Information about the book
'Annabelle?'
Everyone except Dr Allen seemed to be looking at me and I realised that he must have said it a few times. He obviously didn't remember me from my last four visits, but as I seemed to be the only potential Annabelle in the place I stood up and tried to look sick and smile nobly through my pain at the same time.
'Hi, Doctor Allen,' I said unenthusiastically, remembering to cough once more before we went into his consulting room.
'Now Annabelle, got a touch of the flu, have we?'
'No,' I said trying not to be alarmed that my doctor couldn't tell a fake cough from a real one, had no idea who I was and seemed to think we inhabited the same body. I decided to tackle the easiest problem first and clear up the health issue, before I pointed out my correct name or explained the arguments against the concept of a shared universal corporeality. 'I want to be checked out. For diseases. I mean for all venereal diseases. Just to be sure.'
He looked at me with concern and changed to his 'I'm so young and groovy we can even talk about sex together' manner. 'Have you had unsafe sex?' he asked in a low, confidential tone.
'No.' Well, not if you didn't count the bit where I banged my head against the bedside table.
'Have you been having,' he paused and went on delicately, 'unusual sex?'
What the hell was he talking about? Did he mean was I having sex with something unusual, perhaps going home and shagging the cheese grater? Or perhaps he meant that I was having sex in unusual positions and had taken to gaining erotic satisfaction from having my partner put his penis in my ear? That was another bloody problem with Sydney. There was so much pressure to have exciting and innovative sex that if you actually did it twice a week in the missionary position you ended up feeling like a ruddy pervert.
I pretended that I was an ice-cool air hostess called Annabelle and mustered what dignity I could. 'I'm not quite sure what you mean but I would simply like to get checked out, please. I think that I'm due for a pap smear anyway.'
A brief note on pap smears. Let's begin with the name. I am reliably informed that the Pap part is derived from the surname of Dr George Papanicolaou who developed the procedure. No one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me why it was deemed necessary to bring in the term 'smear'. Not only is it a horrible word, conjuring up visions of unsightly stains, it gives the impression that it's a bit of an unscientific, slack process. Unlike a biopsy or scan, or some other impressive-sounding medical term, the pap smear sounds like something that the people who didn't quite make it into medical school are put in charge of. Doesn't really matter if they muck it up, old chum, because it was all smeared to begin with.
The second point to note is the process. A greater indignity cannot be imagined than to have a complete stranger insert something into you and scrape off bits of your insides. I'm not really prudish about the whole thing, as I know how necessary it is, but I am firmly of the opinion that it is not a pastime that requires background conversation.
Call me a snob, but when I'm lying on my back on a table, wrapped in a sheet, with my undies off, my legs wide open and a stranger poking around my genitals, I'm not really in the mood for chitchat. Dr Allen, however, was not averse to a friendly chinwag, which is perfectly understandable as he wasn't the one being subjected to probing medical indignities. So while I gritted my teeth and stared at the ceiling, he nattered away about the last inflight movie he had seen on my former employer Qantas. Pulling on his rubber gloves with a horrid snap, he then bent down for a bit of a squiz at my not-so-private parts.
'It's not Annabelle at all, is it?' he suddenly boomed from between my legs, frightening me so much that I almost decapitated him in a scissorgrip headlock. There was friendly recognition flooding his voice. 'I remember you now – it's Isabelle, isn't it?'
Oh God. He didn't recognise my face but he recognised my vagina. It was all too horrible. Maybe that was where I was going wrong at parties. Instead of re-introducing myself to people I'd already met four times before, I could just uncross my legs like Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and they could all have a brief peek and then say 'Oh now I remember you, it was just the new hairdo that threw me for a minute.'
I hadn't replied, but it didn't matter because Dr Allen seemed quite happy reciting his own inane version of the Vagina Monologues.
'Yes, of course I remember you now. We always have a bit of trouble finding your cervix, don't we?' he said in a jolly tone of voice, as though I was a careless rapscallion, who occasionally left my uterus in my other handbag or tucked my womb fetchingly behind one ear.
I staggered out of the clinic twenty minutes later, hatefully hoping the Sebastian's penis had turned green and was covered in fur, and that he would be subjected to a similar process, preferably inflicted by an octogenarian female doctor with a beard who thought that he was a plumber called Alistair. I was going to start eating properly, as I couldn't bear the thought of getting sick and having to see Dr Allen again, and I was never, ever, having another one-night stand. It was far too much like hard work.
