Girl Scout Cookies

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. Fuck, she said, louder this time. Cunt...ya scum, you fuckin cunt, ya cunt, does it hurt enough, uh...? It was a line from the film. A man was screwing his stock-confined wife, flogging her with a cat o' nine tails while a teenage prostitute licked his balls. They weren't glamorous, these people. Not like them in Rodox. They looked like drug addicts, degenerates; teenage runaways and their abusive father surrogates. The responsible adult's solicitude she felt for their plight lasted as long as it took for her to shiver and fold her arms. She fetched her bag and bumped the door shut with her hip before going back inside.

There was white lemonade in the fridge. The milk had gone sour and she shut the door quickly to contain the stench. Swigging from the bottle, she walked into the kitchen where she put on the kettle and the Superser. Her head was lifting off her shoulders, a sick-making throbbing in both sides of the base of her skull. She sat down, extracting the cotton wool from the Anadin tube with a shaking hand. One tablet left. The heat from the gas-fire started to burn her calves and she turned her legs away. Varicose veins, a certain puffiness at the ankle...How would they look after nine months of extreme load bearing? She and Mike were into the second year of their marriage. People were constantly looking at her in expectation of an announcement. She had stopped taking the pill a month before, saying nothing to Mike. He hadn't remarked on the return of her menstrual cycle. She hadn't expected him to. The erratic and voluminous nature of her periods had precluded any attempts at baby-making. It was only in the week just passed that she had started to return to normal...

Con was right. The actor playing, what was his name, O'Malley, was the image of George. Glasses, black curly hair. The character was a lawyer or a cop. The Mayor's task-force to clean up the city, or something. He screwed his secretary, or rather she screwed him. Are you sure you don't have something against sex, Mr O'Malley? Glasses, brown hair in a bun. She sucked his slender penis with a curious artistry. It was the only scene Regina could remember in detail. She had never done it to Mike. It simply wasn't an option. They would kiss and he would climb on top of her, unbuttoning his pyjama bottoms as she wriggled out of her knickers beneath him. She loved how it felt to be the object of his undivided attention and did her best to be charitable towards his prowess as a lover but it was hard work.

The frustration was in knowing that there was pleasure of another order, seeing the potential for it in the sinews of his neck, the helplessness that overtook him as he approached orgasm. Just the thought of the word brought her out in gooseflesh. Once, in class, she'd had a grave Freudian slip involving the word organic. Only one boy sniggered. Fucking Cosmopolitan. The word was on every second page, if not stated, at least implied. She thought of the process in biological terms, half-remembering illustrations and terms from her Leaving Cert Home Economics textbook. FSH, seminal vesicle, mucus membrane...Her image of the breakdown of the uterine wall was horrifying. Naturally, the word orgasm never appeared. The Sisters of Mercy's approach to sex education was brutally factual.

The semen is deposited in the birth canal. Sister John Bosco's distaste had been obvious. She had looked up continually from the book, shooting impatient glances at those girls whose furious colour betrayed both embarrassment and stifled giggles. Regina had thought she was going to die...

But, as was the case in her sex-life, even back then she had had the sense that there was much more to it than she was being told. A hidden, crucial dimension, one hinted at in schoolgirl misinformation and crude phrases on lavatory walls. She had matured early, like all Ellis females, both physically and in temperament. At thirteen, she was already aware of a shift in her attitude to a certain type of man. Older, grave, patrician. Childhood trepidation giving way to an unspecified longing, a desire to be noticed, to be looked upon not as a girl but as the woman she was becoming. Resisting the urge to touch herself upon the edge of sleep, her nipples stiff behind the crimplene of her nightdress...

Pleasure was something you had to find out about for yourself but pleasure was sinful. Her parent's profound contempt for disreputable women was a trait she had inherited wholesale. Their respectability was their most prized possession and she herself was a considerable part of it. It would have never occurred to her to disobey them...Like a good girl...Her father used the phrase when he scolded her. Sit up straight, like a good girl. The terror of becoming something else had kept her well-behaved. She did as she was told.

