by Anne Enright
Moira makes it easier for him. Every time she moves, she throws it away. She has an abandoned grace. She hardly notices him there on the other side of the table, and he picks up the casual pieces as her hand drops into her lap.
‘I don’t know.’ It is a sigh. She doesn’t know that she has spoken. Her hand scratches the top of her leg and Frank drives into work thinking about sex that is entirely random, the way people graze each other in their sleep.
It would be nice to have a child, to go into work wrecked after a night of two-hourly feeds and claim it was the pints. It would be nice to say that no matter how frantic the work got, no matter how much the world was cut up into shots and the producer at his back paced the room, there was something of his that had its own slow time. He would do a gardening programme that looked at a rose growing for half an hour, or use a single shot of waves on a beach that went on for as long as the tape was in the camera. No tricks. He would take the memory of his father’s cigarette smoke, coming from a hand that had fallen by the side of the chair, and he would stay with it until the cigarette burned down and was dropped on the floor. Force himself to look. Don’t cut away.
Moira is hard to find these days. She spends a lot of time in various attitudes around the house. The evening is like a locked-off shot on the sitting room as she fades from the armchair and appears at the table, then fades again and is standing at the window, one hand holding a cigarette at an angle and the other cupped around an elbow that should be wearing evening gloves. When they talk she looks at the carpet as though she sees something growing there. There is a small eddy in her eyes, a slight shift of the current that strays from where she is looking. Moira was always aimless, casual, troubled. It was a look that mothers have and it made his lovemaking hopeful and direct, like a man posting a letter that would change everything.
On Sunday morning Frank surprises himself by getting up early and cleaning the house. He washes the kitchen floor, runs a cloth along the skirting-boards, cleans out the toilet and talks to Moira over the sound of the hoover with a nod of the head. On Monday she wakes up to find him standing by the window with no clothes on, scratching his stomach and staring. He goes to the supermarket on his own and buys some trout and almonds which he makes for her that night, with a salad full of vegetables that he never knew existed until he was twenty-one. He kisses her back while she sleeps and puts his hand over the Y of her legs, to keep her safe.
In unguarded moments while he is at work, Moira flicks into the corner of his eye. There is no pattern to it. She has taken to reading children’s books. She has eaten her way through Dr Doolittle and enthuses about Dab Dab the duck.
‘What is the difference,’ she asks him, ‘between doing something and not doing something? When I was a kid, hell would open up if you stepped on the crack in the path and the devil would kiss you – but he never did.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
She rubs the corner of her mouth hard with the tip of a finger, as though her lipstick was beginning to smear.
‘I want to go somewhere.’
‘Anywhere you like.’
‘Bolivia?’
‘Sure.’
For some reason everyone is using Spanish music in their programmes that week. It makes the cutting very fast and the colours as sharp as an ad for washing powder. He passes a small girl in her communion dress in the street and there are flamenco flounces down the back of her white skin.
‘How about Barcelona? We can afford that.’ But she just laughs.
It came together in all the things she threw away. As he sat working at his console, the pictures knitted one into the other. Moira glancing at the phone. Moira rubbing at her thigh, as though there was a burr caught between her leg and her jeans. She comes in through the hall door, with the keys between her teeth and they drop to the floor. She wakes in the morning surprised and her mouth seems caught on the pillow.
It is all in the fraction of the second before he cuts away.
They are sitting in the dining room, in an endless two-shot.
‘I love you,’ Moira says; she leans over to put her hand on his arm but stops. ‘I love you more than anything. Anything. It happened by accident. I don’t understand the why. I stepped on the crack in the path by accident and nothing happened. It didn’t open up. I didn’t fall into hell.’
Reaction shot Frank. The film goes on fire.
‘Frank, I can’t tell the difference between things. I can’t tell the difference between what I want to do, what I mean to do, and something that just happens.’
‘What was his name?’
She opens her mouth to speak. He cuts away to the hand that holds the cigarette and before he can stitch it up, falls headlong into the thin, deep hole that he has made.
