Free August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien

began to draw it back and forth, slowly between her legs. Each time she moved it she let out a moan and a muscle in her bare thighs quivered. She had taken off her stockings too. There were whistles and gasps from the various tables. The first orgasm of the evening.
    ‘I can’t stand it, I tell you I can’t stand it,’ Gwyn said. She was sobbing. Jason took an enormous handkerchief and held it over her eyes, and she sobbed and kept saying it was an insult.
    ‘You hold it,’ he said. Ellen looked from the woman sobbing to the dancer teasing the audience and then in matchlight at hordes of ants advancing over the tablecloth, and suddenly her son’s face came to her: in his duffle coat with the hood framing his round pale face, emphasizing his big eyes. She thought of the holiday he and his father were having; the pure unsullied days: digging for worms in the morning, fishing the rivers when the sun went down, slitting a trout open on the river bank and taking the insides out, tipping them back in the river; the smell of methylated and wood smoke; he would make a second fire to keep the flies off, and eating the trout off the new tin plates they would dip their bread in the frying-pan to get the last of the lovely black, savoury, melted butter. She licked her lips for them. The lights on the top half of the dancer were lurid now and dark down below. The natural-colour fox was black between the legs. You could hear a pin drop. Everybody except the actor was engrossed. She caught his eye and he leaned across and said something to her.
    ‘A what?’ she said.
    ‘ It’s a man,’ he said and she asked how.
    ‘It’s behind,’ he said, pressing his thumb on to his palm and hiding it there to show that the man had likewise hidden part of himself. Then the music got very fast and the dancer discarded the fox tail and hung the rubber breasts on either bed post and stood naked except for a triangle of black sequins above the thighs. It was a man who had perfectly mimicked all the coquette of a woman. People clapped, but some must have felt cheated as Ellen did. She also felt a little sick.
    ‘You’re all right?’ Sidney asked.
    ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. She was ashamed to say that she felt disgusted. Gwyn was blowing her nose now into the big handkerchief. It was navy with white spots. It could have been a scarf really. The oriental girls smiled as if they’d just seen a religious ceremony.
    ‘Hungry,’ the actor said. He ordered some artichokes because it was too late to get real food.
    ‘Oh, baby, don’t be silly,’ Denise said to her, drunk now and not caring what she said.
    ‘I can’t eat artichokes,’ Ellen said appealing to the actor. On stage a boy was singing Anyone who had a heart, and the English were joining in because it was the craze song in England at that time. She thought of Hugh Whistler and for the first time had no regrets about his going away. His indifference had fated her to this gathering and this gathering was exotic in a way that no Englishman could ever be.
    ‘You’re going to learn.’ Bobby came and sat next to her. Two artichokes were brought and a small dish of very yellow mayonnaise.
    ‘Not enough here for a midget,’ he said, picking one of the outer leaves, dipping its base in the mayonnaise and then nudging her to watch. With his top teeth he grazed the white base that was covered over with the mayonnaise.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s a good artichoke.’ Sucking it meditatively he said it was going to get better the deeper they got in. He enjoyed showing her.
    ‘ Try it,’ he said. She picked a leaf and watched what he did and then did the same thing. They ate slowly at first and then they began to race it and the leaves got purpler as they went deeper but the white parts were just the same. They put the grazed leaves in front of them on the table and she was doing almost as well as he was.
    ‘Oh,’ she said, surprised by the sheath of hairs that covered the heart.