by Anne Enright
I AM A THIEF
(Premier Showing in the Irish Free State)
THRILLS! DRAMA! ROMANCE!
* * *
Over the mantelpiece was a bill from one of those butchers, where you take your meat from over the counter and pay at an antique cubby hole so that they won’t get blood on the money. There is however, blood on the piece of paper, dried to a smeared brown, which means she got the chit from the butcher and didn’t hand it in at the till. Or perhaps she paid all right and the blood came from somewhere else. She bought one lamb chop. On the back, in a female hand is a list: ‘Chop. Chop. Chop. Chop. Cutlet.’
I move along the wall with an angry rhythm, feeling like I have been fooled and the paper comes with my hand in scraps or swathes. The plaster underneath is an old-fashioned pink and when I scrape it with the backs of my fingernails my teeth are set on edge, the follicles on my forearms contract in protest and the hairs stand to. Sharp edged flakes of pink stick to the paper in liquid shapes, blotting out words and phrases, or they fall off in scabs leaving the page pockmarked with meaning, or a piece shreds as I pull it off, leaving a central tongue stuck to the wall.
Stuck in the cracks around the doorframe are folded pieces of card. A couple have just one word on them; ‘theopneust’, ‘dear’, ‘the Isle of Man’. On the back of a cornflakes packet, with the old-fashioned rooster just about to crow, a poem, by a lunatic. (I have to get out of this house.)
soldiers a g nd piano an undertaker with a long face an operatic soprano with a loofah in her hand
and the rest of her in the bath and the corpse of Sergei Nijinski whose wake it was.
P.S. I know who The Woman Next Door is. Just in case you read this with your yellow eyes.
I wanted Stephen to burst through the door in a cleansing wind, his wings filling the room and a sword of flame in his hand. An oxyacetylene lamp might do. Either way, he was behind me now as I knew he would be, with a small laugh that felt warm on my neck and a copy of the RTE Guide.
‘Read me my horoscope,’ I said. ‘And make a cup of tea. Or ride me. Or sweep all this shite off the floor. Don’t just stand there.’
‘Gemini,’ he said. ‘The Twins.’
‘I’m not Gemini,’ I said.
‘Changes are afoot Gemini! That see-saw heart of yours knows what it is to hit bottom! Why not let someone you love sit at the other end and put you on top of the world again. You know who I mean … Jupiter is swinging through your third house and your luck is in. Clear out the old and sing in the new.’
So I tore the room apart, Stephen hovering at my shoulder in a state of celestial agitation. I yanked up the carpet with the newspaper underneath, stuffed it all out the window and when it lodged in the frame, went into the front garden and pulled, like a vet pulling out a dead calf. I fell into the flowerbed when it shot out in a lump and then wrestled it off me, the yellow scraps of paper blowing all over the road, landing in the neighbours’ gardens, sticking to the hub-caps of their nice cars and sucking up against the holes in their wire fences. Let them read something for a change. I didn’t care what they thought. They had been living with a madwoman for years and never told me.
I pushed and dragged the old sofa out through the hall, and tumbled it down the steps onto the front path. The springs made a tired noise as they gave up their dead; a collection of magazines chewed over by a mouse who had hollowed out a nest in the corner, when the good front room had been too good for anyone to sit in. Digested by the mouse, himself long dead, were: the face of a girl from a 1961 Playboy magazine leaving her smile, her industrial underwear and a G-Plan shelving unit; the hands of Saint Dymphna (I presume) patron saint of the insane; and the top of Gay Byrne’s head from a picture that was thoughtfully clipped and saved.
I wet the floor and scraped the paper off with my fingernails, leaving streaks across the room. When the paste refused to yield I plugged a hose on to the kitchen tap and brought it into the living room. Stephen said Don’t Do It, if only to urge me on and I stuck the end of the hose into his hand, went back into the kitchen and turned on the tap. I ran with the water along the hose and arrived through the door just in time to see it shoot out, hit the floor, bounce back off in a shower of correction marks and soak the television, which blew up, while two hundred and twenty volts arced back along the stream of water to Stephen, who also exploded. Two vacuums collapsing at once made the air feel suddenly thin. There was the smell of burnt wiring like a mixture of piss and sardines and the air held Stephen’s shape for a moment, before expanding gently with the scent of ambergris and of toasted sesame seeds. On the floor, the hose leaked and bubbled.
