The Gift of Women Read online

  But she can tell he thinks it’s her marking him as hers. And, how would she feel if some lover notched her up to his conquests in her sleep? But that’s not the way of it. She’s cutting him into her life long-time, not short-time – blood bonding them together. Look, she’s cut her arm the same, close to the shoulder, and pressed it to his, Siamese twinning a tiny wee bit of what flows from both their hearts and minds inside them, but that’s not how he takes it.

  He looks at his shoulder and at hers, like she’s not cut him in, but cut him out, off from something he’s staring wide-eyed at in the dark – his eyes like two big jellyfish. The noise of him gives her a head-buster of a headache. It’s no human sound. Never mind the Hoeys and the Carscaddens next door hearing it – out at sea, they’ll pick it up on that newfangled detector for submarine noise. And Meta’s slap dab in the middle of the bed with it.

  She has to get up and get herself a headache powder.

  On the cutting board in the kitchen, she chops the twist off the blue packet with the carving knife. Tips it straight into her mouth, instead of pouring it into a cup. She tips three more powders till they are all done and goes through the same routine at the Redmond’s counter the next morning – three in a row, and she needs more.

  She stands back, away from the counter at Redmond’s shop, waiting for them, and is scrolled up and down by the eyes of all who come in and out for their messages. She puts up with the chinging of the doorbell to give Basil the option of an exit while she’s at Redmond’s away from his piercing cheep and chitter.

  They’ve all heard it, but don’t say.

  The shoppers believe Meta is raising budgies, which doesn’t make sense to them. Budgies that eat herring is the only evidence they have. There are those that raise budgies by the hundred, for sale. They imagine Meta’s bungalow, hiving with yellow budgies and white budgie shit. Like everything else, Meta’s brought it on herself.

  “It’s the budgies,” they say, “isn’t it, Meta? Them budgies are the bugger. Wouldn’t you be better keeping hens and selling the eggs?” they ask her out of nowhere, expecting Meta to answer as she stands with her back to the sliding panel for the display window

  “Where would I put the bloody run – in the river?” Meta tells them, then moans, “That’s the only run room I have.”

  She makes sense to them, for once. They shut up and watch her face to keep up with the progress of her headache after she has downed the powders.

  A budgie head-buster.

  God knows who brought her this chirpy wee gift, but Meta’s sunken eyes are as guarded as a cave with moonraker’s treasure. The longer Meta stands, the more she disturbs Mrs. Redmond. But Mrs. Redmond lets her be because Meta might disclose something worth waiting to hear.

  The poor women who get into the breeding business.

  They’ve read about them in the newspapers they buy at Redmond’s. That ladies’ tailor with the chinchillas she reared for fur coats. The chillas had no proper coop, or whatever they use, so she kept them in her house. They ate her wallpaper, her furniture, nibbled her whole house down around her, then ran away from the home they’d destroyed. If they hadn’t sent her to Purdysburn, nothing would be funnier than the ladies’ tailor who wanted to be a high-class furrier with her own home-reared fur. Women with their gumption pointed in the wrong direction are shoo-ins for the asylum.

  “Are you sure it’s budgies and not some bruiser?” one customer asks over her shoulder, as she pulls open the door and rings its brass bell going out.

  They look at Meta.

  “Or a squealer?” the next one asks as her parting shot.

  But what kind of squealer – a traitor, an IRA informer for the Jerries?

  More likely the regular kind of squealer they all had. The squealer for his dinner, squealer for his tea, squealer for his friggin’ fags from the shop.

  “Here, have one on me.” Mrs. Redmond’s daughter hands Meta another blue twist with a headache powder in it.

  He’s there when she gets back, staring at his arm, holding the streak of crusted blood to his nose. He snorts at it, but the noise comes out of his toque.

  “Basil Del Feeney, you’re still stark naked and it’s one o’clock.”

  He turns his look toward his sweater, trousers, glossy, patent rubber slippers as if they’re to blame for abandoning his body. “I’m going to put some vinegar in a pot,” she says, then goes into the kitchen and puts some vinegar in a pot, sets it on a hob of the gas stove. The kitchen is no bigger than a galley on a little boat. Its pungency will help her head and she’ll put one cloth soaked in it on his arm and the other on her forehead. Our Lord gave vinegar the power to do for others what it couldn’t do for him – take away the pain.

