What Are You Like

by Anne Enright

  James Anthony Murphy stood up, and said that as a C . . . C . . . C(atholic?) . . . C(ream bun?) C . . . areful man, he was not in the habit of tripping over holes in the ground but that this one was a very devious hole in the ground and the street lighting was inadequate. The joke was of course not the stutter but the way he slapped his barrister on the back after the jury came up with seventy-four big ones and said, ‘We did it, Corcoran. We creased them,’ before walking into the pale blue yonder. Was it true? It was true because it had to be.

  Notch it up.

  Berts did not have an opinion. It was not his job to have an opinion but sometimes the sheer weight of it got to him. He looked at the stacks of files, heaped on the windowsill and even on the floor. He looked at the map of the city on the wall, stuck with the flags of small disasters. He lived with them. He breathed them in.

  The Murrays. Every member of the Murray family had a claim in somewhere. Berts made sure they had the safest path in the city outside their front door. He had checked it himself, a path like silk, poured with love and finished with the workmen’s own spit. And here was the latest: an ‘incident’ with some traffic cones and pram on the South Circular Road. A pram no less. Throw the little fecker down a pothole, why don’t you? Start them young.

  Berts’ stomach was at him again. There was something coating the back of his mouth – pure distaste. He cleared his throat a hundred times a day as he sifted through damaged ankles, whiplash, lumbar strain. Most of it nothing you could put your finger on, not a torn ligament or a decent-sized scar among them – just aches, lots of aching. An occasional swelling. And distress, of course. Buckets of distress.

  The city was a vague, shifting injury that did not yield to X-ray; a stiffness, a pain, a relapse; a misalignment of the knee that was putting pressure on the hip that was pulling the lower back out of line. It all ended at the back. Get a good back case and you were made.

  Sometimes Berts stood at his window and imagined he could hear the soft sound of bodies hitting concrete, all over town. The world was full of people who fell and gravity was not on his side. None of them ever caught their balance. None of them floated away. They tripped and fell, or pretended to fall, and every day of his life, he fought to make them safe.

  ‘Sufficient unto the day,’ he said. ‘Sufficient unto the day.’ It was one o’clock. Berts lifted his raincoat from the stand by the door, checked the corridor, and slipped along it. Tomorrow was Evelyn’s birthday and he had to do the decent thing. He had to, that is, go outside and walk the length of Dame Street, stepping over the cracks.

  The weather was soft and electric, threatening rain. Berts hopped over cables that trailed from a television van into the Olympia theatre. He ducked under some scaffolding beside Nico’s restaurant and skirted a gas board sign that might as well have said, ‘Flash burn’. On Grafton Street the new herringbone red brick looked lovely, but Berts could not face it. He doubled back up to Nassau Street along the walls of Trinity College – full of Japanese tourists digging up the cobblestones.

  The granite kerbstones were slipping into the gutter, the gutter was falling down the drain. Today, despite all his work, the city was a subsidence, a slow-stirring trap. The city was full of holes.

  What could he get her? Last year he had ended up with a bunch of flowers and the promise of whatever she wanted herself. The year before it was chocolates, but chocolates were wrong, apparently – he didn’t even notice she was fat.

  ‘Whatever you want,’ he said. ‘Anything you want, yourself.’

  The worst was the year he put the money in an envelope. It was not the amount, she said at last. It was the raw notes. She had thought it was a card. Could he not give her a blank cheque?

  As if, Berts said, they were the kind of people who walked around town waving blank bloody cheques.

  This year, he could get her a book maybe, and whatever she wanted herself. He went into Hannas and looked at the cookery section, but the illustrations brought the egg sandwich to the back of his throat. He considered an atlas and put it back down again. He knew what he had to do. He had to go back to the big shops on Grafton Street and buy the wrong perfume. He had to pause over blouses that were too see-through, or too nylon, and examine cases of jewellery that she would pretend to love, and never wear.

