by Anne Enright
‘Christmas doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Right.’
Of course not. Christmas, I went down home. What mattered was the New Year, because when midnight struck I would be in a hotel, drinking good champagne beside bad swagged curtains. I would be in bed with my new squeeze, my big old, hairy old, Mister Daddy-O.
And. And. And.
‘And I don’t mind your dishes, Fintan, but I really can’t take scrambled egg.’
There was a silence.
‘Fried?’
‘Fried is fine.’
He was right. Fintan didn’t care about the champagne, or even about the curtains. I suspect he wasn’t even bothered by the sex. He cared about something else. A small flame that he put his hands around, but could not touch.
He is the gentlest man I know.
But it was a gentle feeling I had, too. I wanted to say that, somehow – that this man had too much money and no taste, but he wanted me very hard. I wanted to say how helpless this made him; how violent and grateful I felt him to be. I wanted to say that he had flat, self-important eyes but the back of his neck smelt like a baby’s hair.
That evening, as I opened the front gate, I heard the sound of the piano starting up in the house behind me. It was dusk. Across the road, the alcoholic teacher had put up his Christmas lights; a different shape in each of the windows. There was a square and a circle downstairs, upstairs a triangle and what we used to call a rhomboid, all in running, flashing, gold and white. Over by the postbox, an object flew out from among a cluster of boys and landed in the roadway. It was a skateboard. I stood there with my hand on the cold, low handle of the gate and listened to the first bars of Pathétique.
You only play when I’m not looking, I thought. Every time I look, you stop.
I stood at the bus stop, but as soon as the bus appeared I pulled my coat around me and walked back to the house. Because, if he was playing again, then the shake was gone from his hands. And if the shake was gone then he was off his pills and all hell was about to be let loose – airport police, Fintan running naked through Dublin or, if he was lucky, Paris; Fintan balanced on the parapets of buildings or bridges, with his pockets full of rocks.
I had never seen him in full flower. I was away when it started, the summer after our finals – in which, of course, he had done indecently well. His notes, they discovered later, were written all in different colours, and some were in code. There was a dried-out pool of blue ink draining out of the bath, staining the enamel. It was still there when I got back to the house – hugely sad. The blue of his thoughts, the blood of his mind, I thought, as I tried to scrub it away and failed, or sat in the bathwater and looked at it.
So when he came out of hospital six months later his room was still there – of course it was. No one was going to let Fintan down. Our other housemate (and my ex), Pat, was setting something up in Germany and was always there and gone again. I had a job. Over the years, the area started to come up. And then it was just Fintan and me.
Now it was just me, crying on the way back from the bus stop, pulled by the sound of his playing along a terrace of pebbledash, painted blue and grey and dark green. The woman we called Bubbles was listening at her front door in a peach-coloured housecoat-negligee. She saw me blowing my nose and I gave her a laugh and waved her away. I didn’t know what I was crying for. For the music. For the guy I used to know at college, maybe, with his boy’s body and his jumper of royal blue. And the fact, I think, that his were the first hands I ever loved, the whiteness of them.
The playing stopped as I put my key in the door. When I got into the living room he was sitting on the sofa, as though he had never left it. I pulled him into an awkward, easy embrace and we sat like that; Fintan twisted into me, his face pressed against my chest until my T-shirt was wet from the looseness of his mouth. We sat for a long time. We made that picture of ourselves. That pietà. When I closed my eyes, I could see us sitting there – though I could not, for some reason, feel him in my arms.
In the kitchen, drinking tea – the phone started to ring and I went out to answer it. Then I came back and sat down.
‘I used to be clever, Fintan,’ I said. ‘But it is no use to me any more.’
‘I know,’ he said.
I should have given him his pills then. I should have forced one into his hand, into his mouth, or down his throat – but we were always too delicate with each other, even for words, so we just said goodnight and went to bed.
