The Gift of Women

by George McWhirter

  “As ready as ever,” Elizita says to Terry, but looks at me and my camera, which I have taken out to set up on my shoulder, as if neither of us are there.

  “My hump,” I tell Elizita.

  “A good hump never did anybody any harm,” she answers. “Not so, Terry?”

  While I fuss with the focus, Terry asks after El’s ex, the one we know of. “How’s Cecil?”

  “Out of touch as usual,” says Elizita. “You know Cecil. Thought it was his sensitivity turned me on, but it was t’other. After I opened the oven door in my dear old flat and woke up to tell the tale, I thought Cecil was the answer.” She moves her head around, trying to see more of my face. “Near-death experience makes a girl horny. I suppose any man would have been the answer.”

  Elizita goes striding into the middle of her story, unfolding everything she has to tell us since she and Cecil lost contact, from just before they were married secretly and left for America.

  “Will you use what I give you on the programme?” she asks me.

  “Do you want me to? You can always change your mind.”

  “And what if you change yours? This is about you too, isn’t it?” she says, lilting on the yours, and I am not sure if she means you too or you two.

  I begin wondering about the mechanics, if anyone will be able to understand it without being told voice-over that Elizita married Cecil after she attempted to commit suicide.

  In the school holidays, when he was young, Cecil worked for the town corporation at the town pool as a helper. Cecil’s father was well heeled – if you considered how well, you might say it unbalanced Cecil. Making him feel both privileged and deprived, for his father gave Cecil no pocket money, insisting that Cecil earn it when he wasn’t at school – at weekends and on holidays. Cecil said his job with the Council only taught him to stare longingly at El, who would plunge in naked along with Terry at 7:30 in the morning while the other girls in their pod swam backstroke in an assortment of bikini bottoms.

  Cecil was too poor to afford a girlfriend, but the girls knew him to be the son of a millionaire.

  “Go ahead, use everything I say and anything you see,” says El. “It’ll do them a power of good.” Elizita pulls loose the belt of her silk robe and takes a silver bathing cap from the pocket. Once it tightens on her head, it makes her full lips stand out more. They are not red; they are, as they’ve always been, a prominent maroon. Her suit is a silver one-piece tied behind the neck with strings into a bow.

  “Do who good?” Terry asks, and touches the corner of Elizita’s mouth gingerly as if she thinks it has been hurt.

  Elizita doesn’t answer. She turns away from Terry and bends to run her finger round the heel of the rubber pool slipper, pulling it tighter. It strikes me that she has been standing here every morning since J. called and Terry spoke to her from Vancouver.

  “Cecil was like you, Gavin.” Elizita looks down her body, presumably to check it is all there. “Sensitive, attentive, but I didn’t actually like it that much – it made me feel as if what I wanted was like an illness. Right enough, sex was a sickness I had, and Cecil hovered around it, thinking that what I needed was to be understood and cared for. But that was only the ’alf of it.”

  “The sensitive ones hover,” says Terry, “like they want to tie your shoelaces so you won’t trip.” The remark surprises me into swinging the camera to Terry.

  “Cecil should have known,” Elizita says behind me, “from before, from when he and Sandy used to watch us girls rubbing oil into each other. Sometimes we girls like to be touched and not just looked at. And, sometimes we want to be watched and not touched.”

  As if to illustrate, Elizita moves to the edge of the pool and drops into the water before I can follow her with the camera. I am not particularly worried because I base a lot of the composition on natural counterpoint, which allows viewers to be seeing one thing while the commentary runs in another direction, but I do have Terry in focus by the time she plunges in behind Elizita. Their robes are left floating across a recliner and a chair. There is an oriental bath scene on one, Terry’s, and on Elizita’s – forms made out of shades of silver, a platinum sea of waves or what could be a sky full of striated clouds, where Elizita’s face and body roll in the arms and between the hands of faceless silver-grey lovers.

  I rest the camera on my shoulder with the viewer to my eye. Terry has taken Elizita by the shoulders and holds her from behind. She whispers in her ear and prevents her from turning in the direction of the camera for a moment or two. Now, Terry moves both hands to El’s hips, turns her, pulls her toward herself and grins, baring her teeth as close to El’s face as she can without their two heads bashing. The water makes their movements slow and sweeping as though they are swinging round in the silks of their gowns, which sends off ripples that subside over the length of the pool.