  Back on Grafton Street, Berts walked under more scaffolding and into the most expensive shop of the lot. He found himself beside the bags: all shapes and sizes like different words – they might as well be talking Japanese. He picked up a kind of purse that said ‘money belt’ on the label. It was a clever thing. Maybe he coud buy her a ‘money belt’ and put the famous blank cheque in that.

  At one of the perfume counters a woman sprayed her wrist for him and held it to his face. Lovely. They all smelt lovely, he said. But the smell of Evelyn was something else again. He paused by the gloves and tried to remember the size of her hands. He remembered them as milky and freckled and young, but Evelyn was nearly fifty-three. He looked at his own hand, then turned to face the jumble and smell of new things. For ten minutes solid, he looked at blouses and dresses and whatever else they were called. He felt fabrics like a pervert and lifted things off the rail, then the humiliation got too much for him and he left the shop.

  There were other places further down the street and Berts tried to move towards them. It was Evelyn’s birthday tomorrow and he needed Evelyn. He needed her to laugh at him for the stupid thing he had bought. He needed her, even if he could not remember what she looked like, from time to time.

  He pushed through the smell of roasting coffee outside Bewley’s, paused, and finally passed the shop where his daughter worked; the mannequins in the window blankly accusing, with their grey, plastic flesh. Warm air ballooned out at him from the open threshold and his whole body was edged in heat. But the security man was smoothing his lips with an unthinking fingertip and his eyes were blank.

  On the junction with Chatham Street he found a new tear of black tarmac. The bricks were gouged out around a manhole cover, leaving a bare hole. And sure enough, there was a blind woman walking straight for it, tapping her cane. Over and back, over and back – the cane swung and tapped, as the herringbone brick ran towards him like a closing zip.

  She was almost smiling. She lifted her foot over the hole in the road, stepped down, and landed on air. Then she fell the extra two inches, and hit bottom. Her face jolted. She tapped twice, and stepped high, and walked on.

  It started to rain.

  Suddenly, Berts felt the unfairness of it all. He pushed back down the street, overtaking the blind woman, passing the open door of his daughter’s shop. All the brains she had, spoiling away in there. She had shut herself up like an accusation. But he would not be blamed. All the mess of her coming home and her small face like flint.

  When she looked at him she did not see him at all. She did not, she could not, see the truth. Because the only truth of it was that every day of his life he had fought to make her safe.

  Berts swung in through the doors of Brown Thomas’s and sank into the deep pile of the grey carpet. He passed the lipsticks and potions, with the girls like psychiatric nurses in their white coats. He stopped at the handbags and disentangled the money belt from the heap of hollow leather with their clasps and straps. Then he went up to the assistant, with her fake accent, and her smile.

  When he got back to the office, of course, he realised he had no wrapping paper, and had to send out one of the girls.

  Spilt Milk

  EVELYN HAD A cup of coffee and an almond bun in Bewley’s to calm herself down, moving the cup from the saucer to her mouth and back again; coaxing herself, like a baby, to take and measure and spit nothing out. She gathered her things around her once more: the strap of her handbag wound around her ankle, her scarf on her lap, the old woman she had chosen to sit with, chewing away on the other side of the table.

  ‘Desperate rain.’

  ‘. . . the like of it.’

  She lifted the cup an
d set it down again, wondering if the iron had eaten its way through the board by now. The radio was still on, leaking into the kitchen, people talking about allergies – allergic to their own ear wax, allergic to the spit in their mouths.

  She thought about Cormac wheezing and scratching as a baby, wondered was that what had made him vicious as a child. She thought about Maria, allergic to the sight of herself in a mirror. And Laura eating bits of herself like she could whittle herself away. Evelyn had wanted to make a go of her children, to make friends of them, but they were all strangers to her still. If you thought about it, it was the loneliest job of them all.

  Evelyn sighed. She checked the woman opposite, to see if she had been talking out loud.

  Thyroid. There was a goitre hanging out over the brooch at her neck, lopsided, like testicles. Evelyn should have been a doctor, she’d have had her out of the surgery in three minutes flat.

