by Anne Enright
‘An angel?’ says Jo.
‘Never mind,’ I say.
‘Hang on,’ says Marcus. ‘We were all virgins. Even you had a childhood and lost it. Or maybe you’re born with a diaphragm installed, here in Dublin 4’, and a little trail of insult crosses behind his eyes, like beads on a miserable string.
* *
My mother thinks that the loss of my virginity caused my father’s stroke and so do I. Never mind the facts. The first fact, fuck it, is that I never was a virgin, never had a hymen, never knew the difference between loss and gain.
The other fact is that I stayed out all night, the night my father’s brain sprung a leak, and that rage kept my mother awake and in the kitchen while my father lost half of his bladder and half of his bowels into his half of the bed.
Never mind that I had spent the night talking and fully dressed, while my mother sat up, listening to the hall door opening, over and over, in her head.
So my virginity, if I ever had a virginity, was just an idea my parents had. But it was my father who took the brunt of it, because it was his brain that tore and bled and was transformed. No wonder my mother felt like a hypocrite. No wonder I felt bad.
I came in at seven in the morning to an empty house. I rang the neighbours and so broadcast the facts that I was a slut and that my father was in hospital, both at the same time. Since then, my father’s illness has not been made my concern.
A few weeks later I did sleep with Brendan (large, rooted and sincere) for the first time. I mourned all right, but not for my virginity. I mourned for my mother in the kitchen and my father in the bed. I was astonished by sex. And I was astonished by the fact that the rhythm of love, when it happened, was the awful swing of my mother’s hall door, always opening, never shut.
Brendan took it all very badly. We lay there in his dirty and tangled sheets. I said ‘That was my first time.’ I said ‘My father’s just had a stroke.’
* *
‘Anyway’ says Frank, ‘she can’t be a virgin. Not after Marcus gave her one that Friday night.’
‘It doesn’t matter’, says Marcus, who has an urgent mind and very little in his pants, ‘whether she was a virgin or not—because on the screen, for the duration of the show, for the punters at home, that young woman was as good as a virgin. And that is the lie we get paid to tell.’
‘She was as good as a ride,’ says Frank.
‘Whore,’ I said into my dinner.
‘All things to all men!’ said Marcus. ‘Which is why, when people criticise the programme—yes, it’s a trashy show, yes, it’s complicated—it’s as trashy and simple and complicated as a one-night-stand is, or as paying for a blow job is, or as falling in love. So when people criticise that experience, whatever it was that they saw on the screen, they are telling you more about themselves than they are about the show.’
‘Gosh!’ said Frank.
‘I know what I’m looking at,’ said Jo.
‘Exactly’ said Marcus. ‘Just what I said.’
Marcus always wins a) because he changes his mind all the time, which he is allowed to do because b) he read somewhere that truth is just a matter of building contradictions. So now he has his cake, he eats it and his shit comes out wedge-shaped with icing on the top.
‘Marcus,’ I said. ‘I was not calling Marie Keogh a whore, whether or not you slept with her. I don’t know how to break it to you, but she is just a distracted young woman we put on the telly the other night. I was calling you a whore. I could have called Frank a whore, but we all know that he’d get up on the crack of Dawn, so it’s not exactly hot news. I was calling you a whore because you get off on television and you love talking shite.’
‘And you are working for Mother Teresa,’ said Marcus. ‘As we well know.’
‘I know what I am,’ I said. ‘I know that I’m out on the streets with my high heels on, earning a crust. You just hang around because you love the smell of cock.’
‘Why do you talk like that?’ said Marcus.
‘I’m just talking. You’re the one who is waving it around.’
‘Oh. You think I slept with her.’
‘I think you don’t know the difference between fucking her on-screen and off.’
‘And what exactly is the difference?’ said Marcus, who wants to make Drama and doesn’t put out.
‘Are those shoes new?’ said Frank.
He has just retrieved a fork from the floor. He ducks down again, followed by Marcus and Jo, their elbows cresting the air like whales going under, with the coffee cups sailing by. It was my shoes they were looking at, so I joined them.
Under the table the world was huge. The sounds were old. Our childhoods were sitting there, with a finger to their lips.
We looked at each others’ faces, small beside our thighs, which were broad and easy on the flat of the chairs, sitting any way, privately akimbo. There were our legs, frank and tender without their torsos, thinking about the possibilities of mix and match. They might for example, walk off in different couples, leaving our bollocks and bits abandoned mid-air.
We laughed. I lifted my flanks to make them look thinner, then dropped them again and twisted my head back up, leaving them to talk in the secret way that legs might have. As I came to the lip I lost Marcus’s and Frank’s knees and crotches, and found their shoulders, shifting blindly along the line of the table top.
Back in the open, the sounds of the restaurant collided like two trains slamming past each other. I was still laughing. Marcus, Frank and Jo surfaced and smiled.
I knew that the trains had crashed and we had all died. It was just that no-one had noticed yet.
‘These old things?’ I said. ‘I’ve had them for years.’
‘Nice,’ said Jo.
‘Well I’ve met him,’ said Frank.
‘Met who?’
