CHAPTER FOUR: MY FIRST HOLIES AND THE BUBONICS (PART THREE)

AN EARLY CHILDHOOD

The first part of Chapter 4 is here.

The second part is here.

CHAPTER FOUR: MY FIRST HOLIES AND THE BUBONICS (PART THREE)

                When in the hospital attempting to overcome my infection, I fell even more ill with what I believe might have been a Masters in Business Administration, but I was in a state known as delirium-reversal because there was a fourteen-year-old beauty in the bed across the way and we made love every night for seven days and seven nights, and none of it Arabian, but there was no reverse delirium involved in the act of passion. The delirium reversal simply meant that I looked a lot better looking and appeared more handsome than I actually was to this beautiful young lassie. It was quite a lucky infection in that sense.

                By the end of my stay in hospital, however, I was truly at death’s door. The eyes had sunk so far into my head that I had to use three mirrors, one at my buttocks, one above the top of my shcalp, and one before my face in order to be able to see so that I could trim the nostril hairs that were now growing out of my eyeholes.

                There were so many welts and lesions on my body of so many different colours (red, green, grey, ordinge) that the nurses often referred to me as the ‘Rainbow-Welt Boy of St Aloysius’ Ward’ and the doctors visited me from all over the world to study my magical hues. And more often than not, the scarring from those welts healed and there’d be puss pumping out of me, most of it localised around the gruan for some reason. And the fourteen-year-old girl I’d had the excitement with two weeks earlier was nothing more now than a smouldering vagina propped up on a pillow in the bed opposite, sexualised beyond all of her humanity.

                But it was standard practice after a month in the hospital, if no improvement appeared imminent, to be fired from the uppermost floor of the institution by a cannon. And that, dear reader, is where the word ‘discharge’ is derived from. Of course, you’re not discharged in the same way, but the sentiment remains. So off I was shot, and believe it or not, I landed slap bang on top of that Main Square tylet, and two of the pat rafters broke my fall into the bargain.

                But I survived, and that’s when Mother came and she pulled me out of that tylet and brought me home and nursed me back to my prime.

                And my First Holy Communion, when it did finally come round, doesn’t really merit a mention because nothing interesting happened that day. Except Father Rorty standing on the altar and explaining that going to Hivin is like being a fly.

                Because there was a group of flies living under the wather. They were actually runts, because they weren’t flies yet and they lived in a pond, under the wather as has already been established. And the group of them says, “Right, the next fella to break through the wather and evolve into a fly has to come back down here and tell us what it’s like up above.” So the next fly breaks through the wather and isn’t he only there, flying around for a few seconds and doesn’t a frog fhlick out his tongue at him and eats him? And the next fellow breaks through the wather and isn’t he only there a few seconds when a great big web between two branches of an overhanging weeping willow only tangles him up and isn’t he only eaten by the spider there living a few hours hence from his arrival on the silky death-thrap gossamer? So the third fellow breaks through the wather and isn’t he flying around having a great time, and isn’t it so wonderful above the wather that he almost forgets about his brothers and sisters down below awaiting his report from up above? But then he remembers. So with a flitther of his wings does he try to break the pond’s surface wather? Yes, he does, but the caterpillary action and the surface tension on the murky pondwather prevents him from breaking the wather and delivering his account of the ‘Aftherlife’, and he can’t for the life of him get underwather. So the other runts say to themselves, Why can’t they tell us what it’s like up above, but sure, they can’t comprehend it. And that’s what Hivin’s like to us mortals. Here on Earth. And then Father Rorty stood away from the pulpit and extended his arms, his loose robes falling erotically off the shoulder a little bit. And he made the declaration:

“Under the auspices of the Church, we grant thee a hymn of grace.”

The chant then went up as the trumpets elephanted out the introduction, and a lit match was thrown into the cardboard box full of dead cats doused in paraffin for the effect.

All of which reminds me of my first holy communion, involving a nun, some very arousing, bosom-uplifting lingerie, a pair of handcuffs, a rabbiting stick, a tight leather sandal, a broken spherral and a handcuff, and that might be worth a whole chapter later on. We’ll see. We’ll see.


To Be Continued in Chapter Five.