by Anne Enright
She told no one and did the cards for people if they asked. It was very accurate if she was loose enough on the day, but her husband didn’t like it. He didn’t like the bingo either and who could blame him.
‘When’s it going to stop?’ he would say, or ‘the money’s fine, I don’t mind the money.’
‘With a bit of luck,’ she said, ‘my luck will run out.’
On Wednesday nights she went with Mrs Power to the local pub, because there was no bingo. They sat in the upstairs lounge where the regulars went, away from the people who were too young to be there at all. Mr Finn took the corner stool, Mr Byrne was centre forward. In the right-hand corner Mr Slevin sat and gave his commentary on the football match that was being played out in his head. The women sat in their places around the walls. No one let on to be drunk. Pat the barman knew their orders and which team were going to get to the final. At the end of the bar, Pauline made a quiet disgrace of herself, out on her own and chatty.
‘His days are numbered …’ said a voice, and Mrs Hanratty listened to her blood quicken. ‘That fella’s days are numbered.’ There was a middle-aged man standing to order like a returned Yank in a shabby suit with a fat wallet. He was drunk and proud of it.
‘I’ve seen his kind before,’ he counted out the change in his pocket carefully in 10s and 2s and 5s, and the barman scooped all the coins into one mess and scattered them into the till. Mrs Hanratty took more than her usual sip of vodka and orange.
‘None of us, of course,’ he commented, though the barman had moved to the other end of the counter, ‘are exempt.’
It was 2 weeks before he made his way over to their table, parked his drink and would not sit until he was asked. ‘I’ve been all over,’ he told them. ‘You name it, I’ve done it. All over,’ and he started to sing something about Alaska. It had to be a lie.
‘Canada,’ he started. ‘There’s a town in the Rockies called Hope. Just like that. And a more miserable stretch of hamburger joints and shacks you’ve never seen. Lift your eyes 30 degrees and you have the dawn coming over the mountains and air so thin it makes you feel the world is full of … well what? I was going to say “lovely ladies” but look at the two I have at my side.’ She could feel Mrs Power’s desire to leave as big and physical as a horse standing beside her on the carpet.
He rubbed his thigh with his hand, and, as if reminded slapped the tables with 3 extended fingers. There was no 4th. ‘Look at that,’ he said, and Mrs Power gave a small whinny. ‘There should be a story there about how I lost it, but do you know something? It was the simplest thing in the County Meath where I was as a boy. The simplest thing. A dirty cut and it swelled so bad I was lucky I kept the hand. Isn’t that a good one? I worked a combine harvester on the great plains in Iowa and you wouldn’t believe the fights I got into as a young fella as far away as … Singapore – believe that or not. But a dirty cut in the County Meath.’ And he wrapped the 3 fingers around his glass and toasted them silently. That night, for the first time in her life, Maeve Hanratty lost count of the vodkas she drank.
She wanted him. It was as simple as that. A woman of 55, a woman with 5 children and 1 husband, who had had sexual intercourse 1,332 times in her life and was in possession of 14 coal-scuttles, wanted the 3-fingered man, because he had 3 fingers and not 4.
It was a commonplace sickness and one she did not indulge. Her daughter came in crying from the dance-hall, her husband (and not, in fact, her father) spent the bingo money on the horses. The house was full of torn betting slips and the stubs of old lipstick. Mrs Hanratty went to bingo and won and won and won.
Although she had done nothing, she said to him silently, ‘Well it’s your move now, I’m through with all that,’ and for 3 weeks in a row he sat at the end of the bar and talked to Pauline, who laughed too much. ‘If that’s what he wants, he can have it,’ said Mrs Hanratty, who believed in dignity, as well as numbers.
But even the numbers were letting her down. Her daily walk to the shops became a confusion of damaged registration plates, the digits swung sideways or strokes were lopped off. 6 became 0, 7 turned into 1. She added up what was left, 555, 666, 616, 707, 906, 888, the numbers for parting, for grief, for the beginning of grief, forgetting, for accidents and for the hate that comes from money.
