by Anne Enright
Nearly the Same Thing
IN THE OFFICE, Frank shows me his wife, or he shows me pictures of his wife, which is nearly the same thing.
He says he never developed most of his photos, in case they turned out different to what he remembered, so they lay around the house like unposted letters until he rooted them out, brought them to the chemist and handed them over, with a smile as faded and hopeful as the chemicals, after all these years.
‘And look at this!’ he says, as if to show that, statistically speaking, he had always loved his wife, because most of them are of her—as if his eye always knew what his heart could not tell. They are not the usual conjugal snaps. She is not standing in front of the view with her hand on her hip and the sun in her eyes. Frank is good all right. His wife is often moving and the colours are blurred. He snaps her like someone you pass on the street. Very rarely, she has a sense of him there in the corner of her eye, but more often she is complete, private and uncomposed.
He tried to show them to her, but she shouted at him. At first he thought she was afraid of how she looked, or what she had lost. Then she slipped a cool word in. She said ‘You didn’t find the ones in the glove compartment, did you?’ and Frank realised what it had cost her to leave the rolls of film as they were. She thought there was another woman in there, whom she did not know and did not want to see, a woman she could study for signs of her own mysterious lack. She thought that he had left them lying around as a temptation, as a dare—‘You can end it anytime. Just look in here.’
In the drawer on her side of the bed, in among the mechanics of sex, was a casing with the celluloid pulled right out, a curl of plastic, with thirty-six unconnected, connected moments that he had lost, whitening in the light.
Relative Density
STEPHEN DEVELOPS A Band-aid fetish, excited by the possibilities of blood. I find him in the bathroom trying to shave, like a boy trying to grow stubble instead of down and he sticks little pieces of toilet paper on cuts that I cannot see. He is full of jokes. He has stacked the kitchen cupboards with Angel Delight. He feeds me rice dusted with saffron or with pollen from the lilies he puts everywhere, in old paint cans and milk bottles. The pollen is thick and smells of oriental sex, falling in the light.
He brings things into the house: a small girl who is in love with him, a horrible coy little thing who wants to help me tidy with her little toy dustpan and brush. ‘Fuck off little girl,’ I want to say. ‘Go get a life.’
Up into the attic then to amuse this hungry little void, who simply pointed at the hole in my ceiling and said ‘What’s up there?’ How do I know how to say no to a child? It is something you have to practise.
And it is quite a trip, quite a picnic, up among the raw wood joists, the splinters and the dust. Light comes in from under the eaves and we lie down and look at the road from a funny angle. We look through the hole in the floor and see my bed, the duvet stiffened with paint. Fortunately she does not find the box containing a rubber Thing that looks like it might once have been inside Mrs O’Dwyer instead of outside. She does not find the glass eye that turns out to be a marble. She finds a doll. She finds Mrs O’Dwyer’s doll. I check it for hexes and then let her have it. It is a nice doll, with a china face.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I think I will call her HANDBAG. After my friend.’
‘That’s a funny name for a friend,’ I say with a dutiful lilt. ‘Where does she come from?’ ‘It’s a him,’ she says. ‘And he’s a secret. And you can’t see him even if you try.’ As I said, Stephen is full of jokes.
He takes her into the kitchen and tells her stories about twins. He says that twins are good for wishes, like the fork of a tree is good for wishes, because the space between them does not really exist.
He tells her the story of two fat twins, who wished for the same thing only differently. The elder twin wished that she would always be slim no matter what she ate, and the younger wished that she would always be eight and a half stone. As the years went by the younger twin got fatter and fatter until finally she was so huge she couldn’t see over her stomach to read the scales—which always, but always, told her that she was eight and a half stone. The elder thought this was great and stuffed her face to her heart’s content until one day she fell through the floorboards and when they finally hauled her out, discovered that she was a very, very small two tons. The difference in their relative density forced the twins to hold on to each other at all times, in case the older should sink or the younger float away. They had always been close, but tensions began to surface in the relationship.
If they weren’t different they were the same. Other wishes he could mention were: the case of the twins who wanted to be more similar, but couldn’t really tell the difference; the twins who wanted one mother each; the twins who each wanted to be prettier than the other one, and who went from pretty to plain, from ugly to hideous, like a mirror in exponential decay.
When I come into the room, the child looks fantastically bored, so Stephen tells her that I work on the LoveQuiz. ‘Oh.’
She loves the LoveQuiz, says the child, whose name is Aoife. She says it is fun, which it is. She says it is silly, which it is. She says it is exciting. She thinks Damien is really funny but he shouldn’t wear leather trousers because they make him look cheap. She says she doesn’t like boys now, but when she grows up she will like them and she will marry one—which sets me muttering.
‘What is a lesbian?’ she says.
‘Ask your Mammy.’
I should take her into the office and show her off. Here she is. The national treasure. Here is the fragrant little scrap who skips through my rooms, making me queasy. She loves you all.
* *
Maybe I should bring my father in instead—sit him in the middle of the room, say ‘Spot the difference.’ Spot the difference between my father and my father. Between him and himself. Between his hair and his head.
