by Anne Enright
Clare’s father makes his way from the Customs House to O’Beirne’s on the Quays, crosses the Liffey by means of a bridge, so sited as to add to the distance between the two buildings a length of nearly three hundred yards.
‘If I could swim now, I’d be right.’ He is a man much given to speaking aloud when company is absent, and to silence when the nicer of social obligations might urge him into speech. Those contributions he does make are as counterpoint to the sounds of liquid consumption only, the sweetest of which is the sound of a pint drawing creamily at the bar, a music only those born with the gift, or those who spend a minimum of three thousand hours acquiring the gift, can hear.
O’Donnel was doubly blessed. He was born with a magic thumb, the sucking of which enabled him to discern the music of a good pint from the discord of a bad, before a head had even begun to form; but being a man of diligence and application (those same qualities which, combined with tenacity, ensured his promotion to the rank of Under-Manager, Grade Two of Dublin Corporation, Sanitation Section, despite the vagaries of political influence, which was never behind him, the unenlightened reservations of his superiors, cognisant as they were of his talents, and thence careful of their own interests and tenure, and the constant, whingeing begrudgery of his fellow workers, craven in the envy of a magnitude only the true culchie could muster, with the smell of dung still clinging to their boots, the stripes of the diocesan fathers still stinging their palms and the sly post-colonialism still giving the edge of flattery to every utterance of a personal nature that crossed their lips), he distrusted the gifts of nature and concentrated the subtle power of his intelligence on discerning, without the aid of his cool, Fenian thumb, that crystalline hum, that black, creamy noise, of a pint just waiting to be drunk.
The river is at an ebb, its green is black in the early evening. ‘It’s not green. See?’ he says to a passing young woman, who ignores both him and the complexity of his literary allusion. He pivots his body and fixes his eyes on her receding back, its cheap, smart blue coat, her black hair and the hurried motion of her tights, with a pattern of skin disease, arranged in bows along the seam.
‘Golden stockings she had on,’ he says loudly, in the interests of the general good. A sharp sniff, and the air stings his nose, outside and in. Three fingers he counts, tapping them one after the other on the interstice of his right nostril.
‘Most high, most pure, most sweet …’ Black hair, blue coat, and flesh-coloured legs – don’t forget the bows. He stands, swaying slightly against the flood of people crossing the river to the northside of the city and strains to hear the broken clack of her shoes on the pavement. He sees her opening cans in a bedsit in Drumcondra. The shoes are loose, and a raw, reddened heel emerges at every step.
‘There will be peace in the valley,’ he assures her and all the other backs now interrupting his view of her, as a benediction, then turns to square himself against the tide.
‘I wouldn’t spit now,’ he says, ‘at a pint. If it was handed to me.’ He was a man who could not abide spit.
O’Donnel avoids the snug in O’Beirne’s, likely as it is to contain Elements. He takes his place with the dockers at the bar.
‘Stevedores.’
There is no need for another word, his order is known. The brown suit strains tightly against the yoke of his back as he places the elbows, long stained with old porter, carefully on two beer-mats equidistant from the apex of his nose. His head is loosely cupped in two large hands.
‘There’s one for the drip,’ says the barman, slapping a mat under the point of his snout. O’Donnel stares at the wood of the counter, his feet broadly placed on the brass rail. His air could be interpreted as one of dignified rebuke.
‘Larry,’ he says, from the cavern of his crouched torso, ‘would you ever hinge that elbow in the way God intended.’ And not wishing to disturb the barman by his tone, he adds the phrase, ‘he says,’ to allow a proper distance from the remark.
‘Does he so?’ says Larry, and places a small preliminary Bushmills on the central mat.
After many hours of similar silences, the air is punctuated by the single word ‘Nevermore’.
The barman gives the wink to a man in the snug, the long-suffering recipient of countless memos on the subject of parking meters: the cleaning thereof, embellished in O’Donnel’s hand by the appropriate quotations from the Latin.
‘So they finally gave the old codger the push, eh?’ The final syllable is terse, sympathetic, way-of-the-worldish; harsh, without interrogative cadence or function.
‘Resigned, Larry. For God’s sake, the word is “resigned”.’ He salutes the barman with his pint, and with one finger he taps, three times, on the interstice of his left nostril.
Clare was late home again. A boy came up to her at the dance and started asking questions. ‘How are you?’ ‘What did the Da say?’ It was the one she had kissed some weeks before and she found herself answering quite sweetly because of the shame she felt. She must have told him everything. ‘You were crying,’ he told her, ‘and you said that you wanted to die.’
‘I wanted to throw up,’ she said.
‘You did.’
‘Well that didn’t stop you, anyway.’
‘Shush,’ he said, although the music was making them shout, and she started to kiss him again.
He had a good, strong accent and spoke very carefully. When the slow songs came on he just stood back and looked at her face. They only kissed again when the music changed.
Apart from that he had green eyes. ‘Don’t fucking worry about me,’ Clare said, ‘I’m clever.’
‘I know you’re clever.’
‘My father is clever.’
