by David Jester
“I hope you’re keeping it clean with my granddaughter, young man.”
I nodded slowly as I tried to understand what he was asking me.
“Strictly vaginal sex, you understand,” he said after a while.
Oh sweet Jesus, no.
“The other way is neither Godly nor sanitary.”
I felt myself getting even redder and redder, while craning my neck to see where Lizzie was in the hope she could save me from a man who was one segue away from asking me about my masturbation habits and demanding I tell him about any homosexual fantasies I’d had.
“Well, you know what they say, cleanness is next to godliness,” I said, for want of anything better to say.
“Exactly,” he agreed. “There are other things to try, of course. All sexual relationships need a bit of variety. For instance, there’s nothing wrong with letting her suck your pecker every now and then, but only if you return the favor.”
I quickly turned back to him. “You mean … ?”
“I mean going down on her.”
“Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to tell me she was born with a penis.”
I seemed to have stumped him and cut short his awkward line of conversation. “You’re a strange one.”
I nodded.
He opened his mouth and then closed it again. I thought I had baffled him into silence, but he continued, his mind floating away to a dark place where only memories of murder and bigotry lay. “I remember once doing the dirty on a Korean girl.”
I cringed. “And by that, you don’t mean that you slept with her and then never rang her back the next day?
“Get with it, boy!” He reached over and slapped me on the cheek. The slap was audible, as was my gasp. I looked up to see who had heard it and when they were going to take this crazy old bastard away from me, but they were all continuing about their business as if nothing had happened, as if I hadn’t just been assaulted by a nonagenarian Nazi in slippers. “I fucked her up the ass.”
“Oh, and …” I shrugged. He seemed to be waiting for a response. “Was it nice?”
“Nice? Nice!” I flinched, worried he was about to slap me again, but he seemed to have gotten it out of his system. “My pecker looked like a melted Snickers bar afterward.”
I considered myself to be a fairly immature adult, ignorant to many ways of the world and content in my own childish bliss, but at that moment, all of my innocence died, along with a large portion of my sex drive.
He seemed to be waiting for another response, as though he thought that this was a two-way conversation and not a one-way assault. But I was dead inside, incapable of responding. I simply stared at him, at the curious and sly smile that curled the corners of his wrinkled mouth. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was doing it on purpose, just to fuck with me.
“Anyway,” he said eventually. “That’s enough sex talk. Too much of that and it’ll put me off my dinner. It’s never polite to have an erection at the dinner table.”
I should have been amazed that a man of his age was still capable of having erections, and even more amazed that they would come so easily, but at that point, nothing about him amazed me.
The others began arriving and I became trapped in a procession of greetings, of handshakes, hugs, smiles, and—in the case of a very bubbly great aunt who smelled like peppermint and tasted like death—a big sloppy kiss. There was an assault of names and titles, far too many for me to remember, and after the procession stopped, after the greetings had turned into excitable and then polite conversation, there were around twenty people all crammed into the small house, including a cluster of kids.
The kids grouped together early on and began running around the house, up and down the stairs, generally making a nuisance of themselves as kids do. Many times Lizzie’s parents insisted that we should have brought Ben and that he was missing out on the fun. But he was barely fifteen months old. He couldn’t walk in a straight line, he couldn’t converse with the other kids, and he couldn’t tell interfering adults to leave him the hell alone when they decided to bother him. Contrary to what they wanted to guilt us into believing, it would not have been fun for him.
I decided to join the kid’s games at one point, but a stern look from Lizzie steered me back toward the adult conversation, which seemed to be entirely about people I had never met and places I had never been.
“Now then, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. I hated her, right nosy cow she was. Does she still have that stupid perm?”
“Maybe. She’s dead now.”
“Oh no, what a shame. Well, may she rest in peace.”
I got the obligatory travel talk from Lizzie’s father, uncle, and cousin, all asking which route I had taken; all telling me how bad the traffic was and which route I should have taken. If not for that and sports, I wouldn’t have had a single word to say to them. Although the conversation was tedious and repetitive, it was preferable to what had happened moments earlier with Satan’s grandfather.
The drinks began to flow and the noise levels increase. I had my cheeks pinched by at least three different old women, who may have been aunties, grandmothers, or cousins, but could have also been random strangers off the street. After a couple of hours in a whirlwind of familial comfort, with me standing out like a soccer hooligan at a chess game, the food was served and the rush was on.
It was a buffet, which saved me the awkwardness of having to sit next to and across from people who would insist on talking to me. But during an attempt to sneak a go at the buffet table, after everyone had grabbed their first platefuls and were content with stuffing their faces until they needed seconds, I bumped into a timid young woman who had attempted the same move.
She was around my age, give or take a few years, and she was very pretty in a nervous sort of way. The first thing she said to me, as I was staring at a suspicious plate of what I assumed were pork pies, was, “You might want to avoid them.”
“Oh?”
She nodded and laughed softly. “Aunty Aggie made them.”
