The Gift of Women (14 page)

Elizita takes sight of me across Terry's shoulder. Her face sets.

I wonder if I should follow Terry with a hug, apply my lips to one or both cheeks. I choose a hug, and one.

“Elizita, you are…” She's waiting for me to pick a word. I go for one, “…what can I say, looking so, very…splendid.”

“Jesus, Gavin. You're not still a grammar school boy, are you, talking to one of the governors' wives on Prize-Giving Day?”

She's given me my cue. “What the hell, El? You could be the prize. Life-size trophy, in that silver get-up.”

“Never a truer word, Gavin. Never a truer word.”

She glances at the camera case I have brought down with me and set on the glass tabletop, which gleams as brightly as the pool under it. She aims a moment without expression at the camera, then tells Terry, “He hasn't changed, has he? Still set to watch us girls to see what we're up to.

“Well, here I am, ready to be introduced to your viewers.”

In her wrap of silvery silk and a pair of rubber pool shoes, I'm tempted to cap her quip about viewers with what pops out of Terry's mouth.

“Voyeurs, love.”

“Oh, I luv it when you call me love.”

I look down at Elizita's feet, at her pool slippers. They too are coloured silver. They make her feet look small, severed from the tan of her ankle and leg. Her hair is short. The silk and the chill of the early morning have braced her skin. It has a winter tan, like khaki, or like the skin of a potato that had been scrubbed and baked evenly and firmly in the oven. A smidgen of oil is all it will take to darken it.

“You look really great, yourself,” Elizita says to Terry. “I bet you catch an eye or two that Gavin doesn't notice.”

“Could be, but look at you,” Terry replies. “Great robe – your whole outfit, great,” and Elizita stares into my silence behind the camera. “Doesn't she just make you want to kiss her?” Terry says with a low, salacious hiss, like she's saying it into my ear.

“I already have, haven't I, Elizita, and I have chapped lips this early in the morning,” I answer, trying to make them laugh and ignore me.

“What's 'e been up to that 'e needs Lypsyll?” Elizita asks.

“Putting his footage in his mouth,” Terry says. “Come on and give Elizita a kiss.”

“Doesn't matter one way or t'other,” Elizita pouts in that North-of-England accent, which she brought with her to Northern Ireland, and has now imported to Nevada. “A touch of t'other does no harm though. Am I right or am I rat-shit?” she asks Terry.

“No harm,” says Terry.

In B., Elizita was a touch of t'other from Birmingham, who joined the school at thirteen when her father was transferred to head the Inland Revenue division for Northern Ireland. In a short while, her class adopted her Birmingham way of saying things, especially
t'other
. T'other was touted everywhere.

“Remember the old pool first thing in the morning? Whatever was it Sandy put in it to keep us from getting the lurgy? Whitewash on the walls, chlorine…?”

“Fresh sea water and tea leaves,” Terry continues for her. “Parts of the pool smelt like a cuppa with too much milk in it.”

“Tea in the teeth. Remember when you got tea leaf in your teeth?”

“Remember those awful changing boxes that smelt of bums and armpits? Others used them for undressing, but not
we
. Sandy knew, y'know, that we compared our parts.”

“Needed his cup of tea to keep awake in that equipment room. Well, one end of the changing boxes was the back of his equipment room, right? Had a slot in t' wall, for lettin' in air and coolin' the old bugger down. While us girls – out in the chill, tits standing to attention. Ready for inspection, right?”

Elizita gives the two fingers – which is one finger over here. Who to? The ghost of the old voyeur, or me?

“Gavin McFee, that man had his big peeper fixed on us, well before you came along with your camera. Now, let me look at you,” she says, and I step back, thinking she's talking to me, but she tugs open Terry's gown that came supplied with the room, a whisper of silk which she found hanging in one of its closets – an entire gown comprising a Chinese or Japanese print of a bathhouse, where the women are on their knees beside the men in the porcelain tubs, washing them.

“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 asks.

“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.”