by Anne Enright
The church is in Walkinstown, so that’s her family off the Cromwellsfort Road. She might have lived at home still, at twenty-four – the price of everything these days. I could go there now, if I wanted to. I could drive there in my little car. I wonder do her parents know what she got up to? I have a shameful desire to tell them – so sharp, I have to stand still until it subsides.
I am not that kind of person.
No.
I make my cup of coffee and I calm down.
Still, I wonder what she looked like. What school did she go to; do they have pictures in the corridors, of former girls in a row, the class of – what year would she be? – the class of 1998.
So young.
Who could be that young?
All the time I am loading the dishwasher and pulling out the hoover and doing my morning round, the funeral is happening in my head. But I am not going to jump in the car and hack my way across town to Walkinstown. I am not that kind of person. I am not going to panic at the last minute and show up at the cemetery to check the faces at the grave and pick up a few words here and there, about what a fine girl she was, ‘irrepressible’, ‘full of fun’. Bloody right she was full of fun.
Or not. Maybe she was shy, unassuming. Easily impressed. She might have been a quiet kind of girl. A girl who was anxious to please.
No.
I am not going to find this out, or anything else. Because that would be obscene. I am not going to show up like a ghost at the wedding – what’s the opposite of that? – like a flesh and blood wife, at this last dance with the dead.
We had the salmon when he came home. Potatoes. A bit of asparagus.
‘Lovely,’ says my husband. ‘Delicious.’ Then he gets up afterwards and makes himself a sausage sandwich, cold from the fridge. Butter, mayonnaise, the lot.
And I say, ‘Why don’t you stick some lard in there, while you’re at it?’
This is the last real thing I say to him, for a long while. Where’s the gas bill gone when will you be home would you pick up Shauna from her ballet? We could do this for ever. After a few weeks of it, my husband gets a nervous cough: he wonders if it could be lung cancer. His toe is numb, isn’t that a sign of MS? And I just say, ‘Get it checked out.’ Because the girl is dead. So let’s not bother with the fuss and foother of getting back together. Let’s not do all that again. Not this time. This time let us mourn.
I am too proud. I know that. And in my pride I watched him – my fantastic, stupid man – lurch around in his life. And I did not offer him a helping hand.
Where’s the key to the shed when will you be home would you buy a pack of plastic blades for the Flymo?
The girl was with us, all this time. Dead or alive. She was standing at the bus stop on the corner, she was sitting in our living room watching Big Brother, she was being buried, night after night, on the evening news.
I think that milk’s gone off when will you be home I really don’t want the children having TV sets in their rooms.
After a month of this, I looked at my husband and saw that he was old. It did not happen overnight; it happened over thirty nights or so. My husband shaking hands with death. And what else? Thinking about it. Thinking it wouldn’t be so bad to be dead, after all. Like she was.
Whenever I woke in the night, he was awake too. Once I heard him crying again; this time in the shower. He thought the noise of the water would cover it. I listened to him snuffling and choking in the spray and I realised it was time to put my pride away. It was time to call him back home.
On Saturday, after the supermarket run, I put on my good coat and my leather gloves. And a hat, even – my funeral hat. And when my husband said, ‘Where are you off to?’ – because God knows I never go anywhere without drawing a map – I said, ‘I’m going to visit a grave.’
I had a beautiful bunch of white lilies, all wrapped up in cellophane. I picked them off the kitchen counter and walked past him – I cradled the lilies against my shoulder and I walked past my husband, who was now old – and I did not look back, as I went out the door.
She did not matter to him, I know that. I know she did not matter. So I went to the cemetery and sought out her grave. I wandered through the headstones until I found her, and I put the lilies on the ground under which she lay, and I told her that she mattered. Then I went home and said to my husband. Then I went home and said to Kevin:
‘Let’s do something for Easter, what do you think. Something nice. Where would you like to go?’