  The woman was wrapping a paper napkin around the uneaten half of her bun. She put it into her handbag, glanced at Evelyn, and snapped the bag shut. Mad, obviously.

  Evelyn closed her eyes and wished that she, too, could be odd. She wished she could be the kind of woman who said, ‘It’s the electricity gives me headaches, Marion, I know it is.’ But she was not. Of course she was not. She had loved her children too much, that was all.

  She remembered a trip they had taken up to Turlough Hill – Berts driving them up to see it one Sunday afternoon. The electricity station built under the mountain; an artificial lake at the top and a real lake spreading at its root. At night they pumped water up the slope, then let it run back down to spin the turbines during the day. It was like pouring milk from cup to cup, over and back with nothing spilt, and it eased Evelyn to sleep, the thought of the electricity spinning out all day, the water flowing uphill while she slept.

  They had gone out to see it in the new Ford Cortina and Evelyn, three months gone, still did not know if she should sit in the front seat or the back. The younger women on the road knew these things, knew absolutely you should sit in the back after the second month, or in the front with no seat belt, when you got the new car. But Evelyn had no one to ask. She had come to this road too late: with too many clothes and a habit of going to the theatre. There was too much of the spinster left in her. She sat in the front of the new Ford Cortina with Laura on her lap, and didn’t care.

  They drove up the military road, past the bogs of the Featherbed and over the Salley Gap. They sat in the car and looked at the mountain brim-full of water. The line of pylons straddling ditches, and clambering hedges, all the way home.

  This was being married. Berts’ profile beside her. The ease of a car. This was the difference.

  They climbed the slope by an Aztec path and, when they reached the top, stared into the concrete crater and its lake. It was huge. Evelyn looked at the sheer sides of the basin. She imagined the workmen hanging there on ropes, the wet concrete spilling down the slope towards them, their boards patting and sucking it smooth.

  ‘A very Irish volcano,’ said Berts. ‘All water.’ He said it like ‘wa-ther’ so that Evelyn would know it was a joke.

  They took out a plug at the bottom, during the day, so the wa-ther rushed down to make the electricity, then they used the electricity to pump it back up again. It didn’t make sense to Evelyn; surely something was lost along the way?

  Berts said maybe it was rain that made the difference.

  But she pictured it at night, when she was frightened and thought, with this baby, she could just leak away. The rest of her life could just leak away. She thought of the economy of it, the buildings humming in the heart of the mountain, the pool at its foot, and the serene cup set in its tip.

  But she could not hold on to it. Evelyn already had her babies – not enough of them, and too late. Laura was the last, and after Laura came the unmentionables, the clots and spoils in the bath or toilet that told her how old she really was. In her head she tiled the bathroom blue-for-a-boy, pink-for-a-girl. Finally she settled on Scandinavian pine, because there was something heartless about grouting, the way it told you how liquid the body was, inside.

  The woman opposite was wrapping up the remains of the jam and the charms on her bracelet jumped and shook. There was something wrong with her husband and Evelyn was not wife enough to know what it was.

  She had always felt like an impostor.

  But Berts had carried Cormac on his shoulders that day at Turlough Hill, and they had looked so fine. Laura in her own arms, Maria running ahead. Who could say they had not been happy? Or done their best?

  Evelyn unwound the strap of her bag from around her ankle. It was time to go home, to switch off the radio, then switch it back on when the silence had settled. She would go down to Hickey’s for a packet of interfacing and catch the bus. She shook out her scarf as the woman opposite put the jam into her handbag. Evelyn was worried about the lining, smeared and unhygienic. She rose to leave and saw that the bag was already full of loose sugar. The sight made her halt halfway, like she had a twinge in her back.

  There was something she had forgotten and she did not know what it was.

  ‘Has it stopped raining?’

  Perhaps that was it. The rain. Maybe the rain was the thing she had forgotten.

  ‘I think so,’ said Evelyn. ‘It must have, by now.’

