by Anne Enright
‘Oh, you are,’ he said, with his voice quite trembly. ‘Oh, you really are …’
‘You fucking bet I am.’
‘No, well done. Well done.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
‘Carpet, is it? I thought you were talking about my father.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I thought you were talking about my father, there, for a minute.’
‘Well, I am not talking about your father. That is exactly what I am not talking about. You are the one who is talking about your father. Actually. Or not talking about him. Or whatever passes in your fucking family for talking.’
‘You are such an uppity cunt, you know that?’
‘Yes, I am. Yes, I fucking am. And I don’t want your fat sister’s fat house.’
‘Well, actually, it’s not her house.’
‘Actually, if you don’t mind, I don’t want to talk about whose house it is. We can get our own house.’
‘We have our own house.’
‘A proper fucking house!!!’
Hazel was so angry she thought she might pop something, or have some style of a prolapse; her body, after the baby, being a much less reliable place. Meanwhile, the reason they needed a house in the first place slept on. His blissful flesh rose and fell. His mouth smiled.
The baby slept like he knew just what he was doing. The baby slept like he was eating sleep; his front stiff with old food and his back soft with shit. He slept through the roaring and the thrown hairbrush, and the storming of his father off to the residents’ bar. He slept through the return of his father twenty seconds later to say something very level and very telling, and the double-fisted assault as his mother pushed him back out to the corridor crying that he could sleep in the fucking bar. He slept through his mother’s anguished weeping, the roar of the taps, and the sad slosh and drip of her body shifting in the bath. It was, in fact, only when Hazel had fallen asleep, crawling for a moment in under the covers, that the baby decided to wake up and scream. Maybe it was the silence that woke him. Mind you, his screaming sounded the same as every other night’s screaming, she thought, so it was impossible to know how much he had been damaged by it all; by the total collapse of the love that made him. Could anger hurt him, when he had never heard it before?
Hazel plugged his roars with the bottle that was still floating, forgotten, in the hotel kettle. She undid the poppers on his babygro, as he sucked, and extracted him from it, one limb at a time. She reached between his soft legs to undo the poppers of his vest, which had a wet brown stain across the back, and she rolled the vest carefully under itself to keep the shit on the inside. When the vest was finally off, she pushed two baby wipes down into the nappy to stop the leak. All of this while the baby sat in her naked lap, with her left hand propping up the bottle and his eyes on hers.
The baby was huge. Maybe it was because she had no clothes on, but he seemed twice as big as the last time she had him in her arms. Hazel felt like she kept losing this baby, and getting someone new. She thought that she would fall in love with the baby if only it would stay still, just for a minute, but the baby never did stay still. Sometimes it seemed like it was all around her, as though there was nothing in her world except the baby, but every time she looked straight at the baby, or tried to look straight at the baby … whatever it was, just wasn’t there.
She was looking at him now.
But she still clung to it, whatever it was. She still hoped and hung on. Was this enough? Was this the way you loved a baby?
The line of milk pulsed and bubbled as it sank down into the teat, and the baby started to suck air. Hazel pulled the empty bottle out with a pop and set him on her shoulder, holding him with her forearms now, because she thought there might be shit on her hands.
The baby was full, his belly taut. She would get some wind out of him, and then clean up. Meanwhile, the feel of his bare skin against her own made Hazel vague with pleasure. She brushed her cheek against his fine hair, and the baby belched fantastically down the skin of her back.
‘Oh! so clever,’ she said, dipping and turning around. ‘Oh! so clever,’ dipping and turning back again. She did it a few more times, just to get the weight and poise of it, with the fat baby against her fat chest, and her crossed hands dangling beneath his bum. Dip and turn, dip and turn. The baby’s cheek a millimetre away from her own cheek – a hair’s breadth, that is what that was called. A hair’s breath.
Outside, the wind had picked up.
Rock a bye baby, she sang in a whisper, On the tree top.
She was nearly out of wipes. She did not have the courage to put him in a slippery bath. She would dunk a hotel towel in the sink and use that, no matter who had to pick it up, or use it afterwards. God, this baby business brought you very low, she thought, and turned with a smile to the opening door.
They were shattered when they got home.
John drove as though the road could feel his tyres; the tyres could feel the road. The whole world seemed as tender as they were. At Monasterevin, he reached his hand to touch her cheek, and she held it there with the flat of her own hand while, in the back of the car, the baby still slept.
When they pulled into the driveway, Hazel saw that her tulips had been blown down – at least, the ones that had opened first. She wondered if the storm had hit here too, and how strong was that wind anyway – was it a usual sort of wind? What would she be able to grow, here? She tried to think of a number she could ring, or a site online, but there was nowhere she could find out what she needed to know. It was all about tomorrow: warm fronts, cold snaps, showers expected. No one ever stopped to describe yesterday’s weather.
WIFE
There was a new woman behind the counter in the newsagent’s and it took Noel a while to realise that her throat had been slit. The scar was still a little livid, and Noel wondered who had done it to her. It was quite a horseshoe, bigger than you got from something medical, he thought. With a scar like that, you’d have to be careful about throwing your head back, in case the damn thing fell off.
