by Edna O'Brien
I omitted to draw the curtains during one of my debauches, so that the neighbours might have seen in. They still smile at me though, a grin. They are Korean. Maybe they are playboys too. High wooden fences divide us, black wood, creosoted; we are all aware of each other though, within our bastions, digesting, decaying away.
I’ve had thieves, a pair. I met the male half when I went down to the general post office. I go down twice a week in case there are letters from the lad. Sometimes he writes two or three in a burst, then nothing for weeks. It depends on where he is. Always bright stamps, very colourful, like transfers almost. I go by bus. It is very hectic in the centre. Different pace altogether, different genders of people, different mien, different skins; some loitering, some with a purpose, office girls wagging their wares, carrying cartons of tea on their heads as if they were Etruscans. I loiter, myself. It is more in the nature of a ritual. I think the longer I dilly-dally the greater will be the likelihood of a letter. So there I was, glued to a window, when this young man approached me. He was in the doorway and I was studying the poses. It was a striptease joint. His voice was very dry, unmelodious. He didn’t catcall or anything like that, he just started to talk to me, about his mother. He had a big grudge about his native land, how they had to cross barbed wire and leave their jewels and their Bohemian glassware behind. He showed me a photo and I began to laugh because his mother was gross. She was sitting on a form opposite a harbour and it looked as if she might collapse there and then on the surface of the black and white photograph. The water itself was very still but she appeared to be wobbling, she being so rotund. Then he told me about the military academy he had been in, the tortures, perversions and so forth. I asked him to tea for the following Sunday. Had candlelight, a bottle of his native wine, muslin around the egg sandwiches, everything very soignée. I thought I’d be in privy with him but he arrived on a motor scooter with a girl. She was called Daphne, dimples. I concealed my disappointment by fopping around and proposing tea and a glass of wine at the same moment. They ate like wolves. I set a booby trap for them; I went out of the room on some pretext then hurried back in. I could have killed her. There she was, conveying his hand under her skirts, having a preparatory go. I went scarlet. I decided that I would fling them together, be their broker, rise above their little cuffuffle. “Ah, the lovers,” I said. As usual I was unrecognisable to myself, I nearly always am unless I’m doing something ordinary like planting a bulb and filling in the hole with a little trowel, or making a batter for pancakes. He produced his etchings, snapshots, she swinging from the ceiling and he with a big sponge wedged between his thighs, his yoke so languorously lay. She blushed. It was a very nice blush, most memorable, and it spread upwards from her neck and throat. It was paler on the neck for instance, the neck originally being a blanched white, but on the cheeks proper the blush was reinforced by a pink of hers that was permanently there, so that her cheeks were crimson. All these different patches of colour on her seemed to be moving, changing shape, changing definition. She was pretty, delectable. She was younger than I. He undid her bodice. Even her chest had a flush to it. The colours were seeping through like port wine through a litmus. I held her, fast.
“I knew you would,” he said, taking one of my hands and attaching itself to his that was already adhered to hers, and I squeezed and I squeezed upon it. I was curbing my jealousy. Her legs were tight, thighs sealed, her very modesty a summonising more welcome than a welcome. We were in the stately room, what Tig calls the Casbah, and all was very breathless, her gasping, continually blushing, his snapping teeth and his capable tongue, the vapours from all of us so gentle, so pervasive like steam. One of my tasks was to undress her for him. She kept her chin down but had her eyes raised in order to look at us both, a beseeching spaniel’s look. Her hair was ash blonde but down below, her topnotch was brown, a mouse brown. She gave little halting breaths, looking at him much more than at me. Then he got in the buff. He was scarred all over and that should have been a warning to me that he was from the underworld. Like a pythoness she was, with her nails and her teeth, a little pythoness pranking things up. The hank that he had on himself, it must have been from his military training. I got the feeling that he’d be just as happy having a game of snooker. All through the event, even when she started combing his hair and brushing it with her wire brush, he was asking me if I knew any rich people. Then we had a very heated