  That night Evelyn dreamt of sperm and the smell maddened her. It lingered in the morning and made her ashamed. It was her fifty-third birthday. Time to throw things out, she thought, and started with a plastic bag full of shoes that had taken the shape of her feet. Ghost steps, and all the wanderings she had never made, knotted at the top and left out for the bin men, waltzing in the quiet, in the rain.

  Eeny Meeny Miny Mo

  SR MISERICORDIA BOUGHT a bunch of freesias on Grafton Street and decided that they were for herself.

  ‘See that woman?’ said the flowerseller.

  Every time a stranger talked to her for no reason Misericordia thought they knew she was a nun. It was true that her shoes were sensible and her tights a little too thick, but she had been plain Maura for years and sometimes, on a Friday, she had too many gins for the hell of it. So,

  ‘What woman?’ she said, in her ‘kind’ voice.

  ‘That one. The one with the cane.’

  Maura looked at the blind woman tapping her way through the scent of the flowers, rising in the rain. Her coat was a sad, vivid, blind-woman’s blue.

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s not blind,’ said the flowerseller.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’s not blind at all.’ They watched then in silence, as the people parted ahead of her. She certainly walked very fast.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Look at her,’ and there did seem to be something more than real about how she made her way. Maura smiled. Yes, it could be nice, all those people scuttling out of your way, the famous white cane, your eyes rolling in your head. A man she passed looked back to see her safe and Maura felt a pang at his kindness. She looked at him for a second, then back at the ‘blind’ woman as she walked into the iron upright of some new scaffolding outside Brown Thomas, face first.

  ‘Would you look at that?’ said the flowerseller. ‘She heard me talking.’

  It spoiled the freesias, of course, those innocent, small flowers that brought Maura back to the May altars of childhood and to country weddings. That brought her back, if she was honest, to her own wedding, lying face down on the church floor. Sometimes she thought she had married a set of octagonal marble tiles.

  Maura stood back from the small crystal vase and sighed, asking forgiveness of Jesus, whom she still loved for all kinds of reasons, though none of them the marrying kind. She took the Foot Spa out from under the bed, filled it with water at the sink, pushed off her shoes and, deliciously, pulled down her tights. She sat on the bed and lowered her feet, so the skin sucked at the hot water and let it go. Then she sank them in and switched it on.

  Bliss. After
a while she flopped back on to the bed and flung her arms wide, thinking about nothing while the Spa hummed and sloshed on the floor. The peppery, childish scent of the freesias drifted towards her and she found herself laughing, a giddiness at the base of her stomach that caught and spread, until it burst outright into the bare box of her room. Such a big, intimate sound – laughing on your back – the sound that babies make, the sound of summer parks and probably of sex. Maura tried to stop herself but couldn’t. She rolled over, finally, her feet dangling and dripping over the carpet as she pulled herself up, her stomach sore.

  ‘Look at that. She heard me talking.’

  Well, she hadn’t lost it, anyway. She always had a big laugh, never mind the name. Sr Misericordia, Maura Reynolds, The Misery, picked up her small towel and started to dry her feet, toe by toe.

  Eeeny meeny miny mo.

  She emptied the Foot Spa into the sink. She threw the rumpled balloon of her tights into the tepid water and they collapsed into strings as the water drank them down. Maura could not stop watching them. She reached up under her skirt for her knickers and dropped them in too. Then she looked into the mirror over the washstand and said the Our Father slowly and out loud.

  What a life.

  Dressed and spruce, she walked out into the corridor, Matron Maura Reynolds, wide, capable mouth, big bust, strong waist, warm grey eyes, barely a nun (she would have to do something about that), washed up, sort of, in the Stella Maris Nursing Home.

  ‘And how are you today?’

  The woman in the bed said, ‘Lovely.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Maura checked around the room, saw the dentures fallen on the floor, and gave a reproving glance to the nurse standing beside her. They were useless without their teeth, something hard in the middle of their face.

  ‘What’s my name?’ the woman gummed as Maura turned to go.