‘And a packet of Maltesers, thanks.’
He wanted to see her do it. Idiot that he was, he wanted to make a little joke and make her laugh in a big, decadent, fifties way – a woman with a scarlet mouth, her face flung high, stubbing out a cigarette. You are a card.
‘Four euros, ten cent,’ said the woman with the scar, and Noel handed her a five.
Of course there was no scarlet lipstick; the woman was a faded sort of creature in a blue-check nylon coat. Still, she made him feel quite jaunty. Noel did not know how many times he had seen her – he only went in there for the weekend papers, or sometimes for a pint of milk if they ran out, and maybe a packet of Maltesers for his wife. Besides, the girls behind the counter changed all the time, he didn’t even see the good-looking ones any more – which was sad, but there you go. And he was halfway back to the house before he realised that the good-looking girls didn’t see him any more: he had it the wrong way around.
But the woman with the scar saw him. She was alert to where people’s eyes went and where they stayed, and even though she didn’t look at you when she handed over your change, still she was noticing every bit of you. Noel couldn’t tell what age she might be – he never could, with women – even her wrinkles sat lightly on her face, like they hadn’t the energy to cut into the skin. Who would bother trying to murder her? Someone she had bored into a frenzy. Or a stranger in an alleyway. Christ, it didn’t bear thinking about. Then again, maybe she had put the scar there all by herself. Maybe, in some sudden surge of strength, she had done it herself.
Noel threw the Maltesers across the kitchen to his wife, who said, ‘God, I love you.’ Then he went into the sitting room, and sat for a while reading the papers.
‘Your mother rang,’ his wife said – or shouted – from the next room.
‘What? When?’
‘When you were out.’
‘Well, thanks for telling me,’ he said. And was ignored.
He went back to his paper but it was spoiled, slightly, and he folded it and let it drop to the ground beside the leg of the chair.
‘I wish you’d tell me these things,’ he called out.
‘What?’
‘I wish you’d tell me when I get a call to the house.’
‘Jesus, Noel, I was hardly keeping it from you. You’re only in the door.’
She had come out into the hall and was looking in at him.
‘Are you all right?
‘What?’
Ten years ago he might have pointed out that just because she failed to pass on a phone message did not mean that he was suffering from some larger emotion. But that was ten years ago. These days, he didn’t bother. So things were looking up, then. ‘Course I’m all right.’
And he went into the hall to phone his mother.
His mother wanted to talk about the upstairs tap. The upstairs tap had been dripping for decades, but now she was a widow Noel’s mother wanted something to fuss about. As if it was his father’s fault – the drip – and she could finally get it fixed, now that he was out of her way.
‘I don’t know,’ said Noel. ‘Forty euros’ call-out, anyway – or used to be when I last got someone – which is a long time ago.’
‘Forty euros!’
His mother was on the new phone with the walk-around handset, which sort of cut out when she wasn’t speaking, so you couldn’t read the silences any more. What did she want?
‘Someone could do it. I could do it. It’s just a washer, probably.’
‘No, no,’ she said. ‘That’s not what I meant at all.’
But he bribed the youngest into the car and went over there, anyway, with his wrench beside him on the front seat. His daughter in the back was making up a song, and laughing through the words which, when he listened in to them, were all about ‘poo’. Noel looked at her in the mirror.
‘Would you ever?’ he said.
The night before she had broken the last, pink string that held one of her bottom teeth, and her gum had surged with blood. Now she was laughing through the fresh gap, singing:
‘And in that poo there was a plop,
A rare plop, a poo-poo plop.’
‘Ah, stop it, ’said Noel. But she didn’t stop, so he switched on the sports news and listened to that instead.
She ran up to the door and rang the bell to her granny’s, while Noel followed up the path, testing the weight of the wrench by swinging it into the cup of his left hand.
‘I told you not to,’ said his mother after she had kissed and cooed over her grandchild. ‘I told you I’d get a man in. That’s what I wanted. I wanted someone in.’
‘Not to worry,’ said Noel.
She smiled at him as he passed. His wife said it was like a romance, the pair of them these days. And maybe there was something in it. Since his father died, they were on the phone a lot more. They talked about things Noel would not usually talk about – not just about skirting boards and damp, but gardening, and people’s lives, and who said what to whom.
‘What’s that?’ he said, looking up from under the wash-hand basin.
‘The Dempseys up the road. I said he’s off the sauce. Those poor girls, what they put up with.’
‘Did I ever tell you I had a thing with the middle one? The blondie little one.’
‘The one you liked?’
‘How did you know I liked her?’
He came out from under the white ceramic. Both of them felt it – something clear and possible in the air between them – because, let’s face it, she had been talking about the neighbours for years.
‘Ah now,’ said his mother. ‘Sure I know everything.’
And she went back downstairs to make a cup of tea, leaving the ghost of the girl who lived up the road with him. The amazing fact, if you ever got your hand down there, that girls actually sweat. It only happened once, and briefly. But it was quite a shock.
Not as much of a shock now, though, as the realisation that the girl in question could not have been more than eleven years old. Too young for him, even at fourteen. What calculation had gone into all of that, he wondered? What style of a little shit was he, in those days?
