by Anne Enright
I never wanted much.
I wanted Jimmy, though, and I had him. Violà! So I thought he might break the curse of it, somehow. I thought my child could want things, and have them, all at the same time. I thought he could love someone and it would go right for him. And it does go right for him. Though I don’t know who he loves, properly speaking. I don’t know if Jimmy ever loved anyone at all.
Except, of course, for his dear old ma.
Then he turns around the night before his wedding day, and he says, ‘I never had a father,’ like it was all my fault. ‘I never had a father,’ shouting it. ‘Better off, too,’ I said – which we both know is true. But still.
All right, here it is; it’s an angel, it’s the devil, it’s anything you want. It’s three wishes. And what you have to watch for, is the trick.
So, pick something small. You want to get rid of the creaks in your knees and the one that is moving into your right hip. You say, ‘I wish that my body was twenty years younger.’ Hang on. Careful. Careful does it. ‘I wish that my body was twenty years younger – not including my brain, which must remain the same age as it is now, with the same experiences to remember.’ Or. Hang on. ‘Not including my brain, which must remain the same age as it is now, but with no early Alzheimer’s in it, like the Alzheimer’s that stops me from remembering my own mother’s maiden name.’ Now is that one wish or is it three? It sounds like six.
‘Oh, be careful what you want,’ said my mother. Whose maiden name was Mary Kearney, thank you very much.
She would have loved this: the opera. She would have loved the glam.
All right, I’ll tell you what I want. ‘I want a small win on the lottery, just a small one, just a few thousand, so I could feel, for once, LUCKY. I want my son to call me on the mobile phone he bought me for a present, that never, ever rings. I also want him to have sex with the right people, meaning female people, in particular the female person who is his wife. I want grandchildren. More than anything, I want grandchildren. Because grandchildren are simple. You wish for them and you have them. And I don’t care if they are ashamed of me. I want my son who has everything to have something, for once. Something real. To have a heart that isn’t withering in his chest. That little smile when he looks at me.
‘Hello, Mum.’
And when the man stops on the circle stairs, I want to look up at him, in his tux. I want to peruse the length of him, and meet him, eye to eye. Old Nick, my friend. I want him to know me, and be very scared of me. And I want to open my mouth, and sing.
THE BAD SEX WEEKEND
He said he had been in New York for a while. He talked about a rat in his sleeping bag in a hostel on Forty-second Street and a guy who got his kidney stolen in the next bed. He said the cockroaches poured out of every hole: the pipes, the flooring, the plasterboard; the room felt like a ship that was sinking in a sea of cockroaches. He was a boy – he did not talk about skating in Central Park, he talked about vermin in a Sligo accent. What did she expect? (What did she ever expect? He had nice eyes.)
She knew Sligo. It was beautiful. She got drunk there once, with some local heads who had a rockabilly band. One of them was in plaster up to the thigh – a car crash, he said. Then he sank nine pints and left to drive home again, pivoting with a hoot, at the door of the pub, on his little prosthetic heel. Sometimes, in her sleep, she tried to figure out how he managed the accelerator and the clutch, jabbing one or the other foot into the duvet and waking up dead. That was Sligo. A place where it rained all day and the rent-boys hung out for the blokes down from Northern Ireland, and they called a housing estate after W. B. Yeats, and you could rot, or you could run, as he did, to somewhere far away.
Now he was back, living in Dublin, talking about the whores in Bangkok, where he had never been, and the way they could blow smoke rings with their pussies, and she liked the way he said ‘pussies’ in a Sligo accent. He was such a sexy boy. All that self-loving self-loathing – that was very Sligo, and the little business with the razor blade after they did a couple of lines, the way his bad eyes said, ‘You can be the edge and you can be the cut.’
