The Gift of Women (2 page)

“You're that starvin', you ate them raw? Sweet Jesus – an extra mouth to feed that swallows herring like I do Aspirin!”

Meta's ambition for the title, “Kept Woman,” is gone. She has ended up with a hungry man on her hands again.

“Is Basil your real name?” she asks him after their meal together on that Wednesday.

“
Deilf
,” he tells her.

“That's only initials for something, your second name. Is Basil the first, the Christian name?”

“Boto,” says he.

“Boat – Oh! ” she says back to him. He nods and still hasn't taken off his toque, nor sweater for that matter.

“
Deilf
, del-feen…”

“Del. Lots of yanks are called Del. I'm not sure what it's short for. Delanore, like Roosevelt? Feen, now… Feeney? Did you run away there from Mussolini, like our ice-cream men, the Capronis, in Bangor?” She claps her hand over his mouth when he begins to flute and whistle. She puts her mouth where her hand was and Basil Del Feeney swings her and dances with her on his mouth. He sets her on her feet, sways her, then has her rolling to his muted whistles and flutes in one ear after the other. Side to side, on her back, on her belly, rocking like a boat to move it forward with nary a sail nor an oar, just a barge pole, Meta laughs. The energy he puts into her!

What do the old biddies say over the tops of their hedges to her buying the last box of herring off the fishmonger on his way back up the road – “Feeding the fleet with those, are ye, Meta?”

When she wakes at 0300 hours, she sees he is gone. Air force men are forever taking off at 0300 to get to Limavady before it's 0600. As far as they're concerned, Northern Ireland is just one big aircraft carrier. When she gets up, goes out, walks up her front steps and is standing on the road, there are no plates, no herring cart –Wednesday is gone like a very fishy dream and what did she do with the box of herring she spent her rainy day dough on?

She sticks out her tongue at the emptiness of Station Road.

Back down the concrete steps she goes to the house, through the house to the back door, opens it and Basil steps in.

“So, you're 'stablishin' a base of operations, are you?”

Before she gets any louder, he puts his mouth on hers to stop her. Meta feels terrible, lying beside him naked, a moment after that. He gleams with something, too – sweat, or grease. What you'd expect from the I-ties and their olive oil. Should she go on about her aiding and abetting, give him a towel, or a pot scrub?

Basil Del Feeney does have the blue jaw of a Mussolini and the regular run of bad men in the pictures. Has Basil-me-boy planted limpet mines, reconnoitered and reported on the building of the latest carrier on the slips at Harland & Wolff 's shipyard?

The hull for those hulks gets launched first and the rest, put together on the water like an iron aerodrome. Like a city – with more people in them than Bangor. Which reminds her! She'll need to go see the Ardglass herring man, but in his Bangor shop.

Except… Meta's back door smells like a fishmonger's already, and pushing the door wide to take a geek, she shoves it into a pack of dead mackerel, lying with the gubs wide open on her teeny back porch. She swears, come the next night, she'll stay awake, but in due course, after he comes and comes, her eyelids buckle, she blinks, wakes and the night and himself are gone again.

Time for a nip of the moonshine, the night life in the morning.

She has this bottle of poteen the policeman, Hagen, left her – that time he had her up in court for keeping a dog without a licence. Poor Rex, who ran away from her in the end and got run over, but brought policeman Hagen with the news and the poteen to sympathize.

She needed a pet, Hagen said. Tucked in together, sipping poteen, the sergeant declared, “I'm your pet policeman.” Now, it's Basil Del Feeney, who shows up next morning with a mother-of-pearl shell big as a dinner plate. Two lobsters snap and squirm on it: green, beady-eyed – colour of ocean jade, clicking like typists or flamenco dancers.

Meta is not without skill or education. She has short-hand, went to Pitman's, but without fail, in her secretarial career, some dirty git of a manager would want her to use her longhand on him and promise her all sorts of things for the job. As she slow boils the lobsters to a coma and empties the shell of meat, he watches her closely. What's he puzzled about? The knack Meta has in her fingers that he can put to use setting timers, attaching wires to detonators? Suddenly, the red lobsters gape like gutted cities at Meta, like Belfast in the Blitz, shattered – these blazing red shells. And feeling instantly guilty, she throws the shells and plundered contents in his face, which just as instantly makes her sorry for his burning hunger for seafood and fucking.

As bad as beating Rex, the dog, with its ham bone for dinner.

But Basil believes Meta's celebrating and tosses the shredded meat over her head like shellfish confetti. From feeling dubious, to devastated, to damn well delighted, Meta decides this is as mad as a marriage for her, at last.

Basil's mating rhythm with her works in sets of seven, regular as waves, and the fizz in her blood is as strong as when her bare skin met the Atlantic on a summer jaunt to the beach at Buncrana. Like dunking her bum in champagne – such sizzle between her skin and the sea, she stayed flushed for hours afterwards, singing all the way back through Counties Derry and Antrim to Down. And as Major Cox of the big-windowed house on the shore put it: “set her effervescent ass on the lap of all and sundry in the charabanc.”

In bed after dinner, she picks slivers of shell from Basil's toque. If she lifts the toque a smidgen, his eyes open and he coos like a sea pigeon. Otherwise he sleeps soundly, but always with the toque on. Like the cloth cap working men wear at all hours – to sleep and to work in. Meta might have expected different, but loves Basil Del Feeney none the less. Still, she needs something more to show for it. A girl can only stare so long at mother-of-pearl, mackerel, sole and giant frigging halibut he hauls to her back door. She pours verdigris over the back step to kill the stink.

But still no proposal, no statement of intent!

Then, would she understand one if he gave it to her, verbally or written in his titillating jibber of Italian or whatever it is? Since none seems to be in the offing, Meta will make a bond of blood, a blood bond as she rummages in a kitchen drawer for the filleting knife she'll sharpen with spit on a cake of carborundum. He won't feel a thing.

In the bedroom, it is 0100 hours.

He's at it again, after the old bum and belly samba, whistling off like a tugboat, chugging into that little sleep that seduces her into the same. Tonight, however, Meta cuts a stroke on his bare upper arm, then one on hers. At the same time, she lies down beside him to make a seal with their blood, shoulder to shoulder, like Siamese twins.

And what does Basil Del Feeney do?

He wakens. He sees the dried blood. He chirps, he chitters and he weeps.

“Jesus, the Axis Powers sent a cry-baby like you to frog-man for them!”

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!