by Anne Enright
But as my hair started to grow out I realised how really unhappy I was. I went to the college doctor and said I thought I had a lump in my breast, and he felt both of them and asked me about contraception and gave me some sleeping pills. He told me to go to the counselling service and I did, but the woman there just thought everything I said was really funny. She said she loved my accent. She said the very fact that I was here meant that I was among the brightest, and that I should nurture my self-esteem.
But I didn’t think I was among the brightest. I thought some of them were pretty thick actually. Apart from this guy from New York, who was massively clever in a dull sort of way. At mid-term I got my assessment essay back with a B despite the fact that ‘you do not know what a paragraph is’. After that I stayed in more, and grew my hair.
At night I walked down to the lake. I stood with my back to the water and checked the lights of all the rooms I knew, to see who was in and where everyone was. It took me weeks to realise that they were all working. Actually working. They weren’t having a good time somewhere that I didn’t know about. There was no secret good time.
One night I woke up and saw Li standing in my bedroom with a pillow in her hands, or maybe she was clasping the pillow to her chest. It was Li and a pillow, anyway, in the dark, and I had to check that I wasn’t dreaming.
‘Oh, Li,’ I said. And in my half-sleep the words came out all worn and fuzzy. Almost loving. Then she turned and walked out again.
Maybe she just wanted some company. It was the first night of the Christmas break; Karen had gone home and Wambui had friends in Chicago. I didn’t have the money to go anywhere and Li, I suppose, had even less. So it was just the two of us, feeling a little left behind.
The next day, I said nothing. There was nothing I could possibly say. I felt a bit sorry for her, that’s all. I wondered did she just want to sleep with me, like I told Karen women do everywhere except here. Or did she want to sleep with me the way women actually do (especially here)? The thought of her skinny little bones gave me a sort of rush, but it wasn’t really a pleasant one.
Meanwhile, she worked in her room as usual, and blew her nose, as usual, under the running tap in the bathroom, making me gag a little at the sound. Other times, she was so quiet I wanted to check if she had died.
We collided from time to time in the living room and she might throw a question at me – What did I think of advertising? or, Was it true they give medicine to children, here, to calm them down? or, Was I short-sighted? Had I read Voltaire? After one particular silence she decided to show me a series of eye exercises they did in China, which meant that many people there ‘did not need glasses’ (Oh, yeah?). You had to rub your thumbs between your eyebrows and rotate your forefinger on particular points of the eyeball and around the socket, and when you were finished, stare into the distance for a while. So we sat there, in an empty block, in the middle of this deserted campus, while the rest of the Western world hung up fairy lights or wrapped their gifts, and we rubbed our eyeballs. Then we looked out the window.
Actually, I think it sort of worked.
She never knocked at my door, but I still found myself staying up all night and sleeping into the afternoon: I felt safer that way. When I staggered out on Christmas Day, she was working at the living-room table. She got up really quickly and handed me a tiny package saying, ‘Happy Christmas, Alison,’ with a shy little duck and twist of her head. Inside was a little calendar printed on a plastic card. There were two cutie-pie babies holding a ribbon with the year written on it. I said, ‘Oh, thank you, Li. Thank you,’ and she seemed horribly pleased.
Later in the afternoon, I stole some late winter roses from a college flower bed and put them on the table along with a burnt chicken and a heated-up tin of sweet-corn. My life was too short to do potatoes. My life would always be too short to do potatoes. I said this to Li who stared at her plate with a snake-like fascination. Does everyone do this? What does turkey taste like? Is it a sacrificial animal? I was worn out just listening to her. I tried to make her drink some wine and she finally took a glass, which made her giggle immediately. I drank and ranted on about advertising, which seemed to interest her, and nuclear power, ditto. She asked about Irish ‘Catholicism’ (with a funny imprecision, I realised she’d never spoken the word out loud before) and I put my head on the table, and said, ‘Oh, Li, oh, Li, oh, Li,’ which we both seemed to find quite funny.
