by Anne Enright
In the middle of the afternoon, my brother-in-law Shay turned up. He stopped on the grass, held his phone up high and, with a cartoonish finger, turned it off. Then he came on to the deck, kissed Fiona and said hello all round. Then he walked inside and switched off the television, and told everyone to get down to the beach, with much shouting for togs and towels and inflatable toys while Fiona found – or couldn’t find – missing sandals and keys to the front door and the hundred mysterious objects her children need: water, suncream, a green golfing visor that Megan liked, Jack’s yellow plastic rake; because, as far as I can see, kids will do anything to stay in a place where they are happy enough, up to and including making their mother weep.
‘Have you ever heard of a Loon A Tic asylum?’ I said to Megan, who regarded me with wise, monkey eyes. Meanwhile Seán’s wife, Aileen, just read the paper until everyone was ready, then she walked back to their car and lifted a single bag from the boot.
‘Right!’ she said. ‘Onward!’
Conor laughed all the way home.
‘The ice-pop!’ he said. ‘The fucking ice-pop!’
And I intoned, ‘Evie doesn’t eat ice-pops, do you Evie?’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘Apparently she has some kind of thing. The child,’ I said, because that was what Fiona muttered to me by the sink, as we washed up.
‘Like what?’
‘You know, something wrong. Fiona didn’t say.’
Evie was a funny, disturbed little article, there was no doubt about it. She didn’t seem the same age or stage as Megan, though they were both around eight years old – or maybe I was biased, my niece being such a little sprite. If I had known more about these things I might have put her on a spectrum, or tried to. Except that Evie was all there – alert, trembling with it – she just found things very difficult. And whether this was, as I suspected, her mother’s fault, I couldn’t say for sure. I did find her slightly unbearable, though. It might have been something to do with the fat; those plump, kissable baby wrists; but with the wrong sort of face above them, the wrong kind of eyes. I didn’t say this to Conor, of course. I mean, I might have said, ‘She is quite an object,’ but I am pretty sure I didn’t say the fat made her unpleasant to me; I did not share my ‘failure to love’, as Megan’s teacher calls a sin these days. Besides, whatever slight annoyance ran through me when I looked at Evie left, as a residue, something both calm and keen.
Pity.
‘Poor child,’ I said. ‘It’s all her, you know,’ meaning the mother. And Conor said, ‘They should both be shot.’
He seemed to like them well enough at the time. He chatted to Seán as we all trekked over to the cold Irish Sea and Fiona chased and cajoled her children into their togs and creams, while Shay opened a bottle of red, sat on the rug and shut down, massively and at speed – it was frightening to watch – like a power cut running through Manhattan.
‘I thought he looked terrible,’ I said to Conor in the car.
‘Who?’
‘My brother-in-law,’ I said. ‘I thought he looked like shite.’
‘Shay’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry about Shay.’
Conor was being a bit obtuse, these days. He was recently finding the whole contraception thing a bit ‘unconducive’, for example. To what? He did not say.
We did not talk about Seán, as far as I recall. Perhaps there was no need to. It is possible that we held an uncomplicated silence, the rest of the way home.
Certainly, in his togs, Seán – my downfall, my destiny – cut a less than imposing figure. I suppose you could say that of us all. In the bare sunshine we looked a bit peeled. Fiona, being, in her day, the most beautiful girl in Terenure, didn’t bare an inch, of course. She had some way with sarong and towel that made Brittas look like Cannes, and when we toyed with the idea of a swim, said, ‘Oh, I was in this morning,’ because whatever effort she puts into it all (and I suspect it is considerable) she never lets on.
So it was just the four of us, Conor and me, Seán and Aileen, playing Houdini with bra straps and towels, then pretending not to look at each other’s bodies on the beach. Truth be told, I didn’t really bother with Seán that day, I was too busy checking out his wife; so dull when dressed, so elegant and boyish in the nip, never mind her age. Her odd little breasts screamed ‘breasts’ at you, though – they looked so tender on her little bony ribs, like they had been grown there specially.
