"It's okay," he said, with a reassuring air. "I'll just need you undressed for a moment or so."
"Sorry," I spluttered, standing up. "I'm... er... not really that comfortable about people seeing me naked."
"No-one will come in here," he said calmly. "No-one can see through the windows. You have complete privacy in here."
I nodded, taking off my jacket. "Yeah, okay. Sorry. It's just a thing I have."
As I undressed, I thought back to a school medical I'd had in my teens in the nurse's office, a room not much bigger than this one. Like this room, it had smelt vaguely of latex and disinfectant, and like today there had been a tingling coldness to the air which had made undressing seem even more unpleasant than it might otherwise have been.
For some reason, probably due to some cost-cutting drive, that year they were doing medicals in small groups and so four of us boys had been herded into the small office together. We'd been told to strip to our 'pants', as they called the white saggy standard-issue school shop briefs we all wore in those days, and had lined up in front of the local authority doctor who had looked even more cheerless about being there than we had.
I remember glancing at the other boys -- none of whom I really knew because our year-group had been sorted alphabetically rather than by class -- and noticing that I, as usual, had by far the most prominent bulge in my underwear. The boy at the end of the line had been a big lad with a growth of hair across his chest, and yet even his underpants showed only the smallest suggestion of what was contained inside.
Here we go again, I thought.
I knew the drill; everyone did. We were going to be asked to strip so he could check our balls, and everyone was going to look at how big my penis was, just like they always did.
The three of them would have willies like their little fingers, while mine, even in its limpest state, would hang halfway down to my knees looking as thick as my forearm. They'd have bollocks like wrinkled walnuts, while mine would stick out, blown up to the size of a pair of over-ripe plums. They'd have only a modest fuzz of hair down there, while my pubes would burst forth like some dense, tangled undergrowth from my belly button down past my scrotum.
As I'd stood there in front of the school doctor, I'd felt deeply ashamed. I knew that my genitals had grown disproportionately larger than the other boys because I masturbated so often whereas they were able to resist their urges. After all, what other explanation could there be?
Every morning, as I got dressed in my bedroom, it was getting progressively worse. I was finding it more and more difficult to pack myself into my underwear, struggling to get the flimsy gusset of my briefs to contain my testicles and penis -- ideally together -- in a way which wasn't too uncomfortable. It was becoming more and more of a challenge to close the fly of my school trousers over my unsightly bulge and I'd had to endure the embarrassment of asking my mother to replace my zip, not just once but twice. And in the classroom, during lessons, I was having to ask to leave the room to adjust myself every time I could feel I was beginning to develop an erection.
And yet, in spite of the obvious effect it was having on me, try as I might, I simply couldn't stop playing with myself.
Each night in my bed, no matter how ardently I forced myself to think of other things, my penis would slowly stiffen under the bedclothes, steadily lengthening and thickening until it had outgrown its foreskin and its pink exposed head would dribble clear liquid inside my pyjamas. Whatever I then chose to do -- whichever strategy I tried to use against it -- the outcome was always the same. Within minutes my hand would be working at full speed underneath the tent I'd made with my bedsheets, my pyjamas would be hitched down around my thighs, a film of sweat would be forming on my forehead and a guilty smile would be slowly broadening on my mouth.
I knew full well what I was doing -- my mother and brother had warned me of it often enough -- and that only 'bad boys' shared my forbidden pleasures. I'd heard all about such bad boys, for many years, oblivious that I would one day secretly share their company. Bad boys started out as good boys, just like I had, but when their peckers started growing hard, they'd find themselves unable to stop rubbing them.
Soon those boys had rubbed themselves so much that their genitals had grown, like mine, too big to for their underwear. Soon their balls were so swollen with their seed that they would chafe, like mine, against their thighs. Soon they had sprouted so much hair down there that it had spread, like mine, right up into their bum cracks.
