The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  The travel agent seemed to be avoiding her except in the hours of darkness. He said that he loved her. He slit his finger and left a small bowl of blood beside her bed. There was a feather in the bowl.

  One day she caught sight of him on the street and the ease with which he walked and talked was a minor miracle. He was wearing a shirt with thick blue-and-white stripes and an all-white collar. He had a blue paisley tie. His blue-grey jacket was slung over his shoulder by the maker’s tag. (Unfortunately he was wearing brown shoes, but she took that as an exterior sign.) There were two men walking beside him in similar suits, one in navy blue, one in grey. They were bigger than him, but their bodies were sloppy. All their attention was devoted to what he was saying and they laughed a lot. She was hopelessly in love with that man.

  Maggie, Sunniva and Joan took care of arrangements while she took to her bed with the shadow of a hawk now real on the wall and wolf howls in the middle of the night. When things were very bad she went back to her fat laugh and her slow, witty talk. She pretended to listen a lot. Her days were spent in prescribed sets of movements, and when she erred – if, for example, she put her shoes on before her blouse – then she was made to suffer badly. She got cramps and side-stitches, shadows flitted and tormented her. Sometimes when she sat still there was music in the room that made her want to cry.

  At night she dreamt of all the men she had loved, who queued by her bedside, and laid red, dark bunches of grapes in her lap.

  Bridget got married in an ivory satin dress with a bouquet of freesias and the wedding march thundering down the aisle. Maggie, Joan and Sunniva cried their eyes out while her mother concentrated on the invisible knitting in her lap. Joe (for that was the travel agent’s name) unveiled fifty-three relatives of impeccable respectability. Several nuns were in evidence, their hair unveiled and neatly styled. The women wore huge and expensive dresses in various sheens of acrylic, with splattered prints and enormous shoulder pads. They rustled and sagged in the church benches, sighing for their youth and the Day They Had Done It. The men were all backslappers, continually checked in their talk by the echoes from the vaulted roof, and they turned around in their seats, mouthing vigorous reminders of stag nights and holes of golf to each other, with jovial incomprehensibility.

  Bridget trembled violently as she entered the church, after being held for ten minutes for photographs in the freezing cold of the porch. Her arms were purple and poked out of her dress like chicken legs. She clutched at the uncle delegated to give her away, as his chin went double with the formal effort of the long walk. Her progress was met with the traditional indulgence and good humour, and there was a great sigh from the bride’s side when they saw how thin, how marvellous she looked. Joe waited for her in front of a Victorian Gothic altar, dapper in his morning suit, hands folded neatly, fingernails manicured and buffed to a slight shine.

  She had a violent sexual tic when she felt the wool of his sleeve. What was under his suit? A bleeding sign slashed into his belly? A word on his breast? Or nothing at all? He smiled and so did she.

  The priest was a malaria victim back from the missions who got her name wrong twice, though not at the vital moments. His sermon drifted back to the savannah as he lifted his eyes to the ceiling and talked to the simple black souls he saw there. He advised Joe against taking two wives.

  When it came to the exchange of rings, Bridget was solid again. She could feel the ground under her feet and she didn’t get his name wrong. Her hands, she noticed, as he placed the ring, were thin and expensive-looking.

  *

  At the reception Joe was the life and soul. Maggie, Sunniva and Joan could hardly contain their enthusiasm as they flirted with him beyond the call of duty. They were shy of expressing their surprise to Bridget, who was shrouded with the new privacy of a married woman, even to her friends. Of course she had married a normal man. How could they have expected a disaster?

  Maggie got maudlin and cried as she said over and over ‘I always knew you were beautiful. I always knew.’

  Bridget wasn’t used to looking so well. She danced with all of Joe’s uncles and three of them made a fumble as they let her go. She got too much attention.

  Her sixteen-year-old cousin tried to seduce Sunniva’s civil servant and there was a tight little scene in the ladies’ toilet. In the corner, the mother of the bride had three brandies, gave a polite rendition of ‘Goodnight Irene’ and told anyone who would listen about the horrors of a life spent with a mean man.