It did not turn her on much, truth be told – the promise of damage. It hit her in the heart and not in the groin and, ‘Oh, shit,’ she thought. Chaos. That was what was on offer. Driving home pissed with only one leg working. Total, sneering hatred, and then crying on her chest with his dick still wet. Oh, shit. The sex, when it happened, an aimless battering around the nub of him, which was sadly distant and, she supposed, numb with drink.
‘What do you do?’ he said afterwards, like it had turned into a job interview, now that he had (sort of) come.
‘Music stuff,’ she said. ‘I work with bands, coming through town.’
To which he said nothing, not even, ‘Which ones?’ And in the dull gap of his surprise, she fell asleep.
She dreams about a boy walking along a cliff road in the wet light; the mountains spilling water, the sea pushing against the cliff.
The boy’s wellingtons are worn to cloth, but that is the least of it. The socks are wriggling off his feet, putting a clump in his stride, leaving the bare backs of his calves to be sucked and left by the boots at every step. His shirt has a tinge of lilac to it and is riding up. You can see the elastic of his underpants and the pearly lump of his hip, where the hand-me-down trousers gape.
She tries to laugh in her sleep but the boy is not funny, or he is not funny enough. Still, there is a joke around him somewhere – she casts about to find it, but all she can see is an old fridge with the door open, abandoned in the ditch.
The boy’s nipples flower under his shirt, and refuse to flower, and the dream moves on, leaving him, nearly hilarious, with no one left to see.
It was afternoon when they woke. He said he had been to Tijuana and the smell of the jacks in the morning was enough to make you puke. He told her that he had crossed the Shenandoah River once in the Shenandoah Mountains and he slept in a town called Shenandoah, and he cased her vinyl collection; hunkered down like a picture of a wild boy, with the thin bones of his backside dabbing at the floor. He asked to borrow her toothbrush and then jumped back in under the duvet for the hangover ride, which was unexpectedly sweet.
He said a woman he was with in America had an abortion once, but he didn’t know if it was his. That there was something about foreign women – you didn’t believe your stuff would stick. But it did. It did even more than usual. Sex loved those Benetton ads.
‘Do you think?’ she said.
‘Little brown babies,’ he said.
‘So are you back now?’ she said. ‘Have you come back for good?’
He thought about it. He said he had driven halfway across America; put the boot down until he ran out of gas, ended up empty in a place called Dewey, Wisconsin. And he got out of the car and looked at people on the sidewalk and he wondered what the hell they were doing here. Maybe it was love. They fell in love, and were amazed by it – by the the fact that All This could happen in Dewey, Wisconsin.
‘And?’
‘No wonder they shoot each other,’ he said, swinging out on to the edge of the bed.
She knew he was leaving. He stood beside the dressing table, poking a finger through the little basket of mascara and lip pencils. He reached up to touch a painted Mexican belt and, in the mirror, his underarm opened to view.
She said, ‘I don’t believe you were ever in America at all.’
‘Oh, I was there all right,’ he said.
Then he looked at her and seemed to change his mind.
No, he said. He stayed. He actually lived out there for a while, in the middle of nowhere, in Buttfuck, Wisconsin. He picked up a job working security in the local mine. Two old guys and a big Italian called Alfie and himself; they flicked through porno magazines all night, sitting in front of TV screens that showed the plant in the weird green of infrared. One of the men was always on a round – you could see his torch leave one screen, then, a few minutes later, you would see it wa
nder into the next. It got so it felt they were floating. Two old guys and Alfie and him. And one morning, around six, Alfie turns around and invites him to a pot-luck barbecue that weekend.
Pot-luck! He was so astonished he actually made something – a mix of Jell-O and whipped cream, from a recipe on the back of the packet. He drove around looking for the house, the dessert shivering on the seat beside him – finally finds the party by the number of people on the front lawn. It is a clear, beautiful day in Dewey, Wisconsin. There’s a bunch of guys on the front porch talking golf, cracking open too many beers. The wives are there, the kids squealing and running, and there is a smell of ironed cotton off these people, even in the open air.