‘Your man. Stephen. Met him in the bookies.’
‘He is not my man.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t care.’
‘Gave me a winner for the Gold Cup so I bought him a drink. And it so happens he knows my name from the credits. “Frank Fingal!” he says, “from the LoveQuiz?” “Is this fame at last?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I’ve just moved in with Grace.”’
‘He’s a flatmate.’
‘Who’s for coffee?’ said Marcus.
‘You shut up,’ says Frank. ‘All right he’s a flatmate. I didn’t mean to annoy you, Grace. I just …’
‘I’m not upset.’
‘I know you’re not. I just wanted to say. And what the fuck do I know about women?’
‘I’m not a “woman”.’
‘Two coffees?’ said Marcus.
‘Grace,’ said Frank. ‘Go for it. I’m serious. He’s the one. OK, say you were casting something—he’s the one that would jump straight bang through the lens and land in your fucking lap. And he’s lucky. He’s lucky.’
‘What is going on around here?’ said Marcus. This is not the Frank we know and love.
‘Frank’s lost the run of himself,’ I said. ‘He’s probably doing it for a bet.’
‘Oh fuck you,’ said Frank. ‘Fuck you, Grace darling.’
‘Who’s this?’ said the LoveWagon calling down the table, right on cue. Which is when I realise that whatever is going on, it is not mine.
‘Just a guy who asked me for an audition,’ said Frank.
‘Well bring him in.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘No. No, he’s wrong. He’s too … he’s too natural.’
‘Natural?’ said Marcus. ‘What’s natural? Yellowstone Park is natural. But if you throw a packet of Daz down Old Faithful it’ll shoot just for you.’
‘Well God knows we need a bit of right,’ she said, ‘after last week. Two anoraks, a psycho and a spoilt priest. Any more shows like that and we’ll be eating the cabin boy.’
‘Shouldn’t we pull straws?’ said Frank.
‘Why don’t we pull contracts instead,’ said the LoveWagon with
a smile, ‘and see who’s got the shortest?’
‘Jesus,’ said Marcus under his breath. ‘Man the lifeboats.’
‘Jump don’t fall,’ said Frank.
‘Jump don’t fall,’ said Jo.
‘How can you tell?’ said Marcus. ‘How can you tell if you’re falling?’
* *
My father’s stroke changed nothing. He still said there was no difference between blue and green. He dried the dishes and still put them back in the wrong place. He was the same, inappropriate man, except that now he was waiting for the real thing to come and tap him on the shoulder with ‘COME ON SWEETHEART. TIME-TO-DIE TIME.’
So his second stroke when it came, was a strange relief. Now he lives on the wrong side of the mirror and says table instead of chair. He is not surprised and neither are we. Perhaps he wants to sit on the table after all and eat his dinner off the chair.
His death might have relieved us more. We are a very private family. We would have buried his wig with him and gone our separate ways.
My mother put a bed downstairs and took him out of hospital because she wanted him to die in the right place. We were called back for the wait, all grown up. The ceilings were too low, the toilet was surprisingly near the ground. We slept in our old rooms, Phil shedding his own hair on to his childhood pillow, myself and Brenda polite as strangers in twin beds.
He was to die in the living room, so we turned on the telly to tease out his poor tangled synapses. We took turns at his side and waited for the peculiar silence after his last breath. I sat there thinking, Just keep going, just keep going until I’m out of the room. Da was unconscious. His fingers were swollen. Half his face was already dead. There was an Australian soap playing. I heard his last breath and I heard the silence. Then another last breath, another silence. He went on for days. We drank a lot of sherry.
I looked at his face, that I still could not remember from one moment to the next. The wig was obscenely young and jaunty on the top of his withered head. It was fake like a hero. I sat there and looked at it, as it looked back at me, and we both hung on.
The house was full of women, delighted, in for the kill. They said decades of the rosary in the front room so we couldn’t throw them out. My father gave off a sweet smelling hiss of disapproval and tried to turn his face to the wall.
He managed to tell us that he was still alive:
He started to say the word Canal.
He tore up an atlas and ate all the maps of America.
We took the hint and started to fight like family again. My mother stood by the sink and called Brenda a slut. Brenda shouted back. She said why did she always have to start an argument when she was on the toilet. She said that if she was a slut then she wasn’t the only one—meaning me I suppose, though now I have the excuse of a good job. Brenda works with children. My mother thinks this is the wrong place to find a good man.
Brenda’s promiscuity is the great family joke. No-one has the heart to say that she sleeps with women, least of all Brenda. She may sleep with a lot of women but I doubt it. My mother probably hopes that she has the sense to avoid housewives on benefit and go for professional women instead. Brenda’s sex life, however, is entirely political. I think that she likes men well enough, she’s just terrified their hair will come away in her hand.
No-one cares who Phil sleeps with. When my father dies Phil will marry a small expensive woman who knows quite a few fun people. She will be very nice and we will despise her. Phil is normal, which, as every sister knows, means buck mad. We remember him at thirteen—his horror of menstruation, his obsession with soaps shaped like animals, his religious inclinations, the delicate way he would carry an egg in his mouth after confession, as a private penance.
