Sex and Death by Sarah Hall Page B

perplexed by the human body than she had been as a child. Her father had once brought home a stack of blank examination booklets from his university for her when she was seven, knowing she liked to fill things in and catalogue them, and later she’d found him and her mother laughing together at the kitchen table, because opposite the box EXAMINING BODY she had written I DO THAT. She hadn’t understood at the time why it was funny – in fact, the question had bothered her, the presumption that anyone else would ever think they could examine her body.
    She handed her completed questionnaire to Agatha, who graded it using a mystical system of numbers.
    â€˜Hmmmm,’ Agatha said gravely. ‘I’m afraid we have a problem.You’re in the danger zone for postnatal depression. You’ve got to come back in next week and take this test again.’
    Selene smiled passive-aggressively. ‘But it’s got nothing to do with postnatal anything. Anyone can get an anal fissure, at any stage of their lives. Men can get them. Women who’ve never had children can get them. It’s just unfortunate that mine is not getting better on its own.’
    Agatha’s eyes had taken on a beatific gleam. Selene stopped talking. She wondered ungenerously if the midwives were given a postnatal depression detection quota, and she’d just helped Agatha to meet hers.
    At the door, within earshot of several women in the waiting room in various pregnancy or post-birth states, Agatha said to Selene, ‘Now remember. You must have sex. It’s good for the scar tissue, too. Keeps it flexible.’
    Selene imagined announcing to her husband when he got home that evening that he needed to go to the late-night pharmacy to fill an urgent prescription she’d been given by the midwife. ‘A prescription for what?’ he would ask, concerned, already elbow deep in their baby’s yellow poo that smelled wonderful, like expensive French mustard.
    â€˜For sex,’ she would deadpan.
    He was always hopeful that the miracle cure had been identified, the potion of potions to put her out of her pain. The first time he’d picked up on her behalf the tub of specially prepared 0.2% nitroglycerine ointment, the female chemist had given him a knowing look and said: ‘Rub a pea-sized amount around the rim of the anus twice a day. Partners shouldn’t share this product, just so you know,’ assuming he was gay. Unfazed, he’d returned a few days later to ask the same chemist if they sold sitz baths for relief from anal pain, and she’d said, ‘You mean the bucket you put over the toilet to immerse your buttocks in hot salty water?’ And he’d exclaimed, ‘Yes, that’s the one!’, glad that she might have one in stock.
    Selene knew that sex was the last thing on her husband’s mind too, that his libido had gone into hiding. He was as distracted and exhausted as she was, as engrossed by his adoration for their son. Sex had never seemed more irrelevant to their bond as a couple. He had been there beside her for every minute of the birth, mildly electrocuting himself setting up the TENS machine, dancing with her in their underwear in the lounge, holding her hair back while she puked through the later contractions, gently encouraging her as their baby peered up at him from underwater in the bath, waiting for the next push to free his shoulders. Sex was great, she remembered distantly, but surely its most important function was to re-establish and affirm intimacy between two people? In which case they no longer had need of that. They were more emotionally intimate than ever before as they cared for their son together. Their relationship had evolved beyond a need for sex.
    That weekend they drove out to Barrington Tops National Park for Christmas in July with three other couples. They’d kept the tradition for a few years, started by one of the husbands who was British