  “It’s heaven,” says Terry, following the roll of the water. Then, she looks at El very seriously. “Where did your lips and your bum come from – I always wanted to know…”

  “I always told you, didn’t I – ‘ A black mon and a black mum frum Burming-um?’ – It is called the Black Country, after all.”

  “On account of the soot.”

  “And the smut? Could be my father came back from somewhere he never talked about, before he came to Northern Ireland. Could be they adopted me off sum black mum in Burming’um. El is for Eliza, hoo might uv’bin black, but Zita – the name – is Hungarian. Could have been a gypsy who left me with my nametag on their doorstep. I don’t know where I got my bits from.”

  “Where we all get it,” Terry says as her hands slip down behind Elizita in the water. Terry looks into her face. El’s teeth split through her lips in a smile. The two of them begin to turn again, hands on each other’s hips, stirring and churning the early morning silk of the water with their arms.

  “Some of us like legs, some of us like bellies.”

  “Some of us could suck shoulders, some of us the lot.”

  “I thought it was just me,” El says when they stop. “The sun on me bum and the buzz between me legs. Remember I used to say, if only it were healthy!”

  “If only it were healthy,” Terry smiles at her until El’s eyes wrinkle, but she looks suddenly sad, staring off at the bare land, blue sky, hills, as though finding the cause for some small sorrow there.

  “Does what you do help?” Terry asks, her arms moving around Elizita, lifting to her shoulders, dropping to her waist.

  “You mean, after I put my head in the gas oven over the sorry cases I had to attend to on the dole and Cecil saved me? Oversensitive Cecil. He had come by to invite me to a reception at Speckworthy’s, where he was interning as a buyer for men’s clothes. He was shouting for me and I was answering, shouting and choking myself on the gas, ‘Wait till I’m done, luv.’

  “He came in expecting to find me with my legs round someone like the sales clerk I had taken a fancy to, someone at Speckworthy’s when I was in seeing Cecil. A sales clerk who was a bodybuilder and sold socks and ties. I couldn’t wait to see him in just his socks and tie.”

  “Socks and thighs,” Terry says, and Elizita erupts into a laugh. Terry’s hands slip down to hold Elizita by the backs of hers.

  “Well, there I was gassing myself, you daft nit. Cecil turns off the burners and looks into the oven at me. ‘Do you want to come to this reception for the American and those other suppliers from across the water?’

  “‘Anyone frum Burming’um?’ I want to know, ‘or just the Americun?’

  “‘Don’t know,’ says Cecil, ‘ cum and judge for yourself, luv, or carry on as you are.’

  “Cecil didn’t mean to be funny, but he was, and that stopped me.

  “‘Alright,’ I says, ‘I will,’ and I sit up to vomit over the deck shoes he always has on, as if he’s ready to go sailing.”

  Elizita’s eyes are shining. Perhaps it is with the cold of the water and the light desert breeze blowing.

  “And…?” Terry a
sks.

  “There was someone at the do from Levi’s.” El puts her hand up to Terry’s cheek, turning her face away from me, apparently, to whisper in her ear. But it is no whisper. “A fella from America, in Levi’s and a sports coat, beaming with health and sexual mania. It was the sexual revolution and I thought I was in it on my own. Not able to get out of this feeling I was sick, not able to get out of it, not even through the gas oven door.

  “Then, I met this Ham in the Levi’s and the sports coat. They say sportcoat here. He’s talking to me, and he has his gadget stood up to attention, or maybe it was at ease, behind the buttons of his fly. Buttons, not a zipper. He’s getting volumes of sales off Cecil, and asking for Cecil’s reaction to the cleats on his denim shirt. Cleats with pearl fronts that you can rip open. Buttons on his fly, and pearl cleats on his shirt. Cecil, he notices, has put on one of the samples he sent, but not with the pearl cleats, the plain metal ones with the Levi’s name on them. ‘You know this type of shirt I have is good for cowboys, or any working stiff. If they get torn open, no buttons are lost and none need sewing back,’ says Ham. It’s a Levi’s shirt, but Cecil has a tie on and the Levi’s shirt collar up to his ears, Lord love us, the way he used to with a dress shirt.