I’m not very good at drinking, I suppose. I’d only done it three or four times and I felt quite dizzy. Before I knew it, I was tackling her about the whole homosexuality thing. She did know about it – she must know – so why did she ask me? She said no, no, they have no such thing in China, they do not even have a word for homosexual in China. There must be a word for it, I said, it’s nothing to do with culture, it’s just a natural thing, but she laughed, as though she was quite sophisticated and I was the simple one. No, she said. Really. Perhaps there was a word once, but not any more.
The phone in the hallway started to ring – my family wishing me a Happy Christmas. So, I did all that ‘Yes, you too. Yes, you too,’ through brothers and sisters and aunts, shuffled at high speed on the long-distance line. When I came back, Li had washed the dishes. She came into the living room and stood in front of me.
‘Thank you for a lovely “Christmas,” Alison,’ she said, with a little squirm. Then she walked past me, into her room.
They were sweet, nothing days. I managed to sleep through all the hours of daylight; the nights I spent reading or looking at the weather as it fell past the street lamp outside: a slight snow, or drizzle, or just the night itself in a long yellow cone. This little slice of weather made me think that the air is really busy and there is an awful lot of it, and it was good to be inside and small and barely, just barely, existing. I felt almost flayed – peeled bare and true. It was so peaceful I jumped at the smallest sound: a plastic bag subsiding in the kitchen; my own breath.
It was a kind of spell, those endless night-days of sitting and pacing and breathing. At four in the morning, I might look at the street lamp and want to cry for the melancholy beauty of the light, or the air fizzing about beneath it, or for the millions of street lamps and the millions of windows and all the drops of rain. Li was in there somewhere too, sleeping her Chinese sleep in those nylon pyjamas: not quite a Buddha but, still, my little plastic charm.
We met over her breakfast, which was my supper, and we murmured at each other like people who live together but have other business in hand. Everything was quite easy. When Karen put her key in the door, I thought we were being burgled. I realised that I had missed New Year’s Eve, somehow. And I was sad. Whatever had happened, it was all over now.
Karen was in a complete rage after the holidays. Something about her father’s girlfriend and a dog, I think, or a car. Whatever. Her father’s girlfriend was Superbitch, and so Karen snapped at us all day and cried herself to sleep at night. We could hear her through the wall. Then, suddenly, I was in love with the massively-clever-but-a-bit-dull guy from New York – completely obsessed. I talked and talked, and paced down to the lake and back again. I finally got him to call for some notes he wanted to borrow and, when he left, I shut the door behind him and slid down it on to the floor. ‘Oh, Li,’ I said, laughing. ‘Oh, Li.’
For some reason it became the roomies’ joke. ‘Oh, Li!’ we said. ‘Oh, Li.’ When anything funny or desperate happened, like a burnt saucepan, or peculiar-looking hair. It was better when she was there, but we said it sometimes when she wasn’t. As for Li, she seemed flattered by the attention: she always made that silly, laughing sound. But it confused her, too.
One evening she announced, quite carefully, that Li was what we call a surname. Her given name, which came second in Chinese, was Chiao-Ping. But mostly Ping. Then she was silent. It seemed that she didn’t want to do anything with this information, she just wanted to say it.
‘Oh, Ping,’ I said, after a moment’s silence. ‘Oh, Ping.’ And we cou
ldn’t help it, we just dissolved, we just laughed and laughed until we were on the floor.
The next night, I found myself struggling through a horrible dream. It was one of those dreams that soak right through you, a sickener. I think the guy from New York was in it, and he was absolutely evil. I fought to wake up and the dream lurched. My mother was there, warning me, I swear it. My mother was there saying, ‘Wake up, wake up, darling,’ though ‘darling’ was never her sort of word. So I did wake up, and my body was flailing on the bed. My head was stuck and there was something wrong with the darkness. I tried to breathe but it didn’t work, somehow. I couldn’t catch my breath. My hand connected with something, a face, and I pushed into it with all my strength. I pushed my fingers into the eyes.