No of course not.
And when I got up in the morning, the room was beautiful. Stephen had finished stripping the paper and had painted the walls white, working by the light of the moon and the light of the paint and by the glow that spreads across his face, whenever he gets a brush in his hand.
Breathing
‘HOW WAS YOUR weekend?’ says Jo, when I come in the door.
‘Stripped wallpaper,’ I said.
‘Sounds nearly as exciting as mine.’
The television in the corner is on with the sound turned down. There is a game-show playing through the static, a blizzard of lips and eyes. You can’t even see the prizes.
‘For God’s sake,’ says Marcus. ‘Look out the window. What is that? It is a transmitter. What is this? It is an Italian game-show. How’ya?’
‘Good morning. Good morning. Was that on all night?’
The LoveWagon mooches significantly by. She doesn’t quite exist outside her office. Open space makes her look like anyone else, with a hangover and an itchy blue line on the back of one leg. I knew it meant trouble.
‘Can I see you for a minute?’ she said. So I went over to get a cup of canteen coffee—the taste of panic in your mouth, the taste of somebody else’s panic heated over and saying ‘hello’.
I go into her office and look at her nose, which is ordinary enough. It sits in the middle of her face like a nose should. The inside of her nostrils seem entirely respectable, though there is one mysteriously broken vein that trails over the small mound at the base of the divide. She is sniffing around, looking for someone to blame. It doesn’t really matter for what. The audience figures are down, that will do for a start.
The LoveWagon’s nose talks to her all day long and her mind has nothing to do with it. Her mind keeps her busy with other things, like how to win, like how to keep the monkey off your back. But sometimes her face goes very still, like a dog testing the air.
Winning isn’t easy. She wants my sympathy for how hard it is to win. First of all she says the bastards are on our back again. The show is going to be pulled again. Damien has been making dirty cracks again, this time in Irish. Apparently there was a pun on Cumann na nGael and a windy orgasm, which none of us understood, so I didn’t cut it out.
She played the joke as though I had never seen it before—stopped the tape, rolled it back, played it again—like a woman reversing repeatedly into a wall. This always made her laugh. Here was disaster on a loop, the gash we had made in time. The problem was more than political. I had scratched the record and made it jump. I had dug a hole we could not get past, nor stitch up.
She has a handsome face, but her hands are old. They look like string bags that are holding in the flesh by accident, that are accidentally the right shape for hands, a little map of wrinkles, fates and cicatrices. I could get sentimental about her hands. She talks with them because, being paranoid, she is afraid you might recognise her voice.
‘We’re up shit creek again. I am trying to save the show, here. I am trying, if possible, to save you.’
I wonder what her hands are saying. ‘I need you—I need you all’? Or maybe she’s playing with a knife, to see how real it is.
‘From what?’
‘I’m on your side, Grace.’
‘I know that.’
Silence. I might as well feed her the lines.
I say ‘Things are shifting up there. Apparently Murphy is moving sideways and up and out of programmes altogether.’
‘Which means we’re finished. Murphy was one of the best friends we had. I know he shafted us at Christmas, but that was just a blind. He can’t be seen to be on our side.’
‘He’s on nobody’s side.’
‘He is on the side of the ratings. Which is our side.’
‘There’s always McNulty.’
‘McNulty’s out. He’s a liability. He only pretends to be on our side in case things swing our way.’
‘I heard he was coming back in. I heard he’s getting a push from Mahon.’
‘Well if he is back in, then he’s not on our side anymore.’
She laughs. She says, ‘Grace. I’m afraid of where you want to push it.’
‘How was I to know he said “orgasm” in Irish. I didn’t even know you could.’
‘There was that stupid looking vegetable.’
‘Oh come on.’
‘And it’s not that either.’
‘It never is.’