On Christmas Day, my mother announced that plum pudding was too much trouble any more, and produced one of those shop-bought ice-cream desserts. My brother had brought a few good bottles of wine, and I supplied the paper hats. After the pudding declaration, we had a huge fight about brandy butter and I burst into tears. My mother just looked at me.
On New Year’s Eve, I rang the house, but there was no answer. And when I got home on the third of January, Fintan was gone.
On the fourteenth of February I got my Valentine’s card and twelve fat, dark roses delivered to my desk at work. I also got a phone call from Fintan’s occasional brother in Castle-knock to say that they had found him, finally, that they knew where he was.
I took the afternoon off and bought a Discman and some CDs, then took a taxi out to Grangegorman. I had never been there before: it was a joke of an asylum, looming and Victorian, people muttering and whining in the bare wards, and a smell everywhere of bleach and sperm that was like your own madness, not theirs. When I found him, Fintan was lying so still in the bed that you could see every bump and crevice, from the knuckles of his fingers to the high, tender line of his penis, under the thin white counterpane. He opened his eyes and closed them again. Then he opened them and looked at me for a while and turned his head away. Drugged up to the eyeballs.
I clipped the headphones into his ears and put some music into the Discman. He twitched, and I turned the volume down. Then he turned to look at me, as the music played. He took my hand and placed it against his face, over his mouth and nose, and he kissed my palm. He looked at me with great love. I don’t know what his eyes said as they gazed at me, over my lightly gagging hand. I don’t know what they saw. They saw something lovely, something truly lovely. But I am not sure that they saw me.
The wedding was in November, by which time Fintan was back in the world again, slightly depleted. Every time this happened, I thought, he would become more vague; harder to see. I felt many things – guilt mostly – but the health worker wanted to put him in a halfway hostel, and besides, I was leaving. Whatever way you looked at it, the house was finished for us now. There would be no more snapping ashtrays and trips to the launderette; there would be no more evenings on the bust-up sofa, or chats with Bubbles on the Captains Road.
But I never once thought of saying goodbye to him. I was only getting married. I even brought him along on the hen night – as a sort of mascot, I suppose.
The evening started off slow. My grown-up girlfriends were talking contact numbers and exchanging business cards – I had to start the tequila slammers myself. Two hours later we were off on the Final Bash, the last night ever. I have some recollection of a couple of horse-drawn cabs. I also remember climbing in over the back wall of my new – that is to say, my future – husband’s house. It did not occur to us – to any of us – to use my key, or even knock at the front door. There was a light on in the kitchen: I remember that. We stripped a red-brick wall of ivy and wore it in our hair. I lost my knickers to some ritual in the flower beds. My oldest friend Cara took pictures, so this is how I know all this – two of the girls trying to get my shirt off, Breda ripping up the dahlias (saying, apparently, ‘Boring flowers. Boring flowers.’) and someone, it looks like Jackie, snogging Fintan up against a tree. In the photo, he is all throat. His head is bent back for the kiss, so the flash catches his Adam’s apple and the blue-white underskin of his neck.
I kissed him myself once. It was in my second year at college, before he went mad, or whatever. We sat on
the win-dowsill at a party and pulled the curtains around us and talked for a while, with our heads tipped against the cold window-pane. I remember the silence outside, the curtains resting against us, and beyond them the fug and blather of the room. At some stage, I kissed him. And that was all. The skin of his mouth was terribly thin. Even then, Fintan dealt in moments. As though he moved through liquid while the rest of us made do with air.
So, I am married, whatever that means. I think it means that now I know.
Now I am living in that house with its boring flowers and ivy-covered walls, I know that I didn’t ‘nearly’ love Fintan – I loved him, full stop. And there is nothing I can do about it – about the fact that I loved him for years and did not know it. Nothing at all.
I sleep easy enough beside my husband, my greedy old man. Because he was right in a way – Fintan is always right, in a way. So many of the men that you meet are dead. Some of them are dead in a nice sort of way, some of them are just dead. It makes them easy to seduce. It makes them dangerous to seduce. They give you their white blindness.