‘My Da’s an arsehole,’ he said, ‘So what?’ He was like a doctor, he asked questions that no one else asked. Whatever it was that made him sad made him kind as well and so she took his sympathy. He was a nice man. She felt obliged to tell him things, like she would tell any unicorn she met in the street.
Clare’s father was sitting in front of the television when she got home, with his eyes closed. He looked away from her when she came in, and examined the curtains. ‘Words,’ he said, ‘are for the radio. They should have stuck to silent films. Where were you?’
‘Where were you?’ she asked back.
‘Your mother never left, you know …’ his voice trailed after her as she left the room, ‘you have her accusatory tone to perfection.’
There was a smell in the house. Clare had never realised that the disinfectants, the carpet cleaners, the plastic boxes that were hung up in the toilet did any good. She had hated their stink, like an industrial version of all the fluids, lotions, perfumes and bath-salts that made it her mother’s house. A stink of unnecessary work and hours spent in front of the mirror, of cleaning windows in pink fluffy slippers, of fits of hysteria when towels were folded the wrong way. Now the kitchen smelt of old fat, the hall of damp and urine, her bedroom of clothes come out of the rain, like the top deck of the bus on a bad morning.
She went across to pull the curtains and was shocked to see that the boy was still outside, his arms folded and leaning on top of the wall. He saw her, smiled and walked away.
Her brother came into the room, and she let the curtain drop. ‘The old man got the sack,’ he said. ‘Where were you?’
Your honour, on this, the second occasion, the victim spent some hours with the accused outside her house. Interglottal activity was engaged upon and some saliva was exchanged. The couple embraced warmly and muscular tissue from the sacral region to the crown of the head was palpated. This was followed by both visual and tactile exploration of the upper limbs and face of the accused and there was a Verbal Exchange. On the evening in question the victim had his back to a wall and indentations made from the ornamental gravel in his buttocks and upper back took thirty minutes to diffuse.
A girl from up the road street told Clare that she had seen her mother in town, walking down the street ‘and Dressed To Kill’
.
Kill what?
It was on the third occasion that the alleged murder took place. I will not offend the court with details save that there were several breaks for cigarettes, which were smoked in a car, the windows of which, much to the amusement of the accused, became steamed up, in the manner of comic sketches which can be seen from time to time on the television set. I have the assurance of the victim that no reproductive processes were engaged, although they were vigorously and callously primed by the frotteur.
(Objection your honour! The term ‘frottage’ implies guilt, I will not have my client tried by lexiphanicism, at the hands of a coprolalomaniac!)
(Objection sustained.) The appalling psychological damage suffered by the victim even before the fatal blow was struck, can only be imagined, and in happier times this frustration of biology might be viewed in the light which it deserves and sentence passed commensurate with the enormity of the crime.
He had left school young. He had a car and a job. He had taken his hand off the wheel and crossed his middle finger over his index and said ‘I’m like that. You see? You can trust me. I’m like that.’ The streetlamp outside the house made slits of his eyes, and Clare was shocked by the freedoms she took. She was violent and tender and made herself cry again. He absorbed it all without surprise.
At three o’clock in the morning, she heard the sound of a dog barking and her father’s voice. He was walking down the street with a Jack Russell at his heel. As she watched she saw that he was not kicking the dog but playing with it. He emerged from Mrs Costello’s forsythia bush with only a few leaves in his hands, but he threw them defiantly, shouting ‘Fetch!’ The dog was confused and he bent down over it, flinging his arm out and repeating the command. Then he straightened up and addressed the street and its dog, in the grand manner: ‘Bitch!’ He buttoned up his coat and walked on.
‘That’s the old man,’ she said to the boy in the car, who smiled.
‘Does he have a shotgun?’
Clare had never seen her father look monumental. He staggered in and out of the light from the streetlamp and she lost all sympathy. He was not in any way normal.
‘You should see mine on a good night,’ said the boy in the car. He straightened his jumper.
‘Do you want to go?’
Mr O’Donnel reached the car and vented a stream of buff-coloured puke on the bonnet, which was fresh and decorative against the biscuit-brown of the paint-work and the chrome. His meditation on the effect was disturbed by the cognisance that the vehicle was occupied and by intimations of a possible unpleasantness to come. He hinged his torso into the upright and carefully aligned the cuffs of his shirt below the line of his coat-sleeves, a gesture he had admired in his long observation of the British Royal Family, and one he reserved for the petty and the punctilious. His relief on finding the face that peered out from behind the windscreen familiar, mitigated to a great extent the indignation he felt on finding that she was not alone: that uncomfortably close to his daughter was a hairy young skelp. The contrasting paleness of his daughter’s countenance, and the bar of shadow that fell from the framework of the car and caressed her mouth, made his throat constrict alarmingly, and the tragedy of generation burst in his chest. This was the entrance to eternity. No sound or movement greeted his thoughts as they took wing, but beneath his hand he could sense the dormant miracle of the internal combustion engine, and above his head stars, that had seen the continents rip, one from the other, wheeled and waited the light years it would take before they could witness his shame. He stood back. The moment cried out for expression. With the flat of his palm, he banged the bonnet of the car.