My mother loves Phil like a son and loves all his weaknesses, but she loves Brenda like she loves herself—the middle one, the one who is left out. They fight about everything and cry in separate rooms. They mooch around the kitchen finding things to do. As for me, I couldn’t be bothered picking up a cloth to dry a cup.
I am my fathers daughter. Nevertheless, when he tied his wedding ring to the cord of the lamp and plugged it in, it was time to leave home one more time.
* *
I only hate the LoveWagon before eleven o’clock in the morning. After noon I am quite indifferent. Late at night I find myself getting sentimental about her washed little blue eyes with the hurt sitting behind them like a stupid child.
She is doing her imitation of a woman at a party, telling stories about the days when she was out on the road. Duck and cover, wait to be seduced. ‘Please like me,’ she says, and it makes you feel a little soiled, a little eager. ‘OK,’ you say.
She tells us about the movie star with the hair transplant, the priest with his pockets sewn up, the minister for health who took the sound man aside and asked him what a blow job was.
‘She is a woman,’ says Marcus, ‘she flirts like a woman.’ Because as far as he knows, the only place a woman can betray you is in your bed.
Marcus is convinced that she is having an affair. He says that she has to be, that the show would have been pulled long ago if it weren’t for the smell off her of someone big. Like who? I say. Like when? She couldn’t be that stupid. ‘But she’s not clever,’ he says.
She has him well fooled. Marcus thinks that someday his talent will shine through, that he will tell them all what power is and what is television. I say he’d do a lot better to be a little thicker, which, being from the country, you’d think he’d understand. It will be a long time before Marcus gets there. He doesn’t have the nose for it—or at least, he has a nose all right but his brain gets in the way.
‘There is only one way to beat her,’ I say. ‘You can confuse her with her own stink.’
‘How do you do that?’ he says.
‘How should I know?’ I say. And he looks at me like I have two heads.
The LoveWagon is telling the story of a woman in Belfast who picked up bits of her husband out of her own front garden. It was a brilliant interview, even the sofa was right. There was a silence after the woman finished, the tears still running down her face and the LoveWagon made the slight move that is the sign to quit, a kind of undertaker’s nod to the gravediggers. When the cameraman, who shall remain nameless, spoke directly to the woman and said ‘I am sorry. I have a technical problem with that. Would you mind saying it again’ and horror stalked the semi-d.
They did the whole lot again and it was dreadful, unusable. And when she viewed the tape later, she saw that the cameraman had just flicked the off button! Which was the kind of thing you could get fired for, but not as bad as the way he took the woman’s hand on the doorstep and looked bang into her eyes.
‘I think it was sexual,’ she says, ‘not to mention sackable. But what can you do?’
‘Maybe it was love,’ says Jo.
‘Love?’ says Marcus.
‘LOVE!’ says Jo and bangs the table with her fork. We all look at her, trying to imagine the kind of love she is talking about. Love that makes you want to turn the camera off.
* *
I have been in love. After we all settled down, between the two strokes.
I left home. At the time I thought that it was nothing to do with my father. I thought it was a political thing, because a girl has to grow up any way she can. So I went to England, a country where women didn’t bury their babies in silage pits, a country where people knew the virtues of stripped pine. Exile was mainly a question of contraception and nice wallpaper.
I woke up six months later with the feeling of a hand choking me in the dark. There was no-one in the room. I was in Stoke Newington and very little of it made any sense. If I hadn’t fallen in love with an Englishman I might have gone home.
Love. Amid all that alien corn. It seemed like I had been practising for so long and still I wasn’t ready; for the way the chair sat so well by the window, for paint that was too bright, for skin. He was blond. He was old enough to know better. He wa
s restrained. There is nothing like taking the clothes off a restrained man.
It wasn’t easy, this difference between one and two. I ended up thinking about death all the time because it was simpler, his death, my death, his funeral, my funeral, the coldness of his face and my swooning to the organ in a blindness of grief.
His face was cold anyway, his eyes nice and cold and blue and his hands were both hot and soft. He used to run a bath after we had made love and lie in it and talk to me, while I sat on the toilet seat and watched the wonder of his mickey floating free. His face would be blood red in the steam, his mouth thin and pale, the roots of his hair almost white where it was stitched into the blush of his scalp and his eyes impossibly blue.
I have always found liars both subtle and exciting, for which, of course, my father is to blame. At the same time, I thought his wig was a talisman against other, less interesting lies. I thought I was immune. And yet, here I was, in Stoke Newington, watching a man wash my smell away.
I came home to the country where you could tell if a man was married, and if you couldn’t, then you could always find out. Not that I could care less, because I was in love, whatever that meant, with a man who rang one Saturday morning and asked me to have his child. Certainly, I said. In Ireland we have babies just like that. We have them all the time. So I got on a plane and flew across the Irish Sea to a hotel bedroom where I took off my clothes and lay down on a candlewick bedspread and crooked my knees, and said ‘I love you’ and he said ‘I love you’ and swung his slow bollocks down to me, full of the miracle of creation.
