Sheela Na Gig Ch. 01

This story was inspired by the gorgeous photography of Heather Corinna – hope she doesn't mind me borrowing her lovely red hair for my main character! Hope you like it, am working on how it develops...

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I am a sceptical person. I trust my reason. I know it's not supposed to be very "feminine" to be so rational, but fuck that. I know exactly how feminine I am and I'm happy with it. When things happen that go against what I understand to be the order of nature, I am distrustful. I suspect that somebody is pulling a con. And I'm usually right.

That's a whole paragraph full of "I"s. Might as well have another one.

What else am I? An anthropologist, a feminist, a sometime photo model, an activist, a queer, a woman who has loved men, a confused, angry, happy, tender, aggressive bitch with a mane of red hair and an attitude and a strap-on in my bedside drawer. I spend a large part of my waking hours thinking about, talking about and researching things to do with sex. Sometimes it seems a little too much like a job. Sometimes it is my job, which takes me to what I was doing in Ireland.

I was investigating the phenomenon of the sheela-na-gig. These are one of the great puzzles of ancient Irish culture. They're small stone carvings, often set in the corners of old churches, depicting grotesque little squatting women, holding open their labias and displaying them to the onlooker. Not what you expect from a cute little old church in quaint little Catholic Ireland, is it? Antiquarians up till this century found them severely embarrassing and they were usually described as "Significance unknown". Yeah, whatever. A sheela-na-gig is a little window back into pagan times. You don't have to have a PhD in anthropology to see that they're about women and obscenity and power. I couldn't get enough of them.

I had the delusion that I would be an exotic creature in the university in Dublin to which I had temporarily assigned myself. I quite fancied myself as the feisty, tattooed visiting dyke in the low-cut t-shirt and short skirt who would have my pick of the cuter girls and boys. It turned out that I was hardly noticeable. I had only one stud in my nose; some of the students had so much metal in their faces that they clinked when they spoke. At 30, I was clearly too old to be of interest to any of them. I spent my nights in my hotel room watching TV and eating chocolates, feeling old and horny and lonely.

I wasn't in Dublin for long, though. I gave a couple of talks and then I was off in my rented car to the heart of the south-west – wild rolling country with a fine crop of little stone women for me to puzzle over. I had my state-of-the-art digital camera and my PowerBook, which contained the downloads of every online paper I had been able to find on the subject. If I didn't come away from the south of Ireland with some new insight into the sheela-na-gig, then I didn't have the right to call myself an anthropologist.

Four weeks later I was seriously thinking of chucking it in and going back to work as a waitress. I had seen a couple of dozen sheela-na-gigs (or should that be sheelas-na-gig?) and not one of them hadn't already been documented to death. And while the thrill of seeing my first one in, so to speak, the flesh, had been real, it had slowly worn off with each new one. These little knots of grinning, cheeky, ugly, sexy stone were remarkable enough, but I wasn't finding in them what I had hoped to find.

Then one evening I pulled into Powl, yet another boring little country town with four pubs and two B&Bs, one of which I booked into (single room, pink floral wallpaper, nylon sheets) and gave the soft-spoken landlady my breakfast order (small Continental with tea, not coffee, thanks), then I put on my makeup and I sashayed out into the town to get a meal and a couple of drinks before bed.

The meal turned out to be dried-out fried chicken from a fast food joint; I told myself ruefully that at least I wouldn't be getting salmonella. The crispy coating had been cooked so hard it practically had to be broken into. The drinks, however, were a different story.

I picked the largest and smartest pub, on the grounds that it would presumably contain the people least unlike myself. I walked into the lounge.

The conversation dipped immediately as all eyes turned to check out who'd come in the door. I'll admit that I hadn't gone out of my way not to call attention to myself. I was in my white t-shirt and tight jeans and black boots, and a red plastic coat to match my hair. I think some of the local farmers got quite excited.

There were some younger people in the corner holding traditional instruments. I like Celtic music and I got myself a pint of Guinness at the bar and sat near them, not intrusively close but close enough to start a conversation if I got the chance.

They were all in their twenties, three men and two women, the men bedraggled but at least one of them truly devastating, the women beautiful. They were talking quietly amongst themselves but they glanced at me as I came over. I nodded cheerfully and one of the men, eyeing me with obvious hunger, nodded back.