Seán gave me the full flat of his face, as if to ask if I had some problem with the body of his wife. But I had no problem with it, why should I? I had problems enough of my own. I had to keep Conor in front of me, for a start, until the other pair were safely wet, or, at least, looking the other way.
‘What is it?’ said Conor. ‘What do you want?’
While I hung on to him, bickering and talking rubbish, managing the towel.
Seán headed down to the surf, hugging himself, with high shoulders and picking, bouncy feet. Aileen gave the sea a cold look, snapped her suit down under her bum and started to walk. Then, at the last moment, Evie flung herself in the sand and caught her mother’s leg, hugging her thigh in terrible supplication.
‘Evie, please stop that.’
While my sister checked round her with vague eyes and loudly said, ‘Megan, what did you do to Evie?’
And I walked away from them in silence, and kept walking until the water covered my thighs.
Then I screamed.
‘Whuu! Freezing!’
But it pulled all the uncertainty out of my bones – the surprise of lifting your feet and finding there was no need for sand. I made my way through the wave’s sharp swell, towards the flat line of the horizon. By the time I turned back to the shore, pushed and loved by all that weight of water, I was happy.
I watched from the sea as Aileen straggled up the beach to tend to Evie, and I realised that her thin body wasn’t fit, it was just busy. You could see it in the hunch of her shoulders; how she might walk at speed, but she took no pleasure in it.
Conor would stay in the water for another twenty minutes, his windsurf board forgotten on the roof of the car. Shay, meanwhile, had fallen backwards on the lime-green, polka-dot rug, belly to the sky. Which left Seán, and Seán’s lacklustre desiring – because we all wanted him to want us. At least I think we did, disporting ourselves (isn’t that the word?) about the place where he sat, our bodies shocked into delight by the cold sea. There we were: Fiona, who was a sort of dream, and his wife who did not matter, and me, who was – for these few moments at least – the bouncing girl. As I came up the short slope of the beach, and bent for my towel, and flung my hair back and said, ‘Hooo-eeee!’ I was the girl who liked it. The fat one.
I was the nightmare.
Or I felt like the nightmare. It must have been the way he looked at me.
This tiny drama happened and then disappeared immediately, as if by arrangement, and we sat around on a spoiled patchwork of towels, as though used to pretending that everyone was fully dressed. We talked about the year we realised you could have more than one bathing suit – which, in my case, was the year in question, when I had to go up a size, due to too much wedded bliss, and went mad in the shop and bought two. ‘One on, one drying on the line.’
Seán talked about wearing his father’s navy underpants on the beach in Courtown, and never forgiving his mother for it, the way she stitched up the flies and said they were just like the real thing. The story made us realise how much older he was than us – which also explained the stone house down the road from Fiona and Shay’s in Enniskerry. Myself and Conor still got age-rage when people waggled their bricks and mortar at us. ‘You have a nice house? That’s because you’re old, you bastard,’ though Seán – so wiry and compact – seemed hardly grown-up at all. The pair of them, husband and wife, were like mantelpiece ornaments, each so particular in the way they moved, and I felt myself inflate slowly on the beach beside them. I was huge! I was horny! I was … careful. When I looked at Se�
�n, and he at me, it was always eye to eye.
In fact, as I discovered later, Seán wasn’t judging my body one way or another. He just waited for my own judgement to rise and then smiled it back at me. It was one of his tricks. I should have known about his tricks.
Two passing teenagers, for example, fabulous and tall; he stared at them for a second too long – stared hard, like he might have to go over there and fuck them, right now. Then he turned back to look at disappointing you.
I was sort of scorched by it, I have to say.
This is why Fiona started burbling on about buying a house in France. It was because she wanted to impress Seán – a man who, in his Speedos, was not exactly a siren song. He stirred us up. Everything he said was funny, and everything seemed to do you down. Or buoy you up. He could do that too. He sat about; a black T-shirt covering his little mound of stomach, and he pushed into the sand with his tough, white toes.
