so he won’t have to make eye contact or get distracted by the expression on Harry’s face. Harry clips and shapes. He brushes a fly away from his mouth and clears his throat.
‘Strong and wiry, Michael, the female pubic bush. Coarse. Nothing like the soft hair of the head. I’ve always thought of it more as fur than hair. Similar colouring can be expected. Dark hair, dark bush; mousy hair, mousy bush and so on, and it’ll all go to grey in the end with senile decay. Not that you have to worry about that for a while, eh?’
Michael makes a brief noise of agreement behind his teeth. Harry pushes on.
‘Why then? Why then a thick bush of hair directly over the female genital opening? In my reckoning the answer is climate. The bush creates a protective warmth, a humid environment for the essential sexual tissues beneath it. See the plant, Michael?’ Harry motions roundly with his hands. ‘The plant is in constant conversation with the soil beneath it. The plant funnels in water and provides shade and nutrients that keep the soil moist and fertile. First rule of farming, Michael?’
Michael moves his head slightly to indicate that he doesn’t know.
‘First rule of farming, Michael, is keep your ground covered. And I’d extrapolate it is much the same with this. Remove the bush and the whole – whole … mechanism will dry out beneath it.’
Harry takes Michael’s hand in his and places it on top of the phalaris.
‘Don’t just be tempted to stay on the surface. You have to push in.’ He turns Michael’s hand sideways and uses it like a knife to chop through the leafy stems to the soil below. ‘This is where the riches are. Notice how the soil is moist beneath the plant, but not in the surrounding area?’
They stand up, Harry absentmindedly still holding Michael’s hand. A cow bellows in the paddock behind them. Harry reaches out and rests his boot on the bush.
‘The pubic bush. A bloody miracle. And it has no sense of gravity. Despite being stuck halfway up in the air most of the time, from what I can see it doesn’t droop.’
Harry favours the demonstration, the practical approach, but he finds it difficult to discuss his own experiences with Michael. Some intimate topics are better tackled in the evening with a cup of Milo, a sharpened pencil and several sheets of Basildon Bond.
I remember this from the early days with Edna. I was making a sandwich in the kitchen and she’d just got up from a nap. It was late afternoon. She had a piece of crochet wrapped around her shoulders and just her underslip on. She propped herself up on the kitchen counter and watched me collecting the paraphernalia – knife, meat, pickles, dripping, plate, bread. Each time I walked past her she put her bare leg out and touched me with it; sort of wiped it against me. I didn’t pay much attention. Ate my sandwich, rinsed the plates. Put everything away shipshape. Then I went over to give her a friendly peck and she had me. Legs around me like a vice, pulling me in to her and her eyes – I noticed her eyes – all glassy, turned in on themselves (remember Babs when she had the staggers?). Despite the shock of it I wasn’t averse. (I can’t think, Michael, of many times in my life when I’ve been averse.) She pulled her slip up and without the hindrance of underpants I slid my fingers between her legs (under the furred pubic mound the skin clefts and splits much like the bifurcation of stone fruit, only deeper), into a slick, a drenching, of sex oil. The internal skin of the female organ is pitted with oil-producing glands that release on arousal. In my experience a slight dampening is the usual state of play, but this particular afternoon Edna was irrigated full-bore. I won’t go into the mechanics of what followed, the point of interest here is the timing and quantity of secreted oil. My reckoning is that it was the sandwich. The connection between sex oil and saliva is obvious. The role of the male in keeping the female well nourished goes back to the ancients, but over the years we’ve drifted away from the biology of it. Feeding the female prior to sexual congress triggers the secretions of saliva and of sexual oil that prepare her for the downstairs menu. This time with Edna, she wasn’t