Anyway this particular night of the wake I was sitting on the bowl doing the last dregs watching the swinging pendulum kind of descent he does and I suddenly realised I’d been feeling hot and prickly for a while and then it came to me I still had my trousers on. Well fuck me, I thought, and then I said to hell with it, I’m nearly finished anyway. So I put my mind to enjoying the rest of it but the enjoyment was greatly diminished, nonexistent if I’m being completely truthful, because I was thinking that after I finished I should strictly speaking soak my lower half in the bath, a manoeuvre that has never appealed to me even sober, and then get miraculously dried with the wee hand towel Mammy had left in the bathroom and change from the waist down. Imagine only leaving a hand towel and all those people coming in. She’d shame you.
The logistics involved in the washing and drying and changing seemed too impractical if not impossible to consider seriously since all my clean clothes were upstairs and to get there minus trousers and underpants and with only a small hand towel held in front of me would present some difficulty. I had a fleeting image of me charging through the hall and streaking past stunned mourners up the stairs like Tarzan. And to add to the gravity of the situation the wakeroom would be on my route of course which meant I’d have to pass Hourigan whom I could hear at that very minute holding forth in his pulpit voice on what drink was doing to family life in Derry. I therefore made up my mind on no account to leave the bathroom until the priest had gone.
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The Wake - Table of contents
HumorTHE YEAR is 1968 and the Swinging Sixties are still swinging - though not in Ireland. But wait! An old woman dies in a northern Irish town and her wake becomes a rendezvous for lesbians, bisexuals and political revolutionaries. And in there among t...