Ping was trying to smother me. Finally. I suppose if it hadn’t been a bunk-bed I might have died but, when I pushed, she overbalanced on the ladder and fell. I looked down and she was on the floor, scrabbling for the pillow. She grabbed it and looked up at me, then she said something in Chinese. It sounded really strange and vicious. I had never heard her speak Chinese before.
I might have left it. Isn’t that funny? Like the razors and the knickers and Karen crying all the time. I might have said nothing and just gone on, or dealt with it in some other, sidelong way. But the noise of her falling woke everyone and, the next thing, Karen was knocking on the door, ‘You OK in there?’ and when she opened it, Ping was still on the floor, and I was still looking down at her.
After that, everyone tried to make me feel guilty again. Ping was sent back to China (to where? to a camp?) and I had about three college counsellors, just in case I might want to sue. They all talked about racism. They sidled up to it. But I said it wasn’t the fact that she was Chinese that mattered, it was the fact that she was insane. Besides, I couldn’t tell them that I didn’t care. I couldn’t tell them what really happened to me, the weird thing, the real thing. Because, sometime after my mother called me ‘darling’ and before I pushed Ping off the ladder, I felt the strangest feeling. It was a thing, it was me, it was my very self, fluttering in my chest and trying to get out of there, exultant, like it had been living in the wrong person and was finally going home.
PALE HANDS I LOVED, BESIDE THE SHALIMAR
I had sex with this guy one Saturday night before Christmas and gave him my number and, something about him, I should have known he would be the type to call. For once, I was almost grateful that Fintan answered the phone. I could hear him through the sliding door.
‘Yes, she’s here. She’s in the kitchen, eating dead things.’
Then, ‘No, I’m not a vegetarian.’
Then, ‘I mean dead as in dead. I mean people like you.’
I said, ‘Just give me the phone, Fintan.’
After the call was finished, I threw out the rest of my dinner, came into the living room and sat down. Fintan was watching a documentary about airports, which turned out to be quite funny. When it was over, I got up to go to bed and he looked up at me and said, ‘Do not go gentle.’
And I said, ‘Goodnight, Fintan. Goodnight, darling. Goodnight.’
I nearly went out with Fintan, before he was diagnosed. Now, we live together and people say to me, Isn’t that a bit dangerous? But he is the gentlest man I know. The ashtrays were the biggest problem; the filth of them. I finally said it to him one day over the washing-up, and he disappeared for a week. Then one evening he was back, sitting on the sofa with a brass box in his hand. It had the most vicious spring lid. I said, ‘Where did you get that from, India?’ and he looked at me. You can hear him clacking and snapping all over the house now. It’s like someone smoking into a mousetrap, but it still makes me smile.
Otherwise I have no complaints. I would get him to wash his clothes more, but I think he is happier with the smell, and so am I. It reminds me of the time when I nearly loved him, back in college when it rained all the time, and no one had any heating, and the first thing you did with a man was stick your schnozz into his jumper and inhale.
These days, he is thinner and his hands tremble. He leaves his coat on around the house, and spends a lot of time looking at the air in the middle of the room – not at the ceiling or the walls, but at the air itself.
You can’t trust that sort of thing. I would be the last to trust it. Personally, I don’t think he would hurt a fly, but I still check his medication when he is not around. And yet, it was true what he said – when the phone rang that night, I was eating dead things. I was sitting in the kitchen with the condensation running down the black windowpane, forking through the carbonara as though it was all the men I had missed or messed up. All the men I had missed or messed up. If it was a song you could sing it. If it was a song you could Play it, Sam.
I went out and took the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’ and glared at Fintan until he left the hall. ‘Sorry about that.’
‘Is that you?’ said the guy at the other end. ‘Is that you?’