Alfie is wearing a chef’s hat. He belts him between the shoulder-blades and takes the mutant dessert out of his hand.
‘Mnn, mnn!’
After a while, he’s tranced by the sun and the beer. Just looking at these people, the way they talk and laugh, and the little things with kids. It gets so he can’t breathe. He wanders into the garage, where it is dark and cool. A couple of small boys are pushing plastic soldiers through the front grille of the car and a woman’s legs are sticking out of a back door. One of her feet is dangling a sandal. When he looks in, he sees Alfie’s wife lying in the back seat, flat out, with her arms stretched up, playing with her beautiful blonde hair.
‘Good party,’ he says.
‘Glad you could make it.’
The sandal hits the ground. And he knows he could have sex with her. He knows he could just drive her out of there – one shoe on, the other left behind. He could just gun the motor and go, the kids running for cover, the car door swinging open, across the summer lawn, down over the kerb and away.
He swung out from under the duvet and sat on the edge of her bed. She looked at the bones running down his back.
‘So, why didn’t you?’ she said.
That wasn’t the point, he said. The point was him going back out into the garden and looking at these people having their good time. The sun going down. Alfie checking him as he came out the garage door. The point was that he realised that there was nowhere else to go.
He didn’t know how to explain it. This garden, this pot-luck bloody barbecue, was all there was. And that’s why people stayed in Dewey – because we all lived in Dewey. There was nowhere else to go.
‘So welcome home,’ she said.
She made scrambled eggs for him and her hands were trembling. She did not know how to keep him in the flat, or what to do, so she broke open a bottle of vodka and mixed it with the cranberry juice, which was all there was in the fridge, and he stuck his nose into his glass and laughed, ‘Nyack nyack nyack.’
He said he had a mad brother. He said mad people aren’t like they’re supposed to be. They’re just very dull. They talk about football all day, like anyone else – only more so. Then you see a smear of shit on the side of the bath. Uh-oh.
The other brother was a builder, he said.
He said he grew up in one of those houses that nobody likes; a big bungalow hacienda stuck out in the middle of a field. Though he missed the weather up there, it was better than the telly. And the bog out along the road to Strandhill, he loved it as a kid – playing Aztecs with pyramid stacks of turf, or staging the entire siege of Stalingrad all by himself, running through the trenches. Rat-a-tat-tat. Much slaughter.
And he pointed his finger and shot her.
There was a lot of stuff that wasn’t sex, just pawing and tormenting; while the sun appeared and left, in oblongs on the floor. He worked his way through the vodka while she trickled it into her tea and they watched children’s television and tried to have sex in the shower. She pulled him back from shouting out the window and late that night he said, or she thought he said, that he had fisted a woman once, and also that he used to meet a guy out on the Strandhill Road when he was a kid and that this guy would fuck him a bit and that he actually quite liked it. Actually.
She did not know if she slept or not.
In the morning he came out of the bathroom, beautiful and clean. He said that Elvis never went the whole way. Elvis was better than sex, he said. That was the problem. He knew there would be this shortfall, that in bed, he would never be as good as ‘Elvis Presley’.
‘What time is it?’ she said.
His chest was pale and freckled, all flat – he was arranged in slabs and blocks with a funny, bendy dick curled in the middle of it all. There was no sign or mark of the man he went to meet as a child and she wondered was that something she had dreamt too, because the road was still in her head and the boy walking along it, all night; and her face, in the dream, was pulled after him like toffee. His eyes were clear, amnesiac, and she thought that maybe he told everyone his bog story when he was really pissed; safe from remembering what he had said. Or maybe it was a lie. Maybe something terrible had happened to him – a different thing. Or nothing terrible had happened to him, and she would never find out what it was. Maybe he had never driven all the way to Dewey, Wisconsin.
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘I have to pick up my niece at half one, I promised to bring her into town.’
‘Your niece?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘How sweet.’
‘Fuck off,’ she said.