“Which one is Aunty Aggie?”
She pointed to the blushing great aunt who had previously tried to lick my face off.
“Oh. Her.”
“Yes, she’s not the best cook.” She had a way of averting her eyes when I spoke to her, and playing with her hair when she spoke to me. She also had a sporadic giggle, which I instantly loved. “When he was alive, my uncle always said she was trying to poison him. He refused to eat anything she cooked.”
“When he was alive? He didn’t—”
She giggled again. “She didn’t poison him, no. He was hit by a car ordering take-out from McDonald’s.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Yes, yes I am.”
She was amusing, and I found myself wondering why I hadn’t been introduced to her. She seemed just the sort of person I would get along with. It also occurred to me that I might have been introduced to her during the initial melee and had just forgotten her name. As if reading my mind, she reached forward and held out her hand.
“I’m Laura,” she said.
I shook her hand. “Kieran. I’m—”
“Lizzie’s husband, I know.”
“It seems my reputation precedes me.”
“No, we met half an hour ago.”
“Oh.”
“I’m just joking.” She tapped me on the arm. “I saw the look you gave me, the one that said, ‘Do I know her, did I introduce myself to her?’”
“Ah, I’m that transparent, am I?”
She shrugged noncommittally. “That and the fact that I saw how bemused you looked when everyone entered. You looked like you were ready to run home.”
I nodded. She was right, I was. “To be fair, I had just spoken to Lizzie’s granddad, which might have had something to do with it. That guy is—wait, is he related to you, as well?”
“He’s my granddad, too.”
“Oh, then never mind.”
She g
iggled again, “It’s okay, I know what he’s like, but he’s sweet. You just have to take the good with the bad.”
I nodded, although I wondered if, like Lizzie, he hid the majority of that bad side from her and saved it up to use on any unfortunate men who married into the family.
“So,” I said, perusing the food table. “Is there anything here you recommend, anything that isn’t potentially lethal?
“Hmm.” She put a finger to her lips and moved around the table, pointing out the dishes. “My uncle’s curry, you definitely want to avoid that.”
“Bad?”
“Strong. He has no tastebuds and I think he buys his chilies wholesale.”
“Ah.”
“My granddad’s bread. A little stale, bland, chewy,”
“That’s enough about your granddad, what about the bread?” I laughed and expected my new friend to join in. Instead she had a look of complete horror on her face and was staring over my shoulder.
“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath. “He’s not—”
“—Oh, hey, Granddad!”
My heart sank and I immediately spun round. I expected to see a wrinkled fist greeting me. I probably deserved it. It wouldn’t be the first time I had put my foot in it, and it probably wouldn’t be the first time the old man had floored someone a fraction of his age and twice his size. But there was no one standing behind me, and when I turned back around, my new friend was laughing at me, covering her hand with her mouth as she did so.
“You bitch,” I hissed.
“I’m sorry,” she said, still laughing.
“No you’re not.”
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m not.”
I laughed with her, more through relief of not being beaten up by a decrepit bigot than anything else.
“What are you two laughing at?”
This time her granddad really was standing behind me. He gave me such a fright that a small and instinctive yelp escaped my lips. He stared at me like I had just asked him out on a date.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he demanded to know.
“Nothing. Honestly.”
Please don’t hit me.
“Okay then.” He turned his evil expression away from me and then smiled at Laura. “So, what was so funny?”
“Kieran here was just telling me a joke.”
I felt my insides freeze in anticipation of what was coming next. Laura, the funny, awkward girl I had just met and immediately liked, gave me a sly grin as her granddad turned his deviant eyes on me and said the words that I knew were coming. “Well then, tell me. I want to hear this joke.”
“You don’t really, it’s too rude.”
He didn’t say a word, but his expression did all the talking for him.
“Good point,” I said in agreement. “Okay, here it is …” I was terrible at telling jokes and even worse at remembering them. The only ones that had stuck were the ones I had heard as a child, which were far too innocent. “I—I—” I shrugged. “You know what, I’ve forgotten already.”
Laura gave me a puppy-dog expression that suggested I had disappointed her. Herman picked up a handful of chips from the table and stuffed them into his mouth. He was a sloppy and noisy eater, and he also didn’t let eating get in the way of conversation. “What a surprise,” he said, spraying me with chunks of potato. “I’ll tell you a joke that will really get your pulses going, how about that?”
“I don’t think—”
“Sure!” Laura jumped in, seeing how awkward this was making me and eager for it to continue.
The next few minutes were some of the most awkward minutes of my life, which is saying a lot. I wasn’t sure if he told the joke right, as he seemed to stumble over a few of his lines and missed the punchline entirely, but extreme vulgarity and racism was the ultimate punchline on this occasion. When he had finished, he was in stitches, laughing and punching me on the arm. At one point, I thought—hoped—he was going to run out of breath or choke on some undigested potato, but he managed to get through it in one piece. I tried my best to laugh along while staying out of his reach, but when he finished, he didn’t seem impressed by the fact that I wasn’t rolling on the floor laughing.
