by Anne Enright
For fuck’s sake, she said. The whole world is about America, these days. It’s not a country, it’s a fucking religion. And I don’t mind. I am perfectly happy with you as you are. I am perfectly happy with you as an ethnic product. But can we, from now, for ever, forget the froth on the milk and the weather in my fucking hair?
The next morning at breakfast, she looked at the fried eggs on her plate and thought she must be pregnant, and she gripped the edge of the table in her fright.
But it was Tim who got sick. They went inland, and he stayed in the hotel room, while she took a day trip out of San Cristóbal de las Casas. There was talk of rebels in the hills. Elaine sat in the back of a pick-up truck, high up in the scrublands, and watched a group of men labouring uphill with sacks of coffee beans on their backs.
After an hour or so, they stopped at a café – just a roof with a table under it, and a broken fridge full of a bright pink cola. In the middle of the table there was a bowl of powdered coffee, turning to gleaming syrup on the communal spoon. A filthy little girl looked at them, with perfect awe as they drank out of plastic cups. Her eyes were the only clean things about her, apart from, when she laughed, the inside of her mouth.
The other people in the pick-up were Swiss. They worked for FIFA, the football organisation, they said: two men and a sharp, hilarious woman, all wearing company baseball caps. She didn’t know what they were here for. She didn’t see boys playing football in the villages they passed; she saw a lot of wooden, evangelical churches, and dirt.
They passed a coffee plantation and Elaine said it was a pity the people didn’t drink the coffee that was growing right there on their own hillsides, that they had to drink horrible dried Nestlé instead. The Swiss looked at her. After a moment, one of the men said, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes.’ He glanced at the woman and gave a little smirk. She smirked back at him. Then the other man chanced a sneaky little smile. They turned away from each other, airily, and went back to looking at the poor people on the side of the road.
The fucking Swiss. They spoke perfect English to her and perfect Spanish to the guide. They could probably say, ‘Well, that’s the way the world goes,’ in French, Italian and German too. So geht es. C’est comme ça.
Is the war over yet? La guerre, est-elle terminée?
She tried to figure out which one of the men was sleeping with the woman; a good-time sort of girl, who wasn’t a girl any longer. Forty-five at least. She was having a brilliant time on the back of a pick-up truck in Chiapas.
The men were middle-aged. It happened to men all of a sudden, she thought. First the baldness thing, and then Boof! big lunches, cars, overtime, fat already. Well, that’s the way the world goes. She wondered if it would happen to Tim, stuck back in the hotel with what might be amoebic dysentry – at least that is what they thought it was, opening the guidebook every few hours to peer at diagrams of what looked like little shrimp, wondering if these were the things that were swimming around in his gut.
When she got back, he was feeling a bit better, and she told him about the Swiss bastards who were so pleased with the way the world went, because it always went their way. Tim started giving out about Nestlé reps going around in white coats with powdered-milk samples, telling women not to breastfeed. But this really annoyed her, somehow. This was not what she was talking about. He did not understand. She said it was almost a sex thing. They smirked because – all three of them – they liked being bad.
The way she said ‘bad’, they might have had sex themselves, if it weren’t for his little shrimp. Instead, they got irritated and fought. She found herself defending Switzerland, when she meant to say the opposite. The Swiss didn’t actually do anything wrong, she said, they just let other people do it. They made their money out of other people’s greed. Because that is the way the world goes. And, Yes, he said. Yes, exactly.
Later, in the dark, she said she was tired of the hurt she caused, just by being alive. She was tired of her own endless needs. And him too. She was tired of him, and of the fact that she would hurt him, too. She could do it now, if he liked, but certainly she would hurt him, over time.
He said it was up to him, really. All of that.
They were in San Cristóbal de las Casas. It was a beautiful town and there were books in the shops and real coffee in the tourist cafés. It was the centre of the rebel movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and Elaine felt that she was in an important place at an important time. She hoped it would work out well for the people here, and also for her and Tim, that they would always be in love, and drink good coffee, and that he would always keep his hair.
