Celebrated Letters of John B. Keane, page 23
Had you not come from healthy stock you would be feeding worms this long while. Fortunately for you, you were always possessed of a stomach which was capable, as your mother once boasted, of digesting an anvil.
On another occasion, after you had returned home with your wife from a dinner dance, one of your neighbours claimed he was unexpectedly awakened from deep sleep. He had left the dance earlier like the sensible man of moderation that he was and was sleeping the sleep of the just when his slumber was disrupted. Granted the same fellow tends to exaggerate but he positively swears that during dinner he saw you eating sufficient mashed potatoes and onions to keep a small army on the march for several days. According to the neighbour you left the kitchen where your wife was preparing some tea and took yourself to an outhouse. Here you were heard to belch so outrageously that the corrugated iron roof of the outhouse was lifted several inches into the air in a veritable haboob of dust before settling once more on its supports. It was then that I was paid a belated but much-prized compliment:
‘That man,’ said the neighbour, ‘has a stomach like a boa constrictor.’
Alas and alack I am at this time so grievously overworked that I would not be surprised if a duodenal ulcer was forming in the uproar of my digestion. It is truly a miracle that I have survived so long without succumbing to a cancerous tumour or to one of the other evil visitations to which all stomachs are subject.
If one of your more comprehensive belches could be fully analysed by a computer my story would be heard at last and you might come to your senses. If some sort of machine could be devised into which you might belch several times in the round of a day, and if a spoken interpretation could be forthcoming, I would a tale unfold that would bring tears from a hardboiled egg.
Please to remember during your more complacent moments that I have been rumbling a long time now. Soon, all too soon, the lava will come spurting from your mouth and I shall be emptied forever. Yet, for all my rumbling and grumbling, my puling and my puking, my external naval area is the most presentable part of the entire anatomy. Even females who are averse to nude masculinity will reluctantly concede that the male belly is less obnoxious and more bearable than the buttocks, for instance, or the back or the chest or the callops, or indeed what have you! Let us, however, leave my outside to those who would have truck with it and let us return to the interior from which much is to be learned if one is prepared to listen. Listen to me my son and I will keep you healthy. The burp and the belch and all the revelations of the posterior, lisping or loud, must be given ear. These are my true sentiments and they contain much that will lengthen your days. I am the soul of patience. You have been stuffing me with impossible burdens of food and drink for the best part of a lifetime. By all the powers that be I should be out of commission long ago. I should have been supplemented, of course, by a second stomach or, at the very least, should have been rested for long periods. I never was, and this raises the question: how long more can I continue as I am? This is entirely up to you and, fortunately, it is not yet too late. Moderation will do both of us the world of good but moderation was never for you. You regarded moderation as a mortal enemy. You are a man who demolished two mature lobsters and a bottle of potstill whiskey for his forty-ninth birthday. In my youth I would have regarded such a monumental intake before bedtime as a mere repast, a challenge to my digestive juices, but nowadays I am put to the pin of my collar to cope with paté and toast.
I remember once aboard a train as you returned with a party of other drunkards from a rugby game the barman announced that all the bottled stout had been consumed.You resorted, as did your friends, to whiskey. Seated across the aisle was a mild-mannered book-immersed gorsoon whose mother dozed fitfully close by. As the whiskey mingled with a dozen or more bottles of stout and, of course, the prime fillet steak, the French fries, the onions and the mushrooms and the gases remaining from the morning’s gin and tonics, there began a series of mild burps which gradually blossomed into boisterous belches.
I recall how I rumbled gently as the raw whiskey made you hold your breath before searing its way downwards into my crammed interior. There came from me, unsolicited by you, first a snarl followed by a whine, and then a succession of minor, almost inaudible rumbles. It was my way of intimating to you that enough was enough, that I needed to be rested. You persisted, however, and as though to keep me in my place threw back a glass of undiluted whiskey as if it were a spoonful of lukewarm soup. It was then that I held forth as I never held forth before. First came an inharmonious, low-key cacophony which increased in volume until all the passengers in the seats contiguous to yours lifted their heads in fear, most notably the gorsoon who sat across the way. Not knowing where the sound came from his face registered considerable alarm. When I attained a crescendo of baying and howling the alarm was quickly replaced by fear and then abject terror. He leaped from his seat and sought refuge in his mother’s arms. She, poor creature, disturbed from her unquiet dreams, bestowed upon him the absolute comfort of her arms as he called out to all within earshot that there were lions and tigers in the carriage.
You were obliged to beat a hasty retreat to the toilet where my rumblings eventually subsided. When you returned some time later your neighbours, drunken companions apart, had taken themselves well out of earshot and occupied some vacant seats at the far end of the carriage. It was not the first time you were responsible for an evacuation of this nature.