Occasionally, at the dinner table, or in front of the television, there were silences which were more eloquent than words. Anything remotely touching on the carnal, no matter how tenuously, gave rise to a panic-stricken tension. Nobody looked at anyone else. Nobody said a word. Regina hadn't thought it strange that her mother and father never seemed to touch each other. Thinking about the possibility years later still made her slightly nauseous. Yet the more thorough the denial, the more fascinating became the spectre of what was prohibited. Sometimes, when she handled a beautiful garment or cashed a cheque in the bank, she felt again the shortened breath of childhood foreboding. Earthly things were trash and vanity. Luxury. The buxom syllables of the word thrilled her, much the same as those of covet in the ten commandments. Your neighbour's goods. Your neighbour's wife...

Paula's blouse the night before was gorgeous. She couldn't wait to tell Regina it was from Brussels. George, who was on secondment to Europe, took advantage of diplomatic bags to bring back all kinds of plunder. Courtesy of the Commission. It was a threadbare joke by that stage. Regina tried hard to like them but they were just too full of themselves. Infected by the decadence of Europe, they fancied themselves aesthetes, epicures. I really must stop reading this trash, Paula had said, returning the copy of Princess Daisy Regina had lent her. Have you read Balzac? She pronounced it Ballsack. And she had clearly lingered over the dirty bits in the novel. There was new fag ash in the gutters, deepened creases in the spine...

George, thighs tightly crossed, had been critical of the awful production values of the porn video. I simply refuse to watch dubbed films. It's laughable. His sense of virtue was less noble than irascible, a preview of middle-aged pomposity. He was good-looking though, in a clerical type of way. A Christian Brother rather than a priest, one of the coarse ones who smelled of tobacco and BO; fluid limbs, cocked for activity beneath the soutane. Brother Stacke, the first headmaster she had served under, had maintained that the garment made for a wonderful freedom of movement. His hand scythed the air by way of illustration...

She remembered the ease with which his affability gave way to violence. Sitting one day at the payphone, whose bench doubled as a holding area for students awaiting punishment in Brother Stacke's office, she had heard an explosion of activity behind the closed door. A volley of cracks, interspersed with whimpers. The whoosh of air in a loose sleeve. They had emerged shocked, nursing their injured hands. Second-years, gamefully trying to remain stoic. Brother Stacke was in the office doorway, smiling at her. Yellow fingers, dandling the lead-bolstered leather. Chalk and ash smudged upon the breast of his soutane. The wire of the reinforced glass between them came at her like a flung net...

She loosened the belt of the raincoat, unsettled by the memory of his black fascia; the bullfrog tumescence it contained. He was definitely a man, not soft or weird like the others. Brother Crowne and his alabaster skin; Brother Lambert and his Sparta fetish....

...Back then, she would have brought Hanlon to him. Explained to him euphemistically the nature of the offence.

The era of discipline is over. It was one of his favourite themes. Mark my words. I suppose you'll want me to go easy on him.

No. No, I think he should be punished.

Dead, smiling eyes, looking at her with a new respect.

Bring him in...

Hanlon slouched abjectly in front of Brother Stacke's desk. Regina stood at the back wall, arms folded.

Stand up straight. Brother Stacke opened the drawer, shut it again. I hope you apologized to Miss Ellis.

Miss, I'm sorry Miss...

Brother Stacke swooped, grabbing the hair on the side of the boy's head. Hanlon inhaled through his teeth.

Are you sorry? You're sorry, are you?

He's doing it for me, thought Regina. This is how he courts...

She held her breath, heard the drawer withdrawn, the rustle of paper.

Lámha...

Hanlon recoiled away from the descending leather, gaping as it struck his outstretched palm three times. The sound of each impact filled her head. She could feel their pressure at the back of her eyes. Brother Stacke looked at her as he reached for the other hand, the tip of his tongue poised in anticipation. This time the sound was less distinct. The final blow was almost an anti-climax.

Back to class. Let it be an end of it, boy. An dtuigeann tú?

Sir...