  Through it all, Joe kept his eye on her, smiled and lusted sedately. They met amongst the dancers and he said ‘How are you? Alright?’ and squeezed her hand like a brave girl.

  ‘Wait until he gets you home Oho ye Boya!’ said one of the uncles and Joe’s teeth glittered as he smiled.

  The D.J. hustled them into a ring to sing ‘Congratulations’. He said ‘Only virgins leave at nine o’clock, but a little birdie told me that they wanted to go.’ Joe singed him with a look.

  The bouquet was thrown and it landed in the chandelier, which would not stop swinging.

  Joan whispered ‘Don’t forget the garter.’ and Bridget felt a burning sensation on her thigh.

  They were forced to run the gauntlet and Bridget was bruised by her mother as she attempted and missed a first and last kiss. Outside, the street was on fire with reflected neon that lit her dress in red, then blue. ‘Jesus Christ, this is it,’ said Bridget as she ripped off her veil and pinned it to the car aerial. The toilet paper flapped and everybody cheered as Bridget was driven into the thin, wet night by her public man.

  What are Cicadas?

  COLD WOMEN WHO drive cars like the clutch was a whisper and the gear stick a game. They roll into petrol stations, dangle their keys out the window and say ‘Fill her up’ to the attendant, who smells of American Dreams. They live in haciendas with the reek of battery chickens out the back, and their husbands are old. They go to Crete on their holidays, get drunk and nosedive into the waiter’s white shirt saying ‘I love you Stavros!’ even though his name is Paul. They drive off into a countryside with more hedges than fields and are frightened by the vigour of their dreams.

  But let us stay, as the car slides past, with the pump attendant; with the weeping snout of his gun, that drips a silent humiliation on the cement; with the smell of clean sharp skies, of petrol and of dung. The garage behind him is connected in tight, spinning triangles as his eyes check one corner and then the next. There is an old exhaust lying on a shelf in the wall, there is a baseball hat stiff with cobwebs, hanging in the black space over the door. There is a grave dug in the floor, where the boss stands with a storm lamp, picking at the underside of cars. Evenly spaced in the thick, white light that circles from the window are rings set in the stone, to tether cows long dead.

  He has a transistor radio. He has a pen from Spain with a Señorita in the casing who slides past a toreador and a bull, until she comes to rest under the click, waiting for his thumb. He has a hat, which he only wears in his room.

  He is a sensitive young man.

  What are cicadas? Are they the noise that happens in the dark, with a fan turning and murder in the shadows on the wall? Or do they bloom? Do people walk through forests and pledge themselves, while the ‘cicadas’ trumpet their purple and reds all around?

  It is a question that he asks his father, whose voice smells of dying, the way that his mother’s smells of worry and of bread.

  They look up the dictionary. ‘“Cicatrise,”’ says his father, who always answers the wrong question – ‘“to heal; to mark with scars” – I always thought that there was only one word which encompassed opposites, namely…? To cleave; to cleave apart as with a sword, or to cleave one on to the other, as in a loyal friend. If you were older we might discuss “cleavage” and whether the glass was half empty or half full. Or maybe we can have our cake and eat it after all.’

  When he was a child, he asked what a signature tune was. ‘A signature tune,’ said his father, ‘is a young s
wan-song – just like you. Would you look at him.’

  He searched in the mirror for a clue. But his eyes just looked like his own eyes, there was no word for them, like ‘happy’ or ‘sad’.

  ‘Why don’t cabbages have nerves?’

  ‘A good question.’ His father believed in the good question, though the answer was a free-for-all.

  If he was asked where his grief began, or what he was grieving for, he would look surprised. Grief was this house, the leaking petrol pump, the way his mother smiled. He moved through grief. It was not his own.

  He read poetry in secret and thought his mind was about to break. Sunset fell like a rope to his neck. The Señorita slid at her own pace past the man and the bull and nothing he could do would make her change.

