Free August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien Page B

to keep sober, but now she thought they were all behaving a little drunk and silliness was appropriate. She thought Denise said ‘Crap,‘ but could not be sure.
    ‘Here’s to sex,’ Gwyn was saying. Someone had brought a bottle of whisky and it was being passed round. The driver refused it. Ellen said she wanted to have it after Bobby, to have a taste of him. They all laughed.
    ‘There’s my girl,’ he said.
    ‘Sex within marriage,’ Gwyn said.
    ‘If I were six months younger,’ Sidney said, his arm tightening round Ellen’s neck, until she felt she’d choke, ‘we’d get married …’ and then the car was brought to a sudden grinding halt and the screech of the brakes was more desperate than the ‘Sweet Jesus,‘ that Gwyn let out. It was on a very deserted part of the road with no houses around. As soon as they stopped the cars behind had to stop too and there was an outrage of hooting.
    ‘General de Gaulle kidnapped,’ Bobby said and made a joke about having to build a private oratory for him to hear Mass every day.
    ‘And a mermaid on Fridays,’ Denise said, and then Gwyn said they ought to be ashamed of themselves ridiculing Catholics like that. They waited for a few minutes with the engine running, and cars hooting from behind, and the men making middling jokes, when the driver got out. When he came back he appeared to be trembling. A motor-cyclist was dead a few yards up.
    ‘Really dead?’ Ellen said, as if there was still a chance to prevent it.
    ‘Looks so,’ the driver said, and Gwyn said they ought to get a priest or something. They all got out. A small group of people surrounded the spot where the accident had happened. Their faces looked stricken and they had their eyes down because of the blinding headlights from a police car. They stood solemnly and watched as they would never have watched if this man had been alive. The actor pushed his way through. Over his shoulder Ellen saw the body, thrown forward from the motor-cycle which was in the centre of the road. A black car with wings like a giant bird was sprawled across the road where it had obviously swerved to avoid him. His trousers appeared to be empty of his legs and one boot was a few yards away. His sock was running blood.
    ‘He was doing eighty,’ a voice said. Most people talked in French. Someone said he was German. His papers were German. She shivered at the thought of falling ill or dying in a strange country. She wanted to go home, not to London to the pipes of light but home to the race to which she belonged: and then she shivered uncontrollably, knowing that their thoughts were no longer hers. She had vanished back into childhood and the dark springs of her terrors. She quickly memorized prayers, saw bog-holes into which animals stupidly plunged, and a mountain lake where two mad women drowned themselves. No houses for miles around. The lake itself lyric and deceptive on a summer’s day. With water-lilies on its gentle surface. More leaf than flower. She dreaded death. She thought of a young priest who came to warn her once when she started to wade out to sea at a point where bathing was dangerous. His eyes brimmed over with soft love. He’d asked nervously if she’d seen the sign. She hadn’t. She could have died but for him, unprepared, shocked and unwilling. She thanked him with her own eyes and wanted to touch his pale hands and move her fingers towards his wrists, lost in big black cassock sleeves. But she did not dare in case of encroaching on his chastity. She reached out and gripped Bobby’s bare arm and clung to him the way she had wanted to cling to the priest with the soft eyes and the austere, Christ-like, disciplined hands.
    ‘Looking at it does no good,’ she said to Bobby. He didn’t hear because he and Jason were trying to restrain Gwyn.
    ‘Listen, baby, it’s none of your business,’ Jason said as he caught her by the stole. She detached herself and one end of the stole trailed along the road