‘There’s a difference’, she says, ‘between showing a bit of leg and mooning at someone in the street.’
‘Fuck them,’ I said. ‘They want it every way.’
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘it will take Murphy just five minutes a year to grind you down. Some years he might forget. But five minutes a year to fuck your life up until it’s too late and he doesn’t have to care. He’s paid not to care. Now as far as I know, he really does want this programme to succeed.’
‘And I don’t?’
This is a mistake. I should say nothing. There is more than one paranoid in the room and once you join in it is impossible to win. The television in the corner of the room has started to slide across channels. She is waving her sad hands in front of an aerial shot that refuses to cut, though sometimes it turns belly-up for a look at the sky.
‘It is real Grace. You have no idea how much they need to be appeased.’
Five minutes later I am out of her office with no idea what real is, but knowing that I am to blame. My bladder is mysteriously full so I go to the toilet where I piss out more liquid than I ever drank in and I think that maybe she was just looking for sympathy after all. I think I should be grateful to her for some things, because I used to like the LoveWagon, I used to call her by her name. Perhaps she is no worse than any other. Perhaps television is just a crash-course in life and there is no such thing as blame. Then again, perhaps she’s just a deceitful paranoid bitch who has it in for me.
The Most Beautiful Woman
MY FATHER LIKED hairdressers. He liked to watch. I realised this when he took me for my first real haircut, not the kind of trip a father usually makes with his daughter, unless he is interested in revenge. I was ten and getting a sense of humour, which did not suit the joke on his head. I still hate hairdressers. I still fancy bald men. I should do a self-help book for women who get it the wrong way round.
It was a Saturday. The room was full of women in extreme situations. Their hair smelt like it was burning, their scalp was smeared with acid goo and they were flicking through magazines. They sat under the dryers with implacable faces. I wasn’t surprised by the helmets humming around their heads, it was, after all, the space age. I was surprised by how ordinary they were, because you never saw housewives on Star Trek.
I wasn’t distressed until Mrs Davitt came out of the backroom looking like a turkey, her eyebrows half-gone and her face shiny with insanity or a facial. Either way, she did an extraordinary thing. She walked over to my father and flirted with him. I remember her nostrils and how raw they looked—Mrs Davitt from up the road was flaring her nostrils.
My father took it like a bishop, his hands square, one on either knee, his face full of mischief. This is the kind of thing that upsets a child. My father was in the wrong place. He was no longer inside my head and once he slipped free the betrayal was comprehensive. (Man IN hairdressers IN wig IN madwoman EQUALS my father PLUS Mrs Davitt.) As if to prove the equation Mrs Davitt gave me a tenpence piece and a pat on the head before she made for the door.
I was put sitting in the chair on a pile of women’s magazines, so I felt I might slide off at any second and land on the floor in a heap of horoscopes and Handy Hints with a pair of scissors stuck in my neck. The hairdresser’s nails were long and red. Her hair was bright blonde and huge. Her eyeshadow was green and her lashes were amazing. She smelt of about six different things. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
My hair was in her hands. She ran her fingers through it and felt the ends. There was something wrong with the ends. She picked it up again near the roots and pulled it down halfway, cupped my face at the chin, then shook her fingers free. One of her rings got caught and she gave the hair a yank, before she remembered herself and picked it loose, her fingers as careful and new as a small child’s.
‘Now,’ she said.
She smiled at my father but I didn’t mind that. They had shared interests. Besides he was too busy watching her hands. Or maybe it was the mirror he was looking at, pretending not to check his face, or his hair, or the line between the two. When he saw me looking he gave me a wink. My father in the mirror was even stranger than my father in the room.
‘It’s her first real haircut,’ he said.
‘She’ll be lovely, wait and you see,’ said the hairdresser and I felt they expected something of me.
‘So what are you going to be when you grow up?’ she asked me. ‘Would you like to be a hairdresser? Like me?’ I didn’t know how to speak to her. She had started to cut.
‘I think that’s a big secret,’ said my father so that I could contradict him. My hair was falling on my shoulders and on the floor.