This is a man who could only stand behind a camera—and even that made him uneasy. He took it out once a year and handled it like an animal, like it might turn round and look at him. There is something embarrassing about our endless black and white family Christmas, the children lurching older, one year at a time, the turkey staying the same. There is something embarrassing about my father’s eye at the back of it all, the fact that we never stood in the sun. When you look at these pictures you might as well be him. You run your fingers through your hair.
My father hated cameras but he put a mirror in every room, because they forget you when you walk away. Oblong, square and oval, he knew them all. You could tell by the way he looked at them out of the side of his face, his eyes staring ahead like setting jelly. When I see one of The Brothers on the street I spot the look before I see the wig; the look that says ‘I know that you are looking at it’, even though you are not—at least not until now.
How could I look into the mirror as a child? How could I do all that milk-white budding breast stuff, eye-gazing, eye-diving and parting your hair six different ways? How could I fall in love with myself, when the place behind the mirror (the place where he lives now) was The Land Where Wig Is King?
But a girl has to grow up any way she can. There is a picture of us on our last Christmas, the one before the camera died. There is the turkey, mutilated and smug. There is the family smiling in front of the mantelpiece, making room for the tree. My father stands with his back to the light to take the picture. If the picture is to be believed, his eye is as wide as the window.
I am going to cut my knee, you cannot see this in the photograph. But first I will throw my plate against the wall, you cannot see that either. You cannot see the plate flying, the shove in the back from Phil, the grazed leg, the split hand, the simple way Brenda drops the camera on the floor. Look closely at our smiles. That picture is a black and white suicide. It is an accident waiting to happen.
It was me that got sent upstairs, of course. I was going there anyway. In the bathroom I sat on the edge of the bath, looke
d at my knee, looked at the floor and wept. The mirror stared at the door.
Everyone used to cry in the bathroom. You would think the acoustics were wrong, but none of us seemed to mind, there was something nice about being overheard behind a locked door. My mother would give it a casual tap on her way from one room to the next. ‘Cheer up,’ she’d say, ‘we’ll soon be dead.’ Though she usually left Phil and his pride alone.
This time it was my father who knocked and the surprise made me open the door. The sound of my mother leaked into the room. He was midway between two crying women.
‘Take your time,’ he said and smiled. His smile was for me, but his look was for the mirror where the wig was busy checking itself.
‘Get out,’ I said and looked at his head in a dangerous sort of way. When the door was shut I went over to smash the mirror. What was it that stopped me?
My jumper in the mirror was a pinker shade of pink, but the jumper in the mirror had no smell. In the mirror it all looked the same, except that it could not feel. Perhaps that was why the mirror was there, to witness the act without pain. Whether or not I felt pain was another matter. Perhaps I did not. Perhaps the pain was in the mirror.
I looked at my eyes in the mirror and I had the feeling, those eyes could see. I looked at the blood in the mirror and was afraid the glass itself might bleed. So I put some blood on the mirror, a smear of solid red. It separated us out. I thought, Now the blood is in the room.
* *
Marcus’s brother came in to the office. He looks just like him. He opened the door and walked in, looking wrong, dressed wrong, with the wrong size hands and the wrong expression in his eyes. He looked like what he was doing was necessary and the right thing, but he still felt foolish and it showed on his face.
I knew that he was related to Marcus because they had the same delicate, wary eyes and I knew that someone had died because of the way he took his too large hands out of his pockets and then didn’t know where to put them.
He knocked at the open door and just stood there while Damien pushed past him saying, ‘Useless.’ It is the afternoon of studio and Damien’s exploding umbrella won’t explode. Marcus is in editing. I am on the phone to Frank who was saying, ‘Half an hour behind. Down one radio mike.’
‘Boom it?’
‘Thank you Grace. It can’t be boomed,’ and another voice says:
‘Don’t tell me. She wants it to sound like shite.’
Frank covers the mouthpiece and insults me for a while, which is what I am paid for. The brother comes over to a desk, sits down and stares at me, because he is surrounded by death and has to look somewhere. Damien is banging his umbrella against a radiator in an experimental kind of way.
‘Come in under,’ I say. ‘Fuck them.’
‘All arses covered so.’
‘Every arse in the house.’ The brother is still looking at me. I catch his eye like we’re all in on the same joke. ‘Except mine.’ He picks a piece of paper off the desk, realises what he is doing and puts it back down.
‘Useless,’ says Damien, coming up to him, and he bangs the umbrella on the desk. The umbrella gives a small thump and smoke comes out of the tip. The brother laughs and then stops.
‘Is that Damien?’ says Frank. ‘Tell him to get his fat arse over here, and stay on the studio floor.’
‘You’re wanted on the floor.’
‘I’m trying to fix my umbrella,’ said Damien.
‘Your umbrella is wanted on the floor.’
I should say something, but instead I keep the phone in the crook of my shoulder and dial another number. Whoever is dead will stay that way. The line is engaged, so I turn to face him, a very busy woman. He asks for Marcus.
‘It’s his father,’ he says, ‘I drove down this morning.’