‘“I will tell you.
The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne,
Burn’d on the water; the poop was beaten gold,
Purple the snails, and so perfumed, that
The winds were love-sick with them, the oars were silver
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description …”’
*
And so beggar’d, he left the lovers, opened the gate with a creak and entered his house.
Clare came into the kitchen at four o’clock in the morning and found her father sitting at the kitchen table. There was a smell of drink in the room but she couldn’t see any bottles. The record player in the living room was left on and the record on the turntable was finished. The sound of the needle going round and round reminded her of the scene in the car and the feeling in her insides.
‘Your mother never left, you know. You have her guilty look to perfection.’
She left her father where he was and went into her room where she took down all the posters and started to write on the walls. She wrote all the poems from the school curriculum so that she would be able to study them every night, and so know them off by heart.
‘Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths.’
‘Golden stockings she had on.’
‘I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, til we loved?’
No more dancing. On the other wall, she copied all her theorems and the basic laws of Physics. Then she lay on the bed and promised herself that she would not sleep for three days and three nights before she closed her eyes and cried.
Mr Snip Snip Snip
THE CINEMA PROJECTIONIST in Frank’s home town was often drunk. When he was thrown out by his wife he slept the night in the projection booth and ate the stale Mars Bars and crisps from the counter in the porch. Once he threw up over a roll of film and had to spend the day cleaning and untangling it. Frank’s first experience of ‘The Dam Busters’ was splattered with small, mucky explosions and the sound-track was a mess.
Even so, everyone went to the pictures, and the boys at the front shouted at the couples snogging in the back row. Frank was not enchanted by the plush red seats, nor by their sexual possibilities, though their smell still sometimes hit him unawares. He felt nothing but the dread of the picture to come, the size of it on the screen, the colours, and the way that it jerked from place to place. The projectionist sometimes put the reels on in the wrong order and the beginning of the picture came halfway through. Most exciting of all was the time that the drunken projectionist fell asleep, and the film, passing close to the bulb, had gone on fire. This was the terror that provoked Frank into a job in television.
*
The air in the editing room had been around the building four times. It seemed to settle there and go cold. Frank sits in a hardback chair in front of the console and a producer sits at his back. What the producer does is his own business. Some of them click their fingers at a cut, or catch their breath or say ‘There!’ Some of them make faces behind his back, field phone-calls, pace up and down the room. Some of them go away. In front of them are three monitors, and Frank sits all day and staples the picture from one monitor onto the picture of another, without any seams showing. He is the magic of television.
Frank doesn’t work on celluloid, he works with tapes that slot in and happen in the machines like they were happening in his head. He can mix or fade, he can freeze the picture at any selected moment, at a laugh, or a fumble. He can make figures move slowly, as if they are pushing their way through honey, or scatter them along the street like Charlie Chaplin. The moment is as long as he likes. Ninety seconds of a finished programme can cover a minute or three years. He is a master of time. No wonder then, that he likes the job.
At three o’clock in the morning the urge to subvert got very strong. He could feed in the word ‘FRAUD’ behind Charlie Haughey, for a micro-second that would hit the heart of the nation. He could put a dog whistle on the other track, so that all the dogs in the country would bark at the same time. He could slow down an interview the fraction it took to make someone slur like a drunk. Of course he resisted this need, because he was responsible, and part
of the broadcasting machine. (Frank’s sister beat him up when he was five, for drawing over the walls with her lipstick, and the pain ticked at the edge of his mind when he was very tired, and subversion was at his fingertips.)
Frank sometimes wondered where it all went, the stuff he threw away; smiles, swear-words, faces that slid out of focus. There is a parallel universe, he thought, in ‘Star Trek’, made up of all the out-takes; the fluffs, blunders and bad (worse) acting that never made it to the final cut. A world where Captain Kirk says ‘shit’ and Spock’s ears become detached. Perhaps the story is better over there. He thought of a universe made up of all the different silences that are nipped, tucked and disposed of. The silence of a hospital at night, the silence when a woman forgets what to say, the silence of a politician. They have to go somewhere. It is a terrible crime, Frank thought, to throw away a silence.
It was the sheer waste that depressed him; the waste of a movement. The woman in the interview raises her arm to smooth an eyebrow and the editor throws away a feast of under-arm hair. He had that gesture, there in his hand, and he threw it away.
When the signal is beamed all the way to Alpha Centauri, the aliens will never see a hairy woman. They will wait for centuries for that one signal, the one they expect and recognise as a call to come and save the world. Who is to say otherwise? Beautiful hairy aliens who never throw anything away except what is deliberately made. Spontaneous Aliens who talk in semaphore and discover everything by accident, in the dustbins of science – which is why they are so advanced.
Frank was dreaming of aliens. He was dreaming of better pay and probably of under-arms. He was dreaming about someone’s laugh that he threw out that day. He was dreaming of the split-second where a man wavered and Frank cut him dead.
Over his monitors, Frank had pasted a sign ‘The mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.’