Status Updates From Mouthing

Back then, when you died, you didn’t have Mick Farrell coming along shoving a pipe up your backside. Pumping you full of Roundup and paint stripper. There was no embalming then. Dead people looked like dead people and that was it. Nowadays you could put a corpse on the catwalk and no one’d be any the wiser. They make them look that good.

…… Romeo isn’t any better or worse than he was before all this drama took place, in fact he’s just a boring old fucker who doesn’t even have a fat wife to hide behind any more. Mark my words, you’ll be hopping mad with yourself that you wasted your young days waiting on a roll in the hay twice a week with a fella who has his head halfway up his arse and who doesn’t have a clue whether he’s coming or going.

You’re not to go next, nigh or near that shite hawk and if he wants someone to drive around listening to the sound of him puffing and sighing in the car, he can go find some other poor eejit who’ll do that for the price of a bag of chips. Fuck it, Paula, you’re worth more.
He could at least throw in a battered sausage, Stacey said.

I followed up by saying that I thought the stripper was all right in her own way. She could’ve been worse like. Never went in for the baby oil or any of that stuff.
It was a fortnight before I was allowed back into the bed. Another week after that before I got a hot dinner. Three fuckin’ weeks without a spud all because of that gobshite and his stripper.

People make presumptions about nurses, thinking they’re all kind and motherly and warm. Well, I’m here to tell you that’s a load of bunkum. Some of the worst description of hures I’ve ever come across were nurses and with good reason. You’ve no use looking to be a nurse if you’re soft and have the sympathy of the world for people. What use is that?

Then there was the funeral….What a glory. Mammy brushed his teeth over&over before handing them to the undertaker. They have to be fitted into the mouth,….It fills out the face. And I wondered at that. All the eating he had done with his bare gums& now they put teeth in. Michael Farrell was right. He looked different. Younger somehow. With the teeth. His cheeks rounded. Cheeks that we had stood in line to kiss.