by Anne Enright
And on the plus side – a family, a marriage, this deliberate happiness. I sit in my garden and am profoundly grateful. And I never underestimate how hard people work at being ordinary.
Anyway, I was going up the stairs with the baby in my arms. He weighs a ton. Between one step and the next I forgot what I was going up the stairs for, or remembered that I had forgotten to take something with me, and into this gap slipped the memory of my dead friend, sitting up in bed, eating his yoghurt. It had been some time since I checked in – a while since I wondered what it was like, being alive – and when I did I found that it was easy. Being alive was easy. And more than that – I had got into such a habit of gratitude, and a mother’s worry for the future, that I didn’t, I found, want to die at all, not for a very long time. I have no idea when the shift happened, but it did. There are no debts, no qualifications, no big thoughts. And more: I want to burst into my life like a bank robber, shouting at my family and at each of my friends, ‘Nobody is going anywhere, all right? Nobody goes out that door.’
It has been such a beautiful summer. I write in the mornings while the baby sleeps and, when he wakes up, I feed him and sling him into the car. We go to a local beach in a town that is full of old people. I watch them: a woman in her dressing-gown and slippers walking up to the water’s edge – she must be ninety, and with such a fierce look to her, as though she is going into that cold Irish sea if it is the last thing she ever does. Another woman is even older, if that is possible, completely bent, with arms like broomsticks, below which – far below which – the flesh hangs. She stands in the surf with her hands crooked back from her hips, and she pokes her old head towards the horizon.
I change on the pebbled beach, and hurry into the sea, and swim straight out. Then I turn and check the baby, who is watching me from his buggy, perched on the high tide line. I leave him my T-shirt while I am gone, and he waves and chews it; a little ruckus of colour against the stones.
Acknowledgements
Version of Some of these essays have been published before:
‘Breeding’ was first published with the title ‘Aliens’ in the London Review of Books, ‘Dream-Time’ in the Guardian, ‘Birth’ in the Dublin Review, ‘Milk’ in the London Review of Books, ‘Groundhog Day’ in the Dublin Review, ‘Naming’ in the Irish Times. ‘Baby-talk’ was broadcast on Radio 4’s Home Truths.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Carcanet Press Limited for permission to reprint lines from ‘Night Feed’ by Eavan Boland © Eavan Boland 1994.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders, and the publishers will be happy to correct mistakes or omissions in future editions.
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Epub ISBN: 9781409017288
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Published by Vintage 2005
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Copyright © Anne Enright 2004
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First published in Great Britain in 2004 by
Jonathan Cape
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ISBN 9780099437628