So, he introduced himself – which is odd if you have slept with someone already. Then, he asked me out for ‘a date’. I didn’t know what to say. There was none of that when I started out. You just bumped into people. You just stayed for one more drink and then by accident until closing time, and then by a miracle, by a fumble, by something slippery and inadvertent, for the night. (But it was a serious business, this accident, I’m telling you. It was as serious as an accident with a car.) This was partly what I had been thinking in the kitchen, as the pasta slithered through the egg and the cream – How do I do this now? How do I crash the goddamn car?
‘So, what about Friday night?’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘Or Wednesday?’
I checked an imaginary diary in the darkness of the hall, and listened for a while to the dialling tone, after he had put down the phone.
I wasn’t sure that I liked him. That was all.
The dinner was hilarious. I should stop whining about my life, but I sat in a restaurant with red velvet curtains and white linen tablecloths and expensive, smirking waiters, and wondered, as I played with the fish knife, what all this was for. We went back to his place and I could feel the migraine coming through the sex. It should have been nice – I have no objection to sex – but with the migraine starting I felt as though he was a long way away from me, and every thrust set my brain flaring until I was very small and curled up, somehow, at the bottom of my own personal well.
Of course he was very solicitous and insisted on driving me home. Men say they want casual sex but, when you say thanks-very-much-goodnight they get quite insulted, I find. So he touched the side of my face and asked could he see me again, and when I said yes he undid the central locking system with a hiss and a clunk, and let me go.
In the kitchen I drank four cups of kick-ass black coffee, and went to bed. And waited.
Some time the next day, Fintan came in and closed the curtains where there was a little burn of light coming through. I was so happy the light was gone, I started to cry. There is something unbelievable about a migraine. You lie there and can’t believe it. You lie there, rigid with unbelief, like an atheist in hell.
Fintan settled himself on a chair beside the bed and started to read to me. I didn’t mind. I could hear everything and understand everything, but the words slid by. He was holding my childhood copy of Alice in Wonderland and I wondered were the colours that intense when I was young; Alice’s hair a shouting yellow, the flamingo scalded pink in her arms.
He got to the bit about the three sisters who lived in the treacle well – Elsie, Lacie and Tillie. And what did they live on? Treacle.
‘They couldn’t have done that, you know,’ Alice said, ‘they’d have been ill.’
‘So they were,’ said the Dormouse. ‘VERY ill.’
I smiled, swamped by self-pity. And suddenly I got it – clear as clear – the smell of treacle, like a joke. The room was full of it. Sweet and burnt. It was a dilation of the air: it was a pebble dropped into the pool of my mind, so that,
by the time the last ripple had faded, the pain was gone or thinking of going. The pain was possible once again.
‘Oh,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Fintan.
He looked at me in the half-dark. Downstairs, the phone began to ring. I went to get out of bed but Fintan stopped me, just by the way he sat there, in a chair by my side.
A couple of weeks later I was arguing with him, banging his dirty dishes in the kitchen. It is possible Fintan has a problem with water. It is possible all men have a problem with water. Some day they will find the gene for it, but in the meantime, I want a better life.
But of course Fintan never answers back, so the argument is always about something else – something you can’t quite put your finger on. The argument is about everything.
Yes, I wanted to say, he is married. But he is separated – well and legally separated – from a wife who is always sick; a daughter who is bright but will not eat; another daughter who is his pride and joy. I liked him; he made the effort. Every time we met, there was some present; usually not to my taste, but ‘tasteful’ all the same; small and expensive, like some moment from a fifties film. And there was an astonishing darkness in bed. That had to be said. I felt, as he reared away from me, that he was thinking about nothing, that there were no words in his head. He rolled his eyes back into it, and the widening dark was bliss to him. It was like watching a man die. It was like having sex with an animal.
None of which I said as I banged the saucepan from Fintan’s scrambled eggs on to the draining board. I didn’t mention the too-bright daughters either, or the crumbling ex-wife. What I did say was that Fintan had to find somewhere for the Christmas holidays, because I didn’t want to be worried about him in the house by himself.