There is an age at which a man begins to suspect he has missed something.
Friends discuss changes they have quietly accommodated for years. At dinner, someone mentions a procedure with the easy familiarity of a favourite walking route. You nod. You have become good at nodding.
I was forty-seven. Reasonably active. Married. Two children. Nothing in my medical history to suggest I would be late.
Nevertheless, each morning in the shower, I checked.
My wife felt I was making too much of it.
‘It’ll happen when it happens,’ she said, which was kind, although she had said the same thing about the extension.
My father had never discussed his own development. Men of his generation rarely did. Once, on a caravan holiday in Norfolk, he had emerged from the washroom looking profoundly settled. I have often wished I’d asked him then.
The discovery, when it came, was almost disappointingly straightforward.
A Tuesday. Ordinary soap. A slightly deeper exploration of an itch I had previously attributed to the car.
And there it was.
My second anus.
Immediately beside the first, exactly where the diagrams suggested, although rather smaller than I had expected. After decades of searching, I had apparently been stopping a fraction too soon.
I stayed very still.
Downstairs, my wife was emptying the dishwasher. Somewhere beyond the bathroom window, a delivery driver was reversing. It seemed extraordinary that the world should continue arranging itself around such minor concerns.
‘Well?’ she called.
‘Yes,’ I said.
She turned off the radio.
For a few minutes, we allowed ourselves to be happy.
Then I noticed the beak.
Or rather, its absence.
I checked the original. Firm. Familiar. A slight downward curve I had inherited from my mother’s side. Then the newcomer: smooth, unremarkable tissue. Nothing you could reasonably describe as a beak, even allowing for the bathroom light.
My wife put on her reading glasses.
‘Perhaps it comes later.’
I wanted to believe her. But she was already searching on her phone, holding it at the angle she uses when she doesn’t want me to see the results.
By lunchtime, I had read everything.
Soft beaks. Retracted beaks. The misleading appearance of a beak under tension. A Canadian man whose had arrived during a funeral.
One website suggested mine might be ‘primarily ornamental’, a phrase I have since asked my wife to stop using.
I booked an appointment.
The GP was excellent. He listened, examined both, and asked whether the second had attempted to take anything.
‘Take anything?’
‘Lint. Loose cotton. A finger offered in good faith.’
It hadn’t.
He made a note.
Apparently, discovery and emergence are separate stages. Some men find a fully developed second anus. Others locate it during what he called ‘the receptive interval’. Mine was comfortably within the normal range.
‘Should I be doing anything?’
‘Try to leave it alone.’
This was harder advice to follow than it sounds. Once you know something is there, you become conscious of the opportunities it is missing. I began sitting differently. I bought better trousers.
Six weeks later, I felt the first small click.
I was chairing a budget meeting. I paused, ostensibly to consider a question about procurement, and experienced a private emotion for which our professional vocabulary remains inadequate.
The beak had seated.
I finished the meeting. Then I went outside and rang my wife.
She knew before I spoke.