by Anne Enright
I leave him a note. I ask to meet on Wednesday after he has finished viewing. He leaves me a note saying that he won’t be finished on Wednesday until ten, how about Tuesday? I say that Tuesday is my studio preparation. What about Thursday? He says he is editing late on Thursday how about Saturday? I say I am on the ferry to Brittany on Saturday and even if I wasn’t, Saturday was the weekend. What’s wrong with Thursday?
‘What’s wrong with Tuesday?’
So by the time we meet it is too late, which is just the way I wanted it. I don’t want to sit there and sympathise with Marcus for shafting me. I don’t want to advise him that shafting me is his best possible, his only option. Besides, by Thursday I might have my nipple back.
No such luck. We go to a local pub. We could have met in town, but that might have looked suspicious. Marcus goes up to the bar and buys a drink. Blood money.
I sit and watch him at the bar. He puts one foot on the brass rail and catches the barman’s eye. Then he catches his own eye in the mirror behind the glasses and the optics. What a good catch he is, with his casual shirt and his job in the media. He puts my drink on the table in a courteous way. If I brought him home to my mother, she might even cry.
The show is not going to be axed. It is going to be doubled.
‘Game show one night, date show the next,’ says Marcus.
‘Same set?’
‘New set. Two new sets.’
‘There’s posh. And after that, twice as much for their money.’ When I get angry, my breast starts to itch. It feels like someone trying to get out from under a sheet a mile wide.
‘One and a half,’ he says.
‘Like fuck. We’ll be going live in half the time,’ I say, ‘because I’m a fucking eejit.’ Marcus looks at me out of his green eye, then out of his brown.
‘We have to stick together on this one,’ he says.
‘Why?’
I have a vision of Marcus in charge, trying to make it all real. I can see him in the kitchen at a party, backing a researcher into the counter, while he tells her how traumatic it is to go bald at twenty-four. I see him writing memos he never sends because he can’t make up his mind if it is better to keep your head down or make a noise. I can see him putting it on the balance sheet of his life with a little gold star. I do not want to be around.
‘What are you telling me for?’ I say. ‘I’m being hung out to dry.’
‘You want it just as much as I do,’ he said.
‘What is there that I should want? It’ll kill us.’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t want it.’
‘I have two days off a fortnight. I don’t want it.’
‘You want it all right.’
‘You don’t know what I want.’ We could go on all night.
Because neither of us really believe and so we can’t let go. There is no end to the fighting when you are trying to believe in something. All we know is that none of it makes sense, so you might as well win. Besides, it hurts.
‘One show each.’
‘No,’ I say. And the night deteriorates as we both knew it would.
Nudes
I STILL CAN’T wash at home because the water is not safe.
‘It never bothered you before,’ says Stephen, as I pour a bottle of mineral water into the sink and splash myself—a lick and a promise, that leaves a trail of bubbles dying on my arm. It bothers me now. Smells sit on my new skin like turds on a kitchen floor. Yet every time I clean myself, I become too clean; my arms more languorous, my knuckles more dimpled, my flesh so soft I am afraid it might tear.
So I take a towel into work and shower at the station, though I don’t trust the water there either. I read the names on the dressing-room doors and pick someone who will not be in until the afternoon, a newsreader. I could become a very clean pervert, I could sneak people in for a fee—Shower With The Famous. Terry Wogan’s bottom slapped against that wall. The stall is indefinably public, an empty archive full of all the flesh that was never shown on screen. It is discreet, blind, a television turned inside out. When you twist the knob you expect a voice to spill out instead of water.
‘A crisis in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism,’ says the showerhead. ‘Minister of Agriculture moves on animal drug abuse’, as I soap between the perfection of my toes and back to the soft handful of my heel.
‘Bishop says no to Aids test.’ There is no hair on my shin anymore. I soap the white swell of my thigh. It is not a modern body, wherever I got it from. And now it has no pubic hair.
‘Ceasefire in Belfast,’ says the water. I have no pubic hair.
