by Edna O'Brien
I can hardly sustain myself till morning. I would have got up long ago only I have a feeling spirits invade rooms at night and if this were vacated they would invade it too. They shy from me fortunately, from my mortality. Maybe they fear me, see in me a plague.
Then the regaled mogul proffered the information that a lady of mixed ethnic origin whom he had met in Miami, told him “It was no bigger than a pearl.” They were down by a pool. “But,” said I nonchalantly, “a pearl is a pearl is a pearl.” He went berserk, called me a crapper, a jerk, a mother-fucker, a cock-sucker, a souped-up bag. I fled and finding myself safely ensconced in a taxi, my bemusement was such that the driver who was Mexican and called José, invited me to sit out front with him. Why not. I was flexing and unflexing my calves so that I would acquit myself well on the float the following day. I was scheduled to travel along the main avenue, doling out shamrocks and doing a bit of step dancing, inveigling, boggling them with Kiltartan wisps. I sat next to him. Pure greenhorn stuff. I thought it was a gas to be out there, head on his shoulder, him panting in old Mexican, the vehicle crazying about the streets and his name and his family name, plus his licence and a likeness of him staring back at us; his slingball as long as Lug of the Long Arms, ochre, reminiscent of the gladed mushroom, sprouting into fiendish and gigantic proportions. It could have steered the car and for a time it did. He began to lose sight of his obligations as a driver. People gaped in, brandished fists, wagged ferrules of umbrellas or maybe it was sunshades they were wagging. Vindictive people. Everyone there looked deprived, especially the people serving in the shops. “Aw shucks,” he said back to them. It was Aw shucks, or more, more, mas. He was waxing. He suggested a hotel. I said better his lodgings. I was tipply and several thousand furloughs away from the jurisdiction of Coose. He said Baby, baby, baby. He said cinco minutos it would take. That staggered me. He was steaming. Rooms, rooms, rooms, he said, tearing off into a side street. I foresaw some joint, the signing of a book, a key, maybe two keys, a flight of stairs, sleaziness, a big bill and subsequent hassling. The tourist chief didn’t give me a very flush expense account, and as for my hotel, it was a shebeen, with empty detergent packets on the window-sill, and the previous inhabitants’ chewed sockets. So I grappled with him, there and then, and using his sirdar cap as a porous font, I issued a few fond words while a great animal leap, a glorious leum spurted from him, whereupon I shot from the taxi and ran for it to a photographer’s studio where I was expected. The last thing I heard him say was “No bueno, no good.” Talk about hyperbole. I was lucky I didn’t get arrested. Needless to add I was in tatters and askew.
Lately, I’m thinking that if I’d kept some of these emissions instead of squandering them so, that if I’d put them in a little jar or a test tube, I could have done a bit of experimentation, dabbled in the mysteries of botany. No knowing what might have emerged, a plant, gestation, a half-thing, a creature, nearly with animation, on the borders between animal and plant, no feet, moving by means of its cilia, always moving in the daylight, in the dusk, in the dark, with something of the phosphorescence of the glow worm or the ocean, a little wandering infuseria. I could have given it names, mused over names, the way expectant parents do, consulted a book. I forsook all that, the domestic bliss, spurned it.
Still, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The raptures make up for everything, even the doldrums. Like screens or roses just floating by, wondrous the colours that crop up in me, moving along like barges, nice, pink, with a lining, a thousand, thousand sundowns.
Then there are the faces, some I have met, some not, heroes if you please, genii, more mouths than could cram in Babel, faces from the east and the west, a flux, a flotsam, then the dancing, the beautiful precocious dancing, sheened limbs, persons only just grazing each other like the spruces that appear to brush the heavens in moonlight.
These must either be a foretaste or an aftertaste or else they’re some little thing sent to keep me going. Oh sweet worrisome briar, oh sweet vertigo.
