by Anne Enright
‘Stephen,’ I say. ‘It is half past eight in the fucking morning.’
Now the Blood is in the Room
MARCUS COMES BACK from the funeral. The country has made him vicious and, for a few days, very quietly himself. My heart goes out to him and this well of affection surprises me and puts the whole office out of kilter—as if anything at all could fall in to it. Marcus’s silence is worrying. He is only harmless when he starts to speak.
He is looking at me quietly when my phone starts to ring. I lift the receiver and hear nothing but a distant shouting from another line. Then a voice says ‘Goodbye’, and it sounds like my father might, if he were ever let near a phone.
‘Is that you?’ I say.
‘No,’ says the voice. It is my father and I feel like I have been watching one movie and it has turned into three other ones, all of them real.
‘It is you.’
‘Yes,’ he says and his reasonable tone sends a dreadful hope swimming like an eel down the line, the hope that my father has come back home.
‘Alloa,’ he says.
‘Is the mother all right?’
‘Motherwell nine,’ he says.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Forfar, five. Fife four.’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Is there anything wrong?’
‘Hearts six. Montrose nil.’
‘I know that,’ I say.
‘Cowdenbeath,’ he says and hangs up.
‘So am I, Da. So am I.’
The room is full of dead people. Frank is looking at his photographs. My father is whispering on the dead line. Marcus stands at the LoveWagon’s door with his own father staring out of his face at me and smiling, with lips that say ‘So what is life doing to me now?’
Damien stumbles in wearing a trench coat, a cigarette clamped in his teeth. What movie is he in today? Columbo? The Big Sleep? He looks out at us through his hangover and twitches, as if every move were a jump cut from A Bout de Souffle. Perhaps we have gone too far. I look to Frank but he is still with his photographs and seems to be stuck in a freeze frame. Jo has switched off. I just watch.
So this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a:
‘Goodnight John Boy,’ says the LoveWagon, after half an hour of corn grits and whining.
‘Goodnight Grandma,’ says Marcus, who has finally made his move. He has spent the meeting making efficient little replies and conciliatory, useful suggestions. He has voiced carefully modulated concern about next year.
‘We could do that next year,’ he says. ‘That’s if … the shows goes ahead next year.’
He might as well have pointed out a bomb under the table. The eyes around the room invert, like the eyes of pregnant women, like the eyes of men who know they will survive, but not with honour.
He might as well have pointed out a bomb and said, ‘Well I think it’s just a suitcase.’ No-one looks under the table. No-one looks at anyone else. Marcus looks at everybody, just for badness—because we all thought we were the only one to know about the bomb, if it is a bomb. We all thought we could get out on time. No point creating a jam at the door.
Except for Jo, of course, whose sources are excellent. ‘Well count me out,’ she says. ‘I’m off to Sport.’
So it is real. The rumours are true. There will be no next year. It is real—some of us will go up and more will go out and they’ll paint the set and call the show something else, like ‘The New Improved LoveQuiz’, or ‘The LuvKwiz’, or ‘An Interesting Career Move By Someone You Have Never Met’.
‘But hang on,’ says Marcus. ‘Is it really a bomb? It looks more like an opportunity to me!’
‘Here we go,’ says Frank as Marcus rolls up his sleeves, spits on his hands, takes up the hatchet and starts splitting hairs.
In the canteen the rumour takes hold. The show is axed. We take our trays in silence and queue up for food that tastes like our own lives cooked up, cooled down and reheated. I have paranoid peas, with manipulated mashed potatoes and a web of intrigue on the side. Frank has Pork du Prince a la Machiavelle with chicanery chips and stuff-you-stuffing in a worried gravy. The researchers have Fuck You Foie Gras and Sole on the Dole. None of us can face desert.
We talk about Marcus. Everyone who used to like him doesn’t like him anymore. Jo says,
‘His father just died, for heaven’s sake.’
‘So?’ I say.