I step out of the shower still itchy with soap. The dressing-room is a pornographic booth. The mirror is unembarrassed, wiped blind of all the faces, known and forgotten, who have talked into it as though half the country was watching on the other side; have stood there naked, looked into their own eyes and said ‘Hello, and you’re very welcome.’
The body that looks back at me is nine years old, or fourteen mixed with nine, or my own, mixed with all the bodies I used to have. I wonder if I am a virgin again. I should ask Marcus. He seems to know what it means.
It is while I am there, as the hammering starts on the door, with one of the nation’s most trusted voices speaking to me in tones that would shock the nation, that I become resolved.
‘What the fuck are you doing in my dressing-room?’
‘Thinking,’ I say. I think that I will stop washing and dress in the dark. I think I will cover my body like the memory it is and just sweat it out. I think I will get my own back. When I come back from Brittany I will bring Stephen in for his audition.
The Audition
HE GOT OUT of bed in silence; no singing, no Busby Berkeley routine with the toaster and a large sliced pan. He might have been nervous. He might have been suspicious or bored or transmundane. I would have checked, but my training got the better of me and I found myself treating him like a very stupid person.
‘Don’t worry, you’ll be a big hit,’ I said. ‘Just give them that smile.’ I was going to say ‘Knock’em dead,’ but stopped myself. I told him to wear the whiter of his two white shirts, buttoned up to the neck and no tie. Then I undid the top button. ‘Perfect,’ I said and told him to tuck his vest into his underpants and then his shirt into his trousers, so that he would be overlapped and interlocked from the waist down like a dovetail joint, because, I said, I have always found this a help when the going gets rough.
‘Nervous?’
‘I don’t have nerves,’ he said.
‘Good.’
‘I have doubts. I have the complication of perfect desire.’
‘Well you should be all right so.’
I thought he might be fretting about going in front of a camera so I told him how Frank had said that he would jump bang through the lens and land in your lap.
‘Exactly,’ said Stephen. ‘What happens if I jump bang through the lens and land in someone’s lap?’ And that was only the first thing on the list. What would happen if he stood in front of a camera and nothing came out at the other end? What would happen if he went through the camera and his electronic version was left standing on the studio floor? Or maybe the camera really did steal people’s souls, in which case, would there be any of him left? Where would he go? There was also the problem of light. Would he be naturally overexposed? Could the camera pick up something as essentially ineffable as he, Stephen must be?
Which made me wonder why, when it comes to being on telly, everyone reacts in the same way.
‘It’s a bit late now,’ I said. ‘And anyway, you are supposed to know all these things.’
‘There are so many places I could get lost,’ said Stephen. ‘There’s at least three feet between me and the camera. And then what?’
‘Then you hit the heart of the nation.’
‘You know what I mean,’ he said. So I told him.
‘Three cameras. Right? You go down through the lenses, along the cables and up into the control room,’ I said, �
��where you get chopped up, joined together, whizzed along under a few corridors, round a few corners, into a room full of circuits that chew you up, split you up, run you through Presentation and bang you off the transmitter.’
‘And?’ said Stephen.
‘You go flying through the air at the speed of light. Child’s play. For you.’
‘What kind of flying?’ said Stephen.
‘How should I know? It’s a wave (it’s a particle! it’s a wave! it’s a particle!). It’s a wave, whatever that means. It’s just a few little squiggly lines coming out of the transmitter.’
‘No.’
‘No. For real and in three dimensions it’s more like a globe, with the transmitter in the middle. One globe expanding after the other, like an onion that never stops exploding.’
‘Shit,’ said Stephen.
‘But you’re still not on telly.’ I was enjoying myself.
The journey to work was spent with Stephen dodging and feinting in the front seat as we picked our way through all the gory scraps of people and pictures that ricocheted off the road; waves hitting the ground at random, bouncing off traffic, sinking into pedestrians, getting eaten by cattle, drowning in Dublin Bay, or swinging past Jupiter on their way to the Horsehead Nebula. But some of them at least would end up wrapping the cablelink aerials and slithering down the wires into people’s homes.