Not always placid either. Tight squeezes, very often on the brink of suffocation I am, or a scream, the joys giving way to the shudders, a tempest, a terrible tempest. But it is beyond that I have to go, anyone has to go, for there to be satisfaction in it, for there to be the real pageant, for one to be conducted through the fire.
Very soon I will be accustomed to killing. As murderess, I list a mere three – Boss, Lil and Lightfoot; not the lad, more than likely he has the irons over me, beautiful little blackguard. He knows how to amputate.
I did take up arms not too long ago, the weapons were ludicrous, warm human flaps of flesh, in strips, brimming with blood, more like pies, and we all having a good go at one another, the enemy side, our side, identical weapons, milling, and pressing back and forth on the plains, the interminable plains; no cavalry, all infantry as far as I could tell. I didn’t get the jitters or anything like that. Then God appeared, parting the heavens in his imperious way, a broth of a boy, hoarse-voiced in white of course, white broderie anglaise, telling all and sundry to quit such considerations, earthly feuds, to remember the writs, to get back to prayer and tillage. When I tell people they laugh but I laugh about their budgerigars.
I had quails’ eggs yesterday. I bought six but ended up with five. They have a very particular yolk, nearly pink, fine tasting.
“Six quails’ eggs,” I said, first in the queue.
“Huh – two herrings please,” said the woman behind and then proclaimed I was a glamour puss. The man serving me was irate. He pretended not to hear her. He put the quails’ eggs in a papier mâché box, but since they were too big for the sockets, they were wobbling and he said they were in danger of breaking. He went away to get something and though I thought it would be chaff, it turned out to be wood shavings. There was a smell of the forest.
“Going to a funeral?” she said, addressing him, and then started to poke things with her cane, to comment on the quality of the skate.
“Offal,” she said, “frozen offal.” He said there was no need to be so toffeenosed and I thought she would strike either one of us.
Then in the pub where I went to get a glass of wine, I had another peradventure. It was a slack time and there was a woman talking to a man, her voice very pleased with itself, saying how she had good taste, excellent taste, and that her three best chairs, her Chippendales, were beautifully scattered around her house – one in the hall, one in her bedroom, one in the lounge. I decided that her hearer was her lawful husband and that it was their one talking point. He looked vacant, his eyes were like the flecks of snow. Suddenly she said she wasn’t going to sit in a saloon bar with a person of my ilk. I was somewhat flamboyant. I often paint my cheeks to give myself and others a little startle. Another time I might have looked quite ordinary in my brown astrakhan and without the caste mark on my forehead. There we were, two women refusing to budge. Like two odd bullocks thrown in together at a market. Her husband was trying to calm her down, assuage her, and in the end what she did was to put a handkerchief over her face, and secure it down with the brim of a fustian hat. Every time she took a sip a bit of handkerchief got in the way of her mouth. Once she was blindfolded he was making winks at me as if to convey what a shrew she was. He was no Casanova either. Then by a coincidence the woman from the fish queue came in and I thought there was going to be a positive onslaught. I made room for her. She ordered a gooseberry wine and said to get this, that she slept alone in her four foot six bed and her husband slept alone in his four foot six bed and no regrets on either side. He got up at two a.m. to let out the dog, but he would have to get up anyhow as he suffered with his kidneys. “Nice,” she said, alluding to my wine. I showed her the eggs and their beautiful speckles. She held one to her ear and after a bit of coaxing had it in her sherry, raw. Such a good, such a true heart possessed her then as she sifted the bits of shell in the palm of her hand and glowed, like a kind of dumpling. “I am earthy,” she said, “but I dream sometimes.”
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sp; Still, little by little the circle dwindles. One has to admit that things are thinning out, handshakes getting more limp, birthdays getting forgotten or ignored, people dying or emigrating to Australia, people going bonkers, or taking umbrage for the remainder of their lives. Madge is a case in point. A big wall or a gangrene has risen up between us. We can’t forgive. Or rather we can’t comprehend the spite that possessed us. I won’t see her again, not till her funeral probably. She might even outlive me, her mother lived to a ripe ninety-four. We shared a flat once, iced cakes together, and carded wool. She got me this job, sent the clipping that brought it to my attention.
