by Anne Enright
Mam said, ‘Maybe it’s the start of something new. A change of heart. She’ll be ringing you up now, all the time.’ I don’t think Mam understands about the way my business is these days. I gritted my teeth and said, ‘Mam … I have two refrigerated vans a day going up to Dublin. One of them goes all the way to the airport because they eat my cima di rapa, which are just fancy turnip leaves, let’s face it, in effing London town. And now Gertie rings up ten years too late and says she wants my product. Ten years of her saying my carrots were delicious, of course, but a bit funny looking, and there was no demand for cima de rapa around here, and some of her customers actually picked the basil leaves out of their pasta and so what could you do?’
‘So what?’ says Mam. ‘You’ve won now.’
But it doesn’t feel like I’ve won. It didn’t sound like I’d won when I was talking to Gertie on the phone. It was a wedding, she said. The bride wanted organic – was very firm about it. And why wouldn’t she be, when her father ran half the cattle in the county? ‘If anyone knows what’s in the beef,’ said Gertie, ‘she does.’ And we had a bit of a laugh about that, before I hung up and went looking for some implement of destruction – any implement of destruction – and a tree to cut down.
I’m throwing my radicchio before swine.
When I married J.P. and turned him organic, Gertie ran the only restaurant for fifty miles. For the first five years we put off having kids, worked all the hours God sent – all that – and Gertie did take some stuff, now and then, to help us out. But she had one cook who was a demon for ‘posh’ food, everything drowned in ‘French’ sauce, and lots of spuds of course, and Has your daddy had enough? I think Gertie was afraid of her, actually. The other one had done a course at Ballymaloe and was very uppity for the first while. Of course, my problem was that I was uppity all the time (thank you, St Matilda’s) and so neither of them would touch one of my crooked, delicious carrots if her life depended on it. All that cleaning, they said. I know this because, for five years, every Saturday night, in the dim hopes of rustling up a bit of business, myself and J.P. took off our wellingtons, put on something half decent and went to eat in Gertie’s restaurant in town. We ate until it choked us. We ate, more precisely, until the children came along. And when we stopped, I actually missed it – there was nowhere else to go.
We have sandy soil, red and light. I went all the way to Westmeath for the organic manure, and brought the first lot back by trailer. We couldn’t afford a lorry. I made five trips.
‘Muck into gold,’ said J.P., shovelling it on. ‘Muck into gold.’ Now the tilth is so fine, it crumbles under your hand.
In year three I swung a deal with a small supplier in Smithfield. In year four I got our organic stamp. Prices went up. Over at Gertie’s, Has-Your-Daddy-Had-Enough said that there were ‘maggots’ in the potatoes, and the uppity one said that she ‘quite liked’ organic, but ‘you could get better organic elsewhere’. I bought my first van. I bought my second van. Every day they roared past Gertie’s door.
‘You know what kills me?’ I used to say to J.P. ‘If they started taking the stuff now, they’d say it was because it had improved. Or they’d decide the cos was OK, but the rest was as bad as ever. They’d tell me I should stick to cos. And there I’d be, selling cos to them and smiling. That’s what kills me.’
J.P. is out of sorts with all this. He is a reluctant sort of man. He likes working the land. I pretend this drives me mad, but of course it’s the thing that keeps me sane. Tonight he takes off his clothes as though they are a trial to him, as though that shirt of his has been at him all day. He puts them into the laundry basket and slaps the lid shut. Then, naked, he gets into bed: my organic man. He closes his eyes, rolls over to kiss my shoulder, rolls back, and sleeps.
At four in the morning I look out the bathroom window and see the poor sycamore oozing sap under a scudding sky. Such greedy trees, sycamores, nothing grows in their shade. I look into the mirror and think about Gertie. The sight of her praying in the school chapel at fifteen, with those lumpy-looking white gloves that girls used to wear when they were all overcome by the Virgin Mary. I think about the little bully she married; her mother, who always had some vague symptom. Her mother’s funeral, then, later. And my own father’s funeral, later again. Shaking Gertie’s hand.
‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’
God, I hate that woman. I put my hands on the side of the sink and lean forward and close my eyes. And I think of the food I must gather for Gertie: the beautiful plump lettuces, the purple sprouting broccoli, the early beans. I think about pulling them from the earth when they are still cool with the morning; settling them into their boxes, with the sweet air trapped among their leaves. I think about how I will gather them up, and pick them over, and pack them with a little knotted sprig of rosemary and thyme. I think how Gertie will take this little bouquet, and look at it, and like it. And I sigh.
Ronan, our youngest, comes in, holding the front of his pyjamas, his face muddled with sleep. I help him go to the toilet and he says something about camels which makes me smile, about how camels hold their water for such a long time.
‘Hydroponics,’ I say to J.P. as I get back into bed. ‘Ebb and flood.’
‘You always say that,’ he says. It is nearly dawn. He might get up now, and let me sleep on. The light outside our window is undecided and we lie there, intimately awake. J.P. has heard it all before – a dream I have of water, an infinity of lettuce, row upon row of the stuff, coming out of a lake smooth as glass, so all you see is the lettuce and the reflection of the lettuce. And maybe, as I fall asleep, me also, floating in there, utterly still amidst the green.
SHAFT
As soon as I walked in, I knew he wanted to touch it. It was a small lift, just a box on a rope really. You could hear the churning of the wheel high above, and the whole thing creaked as it wound you up through the building.
I stood over to give him room – not easy when you are so big. Then, of course, I realised I hadn’t pressed the button yet, so I had to swing by him again, almost pivot, my belly like a ball between us. I was sweating already as I reached for the seventh floor.
You know those old bakelite buttons – loose, comfortable things, there’s a nice catch to them when they engage. If someone’s pushed it before you, of course, they just collapse in an empty sort of way and your finger feels a bit silly. So I always pause a little, before I hit number seven. And in that pause, I suppose, I get the feeling that this bloody box could go anywhere.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he said, even though there was no need for it. American. In a suit. Quite tall.
‘Oh. Sorry.’ I said it too. Well, you do, don’t you?
The button went in with a soft crunch – wherever he was going, it wasn’t to my floor. He eased back into the far corner and we waited for the doors to close.
This blasted lift. Six times a day I go up and down in this box, maybe more, waiting for the machine to make up its mind; waiting for it to finish thinking; checking the building, floor by floor. It’s so ancient – it should have those screechy trellis gates, like a murder mystery. (I should have an ash-blonde permanent wave, the American should be packing a snub little gun.) But it doesn’t. There are just these two endlessly reluctant doors of metal, that click and surge, as though to close, and then change their mind.
I gave a little social sigh – Well, here we all are – and flicked a glance his way. He was looking at my stomach, but staring at it. Well, people do. So I blinked a bit and smiled my most pregnant smile, all drifty and overwhelmed, Isn’t nature wonderful? These days, my skin smells of vegetable soup. I mean quite nice soup, but soup – you know? I tell you – reproduction, it’s a different world.
He looked up at my face then, and smiled. The doors heaved a little in their furrows and then decided against it. Very serious eyelashes. Very bedroom.
‘So. When’s the happy day then?’ he said.
As if it was any of his business. As if we had e
ven been introduced. When you’re pregnant, you’re public property, you’re fair game. ‘Well, hello,’ they say in shops. ‘How are you today?’ It’s as though the whole world has turned American, in a way, and here was the genuine article, corn fed, free range; standing there in his nice suit and inquiring after my schedule.
‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to say. ‘I am just suffering from bloat.’ Or, ‘Who says it’s going to be happy? It might be the most miserable day of my life. I might be, for example, screaming in agony, or haemorrhaging, I might be dead.’
‘Oh.’ I looked down at my belly like I’d just realised it was there – What, this old thing?
‘Six weeks,’ I said.
