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harm, and
pleasure.
    Her late husband, Frederick Mortimer
Eels, had been a professional circus midget. Twice nightly he was fired from a cannon into a net. That and cleaning out the
elephants was his job, though he only got billed for the former. Angel had met
him by accident. She ran over him in her gig. Born with an abnormal fear of
men, Angel saw in Frederick all the innocence of boyhood. Lying in hospital
under drugs from the accident, Frederick had proposed to her.
    Courting her in public was difficult,
as she towered over him by three feet, and he made a point of only meeting her
on the side of a hill.
    As the wedding day approached Fred
Eels was seized with a sexual phobia.
    'Ha, ha, ha,' said the doctor,
'there's no need to worry, Fred. I've known far shorter men marry far taller
women and they've had a perfectly normal sex life. Of course,' he added, 'you
won't have anybody to talk to.'
    Love does something. At the wedding,
Angel, for all her plainness, looked beautiful, and even Mr Eels looked and
walked a foot taller. It was not to last. The honeymoon was fatal. Trying to
change a light bulb in the bridal suite, Fred balanced on a chair and table,
fell back in the dark, broke his neck, and died.
    The funeral, tho' purple sad, seemed
a grim joke. The child-sized coffin lowered into the man-sized grave.
    'I'm sorry, Father,' an embarrassed
grave-digger apologized, ' I thought it was her husband.'
    ' It is,'
whispered the priest.
    'They must have buried him doubled
up,' the digger told his wife that night. ' Some people will do anything to save money.'
    Since then, fifteen long years ago,
Mrs Eels had no other love, but she had visited many, many circuses. In that
time, frustration had snowballed and was thundering down the slopes of desire.
It was a strange thing to be a widow and a virgin; secretly there were times
she would have loved to have run naked down O'Connell Street, shouting 'I've just
slept with a nigger man and this is me lunch break.' All this was now
sublimated in the false zeal of a female patriot.
    By levering hard with the screwdriver
and smashing four teeth, Haggerty had managed to release Meredith's dentures.
    Till now, monkey-faced Mr Ferguson
had said little; now, drawing a breath he spoke in a sing-song manner.
    ' May I make
a suggestion ? We only have this bit here to partition and the pubs close in an
hour. Why not let's all put one hand on the red pencil and draw a line that
falls naturally and peacefully into place ?'
    As he spoke his nose twitched,
violently, an affliction from the Boer War. His regiment had camped near Spion
Cop; the area was strewn with spherical white rocks like tennis balls. Issuing
from his tent one morning, he saw three soldiers throwing a rock around.
    ' Over here,' shouted the enthusiastic soccer player.
    It sailed towards him, he removed his hat, jumped, headed it and fell smiling and unconscious.
    That's when it started. Mr Ferguson
didn't mind. It got him out of the fighting with a disability pension. Twice
annually he would report to a medical board who decided whether the affliction
was diminishing. The day before these occasions, he would soak his nose in
arnica and pull a tight elastic band over his head and down under his nose,
thus holding it in a contracted position all night. The moment before the
medical, he would remove the band, and the nose, sensing its freedom, shook
with terrifying flexibility. So well had it behaved last time, the Board had
increased his pension by a half.
    But back to now.
    On a show of hands, they accepted his
suggestion. In what was meant to be a solemn moment, all hands held the pencil
and pulled slowly across the map. All was silent, the
room was filled with suspicion. Occasionally a gasp rent the silence as they
all strained for the advantage.
    'Steady, someone's pulling to the
benefit of Ulster.'
    'Lies, all lies.'
    'Who gave that jerk?'
    'Ah! I felt that.'
    ' Swine !'
    Finally the pencil reached its
destination. Faces broke