“Sonofabitch,” she said, coming down with a mink over her shoulders. I arrived in the middle of the night, one of the occasions when I got the bejabies and thought that it might not stop at that, that Lil might come, with a sodality, her sisters in Christ. Madge was thrilled. I made straight for the fire and unraked it. She gave me the bellows. I had some notion that I’d kip down there for ever. That’s what I craved, to stay with someone, to give this place the go-by, to have chats and unions in the evening. She produced cold roast pork and tinned apple sauce. There was snow and a blizzard. In fact it is a record night for snow, one in the annals, one when tramps must have cleaved to the ditches like hens do in rain, and in trepidation. Through the big window we could see it spinning, falling, and it was as if the night was turning into some kind of vast corpse that had to be watched and waked over. We were glad of our drop.
“Tell you what,” she said, “you don’t want to live but you’ve got to live, right?’
She knew that I’d come with some tale of woe, some conchology and she put her finger to her lips and said, “You wanted to talk about something. Do me a favour. Don’t.” She said the times was zero, all zero, but fun, good fun. She carved and while she was still carving I was picking, scrounging, eating the best bits of crackling. Her husband Buzz was not her husband proper, for the seventeen years prior to their divorce. She did everything to keep it together, gardened, bought a pressure cooker, learned how to shake cocktails, how to be a poker player and a pretty girl. From behind a platter she produced his letter. It said how rotten he treated her, how life had passed them by, how his new girl had stubbed a toe. The wine was from Italy and tasted of resin. I thought of sun and a holiday, rock faces and the little strands of hyssop, lilos getting blown up, children and dogs sploshing and jumping into water, lovers eating the same dish, maybe paella, so that they would have the same breath smell when they went up for a siesta. It was like being there. I didn’t have to picture it much. “Do you know who I hate?” I said, on the spur.
“Who, what?” she said, in a whisper.
“Loving couples,” I said.
“Innaresting,” she said.
She punched the dresser with glee. The crockery began to waver. It was a low Welsh dresser with jugs hanging from all the hooks, and they shook quietly long after the wood had subsided. In the field outside, a mare was being mounted by a stallion, black as serge.
“Look, fucking,” Madge said. His hooves girded her middle, his great mane rose in the air, and we waited, but all of a sudden the mare bucked as the stallion slipped and fell.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, thinking he had damaged a leg. She mentioned the year’s losses which were preposterous and which she blamed on Bluett, the cowman. He had found her once when she’d taken an overdose and pumped her, used the stomach pump that he had for beasts. After a brief gallop the stallion cornered the mare again. We clapped. She was still as a stone mare and we thought, grudging.
“Yes, my old man, Buzz, he beat the shit out of me,” Madge said, and flung the letter into the fire. She riled against her maker, that all her buzzies were hapless, losers. Outside was very stark, the night, the bare field, the serge black flitches as they rose in the air, the mare so brown, so abject.
“Impotent bastard,” she said. The stallion had slipped again. She said Buzz wasn’t even there for her two miscarriages, was cleaning up Europe after the war, making friends with German doggies, mountain doggies and so forth. She laughed and was snide, said everyone had a grubby fantasy when you got past the bullshit. More snow was falling and everything was getting fastened, her voice in my head, the mare and the stallion with nothing to graze or chew on, and not able to mesh. When she opened the window there was a slushing sound as the stallion trudged round and round clockwise in the boggling snow.
“Tell you a secret,” she said, winking.
“Wedding night, had to put bows in hair and do cancan. Threw things at me, said get off that stupid dressing-table.
“Sonofabitch, he was the one that asked me to get on in the first place.
