The Gift of Women

by George McWhirter

  “Big broad John. With all his moving parts in the right places,” says Elizita, smiling at me lusciously, because of the flush on my forehead, the first sign my blood is rising.

  “The Alouettes,” I say, and aim the camera directly at John.

  “Yeah, great team. Great city.”

  “I bet you went down good with the Montrealers.”

  Elizita looks into my camera directly and tut-tuts Terry. “When a grammar school girl’s grammar goes, her knickers are down round her ankles.”

  Terry lays one hand on John’s shoulder to hold herself steady while she laughs. “Ms. Mathers at Collegiate would love to have said that.”

  “Knickers?” John asks, shaking his head. “Like guys wear to ride racing bikes?”

  “Like girls take off to ride…oh, Jesus,” says Terry.

  John blinks at Terry’s hand which has tightened on his shoulder. “You guys say weird things, we say some too. Bet if I said I got sacked a lot of times with the Alouettes, you’d think I was fired over and over, like?”

  “Sure,” says Terry, liking the way she says sure. I can tell.

  “Doesn’t mean that. On the field it means I got tackled and taken down.”

  “Around the legs, like rugby.”

  “Head-on, more like.”

  I put down the camera and tell Elizita, “You always know how to put us in a pickle.”

  “I like vinegar on my French fries,” Elizita answers as John exits to pick up the suitcases. Terry follows him, talking to the back of his head and shoulders, the white sweep of the fine cotton shirt with the faint lining of black absorbing her completely.

  Elizita pulls up the bottom window of the caboose, to let in some air…or for me to poke my head out and do some filming.

  “First time through a new situation means a lot of camera,” I apologize. “When things repeat themselves, camera is put to bed.”

  “You never know where that camera will find itself in bed.”

  She leads me out after John and Terry. Terry is asking John if his parents met in Haiti or Montreal.

  “At a pot party,” John says over his shoulder. “The next day, when he saw her, my dad says, ‘Man…’ Like man, you still dark, woman. Somebody forgot to turn on the lights.”

  “Was she angry?” Terry asks.

  “Hell no, she only spoke French. He’d been with her all night and all morning and it still hadn’t sunk in.” Terry stops and watches John stride ahead of her. I follow them, moving down the inside of Elizita’s caboose. “Was she that lovely?” Terry asks John about his mother.

  “Or that good in bed?” John says over his shoulder. “Or was my old dad that damn stupid? I dunno, ma’am. That’s the story as he tells it. Overawed by her, I’d say. He always was. And like Elizita says, if you don’t find out about each other first night in bed, you spend the rest of your life in the dark, trying.”

  “Go on!”

  His wit and intelligence surprises Terry, whose fingers land on him, to hit or push him as she does to me when she’s amused by my banter. His bulk doesn’t budge and her hand slides up his back.

  “Hey, hey,” he says over his shoulder.

  “What’s your real job?” Terry asks. “You’re too bright to be a porter?”

  “No, I got a worse job than the porter’s, ma’am, I’m the accountant. Bookkeeper would be a better way to look at it. The guy who manages the money round here has got to be built like a linebacker and think like a quar-terback.”

  He turns to look back at Elizita, leaning out the caboose window before we round the front and head across to our guest railcar.

  “The bookkeeper,” shouts Elizita, “is prepared to give you a float. A starter, like a complimentary silver dollar in a casino, to start you playing.”

  “Playing what?” I ask her to explain for the camera.

  “Our slots,” Elizita answers.

  Through a door in one wall of the repair yard men in blue coveralls load aluminium containers onto a cart with huge rubber wheels that flop softly over everything, rails included. The top of the steel-walled refrigerator truck gleams through the high windows above the door in the corrugated wall. Beyond the gaping, roll-back exit doors at the other end, the railcars for a real train still rest at an actual station, but with no locomotive. The cart with the tractable pneumatic tires moves toward it and we watch it as we walk toward our sleeper (sleeping carriage, we would call them at home).

  Elizita tugs my shoulder. “Let Terry have John to herself for a bit. He’s an interesting man.” She leads me to the other end of the sleeper that John and Terry have just climbed into with our luggage. She lets me climb the iron foot-ladder ahead of her, helping me up the steps with the camera by pressing her hands onto the back pockets of my jeans, then sliding them down the sides as if cleaning her hands off once I’m safely on the metal platform.

  “You go in,” she says, as she opens the door for me, then steps aside. “It’s a half-car, but for you I’ll call it a halfin’, like whisky? You might need one soon.”

  I wonder if the whole car is as long as ones I’ve seen in old movies. I never counted the number of seats the marshal walked past, hunting for a bandit, who leapt from a horse and hid among the crowd on board. Cars were as long as the suspense of the search, I suppose.

