The Wake - Table of contents

The Wake - afters (20)

Frances’s father is a crooked property owner and she says she’s going to shop him come the revolution. But for now she’s biding her time living rent free in one of the plush houses he has up the Malone Road that’s only a short taxi ride from her studies in Queen’s University. Plush isn’t the word when I come to think of it, the place is obscene.

Obscene is probably just about right actually because a lot of the time during every weekend which I now spend up there I should tell you, there are happenings in the pink active sexfriendly ultra king-sized airbed (twelve by ten) that I can hardly bring myself to write freely about even in these decaying months of this most decadent of decades. If the truth be told it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah there sometimes. And what was the other place? Edom, if I remember right from the Teachers’ Guide to the On Our Way catechism. Edom where they did things arseways. A la mode. When in Edom as they say.

I’m telling you this not as a voyeur — even though I have to admit I’ve done a bit of that too — but as a fullblown participant. Body and soul have no bounds there, reader, need is what drives us up the enchanted slopes, ecstasy is what we get at the top and the good vibrations only stop when we’re asleep and not always then either.

You may wonder how I can bring myself to go on lying with Frances given she’s got baps like hot water bottles and an arse on her that would put a fully loaded beer lorry to shame and given also she still contraries me every time I open my mouth to speak. But the mind is a funny thing and up the Malone Road it’s all smoke and mirrors from the first joint of the day to watching ourselves in action when evening begins to fall. As the poet Robbie Burns put it after he saw a louse crawling into the lady’s bonnet in church: O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as others see us. A true philosopher if ever I read one.

And then there’s also the fact that her bed is a non-agression zone, an erstwhile no-man’s land that I’ve been given access to. And we tolerate each other there because Aisling is the prize. Plus Frances has this big soft thick rope with all these strands hanging down that she calls her cat of many tales that inflicts maximum pleasure without leaving welts. Also when I’m taking time out I can get quite delirious watching illegal lesbian acts being performed right in front of me like I was King Herod or somebody. For make no mistake about it, even with all the things I feel about Frances and the awfulness of her Adam’s apple there’s something about one girl surrendering to another that always does the trick.