‘Oh I am so sorry.’ Busy but sympathetic. I ring editing and the phone is lifted. There is the howl of a tape rewinding and then close to the mouthpiece Marcus says, ‘Yes.’ And then to the editor, ‘Just there. Back a bit.’
I offer the receiver to the brother, who gives an involuntary shake of the head. He is shocked. He didn’t come all this way just to talk on the phone. I say, ‘Marcus, could you come down to the office a minute.’
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘Yes. There.’
‘Your brother is here to see you.’
‘Shit,’ he says.
And I feel in the pause a reluctance, for which Marcus will always blame me. He says, ‘And the out on that is “made my knees go kind of wobbly”,’ and then, ‘I’ll be right there.’
Pairings
THAT NIGHT I make a pass at Stephen, just for the sadness of it, and because he has started to smell like someone I might know. He has cut his finger nails and left the bits in the ashtray by the bed. I count them, because there is something about nail-parings that makes you check they are all there. And as I count, nine in all, I find that my problem is how to tell him that I love him.
I could tell him to put my body in a boat when I am dead and burn it on the water.
I touch his face in the dark and listen to his breathing tighten and lose its beat. I touch his chest and my hand seems changed by it. I float my palm along the air that clings to his thigh, afraid to touch, and the hairs on his skin rise to meet me.
Slowly, he lifts the duvet and slowly finds the floor with his foot. He swings around and sits up on the edge of the bed.
He bends down to the floor and comes back up looking at the ends of his fingers. He has found the last nail-paring and now he drops it in the ashtray. I don’t know now which disturb me more, the bits he cut off, or the bits still left on his fingers. His nails are thick, white and clean, the kind you see in films, when you know someone is going to do something unpleasant with his hands.
He looks down at the floor again, pushes himself away from the bed and walks in the dark to a chair in the corner of the room. He starts to talk.
He talks to me about his wife, about how little he understood. He says when he came home one day there were some playing cards in the snow of the yard and britches frozen so hard on the line, they near snapped in his hand.
He expected her to be gone, but she was there when he walked in through the door. He expected her to be gone and when he found her sitting there he knew that she was pregnant instead.
‘It is a difficult thing for a man to understand,’ he says.
The snow kept her warm. Like a drunk, the snow kept her white skin glowing even whiter as she grew, and the veins in her breasts and the veins in her belly spread like blue flames, licking her inside. She grew all winter, so white, and the hair between her legs grew in the spring, like corn. But it was the winter that frightened him, the white heat in the bed beside him, her belly drifting against the swell of her breasts like snow against a wall. Her blood sang in the bed beside him and the child, because it was a child, made her blood hot. The child was a stove in her belly keeping her warm and all he could do was put his hands there, before he shrivelled with the cold, as her blood hissed in and out of the child, that wasn’t a child but a fire.
‘That is what is frightening,’ he says, ‘not that the body dies, but that it grows.’
He came home one day, because he was always coming home, her body a sun he circled, always trying to see the other side. And he lifted her dress and put his hands on her because he thought his hands were not his own, they were so cold. The shock of his hands made the child jump.
The child kicked, he says, like a stone hitting a pond. He saw his own face in the whiteness of her belly then the child kicked and the whiteness of her body melted, like snow melts and he saw what was inside. He saw things lost, he saw things strewn in the ditches, he saw new grass and things that would rot in the rain.
But for a moment he saw his own face there, or some face. He thought that if he could paint he would paint on her belly, stroke by stroke and colour by colour, that face. He would paint a picture of what was inside, a rope in a ditch. He would paint a picture of his o
wn face which was, just then, the face of an angel.
‘It is a difficult thing,’ he says, ‘for a man to understand.’
How do you explain condoms to an angel? Or money, to a dead man? Or sex, to anyone?
‘I don’t think we would have a child,’ I say. ‘You being sort of conceptual, in your way.’ He looks at me like I’ve lost my reason. He looks at me like he could make me pregnant just by looking at me. Like he could make me pregnant through my ear hole and no-one the wiser.
He tells me of the Angel Amezyarak who, with two hundred followers, copulated with the daughters of men. Children were conceived.
‘And?’
‘The angels are flogged every day in the third circle of Paradise.’
‘So you do have circles in Paradise?’ I ask, in the way that one might enquire about patio doors.
‘It depends on who is looking,’ said Stephen. Well silly me.
I ask about the children.
That night, Stephen sits on the chair by my door. If I could sing, I would sing to him. If I were a man I would rape him. I could cut my nails and burn them with his. I could cut my nails and plant them. I could walk across the room and touch him.
I lose my nerve and fall asleep, while all two hundred copulating angels slide down from the attic on to the foot of my bed and Amezyarak looks down through the hole in my ceiling and laughs, with his four wings and forty eyes.
Stephen has to run my bath in the morning, to get me out of the bed and the water seems sweeter than the sleep I just had.
‘Bath. Sheba,’ he says. He tells me that the Queen of Sheba was said to have a donkey’s foot; that Solomon flooded the forecourt of the Temple so she would have to lift her skirts as she approached the throne; that when her foot touched the water it was made human again.