SEASCAPE
He stood like a young seminarian at the water’s edge, refusing to see the bodies that were strewn all around him. His eyes rested on the cool line of the horizon, and sweat gathered in the white creases of his face. His only concessions to the sun were the jumper he had removed, which never left his hand, and the thick boots that stood waiting in the sand behind him. He seemed to be standing quite still, but in fact was edging his feet forward, inch by inch. After a while, a thin film of water pulled at his bare toes, and he leapt back. The jump was awkward, and when he turned to walk back up the beach, he had the loping, twisted stride of an old tramp. He belonged to the street, and not to the sea, because his eyes had that puzzled, childish look, and his mouth was hard.
A woman rose from the sea behind him, the water running from her shoulders and hair.
‘Daniel!’ He stooped to pick up his boots, without turning around, so she ran up the slope after him, her body scattering a wet trail on the sand. The swimsuit she wore was azure blue, with a triangle of viridian at the neck, and her wet blonde hair had a greenish sheen in the strong light.
‘Daniel,’ she said again, catching up with him, ‘are you coming in?’
‘Nope.’ He still didn’t turn around.
‘You grunter! You pig!’ She shook herself at him like a wet dog and he pulled away from the drops. When she was done, he caught her by the arms and pushed her into the sand, then laughed and walked on. There was a moment’s shock before she screamed and scrabbled up again, then charged after him up the beach. The old boots banged together in his hand as he evaded her, but when he reached the towels he turned around and let himself be caught. She pushed him down and sat on his chest.
‘You need the wash, you old pig. I should throw you in like a drowned cat.’
‘I can’t swim.’
‘You can’t swim? Sure everyone can swim. I’ll teach you.’
‘Of course I can swim.’
‘Liar.’ She swung off him.
‘You are a liar,’ she said, picking up the towel, which was yellow like her hair. ‘You’re always lying to me.’
He lay on his back, his eyes slits in the glare of the sun. He seemed to be watching the sky. She flicked her body with the towel to get rid of the grit that had lodged in the creases, but he still didn’t turn around. The laces of the boots were tangled in his hand and there were sweat marks and the marks of her wet body on his thick, old shirt.
‘You like it,’ he said and rolled on his belly to watch her. She covered herself with the towel to block his gaze.
‘And anyway … I don’t,’ and he rolled back again with a small grunt.
He pursed his mouth. ‘Pour us a cup of tea, will you?’ It was an old joke.
‘Pour it yourself, you bad bastard. You’re not in your mother’s house now.’
She sat there, for what seemed like a long time, and watched him sprawled damply on the sand. She did not stretch out, ignoring the freak weather with the confidence of one who already had the perfect tan. The colours of her swimsuit brightened in the sun.
After a while, she became aware of someone staring. It was a small child, naked as a cherub. He turned away from her when she looked up, and put his hands
up to his face, but continued to watch her through his fingers.
‘Hello.’ She smiled at him and he ducked away at the sound of her voice.
‘Look,’ he said, suddenly bold, and with one hand still to his face, he pissed delicately on to the sand.
‘Lovely,’ she said, at a loss – trying not to give the child a complex.
‘No, it’s not,’ he said, ‘it’s very bold,’ and he ran off as his mother lumbered up after him; ‘Come back here and I’ll give you a belt!’
‘That’s the woman for you,’ she told Daniel, as she caught the struggling child and trapped his legs in a pair of pants.
‘A good, pink-skinned Irish ma with strap marks.’
Daniel lay still.
‘Strap marks and stretch marks and Dunne’s nighties. A fine hoult for you in the bed at night.’ Daniel grunted assent.
‘Well, take the old shirt off at least. You look like a maggot under a rock.’
‘I look,’ he said carefully, ‘like something the tide washed up.’
Affairs, she thought, should stay in the place where they were conceived, they do not transplant well. He lay on the sand as though it were the gutter, while she turned her patch of towel into a little piece of the Riviera. Her face was drawn with effort.
‘All I want’, she finally said, with deliberation and a fake smoothness, ‘is an intelligent life. You know what I mean.’ He turned to face her and his eyes were both puzzled and wary.
‘No, I don’t,’ he said, and then as a small concession, ‘it was far from intelligence that I was reared.’