‘There,’ I said. ‘Fame at last.’
‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Stephen. ‘There’s nothing in those boxes, or a little bit of nothing. I could get lost in that vacuum. I could get stuck, in that little bit of nothing-at-all, in the middle of someone’s TV.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘You’re fired across. They shoot you across, like out of a cannon.’
‘Not me,’ said Stephen.
‘It happens all the time,’ I said. ‘It’s not hard. It’s not you. It’s a signal.’
‘You fool. You fool,’ said Stephen. ‘That’s exactly what an angel is.’
When I reach the office, pulling him in like a sacrificial bull with eyes like plums and a garland around his neck, no-one takes any notice. I tell Jo I have an auditionee and she says ‘Well what’s he doing here? Ring up hospitality for …’ and then she looks at him.
‘Hello,’ she says, mops herself up off the floor and leads him away.
I ask Marcus to take the auditions on his own. ‘Personal interest.’ Knowing that there’s nothing he likes better than getting me out of the room.
The television in the outer office is on the blink, as if I needed to be reminded that Stephen is in the building. Jo comes back and fiddles through the static, trying to get a feed from the audition room. I do a running order, already a day late, while she shifts through a series of blank screens with a Bulgarian choir singing through each one. I think I see my bathroom in a music video with a river running over the floor. Some people applaud like Americans. There is a cow in a church burning her wet nose on the candles. Jo laughs and twists the vertical hold. The screen dies. She starts to hum it back to life again.
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘I know that place. I know that place. That’s the place where I was born.’ Which is when the LoveWagon comes charging out of her office.
‘Who is that guy?’ she says. ‘Get him up here.’
Jo keeps adjusting the back of the set until the LoveWagon realises that she works in an office and not in a soap opera.
‘Jo, have you got the number of the audition room handy? I wouldn’t mind having a word with Marcus.’
Attention does not suit Stephen. He comes back from his audition, passes me in the office, turns and winks by the LoveWagon’s open door, which closes after him with a melting, metallic click and does not open again for forty-three and a half minutes. From behind it comes the sound of laughter, softened by the wood. The light shifts with a passing shower, the room shrinks, then dilates. Marcus smiles a tight little smile.
‘Marry me, Grace,’ he says, ‘and I’ll turn your money green.’
When the office door opens, they are both standing there as if they had never moved from the spot. The LoveWagon is smiling in a private way, as if we all like her and none of us are in the room.
‘Just say the word,’ she says.
‘I will. Thanks Gillian.’
Gillian? When I have finished vomiting in the wastepaper basket I see the LoveWagon call Marcus in.
‘What happened to work around here?’ I say. ‘What happened to the design meeting? I have to go filming and Staging is giving us horseshit about the trampoline. Graphics is out sick. Who wants to go to lunch?’
‘In a minute,’ says Frank. Stephen, unimpressed, is looking at the photographs which Frank is back to shuffling, like a gambler down on his luck.
‘Anyway I’ve no fucking time for lunch.’
‘Bring you back a sandwich,’ says Frank, and the two of them walk out the door with a bad attempt at dialogue. ‘So. What do you fancy for the Filly’s Maiden at Navan?’
After a few minutes I follow them out, if only to stop that fucking stupid, sad fucking imitation that passes for fucking male conversation.
I find them in the canteen where Stephen is eating an apple. Frank is smoking, he is saying:
‘Dungarvan, France, Disneyland, France again. Where’s that? Jesus, Tubbercurry.’
‘And these are the children?’ says Stephen, with a curiosity that only I know to be biological.
‘Friends’ kids. Here,’ says Frank, ‘mother and child.’
Frank’s wife is in bed with a new baby and a nightdress that looks oceanic. She is laughing at an older woman who is making an extreme face at the baby. She is wearing a plastic baby’s dribbler, with a scoop-up base and a picture of Donald Duck. It looks hard and unpleasant against the tenderness of her breasts which have made the change from sexual to maternal, or tried to. The older woman, too, looks like she is in pain.