I knew full well that every time I masturbated, my organ would grow a little bit bigger. That every time I released my seed by my own hand, my balls would refill to be that little bit plumper. And that the more I gratified myself in such a way, the more hair I would grow down there as a way of telling the world how dirty I was.
And yet, I simply couldn't stop. In every other respect, I regarded myself as a good boy. I tried hard at school, did well in my exams and fulfilled all of my chores around the house. I steered clear of girls and was respectful to my elders. I even ate all my greens. On top of that, though, I liked to rub my penis whenever it got hard -- which it very often did -- and that, by some cruel decree, seemed to be all that mattered.
So here I was in my school medical, alongside three lads I didn't even know, when the inevitable happened: "Right, boys. Take off your pants, please."
And so we did. We yanked them down and stepped out of them, all cringing with embarrassment. I blushed when I realised my briefs had a noticeable stiff patch on them from when I'd nipped to the boys' toilets during Maths and had taken the opportunity of finding an empty cubicle (and having forgotten about the medical) to quietly attend to myself. Glancing at the other lads, though, I saw that their underwear was -- for a variety of other reasons -- a lot worse for wear than mine and had felt that rare combination of relief and disgust.
However, the worst was yet to come.
Inevitably, as all boys do when they find themselves naked together, we glanced to see what each other was brandishing. Even the doctor ran his gaze across our row of genitals, his eyebrows betraying a flicker of surprise when he got to mine.
The other boys were all much of a muchness: they were clearly the sort of good boys who had accepted what their penises were for and what they were strictly not for. I don't remember specifics, but they were all as they should be: small and insubstantial; foreskins nicely puckered; testicles discreetly tucked away; all framed by the merest dusting of downy hair. All exactly as nature intended; all very proper.
And then there was me.
I stood there, staring down at the carpet with my cheeks burning. I was a thin youth, pale and scrawny, and yet emerging from between my legs were genitals which would look generous even on a grown man; the sort of thick, hairy cock and heavy, prominent bollocks one might expect on a great, looming brute. My cock was so long and fat that my foreskin wasn't long enough to cover the head completely: the tip of it, dry and pink and with its broad slit exposed, peered out from its gaping end.
There was nothing I could do to hide what I had: it was visible for everyone to see and so that everyone could deduce from its abundance what I enjoyed doing to it so much.
One the lads whispered, "Look at Furlong's knob! Jesus..."
Someone else whispered, "They call him Footlong!"
I blushed a deeper shade of red.
The doctor would know that, of the four boys in front of him, one of us was a compulsive masturbator. He'd already deduced, I was sure, which one of us went to sleep most nights soaked in his own seed. Which one of us directed the shower head towards the curtain most mornings so that his parents couldn't hear the slapping of his wrist against his thigh. Which one of us habitually sneaked our mother's catalogue up to his bedroom so he could jerk his foreskin back and forth while he pored over the women's lingerie pages.
I glanced up at the doctor and he threw me a small smile. In retrospect, I realise he was trying to let me know I was okay; that it didn't matter a jot what was between my legs; that I was different through no fault of my own. But at the time I saw it as a sneer. I imagined he had a big red stamp which he would apply to my medical record when we'd filed out from the room: CHRONIC MASTURBATOR.
He walked along the line towards me, holding each pair of balls while the lads attached to them forced a cough.
When he got to me, he made a joke. He probably thought it would ease the tension I was feeling and make the others feel less inadequate. But it was a line which the boys in my school would use to taunt me for months thereafter.
"I'm not sure I'll be able to get my hand around these!"
The others tittered while I went purple and stared downwards. He might as well have announced to the assembled crowd that I had balls like a bull elephant.
He cupped a hand with some difficulty around my testicles and gently fondled them as he manoeuvred them into the required position.
Before he could ask me to cough, I felt the unthinkable begin to happen. The sensation of the doctor's fingers on my balls, cold and mechanical in itself, was having a profound effect on me. In front of the other three boys, flopping against the doctor's wrist, my cock began to swell.
