by Anne Enright
Not that she minded men. She had two grown sons at home, so she was used to it: the cheerfulness, the indifference and the mess. Though sometimes she turned around in the kitchen and was shocked by the sheer size of them – all that protein and carbohydrate, the muscle and milk of them, as though she had fed a couple of potted plants, and grown triffids.
Then one morning, she walked in and the men were gone. The place was perfect; the carpets fresh and new, the hoarding dissolved into thin air and, in the middle of the floor, a pair of escalators, one going up and the other coming down. The steps tugged lightly at each other as they passed, snagging and loosening all day long. It ticked in the corner of her eye, making her feel balanced, or dizzy, depending on the light. They were so clean. The up escalator always mounting itself, step over step, the down escalator falling like syrup; burying itself slowly in the flatness of the floor.
They were beautiful and they never stopped and finally they got on her nerves. Nothing happened in the bed department. People bought a bed, or they did not buy a bed. Kitty used to like the open space, the hummocky slabs of mattress, the headboards like tombstones in a giant graveyard. ‘Who’s been sleeping in my bed?’ But all her satisfaction was gone, now. The way people lay down and curled up, in the middle of the crowd. The old couples sitting on either side of the mattress and looking over their shoulders at each other in a way that was almost coy; the giggles and the silences. Most people buying a bed were in love, she used to think, or hopeful at least of finding love. Now, they just bounced up and down, or put their dirty feet up, or looked as though they could kill for a decent night’s sleep.
Kitty was at home one evening, washing the dishes, when the phone rang. It was a young man who said he was looking for a Kevin Daly. She was listed as K. Daly in the phone book, and Kitty didn’t want to give too much away. She said there was no Kevin Daly at that number and the young man asked was she sure. He said that he was looking for a Kevin Daly he used to know, a man who had gone to school in Malahide. ‘I’m sorry,’ Kitty said, but they were talking to each other now. He told her that Kevin Daly was his brother, long out of touch. Then he said that, actually, Kevin Daly was his father, but that he did not know he was his father, at least he did not know that he was his son. He said he was looking for his father because his mother was sick and that was why she had given him his father’s name, finally – Kevin Daly – and the fact that he’d gone to school in Malahide. It was a schooltime romance, he said. Kitty just said, ‘Sorry,’ a lot, the way you might say, ‘I see.’
‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘So that’s why – you know?’
‘I’m sorry.’
He asked did she have a brother called Kevin Daly, or a cousin, and she just said, ‘No, sorry.’ But he was quite insistent, as though she might be harbouring the man. ‘No, really, I’m sorry,’ she said, and put down the phone.
The next day, Kitty expected someone to float down the escalator into the bed department and call her by name. She did not know who it might be, or how they might be dressed. A girl, maybe, with green eyes, or a slender young boy. She imagined a man in a perfect black suit – something extra about him, anyway, like Cary Grant. A young man with curly red hair gazed at her – or through her – all the way from the floor above and she wondered, bizarrely, if he might be the person she was waiting for. Also, what he might say to her, if he was.
Then a figure did appear that made her heart turn, and it took a while before Kitty realised it was her own mother, sailing down from fabrics and soft furnishings like a queen.
‘I didn’t recognise you,’ Kitty said.
Her mother was in town looking for a shower curtain and thought she would pop in to say hello. But after that, there was little enough to talk about. Kitty was used to seeing her at home: out in the open, she seemed surprisingly well dressed and mute.
‘Well, you always know where to find me,’ Kitty said to her, with a stranger’s smile.
Kitty ended up seducing a man from the local drama society, a little to his surprise. He had been courting her for months, but in an old-fashioned sort of way. He was sixty-plus and Kitty was forty-plus, but that was the kind of age gap you could expect, with two nearly grown sons. They were both in a production of Johnny Belinda, a play about a deaf mute who gets pregnant, though it comes out right in the end. Kitty did the interval coffees and had a walk-on in the final scene. Tom, for that was the man’s name, did the set. He was good with his hands, he said, as he bent over a saw-horse in the scene dock, and Kitty flicked a glance at him to see what he meant – but all he meant was that he was good at making things. Nice. In a way. He drove her home after rehearsal most nights, and one evening they stopped out to eat. After which, Kitty asked him in for a drink.
