(21)THEY SAID IT WAS FACT
They were talking about it on the bus. They said it was fact: one sneeze felt the same as one eighth of an orgasm. Caroline stripped to the skin when she got home. And naked in her kitchen she sprinkled ground pepper on the air and breathed through her nose.
(22)ANTICIPATION
He likes the moment just before. Eyes closed. A breath in - and held. Everything else waiting. To see. If this time it’d happen. It’s there. He knows it is. Waiting to catch him unawares. Then, when he thinks it isn’t going to happen, and he relaxes… then he sneezes.
(23)A DAY OF IT
Been doing it all day. One after another, each one caught in a soggier and soggier handkerchief. And she looks like shit. And her nose aches and her eyes watering and ‘fuck this’ she thinks. One eighth of an orgasm they said. And Ursula’s drained, and it won’t bloody stop.
(24)ISN’T IT MAGPIES?
‘One’s a wish,’ he says. And, ‘Two’s a kiss.’ And Harriet later wonders what a fucking hundred is, or a hundred and one. And she’s not a sight that invites kissing, not the way she looks. And isn’t it magpies anyway, all that one for this and two for that?
(25)WHAT HIS MOTHER SAID
'Better out than in,' Brian's mother said. And she meant sneezes; when his father said it he meant farts. 'And you'll give yourself a hernia trying not to, or pinching your nose'll make your eyes pop out of their sockets, or your brains shoot out of your ears. Just sneeze!
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