5.
Back in Dublin, she unpacked the dressing gown with the flowers on the back and said, I have to get another job, I have to do something, I can’t stand this fucking country. It’s all right for you.
We could live in France, he said.
She rounded on him and said, What do you do? What are you for?
He lifted his empty hands in the air.
This fucking country, she said. You have no idea. Come down to Cork with me. That’ll change your mind.
But he loved them all, and they loved him. Her brothers bringing him down to the local for a pint and her father talking about tornadoes in America, and was he ever in one, at all? And it was all the Big Yank in the front parlour, and no one asked them once about Italy, or Mexico, or the North Circular Road for that matter. No one asked anything, except would he like a cup of tea, because in this house, it became clear, questions were out of the question. She had never noticed this before. Questions were impolite. And Tim better at this game than any of them – not looking at the tablecloth or at the cup in his hand, or at any of their sad, accumulated objects, but instead engaging in a vast discussion about all kinds of weather, from the ice on Lake Michigan to the storm in Bucharest that made your hair stand up with the static.
You don’t say, said her father, his small stash of books behind him, dead on the shelf.
They gave him the sofa to sleep on, so Elaine crept downstairs in the middle of the night and they had the quietest sex known to mankind. They inched their way along the floor and ended up under the table where, looking up, Elaine saw a crayoned boat she had drawn, one endlessly idle afternoon, when she was nine or ten. A green boat with a blue sail. Her own secret sign.
Where do you want to go? he said. Where do you want to go, now?
WHAT YOU WANT
If I had three wishes; the thing to do is get three more. ‘Hello,’ says the angel, says the fairy, says the devil even, ‘What do you want? One. Two. Three.’ And I say, ‘Well, first off, I’ll have three more of those please,’ and then you have five, you see, to play with, which is two extra, because there’s always a trick.
Like you might say, ‘Well, for my first wish, I’d like to have a beautiful body,’ and azzakazzam, ‘There’s your beautiful body,’ says the angel and, when you look down, you’re still the same old yoke and the angel says, ‘Well, it is beautiful – the way one bone fits into another, and the blood flows, and the brain works and all that,’ and maybe, yes – in the scheme of things – but, ‘No!’ you say, ‘No!’ and you blurt out something like, ‘I want a body like Raquel Welch,’ and of course she’s ancient, these days, so all you get is a heap of silicone and arthritis. Or even worse, you ask for a body like Marilyn Monroe, who is actually dead, not to mention rotten, or you ask for the body of ‘a film star’ and the angel gives you Marlon Brando. Or you get the actual body of an actual film star like, say, Nicole Kidman’s body, and she sues – quite right too – because there she is wandering around in your old sack and everyone says it’s just prosthetic, like that stupid nose she wore. Serve her right.
So the third wish then, has to put it all right. You think about it really hard and you say nothing for ages, and then very carefully you say, ‘I’d like a body like the one Raquel Welch had in One Million Years B.C.,’ and dah dah! – the full thing down to the furry bikini, except it leaves out your face
, and you’re some sort of monster oul’ wan with a dynamite bosom, like those plastic things men wear on stag nights. Or your face does change – because your face is part of your body, of course it is – and your grandchildren don’t recognise you and no one will let you back into your own house and you end up in a state of semiprostitution just trying to get the bus fare back to the place where the angel disappeared into the clear blue sky.
It’s all just semantics, as my son Jimmy would say.
The thing to do, I say, is to ask for the extra three wishes first, then you have enough to put it right. And the way you put it right is to ask for the body you had in the first place, of course, the same heap of old bones that gets you up on to the bus in the morning, and after that you still have a couple of wishes left. And with the next wish you say, ‘I would like to have three more wishes, please.’
You see?