YESTERDAY’S WEATHER
Hazel didn’t want to eat outside – the amount of suncream you had to put on a baby and the way he kept shaking the little hat off his head. Also there were flies, and her sister-in-law Margaret didn’t have a steriliser – why should she? – so Hazel would be boiling bottles and cups and spoons to beat the band. Then John would mooch up to her at the cooker and tell her to calm down – so not only would she have to do all the work, she would also have to apologise for doing all the work when she should be having a good time, sitting outside and watching blue-bottles put their shitty feet on the teat of the baby’s bottle while everyone else got drunk in the sun.
She remembered a man in the hotel foyer, very tall, he handled his baby like a newborn lamb; setting it down on its stomach to swim its way across the carpet. And Hazel had, briefly, wanted to be married to him instead.
Now she grabbed a bowl of potato salad with the arm that held the baby and a party pack of crisps with the other, hoofed the sliding door open and stepped over the chrome lip on to the garden step. The baby buried his face in her shoulder and wiped his nose on her T-shirt. He had a summer cold, so Hazel’s navy top was criss-crossed with what looked like slug trails. There was something utterly depressing about being covered in snot. It was just not something she had ever anticipated. She would go and change but the baby would not be put down and John, when she looked for him, was playing rounders with his niece and nephews under the apple trees. He saw her and waved. She put down the bowl and the crisps on the garden table, and shielded the baby’s head against the hard ball.
The baby’s skin, under the downy hair, breathed a sweat so fine it was lost as soon as she lifted her hand. Women don’t even know they miss this until they get it, this smoothness, seeing as men were so abrasive or – what were they like? She tried to remember the comfort of John’s belly with the hair stroked all one way, or the shocking silk of his dick, even, bobbing up under her hand, but he was so lumbering and large, these days, and it was always too long since he had shaved.
‘Grrrr …’ said Margaret, beside her, rummaging a bag of crisps from out of the party pack. This is what happens when you have kids, Hazel thought, you eat all their food – while Margaret’s children, as far as she could see, ate nothing at all. They ate nothing whatsoever. Even so, everyone was fat.
‘Come and eat,’ Margaret shouted down the garden, while Hazel turned the baby away from the sudden noise.
‘Boys! Steffie! Please! Come and eat.’
Her voice was solid in the air, you could almost feel it hitting the side of the baby’s head. But her children ignored her – John too. He had lost his manners since coming home. He pretended his sister did not exist, or only barely existed.
‘How’s the job coming?’ she might say and he’d say, ‘… Fine,’ like, What a stupid question.
It made Hazel panic, slightly. Though he was not like that with her. At least, not yet. And he lavished affection on his sister’s three little children, he threw them up in the air, and he caught them, coming down. Still, Hazel found it hard to get her breath; she felt as though the baby was still inside her, pushing up against her lungs, making everything tight.
But the baby was not inside her. The baby was in her arms.
‘Come and eat!’ shouted Margaret again. ‘Come on!’
Still, no one found it necessary to hear. Hazel would shout herself, but that would definitely make the baby cry. She stood by the white wrought-iron table, set with salads
and fizzy orange and cut ham, and she watched this perfect picture of a family at play, while beside her Margaret said, ‘God between me and prawn-flavoured Skips,’ ripping open one of the crinkly packets and diving in.
The ball thumped past Hazel’s foot. John looked up the length of the garden at her.
‘Hey!’ he called.
‘What?’
‘The ball.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The ball!’
It seemed to Hazel that she could not hear him, even though his words were quite clear to her. Or that she could not be heard, even though she was saying nothing at all. She found herself walking down the garden, and she did not know why until she was standing in front of him, with the baby thrust out at arms’ length.
‘Take him,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Take the baby.’
‘What?’
‘Take the fucking baby!’
The baby dangled between them, so shocked that when John fumbled it into his arms, the sound of wailing was a relief – at least it turned the volume in her head back on. But Hazel was already walking back up to the ball. She picked it up and slung it low towards the apple trees.