‘Hey!’ he said back. Like a cheerleader. I thought he might reach out and give me a playful little punch on the arm – Go for it!
I turned and jabbed the ‘doors close’ button. At least I thought it was the ‘doors close’ button, it was actually the ‘doors open’ button – there is something so confusing about those little triangles – so the doors which were, at that exact moment, closing, caught themselves – Ooops! – and slid open again.
We looked out into the small lobby. Still empty.
‘Well, good luck!’ he said.
And he gave a little ‘haha’ laugh; rocking back on his heels a bit, while I jabbed at the other button, the correct one this time, the one where the triangles actually point towards each other, and, OK, said the doors – Now we close.
Someone got a pot of gloss paint and dickied them up, years ago. Thick paint, you can see the swirl of the brush still in it, a sort of 1970s brown. The doors meet, and sigh a little, and you look at the place where the paint has flaked. You look at the place where the painter left a hair, in a big blond S. You stand three inches away from another human being, and you think about nothing while the lift thinks about going up, or down.
Decisions decisions.
Good luck with what? The labour? The next forty years?
The lift started to rise.
‘I’ll need it,’ I said.
This building used to be a hotel. I can’t think of any other excuse, because there is dark green carpet, actual carpet, on the walls of the lift, up to what might be called the dado line. Above that, there’s mirror made of smoked glass, so that everyone in it looks yellow, or at least tanned. Actually, the light is so dim, people can look quite well, and basically you look at them checking themselves in the glass. Or you look at yourself in the glass, and they look at you, as you check yourself in the glass. Or your eyes meet in the glass. But there is very little real looking. I mean, the mirror is so hard to resist – there is very little looking that goes straight from one person across space to the other person, in the flesh as it were, as opposed to in the glass.
Or glasses. One reflection begs another, of course, because it is a mirror box – all three walls of it, apart from the doors. So your eyes can meet in any number of reflections, that fan out like wings on either side of you. The American in the corner was surrounded by all my scattered stomachs, but he was staring straight at the real one. And, No, you can’t, I thought. Don’t even think about it.
I look so strange anyhow these days. I misjudge distances and my reflection comes at me too fast. I felt like I was tripping over something, just standing there. The American’s hands were by his sides. The left one held his document case and the right one was unclenching, softly.
And then, as a mercy, we stopped. The third floor. Ping.
‘You’ll be fine,’ he said, like it was goodbye. But when the doors opened, he didn’t leave, and there was no one there. They stayed open for a long time while we looked at an empty corridor; then they shut, and it was just me and him, listening to the building outside, listening to our own breathing, while the lift did absolutely nothing for a while.
I always look people in the eye, you know? That is just the way I am. Even if they have a disability, or a strangeness about them, I look them straight in the eye. And if one of their eyes is damaged, then I look at the good eye, because this is where they are, somehow. I think it’s only polite. But I am not always right. Some people want you to look at their ‘thing’ and not at them. Some people need you to.
There was that young transvestite I met in the street, once; I used to know his mother, and there were his lovely eyes, still hazel under all that mascara and the kohl. Well, I didn’t know where else to look at him, except in the eye, but also, I think, I wanted to say hello to him. Himself. The boy I used to know. And of course this is not what he wanted at all. He wanted me to admire his dress.
Or Jim, this friend of mine who got MS. I met him one day and I started chatting to him of course. And then I found I was talking faster, like really jabbering, because it was him I wanted to talk to – him and not his disease – and he was sliding down the wall in front of me, jabber jabber jabber jabber, until a complete stranger was saying to him, ‘Would you like me to get you a chair?’
I would prefer it if he looked at me, that’s all – the American. Even if I was sliding down the mirrored wall in front of him, even if I was giving birth on the floor. I would prefer it if he looked at the person that I am, the person you see in my eyes. That’s all. I put my hand on my stomach to steady the baby, who was quiet now, enjoying the ride – and silent, as they always are. But sometimes they leave a bubble of air in there, with their needles and so on. They leave air in there by accident and, because of the air, you can hear the baby cry – really hear it. I read that somewhere. It must the loneliest sound.
