AN IMPORTANT MISTAKE

Oe thing some boys and men are worried about is genital size/

Charles was worried.

He was receiving messages in his emails from people he didn’t know and although his computer referred to them as junk he wasn’t so sure.

The one thing about Charles that he kept as hidden as he could was his deep concern over his own body. It was why he was still single and yet on the brink of being middle-aged.

It had all started when he was a schoolboy and in the shower after games lessons. Games! What a misnomer that was, because weren’t games meant to be enjoyed? And didn’t he hate rugby? Pointless running with other boys chasing him and even pulling him down so that his smooth knees got muddied and even occasionally bled.

But it was the showers afterwards that he really hated because he had to completely undress and stand under a spray of warm water whilst the mud he hadn’t wanted in the first place got washed away. And while he was doing that he was open to the inspection by the other boys, and he knew what made them smirk. It was his privates. Even he knew they were on the small side and the other lads must be noticing because their smirks said they were. He tried not to look at them because if he did it made him feel even worse about himself.

It all became a disaster when Jane decided she wanted to be his girl-friend. It wasn’t that she was nosy and wanted to see him undress. She wasn’t like that at all. In fact, she was quite the opposite and everyone said she was a bit too innocent to be true, but that very innocence suited him down to the ground.

So he agreed to go out with her, to the pictures where there was a cartoon on. They sat together, watched the film together, laughed at the amusing bits together and, afterwards, had an ice-cream each as they made their way home, and his own disability (that’s how he saw it) didn’t even get a mention.

Then on another occasion she shocked him when she said she liked his jeans. They were, she said, smart rather than scruffy, and she really liked things that were smart. But, she said, it was almost summer (and it was) and if he liked they could both wear shorts. That would have been all right, though it was a bit on the personal side because he preferred to choose what he was going to wear himself, not that wearing shorts was much of a problem as long as (here he hated rhe thought because know the possibility), as long as she didn’t see up the legs of his shorts and see what wasn’t there.

But that had been a long time ago, and she hadn’t seen anything. But she was just a teenage girlfriend and before long she found another boy who was probably less nervy than Charles.

By then he was fifteen and convinced that he was deformed. And to make matters worse one or two of the boys had a lot of fun measuring themselves and announcing personal details about what should never be, in his opinion, in the public domain, and no doubt incorporating exaggerations in their proclamations.

It was then that he withdrew into his shell, so to speak. He had nothing to do with anyone and even went to the trouble of wearing swimming trunks when he was in the shower (the teacher didn’t question his fictitious excuse that the doctor said he should keep that part of him fairly dry.

When he left school he breathed a sigh of relief because the very worst thing in his life was over. He never again had to be in the presence of naked males.

He remained single through his twenties and after that through his thirties, and then, one day when he was checking his emails he came upon one that seemed to be addressed personally and privately to him and to nobody else, and it professed to hold the secret shared by a member of an African tribe where a certain unspecified food ensured physical growth in his private region that would solve his own personal problem.

Who knew about it? The email originated qcross the Atlantic, so how did anyone over there know about his own personal shame?

Someone must. What would he do? Email them back telling them to mind their own business and didn’t they know that the good lord hadn’t made diamonds the size of bricks?

That was all he did, though he never posted it because that seemed a bit too much like acknowledging that he and his physical paucity actually existed. And he met Katherine.

She was so pretty he was smitten. Her face was, to his eyes, the face of an angel, her eyes were bright and alive, her hair just that little bit too long to be really attractive. And as she was a nurse, she told him she was, he knew she would be kind and considerate. It went with her calling.

It was she who brought the subject of physcial imperfections up first.

“I hope you don’t mind how small my chest is,” she said, “but it’s something I can’t help.”

It was then in reply, that he plucked up a huge amount of courage and gave the game away once and for all, and at his then age.

“I’m afaid my you know what’s never grown properly,” he confessed.

“You poor boy,” she sighed, though he hadn’t been a boy as such for quite a long time, “maybe I can look?”

“No way!” he almost shouted, and Katherine decided she was on a loser with him even though she liked him, and never saw him again.

“There’s no need to be so darned rude, Charles,” was her parting shot, “I only wanted to help!”

It had been the shortest romantic affair in the book of romantic affairs, yet he was heart broken, and being somewhat stupid he decided to do something about it, so he posted off the email he’d decided not to post off, and waited.

He’s still waiting, though that doesn't matter because his email box is swelling with offers (mostly expersive ones, but that’s only to be expected when you’re dealing with such delicate things as the artificial forcing of body parts to grow).

Nothing seemed to work, though. He rubbed a paste that smelled suspiciously like Vaseline but was horribly expensive into himself, and waited… and waited, and waited.

But nothing happened. He remained as ill-equipped as ever.

In the end he decided he just had nothing worth living for in his future, so one day in his work lunch break he got horribly drunk and swallowed some tablets, the combination of alcohol and whatever was in the tablets making him collapse later at work and be rushed to hospital.

A nurse was ordered to take measurements of blood pressure and so on. By some quirk of fortune it was the beauty he had known only briefly, Katherine.

She stripped his clothing off and might have gasped, but didn’t.

“I thought you said…” she whispered in his ear, “I thought you were self-conscious about your body, but me oh my, how wrong you were!”

And the very last words he just about heard as the chemicals in his body did their best to still his heart were, “I’d call this magnificent!”, and his last small amount of awareness was the gentility of her soft nursey fingers, and then no more, nothing, his heart was stilled and nothing could reawaken that.

“What a waste,” sighed Nurse Katherine, “what a bloody stupid waste.”

© Peter Rogerson 24.08.23

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