‘Now. There’s your ball.’ Then she turned to go inside.
John’s father was at the sliding door; his stick clutched high against his chest, as he managed his way down the small step. He looked at her and smiled so sweetly that Hazel knew he had just witnessed the scene on the lawn. Also that he forgave her. And this was so unbearable to her – that a complete stranger should be able to forgive her most intimate dealings in this way – that Hazel swung past the tiny old man as she went inside, nearly pushing him against the glass.
John found her hunkered on the floor in the living room searching through the nappy bag. She looked up. He was not carrying the baby.
‘Where’s the baby?’ she said.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he said.
‘I have to change my top. What did you do with the baby?’
‘What’s wrong with your top?’
Snots. Hazel could not bring herself to say the word; it would make her cry, and then they would both laugh.
But there was no clean T-shirt in the bag. They were staying in a hotel, because Hazel had thought it would be easier to get the baby asleep away from all the noise. But there was always a teething ring left in the cool of the mini-bar, or a vital plastic spoon in the hotel sink, and so of course there was no T-shirt in the bag. And anyway, John would not let her bring the baby back to the hotel for a nap.
‘He’s fine. He’s fine,’ he kept saying as the baby became ever more cranky and bewildered; screaming in terror if she tried to put him down.
‘Why should he be unhappy?’ she wanted to say. ‘He has had so few days in this world. Why should the unhappiness start here?’
Instead she kept her head down, and rummaged for nothing in the nappy bag.
‘Go and get the baby,’ she said.
‘He’s with Margaret, he’s fine.’
Hazel had a sudden image of the baby choking on a prawn-flavoured Skip – but she couldn’t say this, of course, because if she said this, then she would sound like a snob. It seemed that, ever since they had arrived in Clonmel, there was a reason not to say every single thought that came into her head.
‘I hate this,’ she said, eventually, sinking back from the bag.
‘What?’
‘All of it.’
‘Hazel,’ he said. ‘We are just having a good time. This is what people do when they have a good time.’
And she would have cried then, for being such a wrong-headed, miserable bitch, were it not for a quiet thought that crossed her mind. She looked up at him.
‘No, you’re not,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You are not having a good time.’
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Right. Whatever you say,’ and turned to go.
Margaret hadn’t, in fact, asked the baby to suck a prawn-flavoured Skip. She had transformed the baby into a gurgling stranger, sitting on the brink of her knee and getting its hands clapped. The baby’s brown eyes were dark with delight, and his mouth was fizzing with smiles and spit. At least it was, until he heard Hazel’s voice, when he turned, and remembered who his mother was, and started to howl.
‘Well, don’t say you didn’t like it,’ said Hazel, taking him on to her shoulder, feeling betrayed.
‘Sorry,’ said Margaret, ‘I was dying to have a go.’
‘Oh, any time,’ said Hazel, archly. ‘You can keep him if you like,’ listening already to her housewife’s camp.
Why not? She sat down at the table and threw a white baby cloth over the worst of the slug trails on her chest and lifted her face to the weak Easter sun.
‘How’s the new house?’ said Margaret.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Hazel. ‘You can’t get anything done.’
‘Five years,’ said Margaret. ‘Five years I have been trying to get carpet for the back bedrooms.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘I mean, five years I’ve been trying to get to the shop to look at the carpet books to start thinking about carpet for the back bedrooms.’
‘What did you used to have?’ said Hazel, then realised she shouldn’t ask this, because it was John’s parents’ house, and talking about the old carpet was talking about his dead mother, and God knows what else.
‘I mean, did you have lino or boards, or what?’
‘I couldn’t look at them,’ said Margaret. ‘I got down on my hands and knees and I got – you know – a claw hammer, and I prised them up.’
Hazel looked at the laughing children running after John, who was also laughing.
‘The dirt,’ said Margaret.