  “The American undoes Cecil’s tie and lets it hang, undoes Cecil’s top button, which is the only real button on the shirt, then pulls the top three of his plain cleats open. Lord love us – Cecil has a chest! Remember his chest, he was so anxious most of the time, you could forget.”

  I sit down to relieve my back, which is beginning to hurt. Elizita has taken Terry’s face in both her hands. “Remember, Terry, you used to brush his chest with your hand when you talked to him at the pool. Like it was polished, like you’d found little bits of dust on it.”

  Terry nods. “Lord, it was tight, but fine as silk. Supple, wouldn’t you say?” I put down the camera only to jerk it back up again in case I have set it in water. I haven’t looked to see.

  “Just like the skin on his cock,” Elizita says loud enough to see if it cuts me through my confusion with my precious camera.

  “Ham, that’s the name of the American, puts his hand in to lay it on Cecil’s chest. ‘There’s something there, why not let it show?’ says he. Why not? I’m turned on about Cecil’s chest, but getting a headache, and getting quite nasty. I look at Ham’s crotch and I ask, ‘You like buttons down there?’

  “‘Some things are just too good to rush,’ says he, screwing Cecil and me with his sales pitch, and Cecil is digging it more than I am. This Ham is screwing everybody with his eyes. He’s supposed to be testing the taste of the local market, but know what this Ham was doing? Like most Americans, he was creating the taste, whetting the eyes of all and sundry.

  “He winked and pushed Cecil’s clasps back together, one by one. Everybody was looking at Ham, and the look he gave them back was like he’d just been to bed with all of them, but was about to leave without asking any of them for their hand in marriage.”

  Elizita puts her finger in her mouth to wet it with saliva and smooth each of Terry’s eyebrows in turn until she’s satisfied. “I still love your eyebrows, Terry. They always look as if they’ve been lacquered,” she adds.

  “Cecil’s glossy tits and my eyebrows. Real – what is it – turn-ons?”

  They talk idly now, as they did when they were younger, as if on this morning they have all the time in the world.

  Or is it for a purpose? To perhaps see if what they share will make me edgy. Word by languid word am I expected to shrink from sight, get lost in the camera or the composition of my commentary on something else, go and film the town of McNair, the Death and Amargosa Valleys, the water diviners, the geologists, out chipping away at those rocks that grow about like stone cacti in the middle of nowhere?

  “We went to Acapulco,” says Terry, “on a last-minuter for £800. To a hotel, the Caleta. There was this diver by the hotel on the rocks. Just light cotton trunks. The trunks tied so’s his thing was crooked at you, like a finger, inviting you to come on over.”

  Terry puts her arm round Elizita’s neck. “So, was that the last of Ham?”

  I look round, needing to relieve my eyes. Staring into an uninhibited conversation causes vertigo. An identical dizziness to when we stopped on the road to McNair. I leaned out over the wall to see into a canyon and follow two eagles that could have been buzzards, spiralling down and away. I leaned out farther and farther to catch a last glimpse of the birds and almost fell in behind my camera. Terry was worried for me, but not now.

  The women spiral and spiral, and I attribute it to something deranged about the light and the sun here. I begin to ponder it melodramatically to distract myself, but the thoughts only turn in a circle with the women. It is neither winter, nor summer light, nor spring, nor autumn’s – it is warm, it goes on brazenly making Terry and Elizita expose themselves in a way that the summers would make them do at home, but in a hard way, a barren way, as if the naked honesty of the stone all around here has put on the women’s skin and wants to touch everything in the most intimate place, to gauge the depth of flesh, the extent of feeling.

  “We drove Ham round to the Royal Avenue Hotel from Speckworthy’s. What would we like as a thank-you? Stand-up or a sit-down drink at the bar or in his room? It’s late and the barman is somewhere, looking to replace a bottle. Cecil needs to pee and I’m left with Ham. Ham takes his hands and lifts up my dress. I pull my knickers down to my knees. I drop them, step over them, give them to him. He puts them in the pocket of his sportcoat like they’re my calling card.

  “Americans say sportcoat, remember.”