Tom. He said all he needed was a couple of hours to fit two dimmers where the old light switch was, but she’d need to redecorate, after. He looked at the photos on her mantelpiece. He was recently bereaved. His daughter had told him to join the drama society, so there he was. In a moment, Kitty thought, he would tell her about his teeth, that they were all his own. Faded brown eyes, silver hair, a handsome where-did-it-all-go-wrong face. They were safe enough. Kitty’s eldest lumbered in from the pub, and stayed to be introduced. Her youngest was upstairs with his own TV. They were nice boys. They did not expect their mother to seduce old geezers in the front room, and neither did the geezer. It was awkward all the way through, and quite satisfying. Kitty did not tell him about her ex-husband, as he did not talk about his dead wife. She did not tell him that her husband had strayed, that she had done everything to keep him – up to, and including, porn videos in the bedroom – and that when she stormed out, the judge had held that desertion against her and awarded him the house. She did not tell him how her husband moved a woman in two weeks after they walked out of court, how the boys had followed her finally to her bedsit and looked after her, as only young boys can, how together they had made their way here, to the outer suburbs and a decent life. Nor did she tell him that she was pregnant, when she realised that she was pregnant. She just let him, and the drama society, lapse, soon after the curtain had rung down on Johnny Belinda, and before anyone could be surprised.
At first she thought it was the change of life. She stood in the bed department and waited for hot flashes. She did not mind growing old as long as it meant growing easy, but it did not seem to be working out that way. There was an agitation, a turbulence in her blood. She rode all the way up to accounts to query her payslip, and she landed back down in the bed department with a thump. She walked the floor and sat on the beds. She had a terrible need to lie down on one of them. One Monday evening during stocktaking, she actually did lie down. She simply reclined. She let her back sink into a double-sprung Slumberland, and felt she might never rise again.
It was not until she bought three pots of apricot jam that the penny dropped. She did not even bother to take a test. She felt that swooping blankness she had felt with each of the boys, so delicious, like diving into a pool and finding you could breathe. The child was no bigger than a pip in the flesh of her stomach. She took it for walks and little outings. She gave it a go on the escalators and on a park swing, scuffing the coarse sand under her feet and feeling a little mad. What would she tell the boys? As for the people in the bed department – Jackie, who shared the floor with her, and the customers who came in to look or buy – they all looked empty to her, like husks. As though she were the only real thing left. It was like that film with the pods, and she wanted to run away somewhere, to a deserted lighthouse, or a shack by the beach, and sit in a shaft of light while her baby grew.
Tom rang. His voice was a shock.
‘I just thought I’d check up on you.’ He sounded close, he sounded right inside her ear. Kitty had to remind herself that there were miles of cable between them, a maze of electricity and static.
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘How are things?’
‘Good. Good.’
In the paus
e, she felt sorry for him. He wasn’t used to this kind of thing.
‘And yourself?’ he said.
‘Oh, flying,’ she said. ‘Flying form.’ And he took the hint and let it go.
Then one morning the down elevator sighed and stopped. People clumped down the steps carefully, almost aslant, squinting at the lines that were strangely solid, though they still seemed to shift beneath their feet. Kitty was glad she wasn’t on the thing when it ground to a halt. It would make you look so foolish. As it happened, the escalators had been empty apart from a young woman on the other side, who seemed to surge suddenly up. Whoosh.