And still he sat in her yellow dressing gown, waiting for the paracetamol to work and flicking through an old copy of Vogue, like some parody of her Sunday-morning self.
She made a pot of tea.
He said that he met a transsexual in Reno with breasts you wouldn’t believe, but then you get down to the pants and … Surprise! And the problem is these breasts are still driving you crazy, you just want to lick them or have them; they just hit your override function, or something.
‘Kinky,’ she said.
And because she doesn’t believe him – or not in the way he would like her to believe him – he is at her again. And she can’t tell this person, this liar, two days in, that she doesn’t want him touching her any more. Though that is what this is turning into now – two people who don’t want to sleep with one another, snogging and clawing, and pushing each other against cupboards. But it doesn’t go any further, as she sort of knew it wouldn’t. He breaks away, and goes into the bedroom and starts to get dressed. Finally.
He comes back in and she is sitting at the table smoking a cigarette, and he is eight years old. Eight, or maybe nine. That’s the look on his little, slapped face.
‘So … hey!’ she says.
‘Hey, gorgeous.’
He pushes his boxers into his backpack, which means his little ass is bare under the jeans. And he leaves with big promises, and she shuts the door with big smiles and she showers and picks up her little niece; feeling a bit guilty, now and then, when she remembers the ruin between her legs.
The dream comes back to her all day. She thinks about it in the evening; sitting at the kitchen table and smoking while dusk turns to night. The thump and slap of the boy’s wellingtons on the road. The lilac-coloured shirt. The old man’s trousers that gape at the waist to show the lump of his hip and the elastic line of his underpants – an unwashed nylon stretch of mermaids, maybe, that his mother didn’t even notice when she bought them, or string pants that leave mesh marks on his skin, catching him like a fish.
The boy walks down the road, and he doesn’t know his own skin, or his tender little prick at the centre of this landscape and of these clothes. He walks down the road and into his own white breath – even his breath loves him, and the man who is watching from the ridge loves him, and so does the goddamned bog.
And she thinks that maybe she should have loved him too. Maybe she should have tried.
The boy sits down to take off a wellington, and the sight of his bare heel, a flush of red on white, puts him in mind of something.
DELLA
Della thought about the stream again, which was black and broad, and the naked boys who played on its sloping banks, all very white. One of them reached towards
the water with a stick, but the stick did not touch the water. You could see him leaning sideways off the steep bank. There was a scrubby tree leaning in from the other bank and its leaves were small and greyish against the black water. Della had no idea of where the river was, or who the boy was, or whether he was about to fall into the water. She did not know if this was something she had seen once, or whether she would see it some time in the future. It was a dream, or something off the telly. She thought it had something to do with the River Blackwater, but it was probably not even Irish. In Ireland, boys didn’t swim in the nip.
Della knew there was nothing important in the river – a clump of twigs and leaves, or a different-shaped stick. The boy was reaching out just for the pleasure of it; to see if he could.
She thought it might be in Russia, the river was so black and the trees were birch trees. Or maybe the boys’ bodies just reminded her of birch trees, that looked always so fresh and hopeful. But they looked sad too, she thought, like a picture of boys that was taken before a great war.
The man next door was going blind, but he didn’t seem to notice it. Della felt she should point it out to him, even though it was none of her business. They had lived side by side for over fifty years but they never got on much. Della had liked his wife once, but the wife was dead a long time, and he had never been chatty. Besides, there was a thing he had about children that stung Della when she was rearing her own. Her five and his two, now gone.
At least hers came back now and again – his didn’t darken the door – but they were very scattered and Della, left to herself for long stretches of time, was prone to forgetfulness and thoughts about birch trees and naked boys that she had never known. Sometimes, from next door a scratching or tapping, like, What could he be up to in there? Other times so much silence she wrote it down: ‘16th April – no noise’, trying to keep track of things, in case the man died. Despite the fact that she couldn’t remember what year it was, sometimes, if the truth be told.