‘And her own mother.’ says Frank.
‘Apron,’ says Stephen, setting the picture on the table and taking up the rest. He shuffles through to Disneyland where Frank’s wife is talking to Alice in Wonderland. She looks like she is discussing the price of sausages. Alice in Wonderland looks concerned about the price of sausages.
‘Apron,’ says Stephen, sets this picture on the first and shuffles again to a barbecue on a summer’s day, this time with real sausages. Frank’s wife is standing behind the grill. She has an empty green wine bottle in her hand, held up to her eye like a telescope. She is looking at the sun through the wine bottle and the top of the bib is distorted and green.
‘Apron,’ says Stephen. At which point I give in and go up for food.
When I come back, Stephen is arranging the pictures by lampshades. Frank has gone blank.
‘Here, eat this,’ I say to Stephen, shoving over a plate of chicken in puff pastry. ‘It’ll put hairs on your chest.’
‘Lampshade,’ he says. ‘Lampshade. Lampshade. Two lampshades.’
‘Frank?’ I say.
‘OK, OK,’ says Frank, and gathers himself up and joins the queue.
‘So how did it go?’ I say to Stephen, whose palm is still open on the table, a stack of pictures weighing it down.
‘What?’
‘The audition.’
‘Perfect.’
‘No mid-air collisions?’
Stephen told me he had found out what it was all for. He told me that nothing hurt so much as being on screen, but that since it wasn’t really him, it hurt something else.
‘It was you,’ I say.
‘But I feel fine.’
He felt better than fine. You could see things in his eyes.
‘Here she is in 1979’, Frank’s wife’s torso is gently inclined. She is bent over in the way that wives in the Fifties hinged themselves at the waist in order to extract perfect cakes from their electric stoves. Her profile obscures the eyes and nose of a crying child. The child is in motion. Its two hands are helplessly extended and flinging dirt through the
air.
‘You have to strip them down,’ says Stephen.
‘She’s leaving me,’ says Frank to no-one.
‘You have to peel them away,’ says Stephen, ‘one layer at a time.’
‘Leave him alone,’ I say.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ says Frank. A wet skin of tears has formed on his eyes. How can I help him when my own body is a blur? How can I help him when Stephen is leaving me?
‘Hang on,’ says Stephen. ‘Try turning them upside-down.’ He sets the photos on their head and gazes at them as if they finally made sense. And it is true that somewhere in this tangle of colour is a thin film of awareness. She wants him, whether or not she knows he is there.
‘At what?’ says Frank. ‘The lampshade?’
When I get back, the LoveWagon is sidling around the office, bumping her hip off the side of desks and reading whatever is lying there with a careless, downward glance. Marcus is standing with the phone wedged between neck and shoulder and a sheaf of papers in his hands. It is the way he shoots someone if he wants to say that they are ‘highly’ successful. Sometimes I think that there is no-one on the line.
‘Is he yours?’ she says, in her girlie voice.
‘No,’ I say.
‘Lucky you.’
After the Audition
STEPHEN IS EXHAUSTED. He has a fever and I put him to bed. The heat coming off him is physical. The sheet stays a few millimetres off his skin and will not be smoothed down. I blame the canteen food and he does not bother to disagree. His sweat smells. He asks me to take the lilies out of the room.
He asks me to take the mirror out of the room. He asks me have I ever looked closely at a wall after you take a mirror down—how blind it looks and how knowing.
My poor sick angel. It makes a change, to look after him instead of the other way round. I hold his hand, because that is what you do when someone is sick. Or is it? All I can see is the radiant madness of his skin as he sweats into the dusk. It seems that I do not have a gift for illness. I practised on animals when I was small, and they all died.
My father hated pets so we saved up for hamsters and brought them home as if by accident; hamsters, mice, anything small or furry or happy. Though they never really looked happy in our house, it has to be said. It was not all my fault. Phil was quite cold towards them and full of scientific curiosity. When the first cat died, leaving us a bagful of kittens, Phil said she died of a hole. I thought he put it there himself.