‘John!’ said Hazel. ‘Tea-time. Now please.’ Then she said to her sister-in-law, ‘A friend of mine found amazing stuff on the Internet. Stripes and picture rugs, and I don’t know what else.’
‘Really,’ said Margaret, and started to butter a round of bread.
* * *
John’s father turned to them, and either shook his fist, or just lifted his hand – he had such a bad tremor, it was hard to tell. And this was another thing that Hazel could not figure out: what part of him was affected by the Parkinson’s, or was it Parkinson’s at all? Was his speech funny? Truth be told, she never understood a word he said.
‘Hffash en silla?’
‘Well, they’re kids, Daddy,’ said Margaret without a blink – so maybe it was just her, after all. They watched him for a while, poking at the flower bed with his stick.
‘He used to love his sweet pea along that wall,’ Margaret said, like the man was already dead.
Hazel said nothing.
‘Will you take a bite to eat, Daddy, pet?’ but he ignored her, like all the rest.
Hazel had a sudden pang for her little garden in Lucan. The seeded grass was sprouting, and the tulips were about to bloom. She had planted the bulbs the week they got the keys: kneeling on the front path, seven months pregnant, digging with the little shovel from the fire-irons; a straight line from the gate to the door of fat, red tulips, the type you get in a park – ‘a bit municipal,’ as her mother had said, squinting at the pack – that were now flaming red at the tips, like little cups of green fire.
‘That’s what I love about this place,’ she said. ‘This wonderful stretch of garden.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, carefully.
‘John. Divorce! Now,’ shouted Hazel, and he finally brought the laughing children to the tableside.
The baby didn’t cry when she shouted. That was something she hadn’t known, that the baby didn’t actually mind shouting. Or maybe he just didn’t mind her shouting.
Still, it was an advance.
‘Who wants ham?’ Hazel said to the kids; loading it on to the bread, helping out.
‘I don’t like ham,’ said Stephanie, who was nearly four.
‘No?’
‘No, I don’t like it.’
‘I don’t like ham.’ They were all saying it now, the big brother and the little brother. ‘I don’t like ham.’ It was all a bit intense, Hazel thought, and accusatory.
‘I think you are confusing me with someone who gives a fuck,’ she said – changing at the last moment, of course, to, ‘Someone who cares whether, or not, you like ham.’
John gave her a quick glance. The child, Stephanie, gazed at her with blank and sophisticated eyes.
‘Maybe a little bit of ham?’ said Hazel.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Stephanie.
‘Right.’
John picked an apple out of the pile on the table.
‘A is for?’ he said, holding it high.
‘Answer,’ said Stephanie. ‘A is for A-A-Answer,’ and the children laughed, even though they didn’t quite know what the joke was. They laughed on and on, and then they laughed at the sound of their own laughter, for a little while more.
‘How do you spell “wrong”?’ said Kenneth, the eldest.
‘W-R-O-N-G,’ said Hazel.
‘W is for Wrong,’ he said. ‘W is for Wrong Answer,’ and they were off again; this amazing, endless, senseless sound – and this time the baby joined in, too.
He was asleep before they reached the hotel. The weather had changed and they carried him through a wind-whipped car park that did not even make him stir. Nor did he wake up in the room, when Hazel prised him out of the car seat – so she lay him on the bed as he was, profoundly asleep, in a dirty nappy and milk-encrusted babygro.
‘He’ll wake up in a minute,’ she said. ‘He needs a feed.’ But he still didn’t wake up: not for his feed, not when John went down to the bar for drinks. He slept through the remains of a film on the telly and another round of drinks, and he slept through the sound of his parents screaming at each other from either side of the bed where he lay. It blew up from nowhere.
‘And you can tell your fucking sister that I don’t want her fucking house.’
‘No one says you want it.’
‘Jesus, sometimes I think you’re just pretending to be thick and sometimes I think you actually are thick. You can’t talk about the carpets without her thinking what you’d put down on the floors if you got her out of there when the old man died.’