Kitty knew it didn’t mean anything, but she feared for her baby, that was now just eleven weeks old. She could not bear the lopsided sight of the stalled steps, like someone endlessly limping at the other end of the shop floor. She took a very long lunch and when she came back a man had taken the panel off the bottom of the broken side. She was right about the chain – there it was, looping around the steps that were wedges, actually, when you looked at them side-on. They packed around the central pivot like big slices of metal pie, then separated out on the way up, dangling their triangular bases into space.
The escalator man glanced at her as she stared into the works, and then went back to his phase tester, tipping the metal gently here and there. He had hair on the backs of his hands, fine and light: one of those big, furry men with cushioned muscles and uncertain eyes. Kitty stood for a long time, making him uneasy. He glanced over his shoulder again, but he did not really see her – which was fine.
Kitty lost the baby at thirteen weeks, or lost something, at any rate. She looked at the blood on the wad of toilet paper and wondered if it was the change of life, after all. Perhaps she had imagined the baby, perhaps it had never been there in the first place. She called in sick and went to bed and could not cry.
At the weekend she drove her youngest to his soccer game in the Phoenix Park. She had to park a distance away, because he was embarrassed by the car. Also, he did not like having his mother on the sidelines any more, so Kitty, amused, went for a walk instead. She thought she might look for the deer. And almost as she thought it, there they were, a herd of does and their fawns, standing or lying, and all of them chewing; watching, as she now watched, a pair of children and their toy plane buzzing at the other end of the glen.
She felt sure it was a baby, now – that she had not been fooled. Her stomach was still warm and aching from it. The deer chewed on and did not mind her, while the toy plane buzzed and sputtered and fell to ground.
The change of life.
Her life was changing, that was for sure, though she seemed to be standing still. But, ‘Up or down?’ she wondered. ‘Up or down?’ The children threw the plane back in the air and it circled again on the end of its wire. Kitty walked on. It had been a baby, she knew it. She had been visited. How could it be down, when she felt such joy.
LITTLE SISTER
The year I’m talking about, the year my sister left (or whatever you choose to call it), I was twenty-one and she was seventeen. We had been keeping our proper distance, that is to say, for seventeen years. Four years apart – which is sometimes a long way apart, and sometimes closer than you think. Some years we liked each other and some years we didn’t. But near or far, she was my sister. And I suppose I am trying to say what that meant.
Serena always thought she would pass me out some day, hence the underage drinking and the statutory sex. But even though she was getting into pubs and into trouble before I was in high heels, I knew, deep down and weary, that I was the older one – I always would be the older one, and the only way she would get to be older than me, is if I got dead.
And of course, I liked it too. It was fun having someone smaller than you. She always said I bossed her around, but I know we had fun. Because with Serena you are always asking yourself what went wrong, or even, Where did I go wrong? But, believe me, I am just about done with all that – with shuffling through her life in my mind.
There was the time when she was six and I was ten. I used to take her to the bus at lunchtime, because she still only had a half-day at school. So I spent my break waiting at the bus stop with my little sister instead of playing German jumps in the playground, which is not me complaining, it is me saying that she was cared for endlessly, by all of us. But there are just some things you can not do for a child. There are some things you can not help.
This particular day, we were walking out of the school lane and on to the main road when a girl sailed through the air and landed on the roof of a braking car. Serena said, ‘Look!’ and I pulled her along. It was far too serious. And as if she knew it was far too serious she came along with me without a fuss. A girl landed on the roof of a braking car. She turned in the air, as though she was doing a cartwheel. But it was a very slow cartwheel. There was a bicycle, if you thought hard about it, skidding away from the car, the pedal scraping the tarmac and spraying sparks. But you had to think hard to remember the bike. What you really remembered was this girl’s white socks and the pleated fan of her gymslip following her through the air.
The next day there were rumours of an accident, and my mind tells me now that the girl died but they didn’t want to tell us in case we got upset. I don’t know the truth of it. At the time there was just the two of us on an empty road, and a girl turning her slow cartwheel, and my hand finding Serena’s little hand and pulling her silently by.