‘Well, start now,’ she said, ‘do my back.’ He lifted his head and looked along the beach.
‘I will not.’
‘Pig.’
She flicked out the towel then lay down on it, with her back to him. After a moment’s pause he made his way across to her on his belly.
‘Here,’ he said, taking the plastic bottle of sun oil from its dugout in the sand. ‘What do I do with this?’ He spilt some on his fingertips and slapped it on her back, then moved over the skin like a farmer with a new lamb.
‘You’re done,’ and quietly he lifted the hair from the nape of her neck. He stroked the side of her face, until her breathing eased, his eyes still out to sea.
‘Did you see the body in the water?’
‘Which one?’ Her voice was muffled by her arms.
‘With the clothes on.’
‘No.’
‘Floating on its face.’
‘No.’ Her voice had an edge to it.
‘It was badly swelled. The gas brings them up, you know, after nine days.’
‘No, I did not see it.’
‘Pity.’ His hand left her face, and he lay down the length of her. After a while, he seemed to sleep.
The afternoon wore on, and still neither of them moved. There was something obscene about the two forms lying so close together, one fully dressed and curved around the naked limbs of the other. She looked like a tropical fish in a dirty pond, with a bad old pike to protect her. Everyone around them was busy being amazed by the good weather, playing and shouting and soaking up the sun, but these two were not sunbathing or flirting. They were probably not even asleep.
The heat grew less intense, and as a slight breeze pulled at her hair, she stirred and slipped away from the curve of his body. She sat up and stared around her, as though surprised by what she saw, and then she reached for her bag and started to search around in it. She produced a bundle of postcards and a pen, and shuffled through them to find the right one. It was a picture of a cat in a window, reaching for the blind above her, with the sign ‘Guinness is good for you’ posted on the wall outside.
Dear Fiona, (she wrote) the weather is glorious. The lump is being lumpish, haven’t seduced him into the sea as yet. Will you check the cat for me? Should never have trusted her with that couple downstairs. We miss ickle pussums, we does, and you too.
She tore it up and took out a fresh one; this had a picture of a donkey and a red-headed girl with a turf creel in her arms.
Dear Fiona, is he psychotic or what? The nights are, as always, amazing, but the weather doesn’t seem to suit his sensitive skin. Besides, he keeps on sneaking downstairs to make dubious phone calls. I don’t care about An Other Woman … maybe, but I keep fantasizing that he’s got a kid salted away somewhere. If you see Timmy, say I’m fine, i.e. give him a crack in the gob and tell him I’m sorry. All is …
She had run out of space and was writing where the address should go. The breeze had brought up the hairs on her arms, and she paused for a moment to examine them. Then she started to write on the front of the card, over the donkey’s face:
I have lovely arms. Not that it makes any difference.
And she abandoned everything where it was and ran off down the strand, into the sea.
She could swim for hours. The water was beautiful, despite the cold, and she aimed straight for the horizon. She felt like diving down, wriggling out of the swimsuit and swimming on and on. The foolish picture of its limp blue and green washed up on the beach drifted into her mind. They might even accuse Daniel of the crime.
She took a breath, grabbed her knees to her chest and bobbed face down on the surface of the water. Slowly, as she ran out of breath, her muscles eased. She blew what was left in her lungs out in an explosion of bubbles, then shot up into the air and took breath. No. She would not be angry. Anger did not suit her. She would carry around instead the chic pain of an independent woman – the woman who did not whinge or demand, or get fat on children.
‘I like independent women,’ he had said once.
‘Bloody sure you do,’ she answered. ‘They’re not allowed to complain.’
The shadows had grown harsher and longer by the time she got out of the water, her hands numb and her legs stiff with the cold. She made her way up the slope heavily, shaking her fingers in front of her. Long before she reached their place, she saw that Daniel had gone. The postcard she had written and left was torn up like the first, the pieces scattered and half-buried in the sand. Among them was his discarded shirt, and a pair of trousers lay broken-limbed and empty on her yellow towel. She yanked at the towel to clear it of debris and the bundle of postcards flew up into the air. Moving slowly, and shivering with the cold she went to each one in turn and picked it up. Daniel had written on the face of them all.