I glared down at it, mortified, and saw the thick ridge at the base of its helmet becoming more pronounced and the foreskin slowly easing back to expose even more of the swelling pink head. The shaft of it was beginning to thicken and I could see it lengthening steadily, pushing forwards against the doctor's wrist.
I couldn't believe this was happening! What could I do to stop it?
I tried to think of all the things which I disliked; things which upset me. My brother and his god-awful friend Aiden. Having to kiss my ancient Aunty Ruth who had bits of skin sticking to her prickly beard. The smell of the dead badger we'd found half-decayed in the woods.
Nothing I could muster up had any effect. My cock had, as usual, a mind of its own.
The doctor seemed to notice my reaction and said, hastily, "Just give me a quick cough and you can get dressed again. There's a good lad."
Jesus, it was starting to stand up.
However uncomfortable I'd felt a few moments ago, standing there showing everyone I had the cock and balls of a compulsive jerk-artist, as my brother often put it, would pale into insignificance compared to what I was about to feel.
It would be round the school in minutes.
"Furlong got a hard-on when the doctor touched his nuts."
"He kept looking at our dicks and next thing he had a stiffie."
"He wanted the doctor to wank him off."
The doctor looked up at me, uncertain as to why I was hesitating. "Come on, son. Just a quick cough and then you can pull your pants back on."
I tried to cough but found that my throat was too choked up.
I tried again but now I had the image of being masturbated by the doctor in my head. Him saying, "Come on, son. Now that your balls have grown, we've just got to collect some spunk from you. There's a good lad."
I tried another cough, desperate for this to end, but it came out as a grunt. I imagined him holding a sample pot in front of my cock, pounding at my shaft with an experienced rhythm and grinning at the others while they gawped on. Me staring back at them, scarlet from the neck up, while my balls released thick jets of my strong-smelling seed into his glass jar.
I forced the loudest cough I'd ever done and the doctor jumped back. My cock stood upward at a forty-five degree angle, the foreskin continuing to retract from the reddening head. I could smell its crisp, sexual tang starting to waft around the room as it gradually hardened.
The other boys, mercifully, seemed oblivious to its misdemeanours. They were nudging each other and looking over at the doctor's notes on his desk to see what he'd written about them.
"That's great," the doctor said, quickly, strolling back across the room. "No problems at all for any of you. You can all get dressed."
I turned my back to the others and hitched up my semen-spattered briefs as quickly as I could. I directed my cock up towards my hip, giving it space to lengthen further along the waistband as I grabbed for my trousers.
One of my balls was hanging out through the leg of my underpants but I didn't care. I just wanted to get the hell out of there. To go somewhere people couldn't see that I had, as my mother had once put it, depravity between my legs.
Now, standing in front of Dr James Courtney in my boxer shorts, I felt another flush of discomfort which I knew to be a leftover from that unpleasant experience and from the years of hearing negative things about my genitals when I was growing up.
After James had finished running a few standard checks on my eyes, ears and throat, had listened to my breathing and heartbeat with his stethoscope and tested my reflexes, he asked me to take off my shorts.
The memory of the school medical flashed back to me again. I hadn't thought about it in years and yet being here, in this small consultation room, had brought it back to me as vividly as if it had happened last week. I wondered why I had imagined being masturbated by the doctor -- the male doctor -- in front of the other boys. Had that been an early foreshadowing of what was I was now going through? The first inconspicuous swell of a wave that was only now crashing onto the beach?
I pulled down my boxer shorts and tossed them onto the chair with the rest of my clothes. They weren't the best pair I owned: if I'd known James was going to ask me to strip I'd have worn my stripy blue pair which had the prestige of being granted Jake's seal of approval. (He'd once seen them when my dressing gown hadn't been fastened up properly and had proclaimed them, with some surprise, to be "not too bad", before correcting his verdict to "well, not as grodey as everything else you wear.")