discussion as to what constituted rich. He thought millions, I thought less. All the time she was saying to him, “Come on Milos, come on.” I got the feeling that he was not above bezzling. Asking me if I knew any dowagers who lived alone, was willing to be a stud. I expect he was with a gang, she too, loyal to him as I know now, loyal, an accomplice. He was quite cursory with her. The other thing he was interested in was horses, said did I visit anywhere where there were stables and could I get him invited for week-ends. Now and then he would jog her like she was a mare, called her Shaggy and frigged her. She had shaved her eyebrows completely and there was something very drastic about that, gave her a gorgon’s look, a feeling she was formerly a snake. Quite rough he was. She went blue-black easily. I felt I had to do something, so I picked up a few nubs of coal in my hand and put them on the fire. The funny thing is they never spoke, there was no Daphne, no Sweetheart, no My little poppet. Everything about him was fawn and epicurean but he was lacking in passion. Biding himself. He stuck the brass-topped poker into her and though she was refusing, she was at the same time whittling away to her pussy’s delight. All of a sudden he hit her, made her sit up and eat a cardamom seed. They had a supply in a plastic bag. Then she cried, got the sniffles so that I had to bring them together. She said he had put her to sleep once for three days and that she never wanted to re-live that. There were little miaows coming out of her, soft and sussural and it was very harmless the whole occasion, with me there like some sort of statue, my stockings rolled down but otherwise clad. I thought I’d better do something so I made a sort of platform with the mirrored cushions and drew them there, as to a hammock, making their foreheads adhere, ordaining them to kiss by means of the nostrils like Eskimos. I lay next to them and said things to them to egg them on. I had to rack my brain, remember my halcyon nights. I had only to gurgle, to approve, to disapprove, to ask for a big finger or a big toe for him to reach out and acknowledge me. I thought I was making a hit with him. I had only to pinch her for him to applaud and vice versa. And when at last, and after much dally, in the full spall and frenzy of their capitulation, it was I who was most gratified, and it was my name they both uttered. Soon they were twain again. We resumed our conversation, they cleared off the sandwiches and the cake. It was sugar and spice and all things nice. Presently he had to leave to take up his duties as a doorman. She lay on her stomach, warming herself by the fire, an offwhite fishnet shawl covering her hindparts. There we were, scarfed, together. She kissed me. She told me that her hair was dyed. She did it herself. She cried a little, said they had no privacy as he always had to have someone, a best friend or a worst friend or a gangster or most often a cripple. She said the gangsters were the softies, wanted marriage and kids. I said what about his big fat mamma and we fell about laughing and blowing our cheeks out and making our stomachs distend. It was all frolic, the fire flames leaping on the panelled door, her shawl, her bangles, then the toast we made, into which we pressed the strawberry jam, home-made jam that I had bought at a bazaar. I trained the lit candle on her face, on her chest, because by then the dark had descended. I pictured her wearing lynx, her hair blue-black, her eyebrows in an arch, a tiara on her head. Her smiles so young, so true, even her little smirks. I wanted to put diapers on her and gingham dresses and turn her into a little child again, give her back to herself. I must have been inebriated. I saw all her ages in her face, her very young ages, her sauciness, her very bitter expressions, the lines that had been added and the ones that would go on being added, and her various masks, lies, wisps, paper dreams, untruth. She said we would be friends for life, like
sisters, and she came up with a glorious proposal. She was to open a little stall, a sort of bazaar and I could work with her, come in as partner. She listed the things we would stock, beads, chains, purses, bales of cloth, all from the Orient. She had contacts in Morocco. I helped her to dress, even held her boot while she got her balance and lunged her foot into it. I laced them for her, they came above the knees. I kissed her then on both knees. She said she would love a horse, a bugie-wugie. We made a plan for Wednesday.
“Fell was the frush,” as they say, when Troy fell. Robbed. Under my very nose. I opened my bag to make an entry in my diary, to give thanks to God and the galaxies for such an interlude, when lo and behold, missing, my brown wallet, the utilitarian one that Lil cut and thonged for me. Most of my month’s salary in it. Buggered.