They played, and I drank, and when one of the other people in the pub sent them over a round of drinks I began to pick up how the system worked. I waited until they were most of the way down their pints and then I bought them a round too. The lounge girl brought them the drinks on a tray and nodded to me, and when they lifted their glasses at me I gravely lifted mine back.

The bizarre ban on smoking in Irish pubs has converted the entire country into a sort of wet, dark California. I slipped outside for a cigarette and a moment later one of the girl musicians joined me. She was slender and willowy and had thick dark hair.

"You wouldn't have a light," she muttered. God, I loved the accent. I lit her cigarette.

"Fabulous music," I said.

"Thanks," she said with a wry smile.

"Do you have a CD or anything? I'd love to take some away with me." I turned my charm on her. She leaned against the wall and took a drag on her cigarette.

"No, we don't," she said. "But one or two of us are on other people's."

"Right," I said.

"Are ye a tourist?" she said. She pronounced "ye" as "yee".

"No," I said. "I'm an anthropologist. I'm here on a field trip."

"Oh right," she said, smiling through the smoke that drifted in the night air. "Sorry for sayin' this, but you don't look much like an anthropologist. Not that I really know what an anthropologist would look like, now."

I laughed.

"I do a lot of other things too," I said. "Actually I'm here to see the sheela-na-gig. You know what they are?"

"I do, yeah," she said, and her eyes narrowed slightly. "You're here to see Sally?"

"She has a name?" I said, delighted.

"Oh, she's a bit notorious around here," she said.

"Why?"

She was silent, then she shrugged.

"You'd have to see her yourself," she said, throwing her spent cigarette into the gutter. Abruptly, she turned and went back in.

I was intrigued. What could she have meant? But it was also really exciting, to think that a simple stone carving could have a symbolic life in a modern community. I wanted to talk to her some more about it, but they went back to playing and before too long the barman was ringing last orders.

I was a little buzzed from three pints of Guinness. I went up to them while they were packing up their instruments and the girl turned and faced me.

"That was great," I said sincerely. "Listen, I'd really like to talk to you some more about the sheela-na-gig. If you want to."

"Well…" she said, wiping the strings of her fiddle with a cloth.

"You want to come back to the house?" said the guy who'd been checking me out earlier. "We're gonna play a bit more." I knew what he had in mind but while he was cute, I had half my mind on anthropology and the other half on the delectable fiddle player.

A funny look passed across her face, like she didn't want him to invite me back. But she looked up at me and said, "Well, we could have a chat there," in a reluctant tone.

I'm ashamed to say that because I was a little drunk, I wrote off her obvious disinclination to spend any more time with me. "Great!" I said enthusiastically.

"We'll go in Martin's car," said the hopeful guy. "What's your name, sorry?"

"Heather," I said. "Sorry. Hi."

"Howya, Heather," he said. "I'm Joe. That's Martin, Paul, Joanne you've met, and Caroline."

They all nodded and smiled at me, apart from Joanne, who was clearly starting to think of me as the cross she had to bear.

We went out into the night and piled into a very dirty and old station wagon. I was sitting on Joe's knee, which came as no surprise. He spent much of the journey rather sweetly trying to conceal his hard-on. We drove down long and twisting country lanes and it never occurred to me to worry how I was going to get back to my B&B that night.

Eventually we pulled onto a gravel drive and stopped outside a largish old house. The musicians walked around the back and we entered a brightly lit kitchen. Two young women were sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking wine.

"This is Heather," said Martin, the flute-player, who happened to be the most handsome of the group and the one with the most natural authority. "She's an anthropologist."

He said with such a deadpan so-what-the-fuck tone that even I laughed.

The two young women at the table were quite different. One was slim, with long blonde curls and one of those fresh Irish faces. The other was shorter, darker and sexier, with a square face and straight black hair cut in bangs over her forehead and tied at the back in a ponytail; she had hooded, sleepy dark eyes and elaborate tattoos on her powerful upper arms, and she was wearing a khaki halter top that was, like my t-shirt, cut low to reveal a deep cleavage. She looked up at me with a look of faint amusement, and I looked back at her with a half-smile of secret recognition; my gaydar was functioning perfectly, and I knew a fellow dyke when I saw one. And damn, she was really something, as well – one of those tough streetwise grrrls who would go one of two ways in bed, either taking ruthless charge and making you sweat and scream, or else yielding herself up to you with tears of abandon. I was in lust. I forgot all about Joanne.