The first was a pictue of a Charolais cow on the cliffs of Moher. The sky was a hazy mauve, and the cow, which was right on the edge of the cliff, stared seductively at the viewer. Across the line of the sky he had written, ‘A Rathmines Madonna Dreams of The Intelligent Life.’ The next was a glossy reproduction of the beach in front of her, the colours artificially bright. Along the curve of the strand were the words, ‘Yes, the nights are amazing, but as yet, I have no child.’ She stared at it for a long time, and looked around to see where Daniel could be, before picking up the next one. It had an oul fella sitting in a pub, the light bounding off the polished surface of the bar counter and a fresh, new pint in the shaft of the sun. There was a crudely drawn balloon coming out of the old man’s mouth with the words: ‘What is the difference between a pair of arms?’ Finally, there was the beach again, though this time there were footprints drawn along the strand, enormously out of proportion, and a figure in the sea with HELP! coming from it. The caption read, ‘O Mary mo chree, I am afraid that the water will claim me back again.’
‘All washed up.’ The voice came from directly above her, and she gave a start. When she looked up he was there, perfectly dry. He was wearing a pair of navy high-waisted swimming trunks. His body was white as wax and his front was sticky with hair. She was ashamed to look at this body and so looked at his face.
‘Oh all right,’ she said, and wanted to turn off the sun like a lamp, so they could make love on the beach.
FELIX
Felix, my secret, my angel boy, my dark felicity. Felix: the sibilant hiss of the final x a teasing breath on the tip of the
tongue. He was the elixir of my middle years, he was the sharp helix spiralling through my body, the fixer, the healer, the one who feels. But when he was in my arms he was simply breath, an exhalation.
Did he have a precursor? He did, to be sure. There might have been no Felix at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain boy-child in my Tir na nÓg by the sea. Felix was as young as I was that year, the year I first fell asleep, and when he whispered me awake, my life became fierce and terrible. (Look at that tangle of thorns.)
Believe me, I write for no one but myself. Mine is not the kind of crime to be spoken out loud. This, then, is the last, or the penultimate, motion of these fingers that burned alive on the cool desert of his skin. You can always count on a suicide for a clichéd prose style.
I was born in 1935 in Killogue, a small town in the west of Ireland. My father was a small, introverted man of uncertain stock, who ran the pub that faced out on to the town square. My mother died of creeping paralysis in my seventh year, and nothing remains of her in my mind save the image of a woman sitting in the parlour in a perpetual Sunday dress, her throat caught in a stained circle of ancient diamanté and a charm bracelet at her wrist. When they laid her out, again in the same room, with the glass-fronted china cabinet pushed precariously against the back wall, I noticed that her ‘jewels’ had been removed. This sensible, pious figure seemed to have nothing to do with the woman I remembered, and I was suddenly aware that she must have undressed like that every night, unless she wore the diamanté to bed.
My father grew more nervous after my mother’s death, his silences grew longer and were punctuated by sudden rushes of speech, always about the harvest or the Inland Revenue, the goings on ‘beyant’. He began to sleep over the bar at night, bringing a small iron bed into what had once been a storeroom, and leaving the bedroom that they had shared intact. He became a crusader for the gombeen class, claiming that there was no such thing as good staff to be found. The days were spent in a silent frenzy of suspicion, watching every boy who was brought in to serve behind the bar, until the explosion burst loose and the boy was sacked – for not charging his friends, or shortchanging the regulars, or simply for sloppy work, licking the knife that was used to cut the sandwiches. Meanwhile, I sat outside, squatting on the kerb that faced the square, where I could see over the brow of the hill to the sea beyond. The strand was hidden by a dip in the road, and it looked as though the water came right up to the crest of the hill and joined it in one clean blue line. I ran towards it like a plane taking off, hoping to dive straight in, always disappointed to discover the street below, the untidy line of houses, the sea wall, and then the beach with its load of mothers wrapped up against the cold, children playing in the sand, and the breakers rolling in beyond.