  *

  ‘Come and do the hedges on Wednesday afternoon,’ said a woman, as he handed her keys back through the window. Then she swept off through the hedges with the exhaust like an insult. The car had been full of expensive smells, plastic and perfume, hairspray, the sun on the dashboard. The lines around her eyes were shiny and soft with cream. Her skin reminded him of the rice-paper around expensive sweets, when you wet it in your mouth.

  He rehearsed in his room until he was ready, then came and did the work. He hated her for her laugh at the door. ‘It’s only money,’ she said, ‘it won’t bite.’

  In years to come he would claim an ideal childhood, full of fresh air and dignity, the smell of cooking, rosehips and devil’s bread in the ditch. On a Saturday night his sisters would fight by the mirror by the door and talk him into a rage, for the fun.

  ‘The place was full of secrets. You wouldn’t believe the secrets, the lack of shame that people had. Children that were slow, or uncles that never took their hands out of their trousers, sitting in their own dirt, money under the bed, forgetting how to talk anymore. It wasn’t that they didn’t care, filth was only filth after all. It was the way they took it as their own. There was no modesty behind a closed door, no difference, no meaning.’

  To tell the truth, he did not go back for the money, although he knew the difference between a pound note and nothing at all. His pride drove him back, and the words of the man under the hat in his room. ‘Give her what she wants.’

  There was a small girl playing football on the grass, just to annoy. They knew each other from school. ‘Your father is a disgrace,’ she said in a grown-up voice. ‘A disgrace, in that old jacket.’ Then she checked the house for her mother and ran away. The woman sat knitting in the sun and watched him through the afternoon. Her back was straight and hands fast. She kept the window open, as if the smell of chicken slurry was fresh air.

  She touched him most by her silence. The kitchen was clean and foreign, the hill behind it waiting to be cleared of thorns and muck. It was the kind of house that was never finished, that the fields did not want. It sat on a concrete ledge, like a Christmas cake floating out to sea.

  He liked the precision of things, the logic of their place, the way the cups made an effort as they sat on the shelf. There were some strays, here and there, an Infant of Prague forgotten on the back of the cooker, a deflated football wedged behind the fridge. The cistern from an old toilet was balanced against the back wall, although the bowl was gone.

  Waiting for his cup of tea, he forgot what it was he had come for. She was ordinary at the sink, ordinary and sad as she took out the sugar and the milk. When she sat down in her chair at the far side of the room, she was old and looked impatient of the noise his spoon made against the cup.

  She asked after his mother, and turned on the radio and said he made a good job of cutting the lawn with the grass still damp. They listened to the tail-end of the news and she took a tin down from the cupboard. ‘I suppose I can trust you,’ she said grimly as she opened it up and a swirl of pound notes was seen, like something naked and soft. There was music on the radio.

  He fought for the pictures in his room, of a man with a hat, who casually takes her by the wrist and opens out the flat of her palm, as if he understood it. He thought of the taste of rice-paper melting on his tongue, of the things she might wear under her dress. He struggled for the order of things that might happen if he held his breath. She gave him an indifferent smile. He did not understand.

  ‘Women,’ said his father, ‘torture us with contradiction, but just because they enjoy it, doesn’t mean that it’s not true.’

  There was a soft scratching at the door, and the two of them froze as though caught, with the money trapped in the woman’s hand. When it opened he saw an old, fat crone who would not cross the threshold. Her shape was all one, he couldn’t tell where one bit ended and the next began. There was a used tissue caught in the palm of her hand. She had a shy face. ‘Monica, is the creamery cart come?’ ‘Yes,’ said the woman in a loud voice. ‘It’s a tanker, not a cart.’ ‘Oh no,’ said the old woman ‘I’m fine, don’t worry about me.’ She closed the door on herself without turning away.

  Her name was Monica. She smiled at him, in complicity and shame. ‘Deaf as a post,’ she said, and the room dilated with the possibilities in her voice. She was embarrassed by the money in her hand. She looked at the bob of panic in his throat.

