The Gift of Women Read Free Page A

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.
    â€œAre 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.
    â€œOr 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.
    â€œHere, 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.
    â€œBasil 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.
    â€œVinegar is a miracle,” she tells Basil Del Feeney.
    â€œVine-gar mir-acle,”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œNo 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.
    â€œOnce in the door,” her Ma told her, “they’re tyrannical invalids.” No, her Ma went one better: “ Titanic invalids!”
    â€œThe 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!
    â€œYou want a bloody hammock?”
    But she can’t be angry at him. He’s wasting away. Hardly