, more to himself than Marie, though she noticed that he was amused. If there was something funny about this, she hadn’t discovered it yet. ‘Not a transplant, no. It’s a penile implant. A device that I can inflate and stiffen with fluid. Very like the original in fact. Except with this one I have a reservoir of fluid and a small pump implanted lower down.’
    ‘Lower down?’
    ‘In my scrotum.’
    Marie wanted to cry. Men were always a disappointment. In theory you had to, eventually, meet one who was straightforward and uncomplicated, a strong, gentle man. But in reality they never happened along. It was always the same, you thought you’d got a man, but what you’d got was a bundle of problems. They were such pricks. Ha bloody ha.
     
    Celia listened. She was good at that. She sipped at her coffee in Betty’s, then she replaced the cup on the saucer and placed her hands in her lap. She didn’t interrupt, let Marie explain all the intricacies of organic erectile dysfunction, and the various methods that the medics had introduced to deal with it. She managed to encourage Marie with various facial contortions, but not a sound came out of her mouth until Marie had finished.
    ‘Poor man,’ she said. Then she added, ‘And poor you.’
    ‘I feel like I’ve been an experiment, Celia. A sacrifice to modern technology.’
    ‘I do understand,’ said Celia pensively, ‘from other friends, and from a catholic reading of the classics, that there are men in the world who do not have the ability to make a woman feel good about herself.’
    Marie laughed. ‘You can say that again. But thank goodness we can talk about it. I feel better already.’
    ‘You’ve forgiven him?’
    ‘No, but I’ve forgiven me.’
    ‘Ah, yes, Marie. You have a good grasp of what’s important. I’ll buy you another coffee.’
    ‘You know the fairy story about the frog and the princess. Where she kisses the frog and he turns into a handsome prince? That’s never really been my experience. The story is always there, somewhere, at the back of my consciousness. So as I come across these frogs I have the right attitude. I mean, I expect them to turn into princes. But they don’t.
    ‘What happens is precisely the opposite. Whenever I kiss a frog, the frog gets decidedly worse. D’you think there’s something wrong with my kisses?’
    Celia asked a waitress to bring them more coffee, then turned back to Marie. ‘I’m sure there isn’t, my dear. It’s the men, they make as much sense as a square toilet seat.’
     
    Marie and Sam arrived at Edward Blake’s office fifteen minutes before the cabinet minister was due. Blake’s blue-rinse secretary was not in evidence, maybe she’d been given the day off, or perhaps she’d already found something better.
    Blake let them in and locked the door behind them,