  “Vinegar is a miracle,” she tells Basil Del Feeney.

  “Vine-gar mir-acle,”

  “You know I didn’t mean to. I got greedy for your rhythm section,” she says. “I had no right to want it permanent on my tum-tum,” she says to him in her talking-to-children’s voice.

  “No right,” he repeats, and sounds too much like a budgie for her liking. A blue parrot she has picked up out of the sea.

  All this recuperation from a little nick. Feeding him fish-soup over and over nauseates her. A cat, at least, can take a turn at bread dipped in a saucer of milky tea. But the bones, the eyes, and the livers. He has to have them. In no days’ time she’s convinced again it was a bad idea to have a man in her bungalow.

  “Once in the door,” her Ma told her, “they’re tyrannical invalids.” No, her Ma went one better: “Titanic invalids!”

  “The debilitation of love,” the minister in the Carnalea Methodist Church said one time in his sermon, while Meta was still a going member of the congregation. “Jesus suffered from the incurable weakness of love for man.”

  Meta snickered at that and got elbowed by her mother.

  Basil Del Feeney is after something. He wants out of bed. He wants to show her what it is he wants. He draws it for her with his finger. He draws squares in the air in front of her face. A sheet of squared paper is what he wants, a paper they can play X’s and O’s on.

  He splays the fingers of one hand and crosses them with the other, he swings his fingers like a cat’s cradle. A sheet of paper that swings? No. A net is what he wants, a net that swings! What’s a net that swings – a hammock – what every lazy-arsed Latin lover likes to lie and do fuck all in, once they have some bitch to do the work for them!

  “You want a bloody hammock?”

  But she can’t be angry at him. He’s wasting away. Hardly a day gone by and he’s wasting in spite of two doses of fish soup, whelks, mussels, dulse – clams, rock cod, eels from under the stones for snacks. She’s got to go back into Bangor and back to work at old Furey’s pub. She’s been a week away already. Old Furey wants her back behind the bar, her bosom there to bump up the take. She can’t be sneaking by old Furey’s to Sharkey, the Ship’s Chandler’s, next door!

  But she could go to a chandler’s in Belfast.

  “Do you want brass rings to go with it?” she asks Basil Del Feeney.

  “So, have you taken on an extra hand who needs a hammock?” the chandler’s helper asks while Meta examines the brass blowers and compasses with her finger. The way she has her breasts thrust up with her corset, Meta could pose as a siren or ship’s figurehead for sale, but she only aims to lead the chandler’s man on – to see if it leads to a discount.

  “If I have, will I get trade rate?”

  “I won’t say I can’t say yes,” he tells her very slowly, then asks, “Your vessel is called?”

  “HMS Del Feeney.”

  “And your new hand’s name is?”

  “Basil Del Feeney.”

  “And what does the boat trade in – dopey monikers or silly monkeys?”

  They both laugh.

  “Perhaps I can assist you mounting the item after you purchase it?”

  “You’ll have to get the train and come to Carnalea with me
to do that.”

  “Perhaps a demonstration here will do instead. I’ll give you trade rate, if you’ll just come in the back and pick your hammock.”

  He says his perhapses as though they are made of truly juicy pears and happy hapses.

  The midnight shadow on Del Feeney’s chin is dry, bristly and blotched. Sickening smudges mottle his back and shoulders. He has her hang the hammock over the back stoop, but looks no happier in it, just darker because of the gloomy outdoors and the rain.

  He still chitters. He’s not cold, hasn’t got a cold. He’s just shrivelling and Meta has begun to connect his chitters to the rain, which has been on since she nicked him and left for Belfast. The river has risen over the edge of her garden, stirring around her whitewashed stones on the river bank, drowning and deadening their colour.

  By the morning, her garden is thoroughly flooded and Del Feeney’s gone.

