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.
I remember my dad removing a Tom Sharpe book from my hands after I asked him what ‘orgy’ meant when I was not much older than Z. As he took it, I yelled ‘No, no! I know it can mean group sex but that isn’t what is being referred to here, I just wondered if it had another meaning?’ Must check that out sometime…
Fred, on the other hand, won’t watch, read or hear of anything that has a hint of kissy, lovey or sexy stuff. He would absolutely kill, however, to hang out with a puppy like that. Too cute!