So it is easy, under the sheets, to lie beside him and think about nothing much. My hairy old baby. Who would do anything for me. He spends money on me, it seems to give him pleasure – more pleasure than what he is buying at the day’s end, because dead men don’t know the difference between things that are alive (me, for example, or even My Cunt) and things that are dead, namely His Money, which is just so many dried-out turds and not worth living in the house of the dead for. And so I keep talking and he keeps dying, and giving me things that have already decayed (a ‘lovely’ silk scarf, a car that I might want to drive some place, two books that are quite like real books I might want to read). There is the conspiracy of the dead all around us and the head waiters still smirk, as head waiters do, while the food fucks on the tabletop in an encouraging sort of way.
I am sick now. This life does not suit me. His old wife has cyst problems, something horrible with her back, some disintegration. I hear her silence on the other end of the phone. I see the cheque-book with her name in it, printed under his. I am thinner now. My clothes are more expensive. Weekends he sees his daughters – always a little bit better at their maths, their smiles always sweeter, their ribbons that little bit straighter; their cheekbones beginning to break through the skin of their faces now, too early, beautiful and aghast.
I meet Fintan in the afternoons and we have sex sweet as rainwater. I need the sun more than anything and we undress in the light. I open the curtains and look towards the sea. He is madder now than he ever was. I think he is quite mad. He is barely there. Behind my back I hear the sound of threads snapping. I turn to him, curled up on the sheet in the afternoon light, the line of bones knuckling down his back, the sinews curving up behind his knees and – trembling on the pillow, casually strewn – the most beautiful pair of hands in the world.
I say to him, ‘I wish I had a name like yours. When I’m talking to you, you’re always “Fintan”. It’s always “Fintan this,” “Fintan that”. But you never say my name. Sometimes I think you don’t actually know it – that no one does. Except maybe him. I listen out for it, you know?’
TAKING PICTURES
Words spoil it. They make it sound silly.
When he showed me the ring I just laughed. I don’t know what it is to be in love, even less to be married. I thought, ‘What can I say?’ I wanted to bury his head in my coat. I wanted to wrap my coat around him and tuck him under my arm. Except that he is so big.
‘So what brought this on?’ said Sarah at work – the bitch.
‘Just,’ I said.
‘Just,’ she said. ‘You’re just getting married.’
‘Yes.’
‘But that’s wonderful.’
Later – drunk, of course – she leans back in her chair and says, ‘So he’s into pain then, is he?’
‘Well, obviously.’ But in my head later, for days later, I’m saying, ‘He is not even interested in pain, Sarah. He will not have it in the room.’
Some nights I stay at his place and some nights I stay back at mine. All this moving around makes us impatient, with the multiplying toothbrushes and a permanent pair of knickers, clean or worn, at the bottom of my bag. But I still don’t know what it is to be in love. I know it is different from being married. But just for now, married seems to me more. And less, of course. But mostly more.
Sarah at work, I can’t stop believing in Sarah at work, just because I am getting married, just because she is jealous. Here is a description of Sarah. She is a washed-out sort of strawberry blonde with fine bones and small features. She is fading to white. She is constantly insulted by men.
Back at his place, I bite my fiancé on the ear. Sometimes I come up behind him and chew at the muscles of his back. Or when he is sitting down I worry my teeth inside his thigh, along the seam of his jeans. If I hurt him, he reads the paper. If he laughs, we go to bed. Or more often do not go to bed, but rumble a while and then talk. He likes to spoon. He likes to go to bed after it is all over. Which is lovely. Which is always a little bit more.
So Sarah at work has a personality problem. Which is to say, her problem is that she does not like other people’s personalities.
My mother had a friend who was always too much, and very clever. I know these things can last a lifetime, so I am careful of Sarah, and careful of my man – too careful to use his name with her. Despite which I end up saying it all the time. ‘Oh, Frank,’ I say. ‘Frank says this,’ ‘Frank doesn’t like that.’