  In his place – a peace offering, an ugly great tuna fish swinging in the hammock, like Basil caught it flying through the air in the dark. For God’s sake, it’s nothing so edible as a tuna, it’s a damn dolphin not even a magician could cut into nice frying steaks. After her going to the trouble of installing a hammock, he only wanted it to go fishing for his farewell.The dolphin has a fin on it like a plough share, and Basil’s frigging toque like a blue bye-bye note stuck over its blowhole, suffocating the poor beast. Its nose is poking through a hole in the mesh.

  Does Meta find the thing ugly because she’s lumped with it as this heart-wrenching, likely back-breaking, very ugly gift? Your dolphin’s not like your nice tuna. They have fins like little ballet dancer’s feet. They do pas de dousies in the sea on them.

  She flips the hammock and is immediately sorry. The slap makes the back porch’s floor boards jump loose from their nails. The river gives a swollen aargh. “Aargh,” Meta gargles back at it as she heaves the dolphin’s tail and body behind it down the back porch steps until she stands shin deep in water, in her own sopping garden.

  The wet makes the grass as slippery as sea weed. She feels mud between her toes; the grass she hasn’t cut all summer winds around her ankles. So what if the damn dolphin doesn’t like it, the slime makes it easier for her, but it’s beyond comprehension what a man will lumber a woman with.

  Now, the dolphin flails. The slide and roll of the swollen river sends the stones all over her grass in a jumbled underwater game of bowls. One hits her shin. She curses the muddied whitewash on it.

  At last, she has the animal in the stream. It beats against it, in the wrong direction. Never do a dumb bloody dolphin a good turn. Where’s the intelligence, the sixth sense they’re supposed to have. But it’s sick, brains all dried out from being fished out and trussed up all night in a hammock. Once it spouts and spits, and unclogs the old blowhole of the toque, it’ll see its way clear. The old toque whirled around it like caught there in a whirlpool

  “What did he stick that frigging toque there with?”

  Spit hits her in the face “You’re welcome,” Meta says to it. “And if you see that rotten bastard, tell him I hope he blows himself up.”

  Away the dolphin goes, taking flood and rain behind it, whistling something close to arrivederci, over and over, through the tunnel under the Belfast County Down Railway, between the red-berried hawthorns and past Whin Hill. But that could also be the 9 o’clock train tooting as it passes over the top and the passengers gaze out at the awfully odd level of the water down below.

  SITTINGS FOR A PHOTOGRAPH IN A GREEN ROOM

  Ms. Tina Martin,

  44 Hambly Close,

  London WC 4.

  September 16, 1977

  Dear Tina,

  How is John? William is well, the children have gone back to school and I have time to turn this over in my mind. Do you ever stare out of the window until the children come home, but never think about them once? If this carries on, even though I’m thousands of miles away in British Columbia, I’ll end up with Sally, a stone’s throw from Belfast in Downpatrick, mired in madness and troubles – not The Troubles: the Wellesley sisters’, Geraldine and Sally’s oldest, and latest.

  I’ve always only been able to talk to you about her, Tina. In school, and in snippets over I don’t know how many letters and tapes, like I do now. You understood when Sally was a teen and turning into what she is. Talking to Mummy was like addressing a bottle of perfume, something rigid and reeking and totally glazed. Daddy was better, but Sally did to him what Mummy must have done ages ago, bamboozled and paralysed him with guilt at his own weakness.

  When winters came, Daddy used to say she was like one of the summer chairs left out in the rain: the paint shone brighter than in the sunshine. It sort of shocks to see it. Do you let the poor thing be, or take it in? Once you put it away, the empty spot stares at you. That’s how I feel about what I’ve just done to my sister.

  Mrs. Moir, the neighbour, phoned to tell us she hadn’t seen either of them in weeks. We knew that these past few years Sally left Daddy to wander the rest of the house while she moved into the Green Room. That’s where Mrs. Moir and the constable found her naked and soaked in Johnson’s Baby Oil.

  You know the story behind that.

  I’ll stop typing this. I have to make a set of phone calls for the Vancouver, Point Grey Little League. Children’s baseball, not dwarfs, Tina. Even though it is British Columbia, we play American games over here.

  NEXT DAY, SEPTEMBER 17

  Sorry, Tina. I had to do some driving on top of the phon-ing.

