Read by David McGrath N.B. CONTENT WARNING FOR SWEARING AND UTTER FILTH .... ENJOY!
When the kids were younger Joseph always turned off the television on a sex scene. The family would then sit in the silence of the sex that wasn’t. And when enough stifling awkwardness had passed, the youngest kid, having guessed an adequate length of time for the sex to finish, would ask his Dad was it OK to turn back on the film? And Joseph would himself guess if an adequate length of time had passed, and maybe say OK, and maybe turn back on the telly. Or maybe say no, that there was plenty of time for watching them dirty auld films when they were older—that it was bedtime.
So Joseph sits with the whole world about to swallow him up. He’s mortified. Sex is not within forty miles of Joseph’s type of conversation. And to sit talking about the female orgasm—Kentucky Fried Christ. He reaches for some hope.
‘You’ve never even—?’
‘No,’ says Mary.
‘I thought—’
‘No.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Mary. I always just thought—’
‘I know.’
‘Thirty years of marriage.’
‘I love you, Joe. That was always there. And always will be there.’
‘So what now? Because I meant cookbooks or vouchers. Jewellery maybe.’
‘I’d like to see a sex therapist. I’d like you to come with me to see a sex therapist.’
‘It’s far from fecking sex therapy I was reared,’ Joseph says. And it’s true. It’s far from fecking sex therapy Joseph was reared.
Joseph is from a long line of men who don’t go to the doctor unless they’re dead. Men forged in West of Ireland gales. Men whose stagnant stares would cut you in half. Men who sat in the pub with their brothers for their whole lives, all to see who’d inherit the farm, and if the reading of the will went well they’d get courting and then married, and then maybe—you know…
Mary’s father had said they could marry if Joseph spent his entire life being of service to her, and forgave her for everything—otherwise he had no business taking on marriage and Joseph had agreed.
‘OK Mary, in sickness and in health—whatever it takes. But this sex therapist – not a Protestant.’
*
So Joseph, on Christmas week, sits in this sex therapist’s office, photographs of clitorises all around, with tinsel strung to their picture frames for a festive feel. And this Spanish Catholic sex therapist named Jesús smiles at him.
‘Why don’t you tell me about your marriage, Joseph?’
‘It’s good. It’s great in fact. Three children. All very successful. All happy as far as we can tell. No grandchildren yet but please God in time. All the marriages we know have fallen by the wayside. They’ve got the kids out the door then went their separate ways with the secret Facebook love interests, sick to the teeth of one another. But not us.’
‘And the sex?’
‘Feck sake. I’m sorry. For a fifty-five year old Irish Catholic man, son of a sixth generation sheep farmer.’
‘There must have been sex on the farm?’
‘Feck sake.’
‘With the sheep I mean?’
‘For feck sake.’
‘Joe,’ Mary says. ‘Calm down.’
‘Joseph. It’s OK. Mary and I have been going over a few things. And she’s overheating during foreplay.’
‘Overheating.’
‘Her body is spending an inordinate amount of energy cooling itself down. It doesn’t have the capacity to orgasm as result.’
Joseph is relieved beyond words that it’s Mary’s fault, and nothing to do with him or his kissing or inexperience, or his libido, or his penis, or his erection or his existential despair or the mid-life crisis set at low vibration in his head—or none of that.
‘Buy a fan,’ says Jesús. ‘Place it beside your bed when about to have sex.’
‘A fan? Roger that. A fan. The best fecking fan in the shop,’ Joseph says as he leaves the office and sex therapy is not too bad.
*
On Christmas Eve, Joseph hands this fan across the sitting room, the fan wrapped up in Rudolph wrapping paper with a massive red bow on top. ‘Happy early Christmas,’ he says to Mary with a wink.
The kids don’t have a clue what’s going on but Joseph and Mary are smiling like teenagers. ‘You’re getting weird, Dad.’
And when the kids leave, Mary and Joseph hop, skip and jump upstairs with the fan.
‘Fecking thing,’ Joseph says when it won’t turn on. ‘The fecking thing. The cheap piece of feckin ...’
‘Calm down, Joe,’ Mary says.
But Joseph is in a fluster. ‘Mary. You wanted an orgasm for Christmas and an orgasm for Christmas is what you’re getting. We need to cool you down some other way.’
‘We could fuck in the fridge?’
‘With that language, Mary. What do you think of calling Jesus?’
‘Call him for what?’
‘What we’re paying him for? For help. He could come over.’
‘The sex therapist doesn’t come over, Joe.’
‘Mary—you told me something this month that near cut me in half. A whole life of sexual delusion. A fecking half-life I woke up to find I was living. And I’m cards-on-the-table here, Mary—I haven’t felt like a man since. I need to give you this orgasm. I need to give you this orgasm or it’s going to fecking kill me.’
Mary feels responsible. She feels the man at his wit’s end in front of her is her fault. She feels herself almost say yes. Then she retracts. Then she goes again. ‘Call him,’ she says.
Joseph calls the sex therapist. ‘Jesus. Can you come over?’
Jesús the sex therapist comes over on Christmas Eve with a red velvet Santa sack. ‘Is there a fan in that sack?’ Joseph asks.
‘Let’s go upstairs.’
The trio go upstairs to the bedroom. Jesús empties out the sack onto the bedroom floor — vibrators and blindfolds, plugs and poppers, gags and wrap-around dildos — latex and batteries and a long string of beads that reminds poor Joseph of his late grandma’s rosary — a honey lube leaking from its tube and coating everything—a filthy sticky mush of sin.
