Free Wild Decembers by Edna O’Brien

her mind, then from under a vase got the ruler and measured him for fun, telling her sister not to forget it, to make a note of it for her little table of measurements in years to come.
    “Give a poor man a break,” he said then.
    “Draw the shades, Reena dear,” she said, and crossing she dragged a folded mattress from under the milk stool, unrolled it, and flung it down.
    “I’m an engaged man,” Bugler said, reaching for his shoes and socks.
    “Bollocks . . . You rode the songstress in her father’s saddle room, we heard.”
    Caught like that and with Rosemary coming before the summer, he feels trapped.
    “Look,” he began, getting earnest. “Why don’t we sit and talk and have a glass of wine like good friends.”
    “Strut your stuff, Reen,” Rita said. It was the cue for Reena to lie out on the mattress, lift her hair above her head, and then, with each and every articulation of arms, legs, and limbs, try to entice him over, the movements reflected on the wall as limbs of flame, inflammatory.
    “For God’s sake,” he says, rising. Rita, having divested him of his trousers, is now hanging them on the kitchen clothesline next to the broderie anglaise garment. She stands back from it then with a little song.
     
As I was going to the fair of Athy
I saw an aul petticoat hanging to dry.
I took off my drawers and hung them thereby
To keep that aul petticoat wa-rm.
     
    Reena is now propped with cushions and stroking a georgette scarf to add to her enticements, moving and arching, serpentine, a corpus of different pinks, all of her in a quiver and the mouth emitting little gasping sighs. He stares with a prolonged and mesmerised stare.
    “Better than the lakes of Killarney,” Rita says from behind his back, and pushes him forward as Reena’s arms come up to lessen the thud of his fall on the thin mattress.
    “Sweetheart,” and she holds him a fraction above her so that she can see him seeing the gluttony that is in her eyes.
    “The business,” Rita says, settling herself on the barrel with her melodeon.
    “His coconut’s shrunk,” Reena says from the floor.
    “Nurture it.”
    “Will you clip back my hair . . . It’s in my mouth.”
    “Good girl . . . The Resurrection and the Life.”
    From time to time Reena lifts her face to breathe or to arch her neck, Rita watching with a rapt attention, the accordion on her lap, half opened, with now and then random notes of stray music coming from it until the moment she feels drawn to crouch down, her voice now a repetition of urgencies—“Give it to him, Reen . . . Give it to him . . . The rich reluctant bastard. Show him who wears the trousers in this hideaway house.”
     
    “When he wakened it was almost light; a slit of it came through the crack in the shutters which she had drawn. He saw himself up and dressed and off out, gone, and Jesus, the mess. He would have to knock a few quid off the hay to keep them from spilling. They were sound asleep, two bodies clasped together in a mimicry of galling innocence, a strand of Rita’s long hair under his elbow as he eased his way out. On the barrel the half-open melodeon, strangely obscene, the fawn semi-parted pleats as if about to start up again and jinx his getaway. He saw her eyes, narrowing, scheming, darting from his face down the length of his body and up again. It was Rita wide awake.
    “What time is it?” he said as nonchalantly as he could manage.
    “It’s morning,” she said.
    “Morning,” he said, and crawled out to pick his own clothes from the jumble of garments in the corner. His trousers were still hanging up.
    “There’s an outside tap,” she said as he went towards the door, and as an afterthought she threw him a bit of torn towel.
    After he’d washed, he looked up at the sky and tried to figure out what time it might be in western Australia.
    “Well,” he said, coming back in, his shirt sticking to his wet back.
    “Well,” she said in an unceasing