  You know the Green Room. The room, where Mother kept the photograph of her in the nude as a challenge to every woman who stepped into it, Sally and I, especially. Would we ever have anything to match it? Or were we expected to add our nakedness – the two missing muses’, and twirl in a same delirium of vanity from the maypole of our youth?

  The shot was taken in 1934 when Mother was 19. We saw it when we were the same age, but did either you or I feel it daring us to strip, fold our legs under us on the floor, and pull our hair up over our head to hold it high and tight in our fists?

  Sister Sally did.

  Daddy said the whole tasteless tableau was to show the woman in the frame was fit to be hung, or have her head chopped off for being such a biddy and posing in the nude.

  Well, Sally certainly lost hers.

  I hated the Green Room. Even if I had to sit with Daddy snoring in the living room when I was home. You know how I played pairs and singles, tennis and shuttlecock, summer and winter with you. It was so I could come home and collapse with you at your house, it was why I became a champion, mad keen on tournaments – to keep me out of our house. And I never got on a train because I didn’t want to meet Mummy on the platform, or in a carriage, coming down from Belfast. She would meet Daddy for dinner after he closed his book for the day at Wellesley Ads. Then, she stayed on at the Grand Hotel or the Abercorn like she was one of his promotions. He left, worn-out, to go home alone in the car and let her go on drinking.

  He spent years socializing just to keep an eye on her. A pity for my poor sister that Daddy was too old and exhausted with no will left to watch over Sally for life.

  They were already in their forties when we came along. Mummy had us – just as if a last call for orders had been shouted. Always the last minute, that was Mummy’s style. Same as her arriving home on the last train – the Station Master took her arm to the gate and locked it when she went through. She had us late because she didn’t want to lose her “lines.” She talked about them as if they were out of some poem and not to do with her face or shape.

  They were still there though.

  Sometimes young men would be too drunk to see the details. They noticed the red hair and the silhouette, and they escorted her onto the train, hoping for God knows what from this middle-aged lady in a sheath dress with enough floral pattern on it to do a botanical garden!

  There was this awful skinny one, in a B Special uniform, with his revolver dragging him to the ground. He armed-guarded
her right down to the house. They teetered along like twins. He was tall and emaciated, dripping with fingers and elegant gestures, for all his guns and holster. Daddy saw something in this Thomas Tallboy Slattery, or so he wrote. He included a cartoon like the ones he used to draw for The Belfast Telegraph before Wellesley Advertising swallowed all his talent for the picture and the punch line. His Slattery cartoon went: IRISHMAN IN UNIFORM, USING POLICE AS A RUNG ON THE SOCIAL LADDER, CLIMBING SHAKILY WITH A FIREARM IN HAND. Daddy always wrote the best captions, and I quote. On the strength of that impression, Daddy even got down the Oliver Cromwell tankard and let the boyo drink from it.

  But when this rakey escort of Mummy’s saw Sally, he put his hands up in the air and said, “An athlete. An Amazon!”

  And Sally, you know Sally was about as athletic as a crocodile. She just lolled in the sun till she appeared the powerful and the healthy one. That’s the shame of it. Sally wanted the looks without the work. She did have a good body. Though not like Mummy’s. More comfortable than muscular.

  She liked to loll about on the rocks that lay farthest out at the Helen’s Bay Beach. On the windiest days, to make her hair blow. It made her look like she was all action without her having to shift herself.

  She was famous for that, wasn’t she, Tina. And that lamb of hers, Sally’s innocence and pastoral purity, paraded about on a string – the poor animal! You couldn’t forget it. If she didn’t have Mummy’s lines and social graces, Sally was wily. People nattered to the lamb and she posed this way and that without saying a sensible word.

  And what was it you called her, Tina? Little Go Peep!

  When boys followed the wee beast home with her, she took them into the Green Room, where they had to sit blinking at Mummy’s belly button in the photo, then at the lamb, then at Sally, then back again.

  Sally had a little lamb

  But her Mammy had an ass

  Its skin was white as snow

  And everywhere the Mammy went

  Her ass was sure to go.

  What would become of anybody, if they had that dirty little ditty trotting behind them on a string?