‘I’m going to be a nun,’ I said. The hairdresser laughed, which annoyed me because I was only trying to please. Nuns get their hair cut all the time.
‘Or an astronaut,’ said my Da. ‘I wouldn’t put it past her.’ And I found him inside my head again. Comfortable and neat.
This is how the LoveWagon frightens me. I am frightened by the fact that I know too much and still don’t understand. I am frightened by her nail polish, because her hands are so old. I am frightened by her room, littered with lost tapes and their lost lives—tapes full of real faces and sentimental cuts, like cut and rotting hair. Cut so it hurts.
What Goes Up
AT HOME I play music because all the walls are white and because I miss Stephen who has disappeared into it. I turn up the music, loud and clean, let it scour me out. It fills the white room, then leaks into me, before overflowing through the rest of the house. An oboe segues up the stairs and slides back down the banisters, swells to fit the shape of the door and picks the lock, as though having a good time was the saddest thing of all. It wraps the chairs and flattens the mirror, mixes with the light and turns it solid. And just when I become this room made of music, always expanding, always the same size, just when I am inside and outside and cataleptic—I hear a breath, distinct and close.
There is someone in the room, or someone in the music, and I have the feeling that whoever they might be, they are certainly dead.
Another noise, this time from upstairs. Another breath close to my ear, in my ear. The oboe plays on, a little thinner, more withdrawn, the noise upstairs putting it in its place. Another breath, loud but apologetic—here I— am it is coming from the CD. It belongs to the oboe-player. If I played the track again, he would probably breathe again—just there. Which is little comfort as I turn off the stereo and listen to a silence more frightening.
From upstairs comes a muffled dragging, the sound of a man toting a sack full of body parts. Then nothing. I still hear breathing, but this time it is my own—or the sighing of the house, or the hot breath of the man upstairs, or the lungs of the corpse he has with him, collapsing gently.
On my way past the kitchen I hook my arm around the door and pick up a pot of blackberry jam, because a missile i
s safer than a knife. Halfway up the stairs I hear a wet rasping and sucking sound and the slap of something wet hitting a wall.
‘Hello?’ I say, because I am stupid that way.
Silence. The wet rasp-and-suck comes again. More silence. Whoever it is, he is in my bedroom. I lift each leg on to each new step as if they were prosthetic, cross the landing to my room and push open the door.
My bedroom wheels past; top corner left, ceiling, window sill, chair. My eyes are too wild to stop and look. In any case, there is no-one there. So why do I hear those slow footsteps walking towards me, across the empty room?
‘Oh please.’
The footsteps halt. There is the same wet, rasping noise. For a moment I think it comes from my own throat.
‘Stephen stop it. Is that you?’
A leg comes through the ceiling. I look at it. Another leg comes through the ceiling. The legs scissor once and the right one kicks. The kick brings a torso down, which hangs briefly at the armpits, before arms, shoulders, head, hands and a can of paint break through. They land on my bed, though the paint also hits the floor.
Stephen was painting the attic.
I look at the lake of white spilling off the edge of my bed and spreading across the floor. I look at my hand and find that I have dropped the pot of jam. I look at Stephen. He is sucking his thumb.
‘I am bleeding,’ he says.
‘Good enough for you.’
‘No. I mean I am bleeding.’
‘Where?’ There is nothing to show for it, one red spot sinking into the white of the paint, turning brown.
It is time to put my foot down. No more painting.
‘What about the floor-boards?’ I say. ‘And under the floor boards?’ Does he want me to take the tiles of the roof? What about the cavities between the bricks? Not to mention the plumbing, and inside the plumbing—I wouldn’t put it past him.
A last bin load of Mrs O’Dwyer’s scurf. A bill from Ostomy products in Parnell Street for something that I hope is out of date and don’t want to understand. A poem about childbirth: ‘The bigger the cock, the bigger the crown/ Because what goes up must come down.’ All of this found in the hole over my bed, in between layers of wallpaper, vertiginously spread, with a gold and green pattern of repeating mermaids who, like Mrs O’Dwyer, had nowhere left to put a man.
