The Gift of Women (19 page)

It prompts me to send Terry's memories of sex in the dark adrift.

“Do you remember
Duel in the Sun
, Terry?”

No sound from the other end, and from the sound of it, the shower is short.

“A bit of a squeeze in there,” says Elizita, stretching.

“Doubtless,” says I, keeping my head down. I pick up and hold out the gown for her to put back on.

“I hate the shower's sliding door. Too like a goddamn guillotine. Fellas clutch their crotch if I wing it across.”

“Less shock with the beads,” I say in this luminous gloom, convinced she's using it like optical cosmetic, to keep the shape while glossing over the heavy weather on the private parts of her body she's bared.

Then I go “Oh, Jesus” at the ring of black mud she has perfectly stencilled round her eyes.

The truth at last. “For the crow's feet and wrinkly brow?” asks I, before I see the thick black frames on the Bette Davis, bad-ass-of-a-business-lass specials.

The truth – time for El to tell me, “No lenses.” She takes them off and pokes her finger through. “They're to show I'm after serious brass fur serious trade.”

With that she goes and turns a light on, to be seen, still holding her gown I handed her at arm's length, like it's the empty cabinet in a magic trick and her very visible body has just popped up beside it. Which makes my stomach take a leap in time, onto the back of Gruff Gordie's Triumph Bonneville, as he wove me on the pillion, in and out of the late Sunday traffic, along the white line, at 105 mph. Up the dual-lane stretch from Craigavad to Holywood.

Gordie's absurd tweed sports coat he always went out in scratched my hands as I clutched on to him, scratched like the hair shirt that never quite fit me.

“How does that effin' well feel? Effin' devastatin', right?”

That feeling flutters through my stomach, reaching into my backbone, which shakes like jelly when I get my mind off Gordie's bike and the phone rings.

I pick up and hear Terry chuckle without speaking, like she hasn't put the phone down.

“How does it feel, Gavin? Like a ride on a train back when?”

Then, off the top of my head or pit of my stomach I'm blurting out Gordie's hell-rider yell, “Like doing the ton and ready to detonate.”

“The ton on a train, hon…?” Terry rhymes me into the ridiculous with the
hon
– Terry, the linguist and sometimes poet, who persecutes me with puns when she's playful.

I know what I mean by detonate, even if Terry doesn't. Elizita is turning my TV documentary into Technicolor TNT. I see it in her face. She waits, waits, looks at me and she knows I hear it in the swallows Terry takes at the other end of the line.

Next thing I know, El lets me feel her breath on the corner of my mouth as she puts her chin on my shoulder…“What do you spy with your little eye when I turn on the ceiling?”

Her breath retreats. “I heard what Elizita said,” Terry tut-tuts. “So, who's doing a turn on the ceiling…?”

I still look up, though.

In the painted glass that covers the near end of the ceiling, young girls are washing themselves down with soap. Some are on their knees, looking up, rubbing at the legs and the genitals of the girls looming over them. They are laughing, lashing each other with soap.

Elizita comes round to sit beside me, alongside where I have fallen back to look up at Terry with a facecloth thrust between her legs. Her young face above me says what I hear from her mouth on the phone, which rings and El hands to me.

“God, what now?”

“Do you see?”

“See what?”

“See who? Sandy!”

I haven't noticed because of the girls and their spectacular sudsing: a three-quarter length door, a man's head and shoulders, the tops of a short-sleeved Fair Isle pullover. The man, faceless under his cloth cap, his missing features shining down, emptily, eerily.

Shuffling the back of my head up the bed to the pillows, as soon as I see my face, reflected in the mirror-glass, I feel Elizita's fingers on my lips, the tips of the fingers hot, the lacquered silver nails, just hard.

“Now, go down t'other end. Take a seat, and have a lie down there,” she tells me.

“I'm teed off with t'other,” I tell her.

“Go.”

I go and sit on the seat facing the wall, which I'm sure gives Terry complete access to me, and me, none to her.

“Lie down, you silly bugger. Take the weight off your legs.” Elizita pushes me and thieves the phone from my fist as I fall back.

At this end of the car's curved ceiling, a veranda looks out over a stretch of cracked red earth with one tree on it. A man lies on the bare veranda with no railing, a woman beside him. They both peer down over their naked hips, genitalia and feet pointed at another couple, sitting at the veranda end. They, in turn, look at another pair coupling, the woman's legs buckled tightly around the man's waist. The same girls I brushed by so long ago mate with men whose bodies have been worked underground or outdoors. The young men engaged with the girls have flattened stomachs and their hips are well honed. On the steps leading onto the veranda, a queue has formed of older men, whose stomachs sag into globes with no definition. They are obviously miners, in jeans and bare chested, their bodies made interesting by work, by various labours and forms of neglect, none contoured by youth anymore. Some have a black confetti of coal dust on their upper body or have been painted around head, neck and forearms with a labourer's tan.

“You want Gavin,” Elizita says into the phone, then nods several times as if for extra assurance to whoever has a hold of the other end. “Okay, here he is, John.”

“Gavin,” John says to me, “your wife insists that she is putting her whole mind and body into getting you that half-crown for the Tonic. What is a half-crown? And is the “tonic” like, for gin and tonic, or code for drugs?”

“Half a crown is a coin, in today's money, about two dollars,” I answer, calculating for inflation as best I can. There is a courteous gasp. “And the joint we shared, John, was the old Tonic Cinema in Bangor, where we courted in the dark, cuddled, out of the Northern Irish rain to watch
South Pacific
or big, spacey Westerns like
Duel in the Sun,
The Searchers,
or
The Big Country
. But so's you know, our real distances were measured with fingers and lips. We were right next to the big thing we were groping for in the dark.”