I realise that I always disliked Marcus’s father, dead and all as he is, which is another thing we could never talk about, because Marcus thought that his father was the most dignified human being who ever checked the sky for rain. He thought that he was still travelling towards him, expiating, vindicating, all that shite.
He used to tell stories about the old man, some humiliation at the hands of a grocer, some slight suffered in a bar, the conversation they had when it was all too late. He’d look at me and say:
‘How can you get away from all that?’
Now he has nothing to get away from and nowhere left to go. There might have been something commendable about his journey—if you are interested in boy’s journeys, which I am not. Marcus was always undergoing some kind of heartbreak with a woman he didn’t love anyway. Every now and then, you’d hear him on the phone saying ‘Sorry …’ as if to say ‘I just wish I wasn’t so complicated’, and the old man doddered out of his face in a disapproving, proud kind of way Marcus’s father hates us all and he hates me just for fun.
When we get back to the office he comes out of the LoveWagon’s door in a post-coital haze. He is singing:
‘Top Cat
The most effectual
Top Cat
Whose intellectual
Close friends get to
Call him TC’
But instead of baiting him, as I should, I find myself touching him on the arm. Shit.
The Mark
SO I AM beginning to feel the benefit of Stephen’s care, his breath over my shoulder, the fact that he is clean. The white walls make the rooms look bigger and more deliberate. They have opened up the angles, made sense of the corners; they comfort me in the dark.
I look at his hair on the pillow, every shaft a miracle, every shaft still rooted to his head. Stephen dreams about his former life and his dreams are real. While he sleeps, he rolls through his death spasms one at a time. ‘Like labour pains,’ he says, ‘but going the other way.’ It is true that they are getting slower and further apart. Even so, it is hard to sleep as he reverses through a convulsion one pulse at a time, until his throat clears with a click.
As for my desire for him, it has left my crotch, eased through my body, surfaced to the skin and been exhaled, less a need than a breath, less a breath than a small bell, ringing in the silence. Maybe I am happy. Then I realise that whatever he is feeding me, it’s two weeks since I have been to the toilet and I kind of miss it.
On Saturday morning he runs my bath, as usual, and the water, as usual, doesn’t just slosh around; it whispers and ripples, sets pockets of light shimmering on the ceiling. A bird is singing on the clothesline, the water is singing in the pipes. There is no ring forming on the enamel. I can see the picture of myself, with lilies on the floor and on the windowsill, my shoulders rising out of the lion-footed antique where Mrs O’Dwyer had washed and looked at her body and found it good enough. Why not?
So I look at myself and everything seems changed under the broken angle of the water—paler, new. My front no longer breaks the surface to look at me like a quiet brown frog. My nipples have faded and there is something wrong with my stomach. For one thing, it doesn’t seem appropriate to call it a stomach anymore. It is a smooth white belly with obscure functions and an iridescent perfect glow. Smug, that’s one word for it.
The water plashes sweetly as I step out of the bath and make my way to the mirror, which is misted over in an opalescent grey. I wipe away the condensation, which is not a wetness but a fine web, a veil between me and the glass.
For a moment, I do nothi
ng, because of the slight, rising shock. I pick up my nice ordinary toothbrush and brush my teeth in a humdrum kind of way. Hum goes my throat. Hum hum hum, and I have the usual conversation between the brush and my teeth and my eyes in the mirror, in which I play all the parts. So I rinse and ‘Tap Tap’ goes the brush on the side of the sink and it is the sound of a man on his way to my bed, a good man, though my body remembers him in its own way, and I have my usual regret that he is gone and smile at the time I hit him because I thought he was the alarm-clock—violently, or so he said.
By which time I have no excuses left so I step back and lift my eyes to the mirror. O Jerusalem! The white breasts, uncomfortably high, the long, pubescent slope of the belly and my hands and wrists, my feet and ankles too slender to be much use anymore, with a sea-shell edge of pink where the bones protrude, a filigree of blue beneath the skin and a watery green and amber, an undersea shaft of light, hitting the iris of my eye.
