Free Bend for Home, The by Dermot Healy

you’re for circumcision?
    I am.
    We thought you were someone else, he explained. Get into your pyjamas and I’ll take you upstairs.
    As I crossed the room in my pyjamas I saw Brendan Heaney enter with his father and mother. They were helping him. His skin was bright yellow and he was in carpet slippers. With my clothes under my arm I took the lift to the second floor. Forty years later I was mistakenfor another Heaney, when a man stopped me up in Sligo town and took my hand and said, You’re made. You can laugh at them now. Then he congratulated me on winning the Nobel Prize.
    *
    Father A. B. McGrath walked down the ward. Then he saw me in the bed.
    What has you here? he asked.
    They took a bit of my mickey off, I said.
    Not before time, he replied. This is a choirboy of mine, he explained to the nurse. He sat on the bed. So why did they do that to you?
    It started to itch.
    Did it?
    My foreskin was too long.
    I see.
    So they cut it off.
    The same, he said, happened to Jesus.
    *
    Una and two of her girlfriends came to call. They sat around the bed, whispering and joking and enthralled by what had happened me. The thought that I might have lost such an extraordinary organ made me an object of great interest.
    Are you in pain? the Keogan girl asked.
    A little.
    Can we see it? said Doreen Smith.
    No.
    Can you go to the toilet?
    Yes.
    How do you go to the toilet?
    Carefully, I said.
    This made them laugh. A few days later I was let go and ordered to return in a week to have the stitches out. Each day I painfully urinated and grew terrified of having the doctors near me again. By the time a week had gone by I did not have the courage to return to the outpatients.
    On the appointed day I walked out to Swellan lake, returned and said it was done.
    Now that I’d told the lie I didn’t know what to do. The next morning when I woke the stitches were still there, a purple hem round my flittered foreskin. The next morning they were there again. I began to fear that the stitches might be there for all time.
    I stopped outside the hospital but could not bring myself to go in. The window of the operating room on the second floor was ajar. I could see Surgeon Moloney in a blue plastic hat washing his hands. A nurse with a tray of implements passed by. Steam pumped out of the down-pipe.
    I ran home.
    That night in the bedroom I took a scissors and patiently snipped each stitch, then gently drew them out. I could feel the pain in the soles of my feet. I thought when I had finished that the head might fall off. But it didn’t. It was a delicate intimate affair, and when it was over, it brought me immense relief. But with each hint of an erection I held my breath and tried to think of other things.
    Slowly it came back to itself. Dirty thoughts no longer made me flinch. When I went jiving at the record hops Una’s friends would laugh, but I’d keep my head aloft, as if I didn’t see them.
    The first time I heard about sex I was up a STOP sign pole where Town Hall Street entered Farnham Street. Whoever was standing at the bottom of the pole carefully explained that babies came out through their mother’s bellybutton. When I heard that I climbed down very slowly.
    I used stand for hours in the library on Saturday mornings, looking at the nudes in tall books on classical art, then take home the The Lives of the Martyrs to read. Lust and pain were regular bedfellows.
    The courting began next a haycock in the field. It was mild enough to begin with. Then the eldest amongst us held one of the girls down in the hay.
    He shouted at us to look.
    A sort of sexual frenzy gripped everyone. The girls laughed and fought. I trailed my fingers across the girl’s knickers. He let go her hands. She put her arms around me and kissed me. Then we got upand walked shamefaced back to town. A few days later I was in the garden at the back of the Breifne with my mother.
    I told her I had something to tell her. We walked through the wild rhubarb. I struggled