‘Really?’ says Sarah.
She is seeing a guy herself – sort of. He isn’t married, he isn’t with someone else, but there is a problem, I can tell – a sick mother, maybe, or even a child. The only thing Sarah will say is, ‘The fucker won’t do Saturdays’. Maybe he’s a bisexual. Sarah has no breasts, truth be told. And you can’t win with a bisexual, I say, because bisexuals can’t lose.
Of course, I don’t say it out loud. Sarah is the witty one. At the time, I just look at her skinny little chest, and think.
We are going over the wedding list for the fourteenth time. I pause over Sarah’s name, and Frank says, ‘Don’t invite her then, if you don’t like her. Just leave her out.’
And I say, ‘I can’t leave her out.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s Sarah,’ I say. ‘Because it just doesn’t work that way.’
The wedding is only four months away. I have a feeling that something massive is going to hit me. I feel like I have been fighting in the surf all my life. Now, out beyond the last, the biggest wave, there is open sea.
I tell Sarah about the dress I tried on over the weekend.
‘White, is it?’
‘Cream, actually.’
‘Sounds lovely.’
‘Sarah!!!’ I say. We have nipped out for a coffee. Something has to break.
‘Sarah what?’
‘Just stop it. All right?’
And then, because she is Sarah, she changes the subject, makes me laugh about Gary in security’s hairy neck. I talk about my sister’s children, while she sprinkles the table with sugar and draws her finger through it, and then she asks about the dress. Seriously this time.
Apparently, I can’t do a dropped waist. I’ll have to get on a sunbed now, and go for white.
Once when she was drunk she said, ‘You know your problem? You’ll be all right. That’s your fucking tragedy, you know that? You’ll always be all right.’
But I don’t feel all right, Sarah. Just because I don’t make a song and dance about it. Doesn’t mean I’m always, or even sometimes, all right. You know?
‘I just wanted to get married,’ says Frank.
‘Profiteroles,’ I say, ‘or chocolate mousse. It’s just a decision. A stupid decision, that’s all.’
But there is an extraordinary thing happening in bed. As if he wants to wreck us both, sink to the bottom, while all the invitations and the profiteroles and the satin shoes wash up o
n shore.
And because I am more miserable about Sarah all the time, because I think she will spoil everything like the bad fairy at the christening, he says, ‘Bring her over. All the two of you do is get hammered and miserable. I’ll cook. Bring her over.’
We don’t just get hammered, we have a laugh. And we talk too. We talk about lots of things. But when I ask her to dinner, it feels odd. And somehow, because I am getting married, the bisexual boyfriend has to come too.
Frank’s flat is better than mine for these things. He has a big living room, split by a kitchen counter, and a table of a decent size. I put candles on the table and on top of the TV. By the time I’m finished cleaning, Frank has all the vegetables on different plates, chopped up and ready to go.
Sarah turns up before it gets dark. She moves sort of sideways and looks at things in the room, picking up an old birthday card, a list of messages, and then Frank’s tax cert. which she puts back down again. She is wearing black, and jewellery. I feel I should change, to put her at ease, but it’s too late now.
Frank has a dish of olives on the table, but she will not eat them. Like it’s all a bit hilarious. When she walked in the door she said, ‘Kisses!’ as if she’d known him for years. But she still hasn’t looked at him. She picks at scraps of paper and touches things. She checks her watch.
‘So married bliss, Frank,’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ says Frank.
‘What do you mean, “Yeah”?’
‘Well, it’s … I don’t know,’ says Frank. ‘It’s such a production.’
And she gives me an arch look, while his back is turned. He comes over to the table with the dips and cut bread. She looks at him then. She gives him a good look, and her eyes falter.
He puts the food on the table.
‘Isn’t he a treasure?’ she says, and I don’t want Frank to cook any more. It makes him look silly. I follow him to the kitchen counter and, ‘Ack ack ack!’ he says, and swipes my hand away from all the vegetables, in their neat rows.