  Elizita hasn’t turned on the light, and doesn’t draw back the curtains. The place gives off a glazed darkness, extending from the wall of dark glass in the middle of the car. Put in to double the size with the reflection. No door or panel adjoins this half to the other half of the car. A wide carriage seat opposite the glass wall doubles as a bed-end.

  “Why’m I made to play blind man’s bluff?” I ask, but the phone rings.

  “It’s for you,” she declares. “Set the camera down on the bed.”

  The back end of the cord-free receiver raps my knuckles.

  Immediately I put the receiver to my ear, Terry asks, “What are you taking so long to do with El?”

  She breathes out in that laboured way that signals she has prepared a minor tongue-lashing for me. “I see, I see,” Terry exhales, but talking to an altogether different person, who must be John, showing her the accommodation, likely with the light on. She gets generously agitated when I don’t reply right away.

  “Well…I’m trying to take things in…”

  “That’s nice, very nice,” says Terry, but again the tone tells me it’s Terry to John, who’s on the right side of her at this point, unlike myself. I sit down on the bed, trying to cope with Terry breathing at me on the phone, and Elizita, doing the same, now, in my ear.

  “That’s just lovely,” I hear Terry say to John. Huffing, I think, because I haven’t spoken, but her breath falters on the total exhale of exasperation. “Ooh, the trains. Ask Elizita if – when she was on the train to Bangor, looking at those pictures on the carriage wall of Newcastle, County Down with those cold beaches – ask her if she was always thinking of a hot place in Nevada, or – let me see – Polynesia?”

  My eyes have adjusted enough to see El go pull a dress like a tunic, and an enormous belt from a closet. She holds it up and laughs at it. I see why it tickles her. The buckle’s as big as the WWE champeen’s belt.

  “Daft, but goes well with this tunic?”

  I nod.

  “Our champion performers wear one. Men contenders, hulks and toughs, even weasels can’t wait to take it off them.”

  “Go on, go on,” says Terry, who for once has ignored the long pause at my end. “I’m waiting for El’s answer, but dearie me. Mr. Pause moves on slow, very slow paws,” she chides me like a child with a silly rhyme… “Ask her, I’ll keep on the phone. And…does Elizita have an old high-backed railway carriage seat at the end of the bed, facing the wall?”

  As always, Terry’s detour from old carriage photos to carriage seats confuses me about what to ask first, but need I worry? “You know what I’ve realized,” says Terry, “why a railcar, as they call it here in America…why it use
d to have just two doors for the whole car, and in Britain and Northern Ireland, each compartment had two doors of its own. Oh, ho, ho,” she snorts and she pauses. “You don’t know why?” She waits for me to supply an answer.

  “I don’t.”

  “El told me long ago. They designed every compartment with its own set of doors to make it more private, easier to have sex, if a couple found themselves on their own.”

  “Has drink been taken, more merry martinis, by any chance?” I try to turn irritation into a bit of humour.

  “Guess.”

  “My guess is distance…” I get up and walk to the glass wall and turn to the carriage seat “…my guess is greater distances between the stops in America. People got in and out less often. More democratic, less stand-offish people in America. Americans didn’t mind riding with everybody together in one big room, in the old days.”

  “That would be nice, riding together with everybody in one big room,” Terry giggles.

  “Are you still drinking?”

  “Aren’t you?” she answers. “What’s wrong with that,

  ’specially if it’s laid on, and I’m here waiting? Aren’t I, John?”

  I’m instantly annoyed, not at her bringing John into the phone call, but her using her prim and boozy “aren’t.” And I can hear the fabric of her clothes rasp as she rubs against some other scratchy material, the heavy upholstery of the carriage seat?

  Breathing very emphatically she asks, “How it feels…do you remember?”

  “What?”

  “Sex in our own private compartment?”

  “Vaguely,” I say, and hold the phone away from my ear to catch the sound of silk coming from the direction of Elizita’s closet. Low whistles of silk like a ghost train’s as the folds of a light bathrobe encircle Elizita’s body.

  “Do you always do things in the half-dark?” I ask Elizita, and regret it right away for the way Terry will hear it.

  El’s side of the sleeping car is organized with Indian blankets: Mojave and Navajo, like the ones that prissy, mousy-mouthed Jennifer Jones wrapped about her in that movie, Duel in the Sun. She played a breed alongside Walter Huston, Joseph Cotton and Charles Bickford, and somebody incredibly tall – Gregory Peck. I remember holding Terry’s hand while the prissiness smouldered on Jennifer Jones’s mouth. I stared into the murk on her oiled and darkened face and into Terry’s in the picture house. Jennifer Jones, a woman I always regarded as twitter-brained and simpering, sizzled like Elizita.

  “Got to get the desert dirt off me,” she announces.

  Bead curtains, made from balls of lacquered goat dung drape the shower door. Elizita pushes her face through them and lets the gown slide down behind her.

  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 jea
ns 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.