Age Appropriate Reading

The creator of the immortal line “The bitches mortared the piss hole and it didn’t blow up!” has, this evening, completed his reading of Chickenhawk, which, while still a wonderful introduction to a soldier’s experience of the Vietnam War, becomes even less age-appropriate during the closing twenty pages or so.

He is lying on his bed, looking small, cute and studious, vestiges of the ice cream from his pancake still on his face. “Mum,” he says. “What does ‘semen’ mean?”

Horrified, I run back through Mason and pals’ relatively coded adventures with painted ladies but can recall nothing so explicit. “It’s another word for sperm,” I say.

“Oh,” says Z. “He’s got the clap.”

“What?!” I say.

Z says, factually, as if talking to an uncomprehending child, “This guy in the clinic has got the clap.”

So, as with any other vexed question of vocabulary, I say, “Give me the context.”

He enunciates in his best (medium) reading voice, “The white fluid resembling semen which dripped from the end…”

“Ah yes,” I say. “He has indeed.”

We are off to Laos at the crack of dawn. Time, methinks, for a nice safe topic such as Buddhism, geology or the Mekong.