Downstairs, his daughter was parked in front of the cartoons, sucking her hair.
‘Out of your mouth,’ he said.
She looked over at him – his beautiful daughter – with her skirt up and one leg thrown over the arm of the chair. The leg was covered in bruises, and the streel of hair cut across her cheek.
‘Have you been to the toilet?’ he said, as his mother came in behind him with the tea on a tray.
He could barely sit to drink it, sitting between daughter and mother – his agitation was so sudden and fierce. Noel bundled his daughter into the car and drove at speed with the wrench on the seat beside him and the match turned up high. The child wanted an ice cream – he had promised, she said, if she went to her gran’s; he had promised. So he pulled in at the local shop and sat, holding the wheel, thinking about the woman with the second grin, inside there in her blue coat behind the till.
‘You go in,’ he said finally. ‘Go on, give her this. Give the lady this.’
He handed the outraged child a fiver and, with a loud show of reluctance, she opened the car door.
Noel did not know what he was looking for. Or avoiding. He sat there trying to figure it out. He did not want to kill the woman with the scar, or kiss her, but he did want to do something, if possible to a woman, and he felt that it was all her fault.
‘Are you happy now?’ said his daughter, still sulky despite the Magnum in her hand.
‘Put your seat belt on,’ he said, but she was too busy with the ice cream. He pulled out into the traffic anyway – he did not want to go home, but home was the only place there was to go. He knew what he was looking for – as he let his daughter in under the arm that put the key in the door. He was looking for the kind of pain he could bury himself in.
‘Are you back already?’
‘That’s us,’ he said. And he looked at his wife.
CARAVAN
The clothes hissed as she wrung them out and a little fizz of bubbles sprang out of the weave.
‘I thought we were supposed to be doing well?’ she said.
‘What?’
Michelle was bent over the shower tray. Dec was just behind her, standing at the cooker.
‘I thought we were doing well?’
‘We’re not doing well,’ he said. ‘We’re doing all right.’
‘Hah!’ she said. If he stooped to get a saucepan out from under the sink, their backsides would collide through the bathroom door. The van, she called it. Le tin can. The kids were messing on the bunk-bed, and the wall above Michelle’s head buckled where they kicked. If you could call it a wall. It was more like a piece of wallpaper, gone hard.
‘Stop that!’ she said.
‘They’re back,’ said Dec, looking out through the back window.
‘Stop it now!’ said Michelle. She had to remember not to shout. ‘Or I won’t pick up the hamster when we get home.’
Complete silence. A car door clunked a foot away from the sink, and you could hear the neighbours – two sweet little girls and their perfect parents – climbing the wooden steps on to the deck outside their own mobile home.
Michelle straightened up and her back put out a fiery twinge. Oh, yes. A good, old-fashioned sort of pain, that. The campsite washing machines were a disaster so she was reduced to Wipp Express and the plastic box she had brought for the kids’ toys. She dangled the shower head into the box and threw the twists of clothes on top of it, to stop it writhing around when she turned on the water. She watched the cloth relax, and lift, and start to float, then she bent over again to knead and swirl and wring the clothes out for a second time. It was actually quite pleasant, as work went; tending to your family when they weren’t there to annoy you; loving them up, in the shape of their clothes. She threw the twists into the sink: Emmet�
�s blue cotton shorts, Katy’s kitten T-shirt with the diamanté crown, worn to a flitter; Dec’s heavyweight T-shirt that he wore because she liked it, though, as he said, all T-shirts looked the same to him. Finally there was her own crinkle skirt, a cheap cotton thing that looked exactly like what it was. Time to move on, she thought. Time to look like people who were doing ‘all right’. Not to mention ‘well’.
‘Emmet! Katy!’ said Dec. ‘Your pals are here.’
You could feel the rustle and the suck of air as the kids debunked. They were, as she craned out of the bathroom, already standing stock-still at the front door. The two perfect girls were on the threshold, in matching pink capri pants and light-up trainers.
Stand-off.
‘Would you like to go out and play?’ she said.
Katy turned to check with her mother, but Emmet didn’t need the distraction. He stared at the girls some more. Then he said, in a large sort of way, ‘I had half a doughnut in the car.’
The girls thought about this. And were impressed.
‘Did you go somewhere nice?’ said Michelle.
‘We went under the bridge,’ said the bigger girl.
‘Lovely.’ And all four of them were gone. She would have given a sigh of relief, as her mother used to do, but Michelle could not let go. She was not used to it. She tracked the sound of their voices up and down the path outside, as she lumped the clothes back into the plastic box. Katy was shy and Emmet was only three: they had never been out on their own before and any silence would bring her out to check where they were gone. Much better to actually go out there and pretend to do something, or really do something, as now, chasing the little patches of sunlight along the wooden rail of the deck to hang the clothes in, because the site they had been given was in the shade.
On the sunny side of the little road, a woman was sitting outside her mobile home with a glass of rosé in her hand. She let the other hand dangle over the arm of her white plastic chair, and turned her face up to the sun. Bliss. Not a child in sight. She had six at least, maybe more – two of them slept in the car. It was Dec who finally twigged it.