"That's Barbara," said Martin, and the blonde nodded and smiled, "and that's Linda."

"Hiya," said Barbara.

"Howyeh," said Linda in what I had come to recognise was an inner-city Dublin accent. I smiled at them both and produced what I managed to wangle out of the barman before we left – a bottle of whiskey.

"I brought refreshment," I said. "Can't just call in at this hour of the night and not bring some of the hard stuff."

"Oooh now," said Martin with a laugh, "steady on, Heather."

"Save it," said Linda with a grin. "Get into that now and you'll be fucked in the morning. There's beer in the fridge."

I smiled at them and cracked the seal. Somebody gave me a glass and I poured myself a stiff one.

The musicians were disporting themselves around the kitchen and tuning up. I sat in on the conversation between Barbara and Linda; local gossip. I could smoke freely now, and so I did.

They played on, the music coursing out of them, occasionally pausing for a break in which stories would be told and jokes cracked. It was natural that I should find myself sitting next to Linda. It was natural that she should put an arm around me. And when she got up and walked outside, it was natural that I should follow her a moment later.

She was standing in the darkness by the side of the house. I went straight up to her and pulled her into me and we kissed hungrily.

I had my hands on her hips and she put hers on my ass, pulling my hips into hers. Our breasts were squashed together as her tongue moved inside my mouth, and I sighed into her.

"You're fuckin' gorgeous," she breathed as we parted for a moment.

"So are you," I murmured.

"I knew you were queer the minute ya walked in," she said, nuzzling my throat and kissing my collarbone.

"I knew you were," I said, feeling a little dizzy from the whiskey. I slid my hands down inside her cargo pants and squeezed her hard, tight buttocks inside her panties.

"Jesus, I'd love to go to bed with you," she gasped, her eyes widening, glittering in the distant light from the open door.

"So why don't you," I whispered, and kissed her all over her upturned face.

Linda made a faint whimper in the back of her throat, and by the sound alone I guessed that she was a bottom rather than a top.

I broke away, and smiled at her eager, breathless face in the darkness, then I hooked one finger inside the waist of her pants and pulled her toward me.

"Lead the way," I said.

We went in by a side door through the pantry, avoiding the kitchen, and she took me upstairs to her bedroom, which was spartan and unfurnished. She peeled off her clothes and lay on her back on the bed, looking at me, her breasts splayed out to either side of her chest, breathing fast.

I slowly stripped off, revealing my body to her piece by piece, teasing her, making her almost sob with anticipation, and when at last I was naked and got on the bed I confined myself to kissing her torso, moving my lips over her navel and slightly soft belly, my tongue tickling the silver bolt through her navel, and moving down into her shaven crotch. I started to kiss and sip at her vulva and she held my head there, moaning as I tongued her into her first orgasm.

Okay – I'm going to risk your annoyance now, and not tell you all in great detail how Linda and I fucked that night. Because we fucked; we weren't exactly making love, we were two horny and rather drunken dykes in a hurry, and neither of us was in much of a mood to be fluffy. She was younger and hastier, but I had more style and finesse; we got into a half-giggling, half-serious wrestling match, each of us trying to find out the other one's points of resistance, trying to establish who was going to play what; it ended with me taking charge, forcing Linda to yield like I knew she wanted to, and as she lay on the bed I held her down and slowly, lovingly fisted her. After she had come, stuffing her mouth with her t-shirt to muffle her screams, she wanted to return the favour, and following my whispered and increasingly breathless instructions she did so. I'll never forget her awe at having her whole hand inside me, or the tears of pleasure I shed at her filling me up. Afterwards we were both dripping with sweat, but I wanted to take her again, really make her melt, and soon she was kneeling face-down squealing into the pillow with her ass in the air, while my hand filled her vagina and I reamed out her musky asshole with my hot little tongue.