Hanlon's crushed his raped palms inside his armpits, his bottom lip squirming woefully. Regina felt a flush descend from her throat to her breasts, picturing the limp and shattered neck of a rabbit carcass in a trap. The helplessness was as compelling as the pitiability. Brother Stacke swung the leather back and forth, a metronome setting the tempo of the boy's departing footsteps. Back and forth as the door closed and they were alone...

...Now the heat of the gas on her arse was too much. She moved to the opposite side of the table and looked up at the ceiling. He wouldn't surface for hours yet. When he did, he'd want to go to the pub and the boys. George was the only one of his friends that she could stomach. They were unbearable when they got together. She hated the way Mike changed when he was around them, his regression to callous adolescence. He was clever but he was also weak. His need to be liked was almost pathological.

At one time, she had mistaken it for vitality. No-one could make her laugh like he could. Every minute in his company had seemed like the prelude to some great adventure. Her parents loved that he was an accountant. The harmony of balanced books appealed to her mother's parsimony. Her father looked forward to learning a few dodges. Their approval enhanced her desire for him, a frenzy she recalled with embarrassment. Mad love, unbecoming a woman of twenty-seven. Flowers, butterflies, gauche versifying upon outsize valentine cards. Her physical need for him was tempered by anxiety. What if she did it wrong, failed to please him...?

When it finally happened, in a sweltering hotel room in Corfu, she discovered she needn't have worried. He came as she was helping him put on the rubber. She was thrilled by the novelty of the spectacle, couldn't understand the mood of him in the aftermath. They argued and he went downstairs to the Irish bar in a huff. She followed him about an hour later and found him in the company of a porcine Finnish couple whose names she couldn't remember. Mike, already half-drunk, bought her a gin fizz, to preclude any further discussion.

They got back to their room shortly before six the next morning where he passed out on top of her. It wasn't until the following hungover noon that it happened properly. Teenage riding lessons had taken care of her hymen but it still hurt, particularly with Mike so unsure as to where his penis was actually supposed to go.

Up a bit...no, that's still my arse...

When he did get it right, she found herself dry, irritated by the slimy latex of the rubber. He came before he was fully inside her, silent, taut-bodied, the totality of the spasm leaving her on the verge of panic. She felt the nipple of the rubber swell with warmth, laughed with him when he returned from the flushing toilet and leaped upon her in ecstasy. He held her with a feverish tenderness, moaning about his love. For the first time in the saga, she felt the stirrings of her own pleasure. His finger probed her moistening vulva as his penis swelled back to hardness against her belly. He held out for over a minute the next time. She told him that she had come too, even though she wasn't sure if she had or not. It was nice but it was nothing like the torso-cleaving paroxysms she had read about in novels and magazines.

The remainder of that week established the pattern of their lovemaking. Her practicality took care of any subsequent disillusion. Books were made up. What she and Mike did was how it really was. Besides, it wasn't all bad. She enjoyed the bulk of him on top of her, his abrading beard (the resultant rash was nothing that a little natural yoghurt wouldn't take care of), the familiar girth and texture of his penis. Sometimes he wasn't entirely thoughtless. She liked to see him naked but he was still strangely coy about exposing his body. On nights she couldn't sleep, she would turn to him and examine him by cigarette light. His face was a silhouette of curves, the hills of some distant Elysium beneath the evolving dawn. Deep, dark sleep she beheld with insomniac wistfulness. He slept like a boy, gluttonous for oblivion. No trace of the dreaming of oxygen deprivation that blighted her nights, that left her choking for breath as she came to. The eiderdown gave forth body heat from its vents, most of it his. She was always cold in bed. Poor circulation, just like her mother. When she put her hand beneath, she could feel the warmth radiating from his torso. If he was hard, that gave off heat as well, one that caused sweat to gather beneath his balls and in the crack of his arse. She'd felt it during sex as she helped him towards her vulva, or when she held his bloated sac as he came. The smell of it on her fingers had become endearing to her, as had the unwashed reek of his spunk or that of her own febrile mucus. Husband...it was in that ripe post-orgasmic miasma that she felt the word most profoundly, the self-righteousness of proprietorship no less than the bliss of conjoined souls.