On the next Wednesday night he was wide open and roaring. He talked about his luck, that had abandoned him one day in Ottawa when he promised everything to a widow in the timber trade. The whole bar listened and Mrs Hanratty felt their knowledge of her as keen as a son on drugs or the front of the house in a state. He went to the box of plastic plants and ransacked it for violets which were presented to her with a mock bow. How many were there? 3 perhaps, or 4 – but the bunch loosened out before her and all Mrs Hanratty could see were the purple plastic shapes and his smile.
She took to her bed with shame, while a zillion a trillion a billion a million numbers opened up before her and wouldn’t be pinned down at 6 or 7 or 8. She felt how fragile the world was with so much in it and confined herself to Primes, that were out on their own except for 1.
‘The great thing about bingo is that no one loses,’ Mrs Power had told him about their Tuesday and Thursday nights. Mrs Hanratty felt flayed in the corner, listening to him and his pride. Her luck was leaking into the seat as he invited himself along, to keep himself away from the drink, he said. He had nothing else to do.
The number of the coach was NIE 133. Mrs Maguire, Mrs Power and Mrs Hanratty climbed on board and took their places with the 33 women and 1 man who made up this Thursday run. He sat at the back and shouted for them to come and join him, and there was hooting from the gang at the front. He came up the aisle instead and fell into the seat beside Mrs Hanratty with a bend in the road. She was squeezed over double, paddling her hand on the floor in search of 1 ear-ring which she may have lost before she got on at all.
He crossed his arms with great ceremony, and not even the violence with which the coach turned corners could convince Mrs Hanratty that he was not rubbing her hand, strangely, with his 3 fingers, around and around.
‘I am a 55-year-old woman who has had sex 1,332 times in my life and I am being molested by a man I should never have spoken to in the first place.’ The action of his hand was polite and undemanding and Mrs Hanratty resented beyond anger the assurance of its tone.
All the numbers were broken off the car parked outside the hall, except 0, which was fine – it was the only 1 she knew anymore. Mrs Hanratty felt the justice of it, though it made her feel so lonely. She had betrayed her own mind and her friends were strange to her. Her luck was gone.
The 3-fingered man was last out of the coach and he called her back. ‘I have your ear-ring! Maeve!’ She listened. She let the others walk through. She turned.
His face was a jumble of numbers as he brought his hand up in mock salute. Out of the mess she took: his 3 fingers; the arching 3 of his eyebrows, which was laughing; the tender 3 of his upper lip and the 1 of his mouth, which opened into 0 as he spoke.
‘You thought you’d lost it!’ and he dropped the black jet into her hand.
‘I thought I had.’
He smiled and the numbers of his face scattered and disappeared. His laughter multiplied out around her like a net.
‘So what are you going to win tonight then?’
‘Nothing. You.’
‘O.’
REVENGE
I work for a firm which manufactures rubber gloves. There are many kinds of protective gloves, from the surgical and veterinary (arm-length) to industrial, gardening and domestic. They have in common a niceness. They all imply revulsion. You might not handle a dead mouse without a pair of rubber gloves, someone else might not handle a baby. I need not tell you that shops in Soho sell nuns’ outfits made of rubber, that some grown men long for the rubber under-blanket of their infancies, that rubber might save the human race. Rubber is a morally, as well as a sexually, exciting material. It provides us all with an elastic amnesty, to piss the bed
, to pick up dead things, to engage in sexual practices, to not touch whomsoever we please.
I work with and sell an everyday material, I answer everyday questions about expansion ratios, tearing, petrifaction. I moved from market research to quality control. I have snapped more elastic in my day etcetera etcetera.
My husband and I are the kind of people who put small ads in the personal columns looking for other couples who may be interested in some discreet fun. This provokes a few everyday questions: How do people do that? What do they say to each other? What do they say to the couples who answer? To which the answers are: Easily. Very little. ‘We must see each other again sometime.’
When I was a child it was carpet I loved. I should have made a career in floor-coverings. There was a brown carpet in the dining room with specks of black, that was my parents’ pride and joy. ‘Watch the carpet!’ they would say, and I did. I spent all my time sitting on it, joining up the warm, black dots. Things mean a lot to me.