Mad. It’s the kind of thing that rolls through your head, in this job, when you’re sweeping or wiping – it’s very repetitive, cleaning. It’s all over and back: over and back again. Your mind starts to run in some terrible groove, and you have to pick the right one or you end up with bombs on the underground and everybody you ever loved lying in the morgue. I can go from a cigarette butt to the Great Fire of London before I have the ashtray cleaned, so I stay in late and listen to the singing. I stand in the dark at the back of the hall, because you have to watch your head, you have to pick something positive to think about, as my son Jimmy tells me, like winning the lottery, though he doesn’t approve of that, either. Because I’ve had my ups and downs.
It never ends. Cleaning. It never ends. Here we go, back to the start, clean what has been cleaned and then clean it again. I start at the top of the house and work down, parterre, boxes, stalls. I hear the other girls hoovering or calling, and we pass each other on the stairs. I don’t smoke. A lot of the girls smoke. But it puts miles on you, trekking up and down to get out to the back door. No. I get an early start – something pleasant – the brasses, or the woodwork, way at the back where no one goes. Sometimes they start rehearsing before we are done, just bits and scraps, but I love the singing. And the odd time, there’s something special on, and the audience are in on top of you before you know it. Not that they notice me. People don’t. They look but they don’t see – which is fine by me. I’m the invisible woman, that’s what I say. I could shimmy backwards across that stage on my hands and knees and no one would bother, so long as I had a floorcloth going. Everyone so dressed up, they see nothing, except looking for their own reflection in the fancy togs.
I was down there on the circle steps, one time, trying to get some chewing gum out of the carpet, horrible stuff, when a man walks by, in his full rig, and he says to me, ‘You’re singing!’ and I said, ‘Am I? I didn’t even notice,’ and he says, ‘Ah! you’re Irish. Isn’t it marvellous the way the Irish sing while they work?’ And I said, ‘Yes, isn’t it?’
And you know, I have about sixteen things to say to him if he ever stopped by again. Like, ‘Oh, that’s not me, that’s just a tape of Maria Callas I’ve got stuck up my arse.’ Or, ‘A cat can look at a king.’ I might say that, ‘A cat can look at a king.’
I am allowed to like the music. My son Jimmy loves it. He has a voice, he never touched a cigarette. He might come here, even, only he doesn’t want to bump into his old mother rooting for the dustpan in the cupboard by the bar.
I might like the opera, you see, but my son Jimmy owns the opera. Jimmy has all the CDs in their box sets. Jimmy was even gay for a while, and then he wasn’t gay, and I said to him, I can’t keep up. And I think, after all, that he wasn’t looking for sex of one kind or another, he was just looking for an education. Which he got. And he has it all now, down to the slice of lime in his gin and tonic, and he never – he very rarely – gives himself away.
Oh, be careful what you want.
I never wanted money – wasn’t that lucky? Because if I’d wanted it I might have got it, and wouldn’t that be an awful tragedy, an endangerment to my soul? And I never wanted fame. I just wanted stupid things, like knowing the right thing to wear for a christening, or my mother not dying so early, or someone to help out at home.
So, maybe my first wish would be that my mother was still alive – but alive at the age she was before she died, not the age she would be, if she hadn’t died in the first place, like a hundred and two. So, with all her faculties and the body of – here we go again – the body of a fifty-year-old. A healthy fifty-year-old. A healthy fifty-year-old woman. As opposed to man. Or horse.
‘Oh, be careful what you want.’ It was my mother who used to say that to me – when I was young, and all I wanted was Séamas Molloy. When all I wanted was the fella in the whitest shirt in the crowd outside the dance hall, on a long summer’s evening that was turning into night.
And if I had the devil himself appear to me, on the stairs, like your man in his tuxedo – ‘Aren’t the Irish marvellous!’ – he was a good-looking man, I remember that about him. But if Old Nick came up to me in white tie and tails, and he took me up on the roof and he said, ‘Look out over London town – all of this can be yours,’ I’d tell him that I’ve heard that guff before. I heard it from the boy in the whitest shirt, that I spent the next six years of my life trying to keep white. My Bobby Dazzler.
