Chapter One Hundred and Thirty-Five
There comes a time in each man’s life when he looks about him and wonders if he might somehow give back what he has taken; render, rather than grab; push his balance book into the black. So it was with Mister Drig, who, having ejaculated across Mister O’Herlihy’s hairless chest, noted that his companion’s penis, like a maple in a meadow untrammelled by man, was regularly left untapped. And so he, with the grace and benevolence of a descending deity, wanked him off. Mister O’Herlihy tried to object that this action was unnecessary, neither solicited nor expected, but Mister Drig’s fist wanked true, and, at the moment of climactic mushrooming; or, if you prefer, the time-lapsed fanning-out of branches into a flickering sky; or, if you don’t like that one, how about the phlegmy cough of a chair-confined superannuate; or might I suggest, the cataclysmic rupture of a decayed dam? Now, if you don’t fancy any of them—what can I do?
Let’s move on.
At his point of eruption, Mister O’Herlihy was treated to a neat precis of his life up to that moment: his penurious upbringing as the ragged son of a coal miner, loved but lacking sufficient regular meals to prevent his stunted growth. His father, having survived a cave-in but lost the use of one leg, had his petition for compensation from the company rudely refused, and retaliated by breaking into the owner’s house and executing him, his wife and his children, only to be burnt alive in the conflagration which ensued during the siege by the soldiers dispatched to put it down. Before his incineration, however, he’d had his wits enough about him to toss from an upper window a brooch, which his wife caught down below and passed to young Seamus to run off and pawn. What young Seamus did was gamble it in a game of cards, win, use his profit to buy his mother and himself a mansion in London, and care for her until her death, after which, with nowhere to go, and his neighbours increasingly annoyed with his inclination to shrilly whinge at the slightest mishap, he took off on a trip round the world, ending up here, with his semen waxing over Mister Drig’s decelerating hand.
Flush with contentment, he slept.