“I don’t think you got it,” he said.
“Oh, I did, believe me. Hilarious.”
“Maybe I told it wrong. Here, I’ll tell it again.”
“No, no, you told it great. Please, my stomach can’t take any more laughing.”
He glared at me for indeterminable seconds and then smiled. “Yeah, it was a funny one. So, what do you recommend?” he asked, pointing to the food.
“You have to try the pork pies,” I told him. “They’re simply divine.”
“So, how did you two meet?”
The question came from an uncle who had, until that point, been incredibly quiet. He had a nice smile and, due to his silence in the face of all the banal chatter, I was actually beginning to like him. I had been asked about my sex life by drunken cousins, had my face pinched and my hair pulled from great aunts, and I had suffered several menacing stares from the grandfather from hell, so it was nice that at least one person kept his opinions and his hands to himself. That is, until he spoiled it by asking the one question I hated more than any other.
Mine and Lizzie’s story is long and somewhat romantic, albeit in a haphazard way. Some have said it was worthy of being made into a book, but I wouldn’t go that far. We met when we were young—fleeting glances and awkward conversations across a small playground in the middle of a drenched and desolate caravan park. I adored her from the first moment, and that adoration increased when I met her in my teenage years. We dated and we departed, although through error rather than anything else. It was tragic and I was heartbroken, but we met again as adults and fell in love for the second time, without even realizing it.
That was the story that I often told, but toward the end, I had a tendency to rush things and try my best to avoid the inevitable question. But it came, as it usually did.
“That sounds so sweet, so how did you meet as adults?”
I looked at Lizzie as the previously silent uncle opened his trap again. There were nearly two dozen people crammed into the living room, some on the floor, some standing, some sitting, and at no point had all of them been involved in one conversation. But now, thanks to the silent but deadly idiot in the corner, they were all focused on me. I felt my face turn red and I turned to Lizzie, whose expression suggested that I was on my own.
I was a terrible liar, so I decided to tell the truth. “We met in a psychiatric hospital.”
The pause continued after I spoke. A few people smiled, thinking it was a joke but not committing themselves to a laugh just in case. I smiled as well, easing the tension, and for a moment I thought I was going to get away with it. I was hoping I could laugh, joke, and then promptly move on as though nothing had happened, but the uncle was preparing to piss on my parade.
“Lizzie worked in a psychiatric hospital, right?” he asked. “Did you work with her?”
The look I gave him could have penetrated steel. “I was a patient.”
The smiles faded, swapped with awkward glances. Seeking solace, I searched out Laura, who had previously cheered me up and seemed to be the only person in the family, other than my wife, who I actually liked, especially now that the uncle had turned into a giant dick. She was standing at the back of the room near the door, an understanding and sympathetic smile on her face.
“I wasn’t in there because I was mental,” I added, laughing softly and trying to play it cool.
“Oh, really?” The uncle was waiting with another question. If I wasn’t scared that he would kick the living shit out of me, I would have slapped him. “So, what happened?”
Do I tell them the truth?
What’s the worst that could happen?
“Well, it began with this naked, one-legged woman who I got drunk and then slept with, she—”
“—I think that’s enough
,” Lizzie said, jumping to her feet and tapping me heavily on the shoulder. “Can I speak to you in the hallway for a moment?”
She phrased it like a question, but I knew better. I followed her into the hallway, brushing past Laura as I did so. She backed away to let us through, and when I passed, out of my wife’s eye line, she gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. She had freaked me out briefly when she put me in an awkward spot with her granddad, but at that moment, she felt like the only person in the room who didn’t hate me.
Lizzie dragged me into the hallway and into the kitchen before saying, “What the fuck, Kieran?”
“Did I do something wrong?” I was playing the idiot, a role I knew well.
“My family doesn’t need to hear your crazy stories.”
“I agree,” I said, nodding. “But they asked. It’s that uncle of yours, Steve, Matt—”
“Uncle Martin.”
“Yes, him. I think he’s doing it on purpose.”
“You mean being polite?”
I frowned at her. “That’s not polite. He knew.”
“He didn’t know. No one knows.”
I gave her a rush of exaggerated nods. “He knew, trust me. I don’t know how he knew, but he knew, and he’s using it to fuck with me.”
Lizzie pressed a hand to her temple, lowered her head, and sighed. “Sometimes I wonder if I did the right thing taking you out of that mental hospital.”
“Psychiatric hospital,” I corrected. “And you didn’t take me out. The doctor did.”
She raised her head again. “Just stay quiet, would you? If anyone asks you a question, ignore them.”
“If you’re that worried about the answers I give, why didn’t you step in to help me?”
“Well excuse me for thinking you could handle a few white lies. I apologize for thinking that you were an adult, that you knew how to react when people asked you awkward questions.”