The stench of molten rubber gives me palpitations. It also gives me eczema and a bad cough. My husband finds the smell anaphrodisiac in the extreme. Not even the products excite him, because after seven years you don’t know who you are touching, or not touching, anymore.
My husband is called Malachy and I used to like him a lot. He was unfaithful to me in that casual, ‘look, it didn’t mean anything’ kind of way. I was of course bewildered, because that is how I was brought up. I am supposed to be bewildered. I am supposed to say ‘What is love anyway? What is sex?’
Once the fiction between two people snaps then anything goes, or so they say. But it wasn’t my marriage I wanted to save, it was myself. My head, you see, is a balloon on a string, my insides are elastic. I have to keep the tension between what is outside and what is in, if I am not to deflate, or explode.
So it was more than a suburban solution that made me want to be unfaithful with my husband, rather than against him. It was more than a question of the mortgage. I had my needs too: a need to be held in, to be filled, a need for sensation. I wanted revenge and balance. I wanted an awfulness of my own. Of course it was also a suburban solution. Do you really want to know our sexual grief? How we lose our grip, how we feel obliged to wear things, how we are supposed to look as if we mean it.
Malachy and I laugh in bed, that is how we get over the problem of conviction. We laugh at breakfast too, on a good day, and sometimes we laugh again at dinner. Honest enough laughter, I would say, if the two words were in the same language, which I doubt. Here is one of the conversations that led to the ad in the personals:
‘I think we’re still good in bed.’ (LAUGH)
‘I think we’re great in bed.’ (LAUGH)
‘I think we should advertise.’ (LAUGH)
Here is another:
‘You know John Jo at work? Well his wife was thirty-one yesterday. I said. “What did you give her for her birthday then?” He said, “I gave her one for every year. Beats blowing out candles.” Do you believe that?’ (LAUGH)
You may ask when did the joking stop and the moment of truth arrive? As if you didn’t know how lonely living with someone can be.
The actual piece of paper with the print on is of very little importance. John Jo at work composed the ad for a joke during a coffee-break. My husband tried to snatch it away from him. There was a chase.
There was a similar chase a week later when Malachy brought the magazine home to me. I shrieked. I rolled it up and belted him over the head. I ran after him with a cup full of water and drenched his shirt. There was a great feeling of relief, followed by some very honest sex. I said, ‘I wonder what the letters will say?’ I said, ‘What kind of couples do that kind of thing? What kind of people answer ads like that?’ I also said ‘God how vile!’
Some of the letters had photos attached. ‘This is my wife.’ Nothing is incomprehensible, when you know that life is sad. I answered one for a joke. I said to Malachy ‘Guess who’s coming to dinner?’
I started off with mackerel pâté, mackerel being a scavenger fish, and good for the heart. I followed with veal osso buco, for reasons I need not elaborate, and finished with a spiced fig pudding with rum butter. Both the eggs I cracked had double yolks, which I found poignant.
I hoovered everything in sight of course. Our bedroom is stranger-proof. It is the kind of bedroom you could die in and not worry about the undertakers. The carpet is a little more interesting than beige, the spread is an ochre brown, the pattern on the curtains is expensive and unashamed. One wall is mirrored in a sanitary kind of way; with little handles for the wardrobe doors.
‘Ding Dong,’ said the doorbell. Malachy let them in. I heard the sound of coats being taken and drinks offered. I took off my apron, paused at the mirror and opened the kitchen door.
Her hair was over-worked, I thought – too much perm and too much gel. Her make-up was shiny, her eyes were small. All her intelligence was in her mouth, which gave an ironic twist as she said Hello. It was a large mouth, sexy and selfish. Malachy was holding out a gin and tonic for her in a useless kind of way.
Her husband was concentrating on the ice in his glass. His suit was a green so dark it looked black – very discreet, I thought, and out of our league, with Malachy in his cheap polo and jeans. I didn’t want to look at his face, nor he at mine. In the slight crash of our glances I saw that he was worn before his time.
I think he was an alcoholic. He drank his way through the meal and was polite. There was a feeling that he was pulling back from viciousness. Malachy, on the other hand, was over-familiar. He and the wife laughed at bad jokes and their feet were confused under the table. The husband asked me about my job and I told him about the machine I have for testing rubber squares; how it pulls the rubber four different ways at high speed. I made it sound like a joke, or something. He laughed.