Even in the strong sun, I was caught by the beauty of his eyes, which were larger than a man’s eyes should be and more easily hurt. I saw the child in him that afternoon, it was easy to see: an eight-year-old charmer, full of mischief and swagger. But I don’t know if I saw how tactical it all was. I don’t think I saw the way he was threatened by his own desires, or how jealousy and desire ran so close in him he had to demean a little the thing he wanted. For example, me.
Or not me. It was hard to tell.
One way or another, we all ended up boasting. Practically naked as we were, in our very ordinary, Irish bodies (except Fiona’s, which wasn’t on show), we sat and bragged for a while, while the children dug in the sand and ran about, and the beach and the sky continued, beautiful, without us.
‘What was all that about?’ said Conor, in the car on the way home. ‘Jesus.’
Will You Love Me Tomorrow
THAT WINTER, JOAN complained of swelling in her feet, which, for our mother, was a terrible comedown, the row of shoes she had, going back thirty years, all forsworn for Granny boots: she just hated it. She got supplements in the health food shop and complained of depression – she was, actually, depressed, I thought – and it never occurred to her, or to any of us, to do anything about it except mope and talk on the phone about kitten heels and peppermint lotion and the various shades in which you might get support tights.
And I had gone back on the pill, which isn’t exactly important, except that the pill always makes me depressed: foggy and guilty and permanently just that tiny bit swollen, so the surface of me is too needy and stupid, somehow. I am not explaining it very well. I just think that if I hadn’t been on the pill things would have gone differently; I might have been able to listen better to my mother on the phone, or think better, but it was like I had gone to the edges of myself, and what was in the centre was anyone’s guess. Nothing, that is one answer. Or nothing much.
And I was busy, it seemed like I was always on a plane. There were times my toiletries never made it out of their see-through plastic bag.
Conor’s mother arrived for the weekend; she sat there eating breakfast and floated the opinion that two pillowcases were more hygienic, she always thought, than just one.
‘Sleep,’ she said. ‘It’s a third of your life.’ And I didn’t throw her out or shout at her that the son she reared didn’t know you could change sheets, he thought they came with the bed.
‘You know,’ I said. ‘That makes a lot of sense.’
Mrs Shiels had five children: two in Youghal, and two breeding mightily in Dundrum and Bondi. A capable, glamorous woman, she was all set to use us for her Dublin shopping base – she knew it and I knew it. For Christmas, I got her some vouchers for a posh hotel.
‘The Merrion!’ she said. ‘Lovely.’
This was a Christmas I could have been with my own mother, but which I spent instead in the middle of a scrummage down in Youghal, with forty people whose names I did not know, each and every one of whom hated Dubliners (don’t tell me otherwise) for the fact that they weren’t from fucking Youghal.
Christ.
I can’t believe I am free of all that. I just can’t believe it. That all you have to do is sleep with somebody and get caught and you never have to see your in-laws again. Ever. Pfffft! Gone. It’s the nearest thing to magic I have yet found.
But the pill is important for another reason too, I suppose, because if it hadn’t been for the pill, I might not have slept with Seán that time in Montreux. Which was – and this is a peculiar thing to say – the only time it did not matter. Apart from anything else, there was a lot of, I think, Alsace Riesling involved.
It happened at a conference. Of course. A week of management-speak on a Swiss lake with flow charts and fondue, and a little trip on a wooden boat, with a mixed gang of semi-state and private sector, a few from Galway, most Dublin-based, and drinking on the last couple of nights, until 4 a.m. Most of them, I might also mention, were men.
The title of the week was ‘Beyond the EU’. I was there to talk ‘International Internet Strategy’ – delighted to get the invite, which was a step up for me. The hotel was a confection in cream and red velvet, with gilt everywhere and stains on the carpets that might have been a hundred years old. And there on the first morning, under the heading ‘The Culture of Money’ was the name ‘Seán Vallely’.
‘You made it,’ he said. He looked better than I remembered. Maybe it was the fact that he was dressed.
‘I wondered who it was,’ I said.
