Ireland, 1985
'Girl Scout Cookies.'
Regina snorted. 'It's worse he's getting.'
Mike laughed. They were driving home from Con's house where, after the pub, they had drank take-out Harp with the man of the house and another couple, George and Paula. All three men were old schoolfriends. Con -- unmarried, alcoholic, an overgrown class clown whose shtick had long since become tiresome -- was kept around by the other two as a token of the bachelor days that they had both recently put behind them. When he had put on the porn video, the men had laughed nervously while the women squealed in feigned horror, pretending to avert their eyes.
'You must be joking,' Paula had said.
'I think I seen your man in this...' Con pointed at George.
'Ah, turn it off, Con.' Regina, who was the most lucid among the drunks, had squinted at him in pity. It was pathetic carry on...
'Pathetic...'
The word echoed in the car interior. Mike, who was trying to look sober at the wheel, said, 'Con's a gas man.'
'And you were stuck to it,' she said.
'Did you not like it?'
'It's degrading to women. A bunch of perverts. All of you.'
They drove along in silence. Regina looked out her passenger-side window, studying her protean reflection. Frog eyes, a Jew nose, a witch's chin. Her hair was cut short, boyish. She moved her arm to look at Mike's reflection. The state of him. She hoped there weren't any Guards out. They were screwed if there were.
'Do you like that kind of thing?' she said.
'Ah, will you leave it now.' He shifted in his seat.
'There was no story to it!' It struck her as an outrage.
"Does it hurt enough, you cunt?"
Isn't that what he was saying?'
The word on her lips seemed to stun him.
'You're acting like you never saw a blue,' he said.
'I haven't!'
'You had them books you confiscated.'
'I burned them. I didn't look at them.' She paused. 'When we...I mean, is that how you think of me?'
'Jesus, it's a film, a video. Now will you shut up about it?'
'You're such a liar.'
She turned back to the window and silence.
*
She woke at dawn to Mike's snoring. Her mouth was full of a gluey, foul-tasting dehydration that a half-pint of lukewarm water from the glass on her bedside locker did nothing to dispel. She lay back down wearily, kicking off the duvet, half-exposing Mike in the process. She studied him through a veil of hungover self-pity. Flesh like mottled dough, a body suit of fur seemingly originating in his beard. She looked down at the piss-horn distending his blue jockey shorts, a portion of ball hanging out from the perished gusset. There had been a black man in the film, his prick as big as a stallion's. She touched her stomach, remembering how the two prostitutes had sucked at it before he had put it into one of them, the other licking his hole while he did so. It was dirty. None of them had any shame...
She had lied to Mike about the books. Acting on intelligence, she had confiscated them from a third-year student at St. Paul's, the Christian Brothers school where she taught Commerce. Shivering, blanched with mortification, he had been unable to look at her. She had taken pity on him and let him go with a lecture on discipline and self-respect.
Rodox. Color Climax.
Red dots on the cover, obscuring genitalia. It seemed especially wrong to look upon such obscenity in the familiar surroundings of the school. She stuffed them inside her folder and took them out to the boot of her car. On the way home that evening, she pulled over in a lay-by and examined them with a growing sense of queasiness. The pages were waxy, somehow redolent of the bodies they depicted. She focused on outfits, fixtures and fittings, trying to pretend that she wasn't shocked. Their faces were bestial. The women's smiles were grotesquely overdone. The concealment of penetrations did nothing to reduce the indecency of the images.
Dishonesty makes it dirtier,
she thought....She traced an X into the condensation upon the windshield, thinking of how much damage this garbage could do to impressionable minds.
Hanlon
...That was the boy's name...She blinked away a vision of his self-abuse, reading from the accompanying English text:
Nancy begs with Roy to put it in her anus. Roy, a gentleman, cordially agrees...
When she got home, she tore them up and used them as kindling for the fire, where they smouldered, refusing to ignite. It took a briskly wielded poker to destroy them...
...She was unable to fall back asleep. Kicking Mike only made him snore louder. She sat up to a nausea rush of vertigo and an intensification of the pounding in the back of her head. There were Anadins in her handbag, which was...had she left it in the car? Pulling her knickers from the cleft of her arse, she went downstairs and put on one of Mike's raincoats, fastening the belt before she went outside. Dawn was cold, its colouration reminiscent of the charred pages of dirty books. Barefoot, she picked her way daintily over the chipped pebble-dash upon the driveway to where the car was parked at a mad angle. The metal of the door handle was freezing, reluctant to comply.
Fuck...
She looked about anxiously as the door creaked open. The sleeping estate had taken no notice.