The railcar begins to bump and shunt as soon as Elizita jabs a switch. The expression on her face says the two aren't synchronized. But I don't believe her face, she must have signalled the coupling of the car to a locomotive or the rest of the train we saw down the tracks at the platform.

“Some scenery to get us going. I luv to save a Midnight Special for special people,” she jabs me.

She turns a round dimmer switch and the view to the other half of the railcar comes on across the wall. I swing my feet and use my arms to push me up, foment this see-through wall.

Now,
that
woman sitting on the other side of the glass with a black man standing beside her – her lips going loose and louche on her. I remember making love to
her
on a Belfast-County-Down-Railway train, trying to lie on one of the long door-to-door seats in a carriage that held only the two of us, squeezed tight-in to each other, so as not to fall off onto the floor.

Taking turns, one on top of the other, flinging out a hand to the other seat to keep us together, I remember the feel of wet lips and faces, of swimming down this clanking, metal river that smelt of musk and smoke, cinders and the scent girls put on. Not like the thick perfume Elizita daubs on herself, here and there, like she smatters herself and us, here and there, with her Brummie accent.

I nod through the window wall at where Terry sits.

“Comfy seat?” I ask her.

“Good for sitting down on. Hauling off the clodhoppers, if it's pelting out.”

“Smart answer, ten points for that,” I congratulate her.

“But it never rains in Nevada.” I see Elizita's frown at Terry. “You got the weather wrong, luv.”

“I'd get a wiggin' from Ms. Mathers over wrong friggin' weather, right?”

“Too friggin' right.” They both double over. “And seat's at wrong end. Way 'way frum door, where John cum in.”

“Is that John collective or singular?” I ask, to break this girls'-school swearing in the lav carry-on.

The railcar heaves, not with their silly belly laughs, but as cars lurch into motion, their coupling complete. Still bent-over, bum-up, it bumps Elizita against me on the seat.

John I see sits, perched beside Terry, pretending to whistle. Elizita straightens up, purses her lips, pretending to answer his pretend call.

“Now, 'bout that client of yours, John. You forgot to check her bona fides. But you'll still bet salary on't she be clean, right?”

“That client of yours” rings out of Elizita's mouth, like an old-time cash register.

“Now, this client of mine… Will you vouch for his bona fides, Ter?” Elizita's arm is around me to ask. “If you do, is it a done deal?”

Terry takes hold of John's hand. “As we smart grammar school girls well know.” She smirks at me through the glass, then round at John. “Like dotting the i's, like circling the number of the right answer on an intelligence test at school. We're sure to score 100%.”

Articulate tart is Terry.

“All's left now is to spit on our hands and shake.”

“Spit on whatever you like, I'll shake,” says I.

“Cross El's heart,” John tells me, “and hope to die.”

any road
means the same as
any way
, as in high road and highway, used interchangeably.

Barter Book
is a ledger in which any items up for barter are listed beside any items offered in exchange.

Brummie
is the word derived from Birmingham to describe its inhabitants or used as an adjective to describe anything originating in Birmingham, the accent, for example.

cleat
is a metal fastener with a male and female connection used instead of a button and button hole on a shirt, jacket or similar garment

diddies
are synonymous with breasts in Ireland, and used to convey the plumpness and mobility of breasts. The word can also be used to emphasise the opposite, for example: “as small as a mouse's
diddy.
”

dirty git
could have the spelling
gait
for
git
and both would be the Ulster word for goat with different pronunciations in different counties and within different parts of the county (North and South Down, for example) and in different parts of Belfast.

drumlin
is a standard geographical term for a round, mound like hill of rich soil left behind by the glaciers in the ice age. Parts of North Down in Ireland are composed of drumlins, graphically described by geography teachers as “basket of eggs topography.”

geek
, meaning look, can be used as a verb or a noun, as in “take a geek.” The look one takes when one geeks is not dainty like in “peek,” but short, sharp, more insistent and intrusive.

gub
refers to the face, particularly the lower part around the mouth. “Shut your gub!” tells you in no uncertain terms to shut your mouth.

do the ton
is a term for reaching the speed of one hundred miles per hour.

guard's van
is the compartment reserved for the guard and the goods carried on the train, usually coupled to the end of the train.

halfin'
is a half glass of whisky.

lurgy
is always dreaded and is a nameless virus that lays one low. Sometimes referred to as the flu, but more often something indefinably debilitating.

peeler
– Sir Robert Peel founded the first police force in England, and as a consequence the first policemen were called peelers thereafter in dubious honour of the founder.

RAG week
let students raise a ruckus and money for char-igy. On RAG Day, they dressed up and hit the streets with a parade and tin cans for collecting the money.

training-slip
is a light women's swimsuit, worn by competitive swimmers in the fifties, when regular swimsuits were too often made of heavier fabric. The term, swimming cos-tume, was still in use by the older generation in the fifties, and traces of that were still evident in regular swim suit designs.

wiggin'
when used here means to grab by the hair and shake. In the old days it was the actual wig that was grabbed and pulled from the head to shame the wearer. In parliament or the courts, the action could be carried out to officially disgrace a person in high position. Nowadays, it is used metaphorically, if at all. Although in the fifties, a student could still find themselves grabbed by the hair and shaken for some grievous error in class.

“Arrivederci” first appeared in
Ambit
; “Sittings in a Green Room” in the
Fiddlehead
; a micro version of “The Dark Barber” was published in the
Antigonish Review
; “Tennis” in the
Carter V. Cooper Short Fiction Anthology Series,
Book Three, and
ELQ/Exile Quarterly
37.1; “Sisters in Spades” in the
Carter V Cooper Short Fiction Anthology Series,
Book Four, and
ELQ/Exile Quarterly
38.2; “El” (original version as “Quid Pro Quo”) was a runner-up in the 1998
Malahat
Review
novella competition.