“Tell you another secret,” she said, opening another bottle of wine. The cork crumbled and she had to force it in. She kept muttering, “Boy, wait for it because it is going to be creamy.” It was a Greek wine and more acrid than the other. A little girl she was, thinks she hadn’t menstruated, when she had to accompany her mother to a big store, to meet ladies for lunch, where she got cramps, then diarrhoea, had to decline the lunch, was teary, but going home in the bus, with the street lights already on, she saw a man in overalls, who looked at her, right into her, and she had a sexual experience, the jellying, a womb wave, her very first, the first big dip.
“I’m fine,” she said, “just fine.” But she looked raddled.
“Know what I did?” she said.
“When he took up with that broad Jody I went to a hotel where they were spending their dirty week-end, brought Bluett who eats enough for four, so we treated ourselves to the best champagne, the best Beluga caviar and the very highest venison they had. When the check came I signed his name alongside his room number and I sent it up with a note on a Kleenex, ‘Super lunch darling,’ then I left.”
I shook my head and she shook hers, slowly, reproachfully.
“You don’t want to live, but you’ve got to live,” she said, and poured the wine with a flourish. At that second we jumped. The stallion was on the mare, cleaved to her and though it was impossible we thought we’d heard the jissoms flow.
“So what do we do now, angel,” she said and gave me a big hug. The dregs she and I. The light was stark, searching. The dawn was brighter than any normal dawn, brighter than this. We stood there watching, enthralled, half drunk, in an embrace. I could see her predicament. I could touch it, it was like an opening in her chest, being let look in. Into her plight. Some part always remains inviolate, there dwells a skeleton within that nothing can blemish, that no feeling can tamper with. She was an inveterate then.
She ran and got bread and put it on the outside ledge of the window, and the birds came out of their hiding places and the gulls came in from their roosts above the sea. But there were no cawings and no songs. The snow numbed everything and time seemed to drip, tick-tock, tick-tock. As the bread froze she scooped it up, held it under the warm tap, kneaded it, and played. It was funny to see the steaming bread burst out between her fingers and smear what she called her lousy engagement ring. Out again, on tiptoe, then back, and the birds reconvened. There was one robin, its breast an impudence, too bright, a gash, since everything else, the laurel hedge, the rhododendron bushes, the railing wire, the posts and the numerous trees were bandaged in snow. She was watching, engaged.
“You shouldn’t have stuck him for that lunch,” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said; I looked and saw that the bonhomie had passed.
“I mean,” I said, trying to gloss it.
“You son of a bitch, you come here to blubber, big mouth, do me a favour, stay away, who’s cried on my shoulder, who’s the one whose kid I had to play Scrabble with, while you screwed and jounced with a black, Uncle Tom no less, who’s been Miss Raw Nerve while the rest of us wipe your arse, you’ve had it boy, you come here without an invite, so you get out, and that’s only for starters …” She threw the glass she had been drinking from and as it fell around my feet, I looked at my toes and wondered how I wo
uld get out and if I would meet wild dogs on the way to the village. She went to the dresser, unhooked three of the jugs and smashed them on the tiles. Two little white handles stayed on her fingers like rings.
“You rat. You bloody don’t,” she said when I started to dial the operator to get a car hire number. She pulled the receiver from me and mashed it as if it were a bone whose marrow she had to get to. Then all of a sudden she was hitting me, punching, saying son of a bitch, calling on God, calling on all bastards, calling on Buzz. It lasted no more than a minute. She let her hands drop to her sides and said foolishly that she hadn’t been sleeping well of late, that a cigarette cough kept her awake. I stayed but it was only for appearance sake. Suddenly we were radically sober, sober and ashamed. I lay on the sofa. At intervals she would appear in the doorway and throw in a blanket or a bunch of cigarettes or matches and say “Catch”.
She made toast for breakfast and cut it into little segments, like croutons. She was doing everything to make up for it and so was I. But our voices were stilted and our looks veiled. We made no reference to the bruise I had. We were terrified that I might be snowed in, so that when the car hooted we both let out a yell of relief as if in fact a reconciliation had occurred.