Two nights later I was sitting starkers, on a tea-chest, with seven people sketching me. They all had sheets of white paper and I was sad to envisage any mark, any trace of charcoal going on them. After the flight of the thieves I set out for the High Street, to scrutinise cards in windows, where I had already seen offers of jobs. I put some system into it. I studied all the cards on one side of the street first, then retraced my steps and studied all the ones in the opposite direction. It was there I saw about the missing black cat, the nursing mother; and various sofas for sale and people house-swopping and soliciting. Some of the windows were lit up and even had twirls of coloured paper that moved in a swirl, but one was in darkness altogether, inside a porch and I despaired of finding anything. Still I got the Ally Daly of a job – it said, “Wanted, artist’s model, Teutonic, modest rates, evenings”. I felt anything but teutonic when I pressed the luminous bell. A Coose numbskull. They had already foregathered, five women and three men with their various accoutrements and brushes. Dabblers except for the leader who said he was an academy man. Definitely a Prussian.
“Open up, Sunshine,” he said to me as soon as I got undressed and got on my perch. My perch was a tea-chest on which I had to sit lotus wise. Fecund in its prickles, surpassing even the old horsehair sofa – the discomfort of it. To lift the epidermis in one place was only to invite a bevy of nips in another. The Jesusing that I had to suppress. I still feel that there are numerous splinters in my arse and no Good Samaritan to weevil them out.
“Open up Sunshine.” I kept looking at my clothes over in the corner, a ridiculous heap with my scarf spread over them for seemliness’ sake. Seemly! I was like a polyp without my robes and my decoys. He kicked me with his corduroy slipper. The owner of the studio winked, probably her way of saying “poor you”. I’d hate to see her undressed as she was in a very commodious garment and still bloated. There were no refreshments, just some bottles on a tray to grig me. I came to the conclusion that the thieves were a brother and sister team. Incestuous thieves. A power of good knowing that did me. There were a couple of hours when I thought one or other of them would come back with restitution. I thought it would be he.
I was already thinking what I’d do with the remuneration go to the Drake café and have a feed and then sit in a corner, mulling. They know me there and call me a Mick.
I was subjected to very highfaluting drivel about spatial conception and contours, my contours. They seemed to omit the fact that I could overhear. I was afraid I’d either get collywobbles or sweat, and that my talcum powder would flake, even wriggle. It had lost its initial gardenia smell. My pubes were like an old furze, tangled. I amused myself with thoughts of the gorse flowers, the yellow vistas and then the gorse fires on St John’s eve, the night we call Bonfire Night. I thought how the lad would laugh, condone. First time he saw me in a pair of clandestine arms, he paused, said “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”. It was Moriarty’s arms. There was no knowing what sort of spectacle I presented, face blazing, muscles fibulating, skin white and the knees a deep purple from my sanctimonious days. I was longing for a swig from his whisky glass, what with the sweating and at the same time the shivers. Their voices were very hushed as if they were in chapel. They took ages over setting up their easels and appointing the light and getting the perspective. Their charcoal made different sounds, different impacts on the sheets of paper, some silken, some more like a squiggle, and there was I, avid to know how I was turning out but not able to preen or not able to smile in case of disturbing the pose. I knew I’d get cramp. A bunch of amateurs they were, judging by what they said, because alas, I never saw the finished effects, due to a rude interception. He stood behind a lady called Hester and started to taunt her. It seems she concentrated on the outer edges of me, my hip bone, my elbows, the boundaries.
“But last time you said the perimeter was sacrosanct,” she said.
“Perimeter my arse”, he said. And then he told them to move in on me, to look at me, to inhale me, to smell me, to internalise.
“Value for money, Sunshine,” he said, giving my pelvic bone a bit of a jolt. The one called Joseph was peering into my nipple so that it must have been reflected in the pupil of his small eye. He knelt and crouched and did everything to mock me.
“Get that arse open, get those hams out,” the Prussian said to me. Suddenly I could smell senna and the brews that Lil used to give us on Saturday, to be cleansed within and without for the Sabbath day. I had no idea how I was behaving and I longed to open my flapjack to see my reflection in the mirror, but even my handbag had been removed from near me. The tea-chest would squeak as I moved from one haunch to the other. He stood beside each person and then let lash. Thelma’s was not fit to line a birdcage with. But Victor’s was heartening.