That was one incident. There was another incident when she was maybe eight and I was twelve when a man in plaid trousers said, ‘Hello girls,’ and took his thing out of his fly. Maybe I should say he let his thing escape out of his fly, because it sort of jumped out and curled up, in a way that I now might recognise. At the time it looked like giblets, the same colour of subdued blood, dark and cooked, like that piece of the turkey our parents liked and called ‘the pope’s nose’. So we ran home all excited and told my mother about the man in plaid trousers and the pope’s nose, and she laughed, which I think was the right thing to do. By the lights of the time. And we had the same three brothers, who went through their phases of this or that. Nothing abnormal – though the year Jim wouldn’t wash was a bit of a trial. Look at me, I’m scraping the barrel here. We had a great childhood. And I’m fine, that’s the bottom line of it. I’m fine and Serena is no longer alive.
But the year I am talking about, it was 1981 and I was finished uni and starting a job. I had money and was buying clothes and I was completely delighted with myself. I even thought about leaving home, but my mother was lonely with us all growing up. She said she felt the creak of the world turning and she talked about getting old. She cried more; a general sort of weep, now and then – not about her life, but just about the way life goes.
I came home one day and Serena was in the doghouse, which was nothing new, because my mother smelt cigarettes off her, and also Something Else. I couldn’t think what this something else might be; there was no whiff of drink – perhaps it was sperm, I wouldn’t be surprised. It was three weeks before her final school exams and Serena was trashing our bedroom while my mother stood in the kitchen – wearing her coat, strangely enough – and chopping carrots. I went in and sat with Mam for a while, and when the silence upstairs finally settled, I went to check the damage. Clothes everywhere. One curtain ripped down. My alarm clock smashed. A bottle of perfume snapped at the neck – there was a pool of Chanel No. 5 soaking into the chest of drawers. I had a boyfriend at the time. The room stank. I didn’t blow my top. I said, ‘Clean yourself up, you stupid moron, Da’s nearly home.’
None of us liked our father, except Serena, who was a little flirt from an early age. I don’t think even my mother liked him – of course she said she ‘loved’ him, but that was only because you’re supposed to when you marry someone and sleep with them. He had a fused knee from some childhood accident and always sat with his leg sticking out in front of him. He wasn’t a bad man. But he sat and looked at us shouting and laughing and fighting, as though
we were all an awful bore.
Or maybe I liked him then, but I don’t like him since – because after Serena he got a job managing a pub and he started sleeping over the shop. So that’s another one, now, who never comes home.
For three weeks the bedroom was thick with the smell of Chanel, we did not speak, and Serena did not eat. She fainted during her maths exam and had to be carried out, with a big crowd of people fanning her on the corridor floor. All of June she spent in the bathroom squeezing her spots, or she sat downstairs and did nothing and wouldn’t say what she wanted to do next. And then, on the fourteenth of July, she went out and did not come home.
We waited for ninety-one days. On Saturday the thirteenth of September there was the sound of a key in the door and a child walked in – a sort of death-child. She was six and a half stone. Behind her was a guy carrying a suitcase. He said his name was Brian. He looked like he didn’t know what to do.
We gave him a cup of tea, while Serena sat in a corner of the kitchen, glaring. As far as we could gather, she just turned up on his doorstep, and stayed. He was a nice guy. I don’t know what he was doing with a girl just out of school, but then again, Serena always looked old for her age.
It is hard to remember what it was like in those days, but anorexia was just starting then, it was just getting trendy. We looked at her and thought she had cancer, we couldn’t believe this was some sort of diet. Then trying to make her eat, the cooing and cajoling, the desperate silences as Serena looked at her plate and picked up one green bean. They say anorexics are bright girls who try too hard and get tipped over the brink, but Serena sauntered up to the brink. She looked over her shoulder at the rest of us, as we stood and called to her, and then she turned and jumped. It is not too much to say that she enjoyed her death. I don’t think it is too much to say that.