Everything Will Be All Right by Tessa Hadley Page B

outstretched, hissing; the delivery men wouldn’t leave their vans until Lil had driven the geese off, flapping at them with her apron. Gus, Ann’s favorite, was the ringleader and the most vicious. She crooned to him, smoothing down his creamy fat neck, burying her hands under his wings, kissing his beak; he loved nothing better than to stand pressed dazedly up against her while she tickled him. Gilbert, in a kind of symmetry, made up to Flo. Gus and Flo slept together in the grass in the orchard, a plump heap the color of yellow cream, feathers as satisfactorily intricate as neat knitting. They always slept with one eye open; if two of them slept together, one watched right, one left.
    Ann played with Gilbert as if he were another pet. He submitted patiently while she stroked the lines of his face with her fingers, pinched the lobes of his ears, nibbled his hands. They competed in Scissors, Paper, Stone and she always won, because she saw his fist first and changed hers in a fraction of a second. He traipsed round after her in obedience to sharp commands she snapped out in her bossy voice. She didn’t call him Uncle Gilbert as Vera said they should, just Gilly. Once she dressed him up in one of Lil’s dresses over his trousers, tied a bow of ribbon in his hair, and put lipstick and clip earrings on him. When Lil gave her a talking to, Gilbert said she didn’t mean any harm by it.
    â€”You don’t know her, Lil said. She means it, all right.
    Ann teased Gus and Flo, offering bits of grass and snatching them out of reach, ruffling their neck feathers the wrong way, picking up their patient pink feet. Flo didn’t mind, but Gus would lose his temper and then Gilbert laughed at him and held his beak closed if he tried to snap at them. Their wings were clipped, but they could fly high enough to then come skidding down along the surface of the rhines with their feet out, sending up a crest of water to either side; they seemed to do it for the sheer pleasure of it. That made Gilbert laugh; he sat watching them for half an hour at a time, crouched down on his haunches with his elbows on his knees. Joyce remembered that in the North she had seen men sitting out in the street like this, the miners outside their houses and on the street corners, smoking and talking with their friends. Another thing that reminded her of those men was the way he smoked Lil’s Woodbines, nursing them down to the last nub between thumb and forefinger, behind the palm of his hand. Vera got exasperated with how he mashed up his potatoes into his gravy and drank his tea out of his saucer, and how he liked to wash stripped down to his trousers at the kitchen sink, lathering and puffing and blowing. Joyce couldn’t see how he was going to last in the South, where none of these ways fitted in with how people did things.
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    Lil had packed his bag to go into that place. Her mam had sent the neighbors for her when Gilbert started on his rampage in the afternoon. Not that any of them had thought he was going in for more than a few days. She hadn’t thought at the time that he was sick, just angry. Gilbert had always had a temper; when he was a baby, scarcely toddling, he used to beat his head deliberately against the floor when he was crossed; he’d even crawl off the rug to where he could beat it against the bare tiles because it hurt more. And when he and Ernest fought as boys, Gilbert often came out best even though Ernest was bigger, because Ernest was slow and gentle where Gilbert was wild. He clung on like a vicious dog; she’d seen his big boot stamping down on Ernest’s head where he had him pinned on the floor, cursing him from between his clenched teeth. This fighting used to break Mam’s heart. Gilbert was her favorite, her late last baby, beautiful with his yellow curls. She’d dressed him up when he was small in a plaid tam-o’-shanter set sideways at a jaunty