  Terry bats her eyelashes together in mock ditziness. “I’m gushing with nostalgia for the old Royal Avenue Hotel,” she says. “We always wanted to stay there on RAG night after the RAG ball at Queen’s.”

  “My problem is I want my whole life like RAG nights after the RAG ball,” says Elizita. “I like it wild, but I like it organized.”

  “Like America,” I say, but am not listened to.

  “We used to watch you,” says Terry, “the times you actually used the changing boxes at the pool. Those were great peek-a-boo doors that covered you from shoulder to knee. We’d see your pants go up, then come back down again when you put on your skirt. You kept them in your school bag, didn’t you, on those days?”

  “Didn’t we keep all the important stuff in our school bags?” Elizita asks, and she and Terry slap the surface of the water with the flat of their hands.

  “Lord, that night my lips stuck to Cecil’s tits like limpets,” Elizita says sadly, and looking down at her body, which is soaked from the splashing; without another word, she begins to swim laps, leaving Terry to watch, then follow her.

  Have they been waiting for someone other than me, the waiter who they see coming along the side of the pool, to stop their reminiscing? They swim away dismissing me, leaving me beside the waiter, who nods and watches them swimming together. He waits patiently, looking at the camera as I drop it wearily to my side.

  Seeing them so solidly together in their bodies and their conversation, I am as confused as I used to be at the pool-side back home. Is their duet in the water to let me watch their legs and arms, instead of listening to them? I remember how they used to stand, wiping the sweat from their stomachs after lying on the wooden planks that served as seats on the bleachers, then dive into the ridiculous milkiness of the pool.

  They would take a breath before diving in. A small prayer in the intake before the heart-jolting switch from hot to cold. When they came up, they swam in another element, another existence that was made entirely of light, air, water and limbs.

  When they swam back to the side wall, it was to look up out of the water at me standing on the bank. My toes would curl over the concrete edge as I looked into the cleft between their breasts and I would get vertigo.

  Elizita taps my foot with her painted fingernail. She shakes her head at the waiter and he leaves. Her nipples in the silver rac
ing slip stand out, but the full contours of her breasts are pressed down by it. They look elastic and young. Terry has stopped behind her; she comes up, puts her hands through Elizita’s arms and onto each breast.

  “Diddies groped,” she lets out one of their ritual vulgarities.

  “Grope Gavin’s, he has them too,” Elizita says to my face. “A bit heavy now, and soft.” Her eyes query me for confirmation. “Drooping at the nipples?”

  “How do you like your nipples?” Terry prolongs the litany into the order of tits.

  “Big and ripe. Cold, too – my dear, like strawberries on a sundae.” Elizita has her order of nipples ready on the instant.

  “When I first came to America, I loved sundaes. Ham was always eating them. He wanted Cecil over in Salt Lake City after we got married. To see the land Levi’s come from. Ham wasn’t Mormon, but he liked the idea of the Mormons. He used to say if he could only get them to give up the dark suits and go round the world preaching in denim for Levi’s, they’d make a fortune for the company. Then, he imagined them doing it for this other outfit called Vaquero’s.

  “Ham set me up in the railway repair yard, but…” she looks up into my bared face, where the camera was a moment before, “Gordie got me started.”

  We remember Gordie. He was gruff and worked for the Belfast County Down Railway, part of Ulster Transport, as it was called then. He had a degree, but you’d have thought he’d learned everything with his hands and a spanner. He wanted to have a factory of his own, any kind of factory. Didn’t matter if it manufactured candies or brass rings.

  Now, this is how I begin imagining this Ham she tells us about. We nod, Terry and I, with agreement over a puzzlement Terry shares with me, and some alarm that Terry has not anticipated. The mention of Gordie has broken the unison in the female mischief and reminiscing.

  “Gordie liked you, Terry… Gordie,” Elizita repeats his name, pushes it at Terry, then, leaves it hanging. Terry turns to me to let me see her unpreparedness regarding Gordie. But I am doubly sure this is the way she imagines Ham, in the way we remember Gordie, working with his toolbox, a screwdriver or spirit level sticking out of a breast pocket in his overalls for show, his face butted forward, eyeing you like you were where he would put his oil can next.