Afterwards we lay in a loose tangle, her head on my shoulder, companions in desire, and I kissed her forehead fondly. We talked a little. She was from a tough, working-class background and had left school at 16. She'd always known she liked girls and she went to work in a gay bar in Dublin, first as a bottle-washer, then as security. Now she was living down here and working on the farm that belonged to Martin's parents. She'd spent holidays down here when she was a kid. She loved it here; people didn't judge her the way they did in Dublin.

"Do you know anything about the sheela-na-gig?" I asked.

"Sally?" Linda said and chuckled sleepily. "Ah yeah. It's supposed to be magic. I was always dead scared of it. I don't think I've seen it since I was a kid."


"What sort of magic?" I asked.

"Dunno," she murmured. "I mean there was all things ya were supposed to do around it that'd make magic happen. This was what everyone said. I never done it meself though."

"What sort of things?" I asked, feeling my eyelids droop.

"Oh, I'll tell ya tomorrow," she said. "I think like…ya had to be naked and you'd to say the Lord's Prayer backwards and shit like that. I dunno."

I must have fallen asleep because the next thing you knew, I was dreaming of crawling naked through long grass with Linda riding on my back singing about the fields of somewhere or other.

I woke up late to find the bed empty and Linda nowhere. I was thirsty and my head ached and I was a bit embarrassed; I'd got myself invited down here and promptly slept with a farmhand. I pulled my clothes on and staggered downstairs to find Joanne and Caroline, two of the musicians, sitting at the table drinking tea. The remains of a fry were scattered about.

"Hey Heather," said Joanne, and she looked a bit like I felt, but she was smiling at me more warmly than she had the night before. There was even something teasing about her look.

I had a choice; I could be cool and American and superior and get out of there with dignity intact, or I could abandon the pretence that I hadn't been up all night fist-fucking one of their housemates. The hell with it, I thought, I'm in Ireland. One of my ancestors was Irish. Bite the bullet.

I grinned, slightly shame-facedly, and blushed. The other women laughed, but not unkindly.

"Linda was in a very good mood this morning," Joanne said. "She's out in the barn right now."

"I just need some fluids," I croaked, and poured myself a glass of water from the tap.

"There's tea in the pot," said Caroline.

"Wow," I said, "what a night. I mean the music and everything. It was really amazing."

"Thanks," said Joanne lightly. "Thanks for the whiskey too. Came in handy when we ran out of beer. Sorry we drank it all."

"Oh no problem," I said. "The least I could do. Listen," I went on, sitting at the table, "is there anybody I can talk to about the sheela-na-gig? I should really start getting my shit together or the university will wonder what I'm doing here."

The girls were silent. They glanced at each other. Why did I always feel like this was a forbidden subject? Or at any rate an unwelcome one?

"Is it something you don't want to talk about?" I asked. Even if it was a taboo subject, that was interesting in itself.

"It's not that," said Caroline. "There's just something…weird about it. Everybody who's seen it thinks so. There's something very creepy around there altogether."

"What do you mean by creepy?"

"Well," said Joanne, "the story goes that witches used to gather round there. I dunno about that because we didn't really get witches in Ireland the way you get them in England or in America. But it must be some old legend or something."

"My boyfriend's sister's best friend," said Caroline, leaning forward and whispering, "had sex with her boyfriend down there when they were first going out. And she got pregnant but she lost the baby."

"Shit," I said, with the proper expression of respect. "Could be just coincidence, though."

"That's the kinda thing that's always happening down there," she said.

"I'll tell you who'd know more about it," said Joanne. "Mrs Lennon. She's the local librarian. I bet she'd have a load of stuff on Sally."

"How can I get there?" I said, sipping my tea and smiling at them.

Two hours later I was walking back into Powl town square. I'd figured that the best way to lose my hangover was to walk it off. It hadn't exactly worked, but I felt a little better. (After breakfast I'd gone out to the barn to say au revoir to Linda – she'd looked like a parody of a sexy farmgirl in her t-shirt and bib overalls. We'd had a swift roll in the hay which climaxed with me getting her overalls off her cute round ass and finger-fucking her. As she got dressed, I'd promised I would call her. She'd smiled at me from under her heavy eyelids and said I'd better.)

I went into a shop and bought a bottle of mineral water and asked where the library was. I found it in a street off the square, a dusty old building next to a building site where they were evidently building a new library. The site was deserted, though, which suited me as I didn't want the attention of a bunch of builders.