“You always improve when there’s a bit of naked quim in the room,” the leader said. Victor broke his crayon, in protest. Then picking up the pieces he went on as before. I couldn’t smoke either. I was like a switchboard gone mad, sending different signals to myself – open, close, shut, spraddle, dilate, contract, Lil, Mother of Jesus, Jesus, St Anthony of Padua, fallopian, haemorrhage, blossom, alone, forever, never, hold on, Holy Moses, King of the Jews. He bemoaned the fact that they weren’t in possession of a Polaroid. Tasty was the word he used, then. “Don’t ye baw’ at me,” I said, suddenly, whereupon he got very vindictive and the Michelangelos were all screaming and jittery, thinking it was going to turn into a brawl, because to my astonishment I rose up and kept on saying it, and added a volley of abuse such as that he had black teeth and scurf, which he had. The upshot was that I was bundled out of there with my clothes under my arm and not even a sous for my excruciating services. I proceeded to dress myself on their front lawn, where out he rushed with implement, and abuse, and there was I skeetering down the icy street naked, yelling “Don’t ye baw’ at me,” and he shouting some terrible threats about reprisals and what he wouldn’t do. In the bus shelter I met a woman who ventured to ask me if I had just been rogered. A very understanding woman who said that her best fling was in the war and if she is to be reincarnated she’d like it in the trenches but not Asia because the mens’ organs are lop-sided.
*
Birdshit on the window. Happened without my notice. Bloody negligence. I was looking down at myself, surveying the zones that are going to rack and ruin. The poor old corpus, the corpus collosum and ciliare and dentatum and spongiosum and urethrace and the devil knows what. The bones are supposed to give revelations but I haven’t had any yet. Soon I will be eligible only to play gooseberry, to wait under lamp-posts or at crossroads, while some wench is experiencing the ends of fingers. Getting nearer and nearer to the Corpus Christi. Lovely to throw the shackles of it all off and head for the transmigration.
This bit of shit is the same colour as the light itself, chalk white. It is irregular, not a full circle, not even a stab at a circle, a whitish splash with inlays of grey. It will dry out. It will freeze over. Nothing is nearly so revolting when it dries out. I am examining it, but I am not going to touch it or trace its shape through the glass, or press my forehead or my dinky little nose upon it. There was a time when I would and did. I used, for perversity’s sa
ke, to slide my hand in under the dark swamp of a hen’s bottom, while the eggs were being hatched, the thirteen eggs, the baker’s dozen, with the speck of cockadoodle dandy in them. Not very exalting that. The poor clucking hens were delighted and misled, rose in their fine bustles and clucked with gratification, thinking that I was rescuing them, taking them from their sombre chambers, those hay boxes in which they were interned, or those round iron pots that just covered the girth of the nest. Ah yes, I perused the inglorious darkness. Now I incline upwards and my most constant companions are the birdies, singing and flying and bobbing and dancing and pirouetting, the enchanted birds and the everyday ones, sparrows, the robins and the town starlings. Of course it is nothing to what it will be in the spring and summer when I have the fountains on and the lovely brickets of water will be flowing out and the birds very bossy and loquacious, getting plenty of insects and slugs off the various plants, converging on the fountains, singing, uttering, shitting, dallying to their hearts’ content. Bobbing on the bobbing branches and never in danger of falling. Even now at the slightest sound such as if I ring a little bell, or rap on the window, they fly away but are back in no time, knowing that it’s only me up to one of my pranks. I am agog to know those birds that live continually in the higher air and are never seen at all until they fall down dead. That is something I may never see. The funny thing is though, that the most haunting bird I have ever seen was an unborn, never-to-be-born bird, two-dimensional, sketched in its own placenta, on a wood road that was soft and nobbled from acorns and the roots of various trees. That bird was more of a bird than any that I have encountered in the bushes, or in cages or walking along the ground as they were wont to in Coose, when amorousness prevailed and their pituitary glands were gurgling. I can safely say that I have observed birds, in the skies, wheeling and circumventing in the autumn going south, in the spring treetops nesting away, singing, grooming, pin-feathering, eating, squirting, copulating, pecking at snails; birds loving, birds vehement, birds busy, birds dead on motorways, birds as they dropped into the scrub at the bid of the huntsman’s bullet, and let out their little spill of blood that so beautifully complemented the feathers which were on the oaken or russet side; birds cooked to a fine turn, birds roasting; in short, birds; yet none have left such an impression upon me as the one I saw on the roadside, two-dimensional, intact in its own placenta, fallen to its death before it actually became born. So near and yet so far.