The Portable Virgin
Page 10
Soon after he started the job, Frank began to pick up the pictures on the side of the road and string them together in his head. His car stops at the lights beside some road-workers. They talk over the pneumatic drill in glances and a toss of the head. The age of the men is surprising, they have pot bellies and cement dust has settled in the creases of their clothes. Everything is coated with the road; there is cement caked under their fingernails, and their boots are encrusted with tar – in three weeks’ time they will be altogether solid. Frank turns the dust, the wheelbarrow full of flaming tar, the traffic cones, and the way the drill turns everything mute, into a beer commercial, where the world is tinted blue. He catches the looks between the men to the rhythm of the song ‘Heart of Stone’. It is a good piece, but short. Someone changes the station on a remote control as the traffic lights go green.
It got worse. Frank dreamt of the slice of time between shots, so thin, it couldn’t be said to exist at all. He edits and re-edits the film of his father in his sleep. The story of his father is a loose montage that also involves clay and calloused hands, a boot on the side of a spade, a figure moving over the brow of a hill. Sometimes the music is sentimental, sometimes unsettling. Most often he uses the sound of a distant wireless where a quiz show is being played out, and the sound gets closer when his father walks into the room.
The Sunday dinner table is composed of glances from one child to another, and warning looks from his mother. The camera goes under the table, where one small foot in a long grey schoolboy sock kicks out at another. He sees his father’s mouth chewing, he sees his knife and fork cutting the meat with delicate violence. The sound-track is silent, except for the scrape of cutlery.
Frank twitches in his sleep. He is running along a mile of tape where his family are caught like ants in amber. Sometimes he feels as though he will fall into the picture, as though the dinner table is under a stretch of water, or glass. Every few seconds he leaps over the gap between one shot and the next, and the gaps become wider.
His father at the table lifts his fork and points it at the camera. Frank leaps away to the salt-cellar, then drives over to his mother’s face, jerks back to his father’s hand. His father is talking. Frank cuts out the word ‘slut’ and, before he can stitch it up, falls headlong into the thin, deep hole that he has made. ‘You were dreaming.’ Moira wakes him with a smile.
Moira makes it easier for him. Every time she moves, she throws it away. She has an abandoned grace. She hardly notices him there on the other side of the table, and he picks up the casual pieces as her hand drops into her lap.
‘I don’t know.’ It is a sigh. She doesn’t know that she has spoken. Her hand scratches the top of her leg and Frank drives into work thinking about sex that is entirely random, the way people graze each other in their sleep.
It would be nice to have a child, to go into work after a night of two-hourly feeds and claim it was the pints. It would be nice to say that no matter how frantic the work got, no matter how much the world was cut up into shots and the producer at his back paced the room, there was something of his that had its own slow time. He would do a gardening programme that looked at a rose growing for half an hour, or use a single shot of waves on a beach that went on for as long as the tape was in the camera. No tricks. He would take the memory of his father’s cigarette smoke, coming from a hand that had fallen by the side of the chair, and he would stay with it until the cigarette burned down and was dropped on the floor. Force himself to look. Don’t cut away.
Moira is hard to find these days. She spends a lot of time in various attitudes around the house. The evening is like a locked-off shot on the sitting room as she fades from the armchair and appears at the table, then fades again and is standing at the window, one hand holding a cigarette at an angle and the other cupped around an elbow that should be wearing evening gloves. When they talk she looks at the carpet as though she sees something growing there. There is a small eddy in her eyes, a slight shift of the current that strays from where she is looking. Moira was always aimless, casual, troubled. It was a look that mothers have and it made his lovemaking hopeful and direct, like a man posting a letter that would change everything.
On Sunday morning Frank surprises himself by getting up early and cleaning the house. He washes the kitchen floor, runs a cloth along the skirting-boards, cleans out the toilet and talks to Moira over the sound of the hoover with a nod of the head. On Monday she wakes up to find him standing by the window with no clothes on, scratching his stomach and staring. He goes to the supermarket on his own and buys some trout and almonds which he makes for her that night, with a salad full of vegetables that he never knew existed until he was twenty-one. He kisses her back while she sleeps and puts his hand over the Y of her legs, to keep her safe.
In unguarded moments while he is at work, Moira flicks into the corner of his eye. There is no pattern to it. She has taken to reading children’s books. She has eaten her way through Dr Doolittle and enthuses about Dab Dab the duck.
‘What is the difference,’ she asks him, ‘between doing something and not doing something? When I was a kid, hell would open up if you stepped on the crack in the path and the devil would kiss you – but he never did.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
She rubs the corner of her mouth hard with the tip of a finger, as though her lipstick was beginning to smear.
‘I want to go somewhere.’
‘Anywhere you like.’
‘Bolivia?’
‘Sure.’
For some reason everyone is using Spanish music in their programmes that week. It makes the cutting very fast and the colours as sharp as an ad for washing powder. He passes a small girl in her communion dress in the street and there are flamenco flounces down the back of her white skirt.
‘How about Barcelona? We can afford that.’ But she just laughs.
It came together in all the things she threw away. As he sat working at his console, the pictures knitted one into the other. Moira glancing at the phone. Moira rubbing at her thigh, as though there was a burr caught between her leg and her jeans. She comes in through the hall door, with the keys between her teeth and they drop to the floor. She wakes in the morning surprised and her mouth seems caught on the pillow.
It is all in the fraction of the second before he cuts away.
They are sitting in the dining room, in an endless two-shot.
‘I love you,’ Moira says; she leans over to put her hand on his arm but stops. ‘I love you more than anything. Anything. It happened by accident. I don’t understand the why. I stepped on the crack in the path by accident and nothing happened. It didn’t open up. I didn’t fall into hell.’
Reaction shot Frank. The film goes on fire.
‘Frank, I can’t tell the difference between things. I can’t tell the difference between what I want to do, what I mean to do, and something that just happens.’
‘What was his name?’
She opens her mouth to speak. He cuts away to the hand that holds the cigarette and before he can stitch it up, falls headlong into the thin, deep hole that he has made.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
‘Luck be a Lady’ first appeared
in the ‘Summer Fiction’ series
in the Irish Times, July 1990;
‘The Portable Virgin’ was first published
in Revenge (Virago, 1990),
edited by Kate Saunders.
Thanks to Mary and Bernard Loughlin,
the Tyrone Guthrie Centre,
Annaghmakerrig, where some
of this collection was written.
SPECIAL THANKS TO
MARTINA, ALEX, AND D.B.K.
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Copyright © Anne Enright 1991
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