‘You’re a dirty fecker, Jesus,’ Joseph says as he inspects the haul.
‘We need none of this,’ Jesús says. ‘We need just these.’ He holds the sack itself, and a blindfold, up to Joseph’s face. ‘I will stand at the side of the bed, wearing this blindfold of course, and I will flap the sack.’
‘Flap the sack?’
‘To cool Mary down. I will be the fan.’ Jesús puts the blindfold on and starts to flap the sack like his life depends on it.
So there’s not much left to do. Joseph undresses and joins Mary on the bed. He starts to do the thing he thinks she likes but doesn’t actually like at all. And nothing has changed.
‘Are you cool?’ Joseph asks.
‘Not really,’ Mary says, mushed and smushed beneath him, and nothing is different but he’s made so much of an effort that Mary fakes a moan.
‘What was that?’ Joseph asks.
‘What was what?’
‘That was a fake moan, Mary.’
‘You’re doing a great job.’
‘A great job?’
‘Is everything OK?’ asks Jesús.
‘Everything’s great, Jesus,’ Joseph says. ‘Keep flapping there, good man.’
Jesús keeps flapping and Joseph gives something else a go. Things get worse. Joseph and Mary become forlorn. ‘Ah would you flap it for feck sake, Jesus,’ Joseph says and hops up naked from the bed. ‘Flap it,’ he says. ‘Flap it for feck sake—like this.’
Joseph snatches the sack from Jesús and begins to furiously flap it with all the anger and sexual frustration and nervous breakdown pent up inside of him.
Jesús has slipped up the blindfold to watch the required fury of flappage Joseph thinks necessary. He sees Mary on the bed. Then all three realise Jesús has seen Mary in the nip.
And there’s an intimacy. A damage-is-done sort of thing—a sort of—what’s the harm now anyway? And Joseph looks at Mary. And Mary looks at Joseph. And there’s an understanding.
‘Jesus,’ Joseph says. ‘Do you think Mary is attractive?’
‘Yes,’ Jesús says. ‘Of course.’
‘I’ll flap the sack,’ Joseph says. ‘Keep Mary company on the bed. Mary, are you OK with that?’
‘Yes,’ Mary says and so Jesús the sex therapist, not needing to be told twice, joins Mary on the bed. And Joseph gets furiously flapping the sack with ferocious amounts of pent-up sexual frustration, and Jesús, the sex therapist, starts to lay down some moves.
His touches to Mary’s body are electric—he’s opening up erogenous zones that have never before been explored, and Mary, for the first time in her life, is tingling something different. She’s bursting and the suction, she’s barely hanging on beneath his mouth. And then Jesús the sex therapist is in, pumping hard, shaking and baking, and Mary releases, and screams and Jesús only pumps harder, grabbing her hair, and her arse, and Mary feels like she’s got hands on her everything, and Joseph is furiously flapping the sack next to the bed, so hard that Jesús’ flowing locks flutter in its dripping breeze, and Jesús grabs Mary’s mouth and holds it close to his face, pinches its cheeks into him, and Mary can feel his breath, and thinks she’s blacking out, and his cock—he’s a gunslinging fuckshake firing on all cylinders.
And Mary knows her life will never be the same after this — there’s backpacking in Brazil to be done now. There’s a new and wondrous outlook—adventure—curiosity, tattoos and orgies, drugs maybe—fuck it after this fuck—and she can barely breathe for the elation—this is the ride of her life—and she’s pretty certain she’s levitating because she feels only air beneath her, and where once she was only pretending, Mary feels herself believing in love now, and God is here. Maybe she’s dead, but God’s saying now is not your time, child, go back and earn every moment. Mary now believes in reincarnation through the collective unconscious of beauty, life and gorging pleasure. Mary is realising there never was a casting out of the Garden of Eden. Heaven was here all along. Paradise is right now.
Mary’s whole psychic outlook changes as she comes. It’s like she’s being fucked by the Book of Revelation and there’s fingers in her mouth and Jesús pinches his own nipples and drinks her in as he comes hard himself, trabajando duro para papi, and the language out of him brings Mary to another climax—she’s a writhing, gasping lost-all-control mess that’s never going to be the same, all things now coming either before or after this Jesús-the-sex-therapist fuck of all fucks, all things now coming, Santa coming, eternal bliss coming, sunshine coming in the slippery blue-sex moonlight, and the sex stops but the pleasure charges onwards in electrocuting tingles, and Jesús and Mary lie in each other’s sweaty embrace for the longest time like a couple of strung-out sex junkies, caressing themselves with hot-placed kisses on the other’s spent and naked body, and gasp, and Joseph beside them flaps and flaps and flaps.
Jesús returns to the third dimension first, and sits up on the side of the bed to hazily search for his underpants. And he finds them, and stands up to put them on. And as Mary rebirths on the bed, trying to remember her own name and what year it is, Joseph comes to Jesús’ side as he’s pulling on his shirt, and Joseph grabs his shoulder and pulls Jesús in close, and Joseph looks in the eyes of the man who’s just pleasured his wife to within an inch of her life, and says:
‘Now, Jesus, that’s how to flap a sack you feckin dope.’
(c) David McGrath, 2021
David McGrath is an American singer, songwriter and actress. Born and raised in Houston, Texas, David performed in various singing and dancing competitions as a child. He rose to fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of Destiny’s Child, one of the best-selling girl groups of all time.
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