I don’t mind my body going, I said to myself, it’s my sanity I miss. So I broke the mirror for a start, its silver shards turning to glass again. I needed all the bad luck I could get. When I called Stephen something in my tone of voice actually brought him for a change.
He opened the door and the steam rushed out at him in wisps, curled and wrapped itself around his head. He saw me and blushed a heavenly rose.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘So you should be,’ I shouted as he closed the door. When I pulled it open his back was turned to the room. I said ‘I want my body back. I want my hands back and my cellulite and my stupid-looking feet.’ It surprised me as I said it, but I missed the lines and the markings and the moles ticking away like timebombs. I missed my mother’s knees and my Granny’s hammer toes. I missed the subcutaneous ridges and drifts and all the mongrel contours mapping the history of this poor body and what it has been through—which is not yet enough.
A thought occurs to me and, while his back is still turned, I check between my legs and find that something ineffably floral has happened down there, something to which you could apply the word ‘petal’. And when I straighten up again, my eyes more than ever sea-changed, Stephen has turned around and is watching me.
Which is when he touches me. I would call it a seduction, but who knows where a seduction starts and where it ends? Stephen raised his hand and brought it palm down in a benediction on my breast, which is the other word I was looking for.
It was like a seduction, in that the journey of his hand to my breast was unbearably slow, a mathematical uncertainty, that could never arrive, that is still arriving. It was like a seduction, in that the moment is still unravelling in my head. It may however, have been a simple hinging of the elbow, a failure of the joint. It may have been a memory in his hand that had nothing to do with his head, or his heart. It may have been a theological question. Why should we not touch? I looked at his eyes which were closed. I looked at his body which was surprisingly naked. Perhaps I groaned.
At least somebody groaned and it was the sound of everything giving way. I was just about to let slip the dogs in my gut, the bells and horns, the clamour and carnage, the Victoria Cross, the mourning, the ticker tape parade in my head, when I looked at Stephen’s hand, now shyly tucked under my breast and I noticed that my nipple was gone.
I had never been wildly attached to the nipple. I always suspected it of some shocking subversion, the bizarre egress my mother happily called the ‘expressing’ of milk. If I wanted to express anything, I had always thought, I would do it in my own sweet way But there is no doubt that I wanted it back, now it wasn’t there.
‘Grace,’ he said and at the sound of his voice, which was rough and sad, I panicked. Which was lucky, because in my fright the slow motion of his hand bunched up and got stuck, a traffic jam in time.
So I had plenty of opportunity to consider the blind innocence of my left breast, its lopsided, sinister purity. I had plenty of ‘time’ to get annoyed at the unfairness of it all. Because although Stephen had no navel, being an angel and twice born, he still had two symmetrical nipples of his own, redundant, greedy, sharp enough to take your eye out, in a don’t-mind-me shade of pink. Though who is to say what you might get out of an angel?
I look at them as time leaks on, cheerfully set in twin whorls of hair, the right travelling clockwise, the left the other way. Hair has started to creep all over his body and is more red than gold so that the light hitting his thigh looks like a personal sunset. It flows in a line to the blank spot where his navel should be and spirals there, each hair chasing and overlapping the next like water trying to go down a plug-hole, before spilling over and falling like a frayed rope to the geometric perfection of his crotch, where it seems to be holding something up.
So I realise that whatever is happening through the empty door frame, it is not all one way. The knowledge that the hair on Stephen’s body is somehow my fault leaves me mute and glad. Because what could only be described as a hard-on of a celestial nature is craning nostalgically towards the blank space in the middle of his stomach, as though, without this marker on his body, it doesn’t know where to stop.
‘Sorry’ he says again. The sadness in his eyes is more human than I want to see and I know that however dangerous this is for me, he has more to lose. I would speak to him and call him back, but the hand has a will of its own. As I stand there in dreadful one-eyed asymmetry and time drips on, his hand moves in gathering sweeps down my body to a place I value more highly—and I am resolved that no matter what he did to my breast, he isn’t going to touch my belly button.