There was the occasion of the excursion and I think you will agree that this is the one incident of all the incidents in your life that you would most like to forget. At the time you were a mere eighteen and it was with considerable reluctance that you accompanied your mother who expressed a desire to spend a summer’s day beside the sea. She prepared a lunch of chicken and salad which subsequently proved to be highly palatable as well as being extremely beneficial and easily digested. As soon as the lunch was consumed some elderly friends of your mother’s happened along the beach. You excused yourself and informed her that you would like to have a swim and take in the amusements of the resort before returning to take her to the station. As a result it was not you but the contents of yours truly which were obliged to swim. These contents included the delectable salad so lovingly prepared by your mother, a large bag of periwinkles, a double portion of fish and chips before you started drinking and a second smaller portion when you felt peckish after you had drunk your fill.
At the time you were still a long way from graduation to beer and stout but you were a comparatively old hand as a dabbler in O’Shonnessy’s sparkling cider, a beverage which you had been flooring successfully if excessively since your fifteenth birthday. Now in your eighteenth year you were to indulge to an unprecedented degree in what the manufacturers euphemistically labelled ‘the produce of the home orchard, pressed out of mature and luscious fruit’.
On the return journey you deposited your mother near the window in the front seat of the carriage directly behind the engine which was as far removed as possible from the carriage you had terrorised on the outgoing journey. You need not have bothered for the good reason that your victims had observed you as you entered the station and shrewdly waited for you to deposit yourself before availing of a carriage at the other end of the train.
Experience, like history, is a net from which it is difficult to extricate oneself but those homebound travellers should have learned from my rumblings and grumblings on the outward journey and should have extricated themselves at once from where they found themselves and awaited the arrival of the next transport.
All went well during the first few miles but then your brimming bladder began to expostulate and you relieved yourself in the toilet. It was here that you made the faux pas which was responsible for the disaster that followed. You had, in the tavern, out of sheer bravado, purchased a baby bottle of Jamaica rum which you concealed in your trouser pocket to relieve, as you told yourself with a smirk, the rigours of the return journey.
How wise was he who said that you cannot put an old head on young shoulders. Unscrewing the cap you swallowed the entire contents of the baby rum. Such was the impact of this fresh intake that you found yourself panting for air.
But for a succession of breaths, long and deep, I would never have been able to retain that powerful Caribbean potion. Shaking your head and swallowing hard you drew yourself erect into a semblance of sobriety. The toilet, it transpired, was situated at the very end of that very last carriage and who should be seated in the seat outside but the same gorsoon you had routed on the rugby train. He made at once for his mother’s lap, the naked fear rampant in his eyes. In the seats close by sat several other passengers, all alarmed, forewarned by the quaking boy and his anguished mother. Now, fully alerted to your presence, they sat rigidly upright in their seats.
For a moment you stood apologetically surveying them. You noted the pretty white frocks of the two genteel sisters in their early twenties and were hurt when they frowned upon seeing you. There was an elderly parson and his wife, a frail creature dressed in a leopardskin swagger of indeterminate age and a red bonnet weighted down by an assortment of multicoloured wax fruits. Finally there was a trio of nuns, hooded and veiled with beads in their hands as they silently recited the evening prayers.
As you stood uncertainly, unable to make up your mind whether you would be capable or not of maintaining your balance, you were suddenly suffocated by a feeling of nausea. Then came the upheaval prompted by the earlier and injudicious intake of the Jamaican rum. A torrent of cider issued in wanton abandon from your open mouth. In it was the undigested flotsam of periwinkles, chips, fish, chicken, salad and every other particle in my beleaguered depths. It would be the vastest and most drenching vomit you would ever make and I say this knowing you to be a veteran of a thousand upheavals. What an ecumenical puke it was! It equally drenched the Roman Catholic nuns and the Church of Ireland parson as well as his horrified wife. The end of the stream which contained the majority of the undigested French fries and all of the barely chewed fish was distributed evenly over the mother and son and the pretty white dresses of the mortified sisters.
Still spewing the remains of the record-breaking retch you lurched forward without as much as a word of apology leaving in your wake a vomit-covered and utterly shattered company of innocents who between them, the clergyman apart, had never consumed as much as a solitary pale sherry in their entire lives. They sat now reeking in unfamiliar filth, too stunned to utter the slightest protest. The clergyman was the only person to pass comment. Imagine my surprise to hear a man of the cloth suggest that it was I, the stomach, which was to blame for the entire catastrophe. Said he in a voice shaking with disdain:
‘The scoundrel can’t stomach his liquor!’
To associate me with the appalling misbehaviour of my proprietor was an injustice of the greatest magnitude and to think that it came from the mouth of a uniformed Christian. It was you, the Brain, who was totally responsible and it was you, you craven coward, who slyly departed the scene when the damage was done.
The fact that I have survived intact to this day is ample testimony to my mettle. I am, however, prepared to forget the past. There is little profit in remembering ancient wrongs although I can never quite erase the sight of those genteel people endeavouring to clean themselves as you sneaked drunkenly to the leading carriage.
The tragedy was compounded by the fact that they had believed themselves to be safe. I believe that Robbie Burns created the most truthful and profound stanza of all time when he leaned on his plough to address himself to the mouse who habitation he had unwittingly destroyed:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Gang aft a-gley
And leave us nought but grief and pain
For promised joy.
