Unfa­vour­able in appear­ance, devel­op­ment or behaviour

I’m afraid this is going to be an unpleas­ant story, for it begins with the fol­low­ing words: I am sprint­ing des­per­ately up Lygon Street at three minutes to five shak­ing a jar of my own urine.

A few months ago, upon read­ing Kim Beazley’s latest poll res­ults, I decided to take out trauma insur­ance. This, like abso­lutely everything in this story so far is com­pletely untrue, but it gets me to Lygon Street a lot more quickly, which is true and truly happened last Thursday, for when one applies for insur­ance per­tain­ing to the bod­ily per­son one must sub­mit to a full med­ical stock-take.

So at three in the after­noon I am in the wait­ing room of my local med­ical clinic, flip­ping through a five-page med­ical ques­tion­naire sent to me by the insur­ance com­pany for a doc­tor to fill in, and find­ing what I read more than slightly alarming.

Take, for example, ques­tion one: ‘Is there any­thing unfa­vour­able in the subject’s appear­ance, devel­op­ment or behaviour?’

Well, hon­estly, I’m not con­vinced the insur­ance com­pany has any busi­ness ramp­ing up my premi­ums on the basis that some GP I’ve never met before finds my devel­op­ment unfa­vour­able. She’s never even seen me tango, or do my beach ball trick.

I am made to wait five minutes after the appoin­ted time, just long enough to pon­der why I was just con­vinced I had a beach ball trick, before the doc­tor calls me in. She takes the form, reads the first ques­tion and silently looks me over. A small tick is made, but I can’t see in which box.

It tran­spires over the fol­low­ing half-hour that I am in almost every way a model of banal good health. There is noth­ing wrong with me bey­ond the slight long-sightedness which my teen­age self took to be the venge­ful wrath of the Lord (I was wrong, by the way — His ven­geance, crueller and infin­itely subtler, came in the form of a gor­geous Maltese girl who allowed me to inter­fere with her car­nally then told me she was look­ing for more of a ‘brother-sister’ kind of vibe between us), and noth­ing so unseemly about my appear­ance, devel­op­ment or beha­viour as to require a med­ical pro­fes­sional to alert the insur­ance industry. It appears I have lost a few kilos, which I really could have done with, and gained half an inch in height, which I frankly don’t need.

‘Right,’ says the doc­tor. ‘Now all we need is some­thing to go in this.’

She holds up a small plastic jar with a yel­low lid, and we look at it sol­emnly for a moment.

‘I have some loose change,’ I ven­ture. Her glance at the clock is almost imperceptible.

My blad­der is shy and I don’t care who knows it, as long as they don’t know it while stand­ing next to me at a urinal. I have always found the pro­spect of mic­tur­at­ing in com­pany dis­quiet­ing, right back to the first time I was asked to fill a jar at about seven years of age, for reas­ons now lost in fog. On that day, a nurse actu­ally accom­pan­ied me into the toi­let and stood to watch at what she clearly believed to be a sens­it­ive remove. I couldn’t under­stand why she had fol­lowed me in and in my panic I pulled my trousers right down instead of merely unzip­ping and struggled to wee while my exposed bot­tom burned with shame.

Back at the insur­ance test, it is over before I reach the cubicle. Some muscle con­trac­tions are vol­un­tary, oth­ers are none of your busi­ness, and at moments of great stress the brain can turn the former into the lat­ter without your con­sent. My pro­state, upon hear­ing the news of my flash­back to buttock-flashing shame, flicks on the auto-pilot quicker than if someone had said ‘crowded pub-toilet’, and will admit of no induce­ment to relent, its ideas of my self-preservation being both very dif­fer­ent to and appar­ently more strident than mine.

I return the shame­fully empty jar to the doc­tor and apo­lo­gise in a small voice. She kindly offers to send me home with the jar and wait until five that even­ing for me to return, when she will ana­lyse the con­tents, but I must return by five, no later. I prom­ise to be as good as my blad­der and race home to brew a pot of strong tea, neck a tal­lie of tap water and sit down to wait.

At ten to five, with the clinic ten minutes walk away, I am strain­ing over the jar in a way which would undoubtedly con­sti­tute an unfa­vour­able appear­ance. Then at seven minutes to five, suc­cess — in fact pre­dict­ably too much suc­cess, which keeps me until four fifty-five.

The prob­lem is then one of trans­port: there is no way I am going to stride con­fid­ently up Lygon Street with the warm jar there in my hand like an over­due copy of Pir­ates of the Carib­bean. At four minutes to five there is no paper bag, old envel­ope or empty bean tin avail­able, so it is with a semi-transparent Coles shop­ping bag that I tear out of the door and begin my sprint.

An imme­di­ate prob­lem arises, bey­ond the obvi­ous one of semi-transparency, which I am deal­ing with by palm­ing the jar like an ama­teur magi­cian. Why I think the popu­lace will be less con­cerned if the man run­ning up the street with a jar of piss in his hand is an ama­teur magi­cian is a ques­tion for the ages, because the prob­lem which arises is the sloshing.

As I run, the con­tents of the jar are mak­ing a rhythmic plap-plap noise against the lid in a way which I find dis­turb­ingly redol­ent of the hol­i­day I spent on the shores of the Adri­atic. As the adren­aline floods through me and ped­es­tri­ans scat­ter I am pic­tur­ing hand­ing my warm, bul­ging, semi-transparent bag to the attract­ive med­ical recep­tion­ist to have it burst expans­ively, spray­ing ter­rible waves over her, me, the wait­ing room patients and inno­cent res­id­ents of sur­round­ing sub­urbs. There is noth­ing for it but to trust the dili­gence of the design­ers of little plastic jars with yel­low lids and, as it were, piss-bolt.

I hurdle the fence of the cricket ground and streak across the field, baulk­ing around an eld­erly Red Set­ter as I charge into the goal square. The jar rattles like a cock­tail shaker.

It is four minutes past five when I stag­ger into the clinic and col­lapse, gasp­ing and groan­ing, against the counter. The recep­tion­ist reaches calmly for a rub­ber glove.

‘Let me take that for you,’ she says and reaches into the bag.

‘… no … don’t — danger …’ I gasp, but it is too late.

She takes out the jar and pauses. My urine has a head on it. We agree I should sit down.