We are all just stuck together. I felt like telling him that too.
Anyway, what the hell. There was this guy looking at my stomach in the lift on the way up to the seventh floor one Tuesday morning when I had very little on my mind. Or everything. I had everything on my mind. I had a whole new person on my mind, for a start, and the fact that we didn’t have the money really, for this. I had all this to worry about, a new human being, a whole universe, but of course this is ‘nothing’. You are worrying about nothing, my husband says. Everything I think about is too big, for him, or too small.
Of course, he is right. I pick the things off the floor because if I don’t our life will end up in the gutter. I put the tokens from the supermarket away because if they get lost our child will not be able to afford to go to college. My husband, on the other hand, lives in a place where you don’t pick things up off the floor and everything will be just fine. Which must be lovely.
‘It’s perfectly natural,’ he says, when I tell him the trouble I am having with the veins in my legs, or the veins – God help us – in my backside. But sometimes I think he means, We’re just animals, you know. And sometimes I think he means, You in particular. You are just an animal.
By the time we passed the fifth floor I had the sandwich in my mouth. Roast beef, rare, with horseradish sauce. That’s why I was in the lift in the first place, I had just waddled out for a little something, and God, it tasted amazing. I lifted my chin up to make the journey down my throat that bit longer and sweeter, and maybe it was this made him breathe short, like laughing, almost, made me look at him finally, sideways, with my mouth full.
‘Well, that sure looks good,’ he said.
This American laughing at me, because I am helpless with food. And because I look so stupid, and huge, this man I have never met before being able to say to me, ‘Would you mind? May I touch?’
I could feel the lift pushing up under my feet. My mouth was still full of roast beef. But he stretched his hand out towards me, anyway. It looked like a hand you might see in an ad – like that old ad for Rothmans cigarettes – slightly too perfect, as though he was wearing fake tan. I turned around to him, or I turned the baby round to him, massively. I did not look him in the face. I looked sideways a little, and down at the floor.
I wanted to say to him, Who is going to pay for it? Or love it. I wanted to say, Who is going to love it? Or, Do you think it is lonely, in there? I really wanted to say that. I swa
llowed and opened my mouth to speak and the lift stopped, and he set his hand down. He touched all my hopes.
‘It’s asleep,’ I said.
The doors opened. So we were standing like that, him touching my belly, me looking at the ground, like some sort of slave woman. Thinking about his eyelashes. Thinking that, no matter what I did these days, no matter what I wore or how I did my hair, I always looked poor. Lumbered.
He said, ‘Thank you. You know, this is the most beautiful thing. It’s the most beautiful thing in the whole world.’
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he.
IN THE BED DEPARTMENT
Kitty was suspicious of the escalator, or more properly the escalators, as there were two of them, one falling and one rising, anchored side by side in the middle of the main shopping floor. She disliked the push of the motor, and under that, the loose, light clacking sound of something she could not analyse. A chain perhaps, that ran freely deep in the machine.
They were new. The space where they appeared had been boxed in for months, floor to ceiling, with cheap wooden panelling, painted blue. First they knocked a hole in the floor, and then another in the ceiling above, she supposed. They worked at night, but even during the day, men came out from behind the panelling, filthy and smiling, and went back in again. Ordinary Dublin men who worked whenever, and installed escalators in the middle of the night. She wondered how much they were paid.
Kitty tried to take to them, but she couldn’t. She was disturbed by the sight of them out among the merchandise. She disliked the way they talked to each other loudly and laughed as if they owned the shop. They interrupted the conversation, somehow. You’d be selling a bed, talking about springs, you’d be with a young couple, pushing into the mattress in a cosy sort of way, and who would stroll past but the lean blond one, maybe, with the dirty-looking tan, adjusting his zip on the way back from the loo.