Or if he said, ‘Fling yourself down there and the angels will catch you before you hit the ground.’ Well, what sort of a temptation is that? You go to all the trouble of killing yourself and you don’t even die? That’s what I call a swizz. Besides, it just sounds like falling in love, to me. Which Jesus never did, when you think about it. Which I did, like a fool – because my mother was right, of course: he was an awful messer, Séamas Molloy.
It’s a nice view up there – all the lights of London town. I go up, sometimes; the last little flight of steps. No one has to know.
We didn’t need the devil, Séamas and me: we thought the town was ours for the taking. Except of course he couldn’t take it at all. He couldn’t take not knowing who anyone was; he couldn’t take the humiliation every time he opened his mouth and the accent came out: it didn’t suit him at all. Because Séamas Molloy was a big man, he was the man in the whitest shirt, and I had to throw him out, finally, before the baby came to any harm.
I have a terrible dread of finding him on the street some day, his beautiful eyes all bloodshot, with the memory of me held somewhere behind them, and the kisses we had. Something about me; my hands or my ankles – they’re still slim – some giveaway.
But sure drink wipes everything, even your soul.
Come on, Old Nick, offer me London town, and free flying lessons and – what was the third thing? Stones into bread. We’ll call that getting your breakfast brought in to you on a tray. He was just trying to get Jesus to show his hand. ‘Go on,’ he was saying. ‘Prove it. Prove it!’ And Jesus didn’t prove it. He wasn’t bothered.
I know what he meant, sometimes. Up there on the roof on a summer’s night with the city sparkling and you feel you could just close your eyes and blast it all away. One big hot breath. And when you opened your eyes again the place would be reduced to cinders. Every light gone out. Every miserable room I slept in with baby Jimmy after his father left. Every hall and office and sitting room that I swept and hoovered and polished and shone. Whooosh. Gone.
And then you do open your eyes, and it is still there. Gorgeous. Never mind Old Nick.
I stopped going to Mass for the religion long ago. I just go for the company. I had my lapse, I gave up God, but I said, I’m not going to give up every sinner I know too. They don’t know it, of course – that I don’t believe a word the priest says, that I am laughing up my sleeve at him, and at his God – they would find it very sort of blasphemous. But I don’t care. There were years when these people were all I had.
Except for Jimmy, of course. I always had him.
Talking to that child – that’s been my education. His little face. If you ever want to know what
you really think, talk to a four-year-old. Is there a heaven? Where do we go when we die? Why do people shoot each other? Why does purple not go with green?
And there you are, lying your head off, and trying to tell the truth at the same time. You offer them the world, worse than any devil. You say, ‘When you grow up, my darling, you can be anything you want, you can earn your own money and buy as many toys and records as you like, and you can fly all the way to Timbuctoo.’ He comes home crying from school because Shane Fox says he’s a nancy boy, or whatever word it was in those days, and I say, ‘In twenty years’ time you won’t care a bit what Shane Fox says,’ because you only have to take one look at that child to know where he will end up. And sure enough, time goes by and Jimmy gets his money and his toys and Shane Fox gets ten years for aggravated assault. There’s my amazing son, who changes jobs the way men used to change their shirts. He takes a year out to travel, goes to Asia and South America, and he comes back to another job, with even more money. And now he has a wife, who is really quite nice, and they’ve no plans for babies, he says, even though they can afford it, and she’s thirty-nine.
I don’t know.
Jimmy tells me I’m wasting my time on the lottery. He says, anyway, rich people don’t spend their money, they invest it. And I say, You might as well not have any in the first place – but I see what he means, he means the only way to keep it is pretend it isn’t there. He says that rich people live cheap, they’re the meanest lot. They have holidays in other people’s summer houses, and dinner on expenses, and some company sends them tickets for the ballet or the opera, and all they have is the hire of the suit. Except they don’t hire the suit, they use their grandda’s suit. And so on. Jimmy wanted me to cut up my credit card, he said it wasn’t plastic money it was plastic debt, and I said he sounded like a socialist, which is the last thing he is, the absolute last thing. His father shouting at the radio, throwing it out into the back yard when Kennedy made that speech over Cuba. But sure I never got into debt.