‘Ah, wheels within wheels,’ he said.
We shook hands.
His palm felt old, I thought, but most palms do.
I checked him out giving a seminar that first morning: I glanced in through the open door and saw him eating the room. His open jacket flapped behind him, as he turned to one corner and then the other. He worked the air in front of his chest; he cupped the thought, and held it out, and let it go.
‘Why,’ he said, ‘do you dislike rich people?’
It was quite a spiel.
‘You. What’s your name? Billy. OK, Billy. Do you like rich people?’
‘I’m not bothered.’
‘You take it personally, don’t you? The house, the car, the holidays in the sun. You take it personally, because you’re Irish. If you were American, you’d let them have it. Because, you know, these people are not connected to you. They bought their nice house and your name didn’t even come up. They went to the Bahamas and they didn’t even forget to invite you.’
There were two speakers each morning, and people were split into groups for workshops during the afternoons. I thought Seán was sleeping with the ‘Global Tax’ woman, or that he had slept with her. But, I learned later, they just didn’t like each other, or so he said.
Meanwhile there were the chocolate tastings and shopping opportunities and much rubbish to talk. The wilder ones, myself included, formed a kind of gang, with large amounts of drinking to get through. There were two Northern Irish guys ‘from either side of the divide’ whose catchphrase became, ‘just so long as nobody gets shot’. There was a really nice gay guy who played torch songs at the piano in the bar and the Global Tax woman, who drove me up the wall by stopping the conversation, many times, in order to make her point yet more clear. By Wednesday night it was a drinking competition, and I had her knocked out by the fourth round. On Thursday I ended up in one of the Northerners’ rooms, polishing off the mini-bar with the other Northern guy and Seán; the queen of international tax returns passed out on the second bed. On the last night – Friday – Seán met me on my way back from the ladies, and he turned to gather me up, saying, ‘Come here. I have something to show you.’ At least I think that is what he said. I may not remember the words exactly, but I remember his hand on the small of my back, and I remember knowing what we were about to do. It seemed that choice had nothing to do with it, or that I had chosen a long time ago. Not him, necessarily, but this; waiting for the lift in sudden silence with a man who did not even bother to court me. Or had that happened already? Maybe h
e would court me later. Things, clearly, did not happen in a particular order anymore: first this, and then that. First a kiss, and then bed. Maybe it was the drink, but my sense of time was undone, as idly as a set of shoelaces, that you do not notice until you look down.
In the lift we made small-talk. Don’t ask me what about.
A part of me said that there would be other people in his room, like the previous night’s fun – that we were still a happy bunch of people who were trying to move beyond the EU – another part surely hoped that there wouldn’t be. But there is little point in agonising over something so simple. We went upstairs to have sex. And it seemed like a great idea at the time. I was, besides, so drunk, I only remember it in patches.
We had an amazing session outside the room, I do remember that; as I resisted going in the door and he turned back to persuade me. My memory skips the beginning of it, like a needle in an old record, so I have lost the moment of decision, the leaning in. But I remember how he slayed me with kisses, how, when I struggled to open my eyes, I was surprised to find the hotel corridor still there; the dizzy carpet, the receding line of identical doors, and the wallpaper, in vertical stripes of scarlet flock. As I continued to leave and he continued to keep me, the kiss was a sweet argument and pursuit, so tranced and articulate, his left hand on my arm, the other holding his plastic door key, not yet slipped home.
It was the luxury of the kiss that held me, the pure pointless, greedy delight. Even when the lock whirred and the door clicked open, we carried on, and it was only the sound of people coming out of the lift that sent us scurrying inside, laughing in the darkness.
After the kiss – the five-minute, ten-minute, two-hour kiss – the actual sex was a bit too actual, if you know what I mean. There is another blank when I try to recall how we got from the door to the bed, after which, much enthusiastic bouncing and writhing, despite the fact that I couldn’t really feel much, I don’t think, and Seán (who is now the love of my life – my goodness, how it betrays him to say this), took about half an hour to come.