How blissfully they sat before you were called to the toilet, and then in a trice how shattered! I could recall for you other indiscretions but the excursion puke as I would like to call it is sufficient for our purpose. It is now high time you came to your senses.
Look then to my upkeep and maintenance and spare me henceforth from the indigestible and the unpalatable. I will reward you well for it is true to say that when I fail you everything else will fail you as a matter of course. Remember this when next you tax me. I cannot go on forever; time to wind me down, to give me the rest I so richly deserve or I will growl you out of your appetite and groan you into an early grave.
Sincerely
Your Stomach
The Posterior Writes
Dear Brain
What a shapely and ornamental article I was in my heyday! How rotund and fulsome, how firm yet buoyant, how curvaceous yet slender! Oh how eminently pattable was I, how kneadable, how caressable! How trim! I was as shapely a backside as ever adorned the end of a trunk, as ever overlooked a thigh or collop, as ever saucily sported itself before the eye of misfortune!
How I scorn the term buttocks; they remind me of so much dead meat.
They have labelled me bum, bottom, backside, arse, croup, rump and coccyx but what care I! I am what I am, a simple posterior designed to enforce the rut, to break the fall, to suffer the kick, to steady the scrum, to sit on the fence, to press the case, to soften the shock, to bear the brunt.
I have been threatened with more kicks and, perversely, invited more kisses than any other part of the anatomy. Alas, I have received too many of the former and none of the latter. I doubt if it will ever be resolved whether posteriors were just made to be kicked or whether the brain draws the kicks upon us. It’s like trying to decide which was there first, the hen or the egg, the whore or the pimp. I have watched silently as our own feet, left and right, aimed themselves after a retreating posterior whose owner had been aggressive or insulting. Similarly I have seen you kick a bending figure on the rear end for no reason at all. I heard you justify your actions afterwards by suggesting that as surely as stones were made to be flung so were arses made to be kicked; your very own words my dear lord and master.
Unlike Gaul I am only divided into two parts. Yet there exists no partition for we are really one. Can you imagine a posterior with only one cheek? Could anything be more ridiculous? I remember the first kick which ever jolted me into the harsh realities of coexistence. You were but a ten-year-old whilst the man who kicked me was eighty. Much as I resented that kick it was, I felt, richly deserved. You had callously taken the life of one of his three ducks, the remnants of a once populous clutch which he had vainly hoped would provide him with eggs for his daily needs. The stone which you flung would not normally arrive within an ass’s roar of the target but on this tragic occasion the duck was smitten on the very top of its head. Death was instantaneous. You were caught in the act and the old man implanted a kick which you were to feel for several weeks afterwards. That was the first of many. Kicks, however, I could accept but not permanent disfiguration which was to be my lot when you reneged on your fees in a seedy massage parlour. Before you had time to draw on your trousers the madame, quick as a flash, inscribed the sign of the cross with a razor blade on my left cheek where the mark remains to this day as a caution to masseuses everywhere that they were not to be duped by your innocent face but were to demand their fees in advance.
Some months later as your mother handed you a towel in the bathroom she could not help but notice the transverse lacerations which dominated my left cheek. Shocked beyond words she demanded an explanation. Hastily wrapping the towel around me, thereby concealing the crude disfiguration, you explained without batting an eyelid that it was part of an initiation ceremony. Inveterate liar that you were you convinced the poor woman that you were now, as a result of the sacred inscription, a member fully-fledged of a society devoted to the propagation of the Catholic faith, a society which expressly forbade its members to wear their hearts on their sleeves but rather wished them to pursue their vocations secretly and discreetly. You brought tears to the poor woman’s eyes when you explained that the reward for such unselfish devotion would come not in this life but in the next. She never doubted you and you salved your conscience by convincing yourself that you wished to spare her the seamier side of your more mundane activities.
As the years rolled by and your paunch began to protrude so did I begin to obtrude in the opposite direction until the specially tailored slacks and trousers which fitted your once lithe figure so admirably had to be disposed of for good to be substituted by the baggy britches which are anathema to females. Drink was the chief reason for my expansion. You might have held the obesity at bay had you moderated your intake and indulged in jogging or even walking, although my innate honesty compels me to recount an isolated occasion when you ran several hundred yards without stopping until your goal was attained.
You had dined well, as I remember, but then there was never an occasion when you did not dine well. On the evening in question, while the stomach laboured incessantly to digest the beef, the pudding, the potatoes, the assorted vegetables, the gravy, the sweet and the cheese, you fell into a deep slumber in front of the sitting room fire. Around you sat your loving family, your well-preserved, pseudo-aristocratic wife and charming daughters. Your snoring soon dominated all the other sounds of the room. After a while the snores grew fitful and uneven. Your wife, believing you to be the victim of a nightmare, called into your ear that there was no need for alarm. When you spluttered into wakefulness she repeated the assurance.
‘No need for alarm!’ you echoed in consternation as you noted the hands of the mantelpiece clock. The time was twenty minutes to eleven which was the precise and blessed hour the taverns closed their doors for the night. You leaped from the armchair like a scalded cat and without donning hat or overcoat dashed out of doors and ran through the streets like a man demented until you reached the nearest pub.