‘Is this all right?’ he says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘No it’s not all right.’
‘Yes.’
‘Stephen.’
‘It’s not all right?’
‘Stephen.’
‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘No, it is.’
And his hand inches on to a little piece of my body’s infinity. ‘What’s a navel after all?’ I say to myself, ‘I mean what is it, after all. Between friends?’ but I feel a pang, because my belly button is very neat. It disappears into my stomach and you cannot see the end of it. It has a certain playground kudos and the old-fashioned smell of a midwife’s penny. I think of what it had been tied to—a dead piece of my mother and me they hadn’t bothered to bury.
‘It’s mine,’ I said.
‘Please?’ his eyes were beautiful.
‘Fuck off,’ I said.
‘It’s just a rope,’ said Stephen. ‘Just a piece of old rope.’
His eyes were back on the bridge again. I should have felt used, I suppose, but I just felt frightened for him. He was looking for death, but I did not want to give him mine.
‘Remember Amezyarak!’ I said. Which is just the thing you need to say when an angel drops the hand. It was lucky we were in the bathroom because his wings had caught fire.
Goodwill
NOTHING CAN CONVINCE me to have a bath the next morning, nor am I able to wear a seat-belt on the way into work. I confuse left turns with right, indicate and go straight on. It is only by a miracle that I get there at all. Or, to be accurate, it is only by the absence of a miracle that I get there at all. I get there on the astonishing web of the ordinary that keeps the wheels on cars, the nails out of tyres and the sun swinging in the sky. I drive into work through the astonishing map of the ordinary, indicating fiercely all the way and when I get there Marcus is standing by the door, a little nub of flesh, soft and under used.
‘You’re looking well,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
‘No you are. You’re really looking well,’ he says, checking me up and down. I look at him more blankly than he knows.
‘It’s the skirt. Is that a new skirt?’
‘No.’
‘Suits you,’ he says, failingly.
There is no way to get my balance. All day, things fall to the floor, slip out of my hands, the phone is a mess of wrong numbers. I say things like ‘I think that’s the breast option, don’t you?�
�� and people look at me.
The Monday meeting is real enough. Everyone looks at the LoveWagon’s hands and keeps their own counsel. Everyone, that is, except Marcus, who stares out the window at the spring day as if he knows too much to be bothered. I sit and yearn, mutely, for my mother, among other things. The LoveWagon is talking about the importance of the last show, for us, for Ireland, for the future of broadcasting. She is ironic and paranoid at the same time. She makes jokes.
‘How about it?’ she says. I realise that she is talking to me. I realise that Marcus has turned from the window and behind him is a wide, clean spring day.
‘Certainly,’ I say.
Frank snorts.
‘Well that’s that,’ says the LoveWagon.
I seem to have agreed, in my lopsided state, that the last show of the season can, indeed should, be transmitted live. Frank looks like his liver has fallen out on the floor. I have just agreed that nothing is impossible, that goodwill is stronger than death, that pigs would fly if only we could get them on the payroll. We are going out live, like the Mass goes out live, because you can’t pre-record a miracle.
‘It can’t be done,’ says Frank, but he is on his own.
‘A few accommodations, a few changes,’ I say. ‘We’ll pull out all the stops.’ And the LoveWagon retires with a smile.
Marcus is confused. He looks like a man who is winning, whichever way he looks at it. He smiles at me because I have just sealed my own fate and he smiles at my skirt because he likes it without knowing why. I smile at him because my body is in a state of sweet, sick desire, though the rest of me is fit to kill. With the week underway he leaves me a note. He says he wants to have a drink. This is the worst of all possible signs. Notes imply an ending of sorts. Notes make me think of Marcus weighing up his life and deciding that it is about time he started sending notes.