I realised in myself a slow, physical excitement, a kind of pornographic panic. It felt like the house was full of balloons pressing gently against the ceiling. I looked at the husband.
‘Is this your first time?’
‘No,’ he said.
‘What kind of people do this kind of thing?’ I asked, because I honestly didn’t know.
‘Well they usually don’t feed us so well, or even at all.’ I felt guilty. ‘This is much more civilised,’ he said. ‘A lot of them would be well on before we arrive, I’d say. As a general kind of rule.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t really drink.’
‘Listen,’ he leaned forward. ‘I was sitting having a G and T in someone’s front room and the wife took Maria upstairs to look at the bloody grouting in the bathroom or something, when this guy comes over to me and I realise about six minutes too late that he plays for bloody Arsenal! If you see what I mean. A very ordinary looking guy.’
‘You have to be careful,’ he said. ‘And his wife was a cracker.’
When I was a child I used to stare at things as though they knew something I did not. I used to put them into my mouth and chew them to find out what it was. I kept three things under my bed at night: a piece of wood, a metal door-handle and a cloth. I sucked them instead of my thumb.
We climbed the stairs after Malachy and the wife, who were laughing. Malachy was away, I couldn’t touch him. He had the same look in his eye as when he came home from a hurling match when the right team won.
The husband was talking in a low, constant voice that I couldn’t refuse. I remember looking at the carpet, which had once meant so much to me. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing.
I thought that we were all supposed to end up together and perform and watch and all that kind of thing. I was interested in the power it would give me over breakfast, but I wasn’t looking forward to the confusion. I find it difficult enough to arrange myself around one set of limbs, which are heavy things. I wouldn’t know what to do with three. Maybe we would get over the awkwardness with a laugh or two, but in my heart of hearts I didn’t find the idea of being with a naked woman funny. What w
ould we joke about? Would we be expected to do things?
What I really wanted to see was Malachy’s infidelity. I wanted his paunch made public, the look on his face, his bottom in the air. That would be funny.
I did not expect to be led down the hall and into the spare room. I did not expect to find myself sitting on my own with an alcoholic and handsome stranger who had a vicious look in his eye. I did not expect to feel anything.
I wanted him to kiss me. He leant over and tried to take off his shoes. He said, ‘God I hate that woman. Did you see her? The way she was laughing and all that bloody lip-gloss. Did you see her? She looks like she’s made out of plastic. I can’t get a hold of her without slipping around in some body lotion that smells like petrol and dead animals.’ He had taken his shoes off and was swinging his legs onto the bed. ‘She never changes you know.’ He was trying to take his trousers off. ‘Oh I know she’s sexy. I mean, you saw her. She is sexy. She is sexy. She is sexy. I just prefer if somebody else does it. If you don’t mind.’ I still wanted him to kiss me. There was the sound of laughter from the other room.
I roll off the wet patch and lie down on the floor with my cheek on the carpet, which is warm and friendly. I should go into floor-coverings.
I remember when I wet the bed as a child. First it is warm then it gets cold. I go into my parents’ bedroom, with its smell, and start to cry. My mother gets up. She is half-asleep but she’s not cross. She is huge. She strips the bed of the wet sheet and takes off the rubber under-blanket which falls with a thick sound to the floor. She puts a layer of newspaper on the mattress and pulls down the other sheet. She tells me to take off my wet pyjamas. I sleep in the raw between the top sheet and the rough blanket and when I turn over, all the warm newspaper under me makes a noise.
WHAT ARE CICADAS?
Cold women who drive cars like the clutch was a whisper and the gear stick a game. They roll into petrol stations, dangle their keys out the window and say ‘Fill her up’ to the attendant, who smells of American Dreams. They live in haciendas with the reek of battery chickens out the back, and their husbands are old. They go to Crete on their holidays, get drunk and nosedive into the waiter’s white shirt saying ‘I love you Stavros!’ even though his name is Paul. They drive off into a countryside with more hedges than fields and are frightened by the vigour of their dreams.