  ‘There was a woman lived up the way from us, the kind that had all the young fellas in a knot. You could tell she wanted something, though probably not from you. She was ambitious, that was the word. It wasn’t just sex that gave her that look – like she knew more than you ever could. That she might tell you, if she thought you were up to it. She had an old husband in the house with her, and a mother, senile, deaf, who pottered around and got in the way. And one day the old woman died.

  ‘My father came in from the removal, rubbing his hands. He was a mild kind of man. “Sic transit,” he said. “Sic, sic, sic.” He took off the old coat with a kind of ceremony. I remember him taking the rosary beads out of his pocket and putting them beside the liquidiser, which was their place. I remember how ashamed I was of him, the patches on his coat and the beads and the useless Latin. When he sat down he said “How the mighty,” and I felt like hitting him.

  ‘When someone died, this woman Maureen would wash the body, which was no big deal. She might take any basin they had in the house and a cloth – maybe the one they used for the dishes. I don’t know if she got paid, maybe it was just her place.

  ‘“The secrets of the dead,” said Da, “and the house smelling of fresh paint. Oh but that’s not all.” He told me one of those country stories that I never want to hear; stories that take their time, and have a taste to them. Stories that wait for the tea to draw and are held over when he can’t find the biscuits. “Do you know her?” he said, and I said I did. “A fine woman all the same, with a lovely pair of eyes in her head. As I remember.” He remembered the mother too of course and what kind of eyes she had in her head, as opposed to anywhere else.

  ‘It was the son-in-law broke the news that the old woman had died, and when Maureen came to lay out the corpse, she found the man in the kitchen reading a newspaper and the wife saying nothing, not even crying. She offered her condolences, and got no sign or reply. There was no priest in the house. So Maureen just quietly ducked her head down, filled a basin at the sink, tiptoed her way across the lino with the water threatening to spill. When she got to the door of the old woman’s room the wife suddenly lifted her head and said “You’ll have a cup of tea, Maureen, before you start.”

  ‘The corpse was on the bed, newly dead, but rotting all the same. The sheets hadn’t been changed for a year so you couldn’t tell what colour they should have been. She had … lost control of her functions but they just left her to it, so her skin was the same shade as the sheets. Maureen cut layers and layers of skirts and tights and muck off her and when she got to the feet, she nearly cried. Her nails had grown so long without cutting, they had curled in under the soles and left scars.

  ‘“Those Gorman women,” said my father, with relish. “So which of them came first, the chicken or her egg?” a
nd he laughed at me like a dirty old codger on the side of the road.’

  After he left the house, the sun was so strong, it seemed to kill all sound. He met her daughter on the road and tackled her for the football, then kicked it slowly into the ditch.

  ‘When I lost my virginity, everything was the same, and everything was changed. I stopped reading poetry, for one thing. It wasn’t that it was telling lies – it just seemed to be talking to someone else.

  ‘Now I can’t stop screwing around. What can I say? I hate it, but it still doesn’t seem to matter. I keep my life in order. My dry-cleaning bill is huge. I have money.

  ‘My father knew one woman all his life. He dressed like a tramp. Seriously. What could he know? He knew about dignity and the weather and words. It was all so easy. I hate him for landing me in it like this – with no proper question and six answers to something else.’

  The Brat

  SHE WAS A brat. It wasn’t that she was good-looking – she could be, but she wasn’t. She wore her ugliness like a badge. Her clothes were tight in all the worst places, but she pushed her body forward as she spoke. She had fat arms and small breasts. She wore bower boots and cheap pink cotton trousers. She was all wrong. Her eyebrows were plucked bare and a thin, brown line was pencilled in over the stubble. There was a flicker in her eye that told you she knew that she was being watched, and every gesture took on the slight edge of performance. It made her unpopular, except with new acquaintances, whom she seduced casually and then annoyed.

  Clare was fifteen. She had been drunk once in her life, with a girl from school who had filled two pint glasses with the top of every bottle on her parents’ cupboard. They drank it all in one go and Clare noticed nothing until she sat down in the bus and discovered that her legs were numb. The rest of the night was spent throwing up in the queue for a toilet, and kissing a boy who took her home. When she woke up her eyes were swollen, and her father had left without his breakfast.