The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

  The $1,000,000 Derby

  Benny the Ball’s old nag goes mad at the: sound of ambulance bells. So T.C. pretends to be a rich sheikh and runs him in the Derby with a bell on his neck. When the bell falls off they all hare around the track in a hijacked ambulance and the horse recovers his form. He’s just about to win when the commentator says “It looks like a photo finish!” and the horse screeches to a halt, turns to the camera and smiles. I remember that smile, his front hoof lifted and frozen, his face saying “Who? Me?”

  6.00 THE ANGELUS

  6.01 SPORT

  6.15 THE NEWS

  6.20 RECITALS

  Jaqueline du Pre, with her sister Iris on piano.

  6.40 APOLLO 11

  The Landing Craft separates from the Command Module and Collins gets left behind. I can’t remember this without sad and spurious 2001 soundtrack. I can’t remember this without David Bowie singing Major Tom.

  7.10 WORD IN ACTION

  Religious programme with interviews. Never mind the moon – Here’s God.

  7.25 THE LUCY SHOW

  What do children laugh at?

  7.55 AN NUACHT

  8.00 THE ELLA FITZGERALD SHOW

  Definite fake memory of this, like the way you always loved Motown. And one tiny flutter of a real memory, a black face (my first?) in three-quarter profile, with a rind of white light along her cheek. Waiting for the moon; a fibrillation of the heart.

  9.00 APOLLO 11: Touchdown on the Moon.

  Remember that first contact, so tentative and gentle?

  9.30 THE NEWS

  9.45 “YOU’LL NEVER SEE ME AGAIN”

  Thriller. Ben Gazarra looking for his wife, with Leo Genn and Brenda de Banzit.

  10.45 approx. SPORTS FINAL

  Highlights of hurling and football finals, introduced by Brendan O’Reilly. (I know him!)

  11.15 approx. LATE NEWS

  * * *

  Stephen’s favourite show is The Angelus. I thought he might be a bit bored with it by now but he says that you can’t get bored in eternity, he loves repeats.

  As for me, I’m still trying to remember the films I wasn’t allowed to stay up to watch. I never saw You’ll Never See Me Again because I was sent to bed. Even the astronauts, I was told, had gone to sleep. I thought this was a very stupid thing to do when you had just landed on the moon.

  So I will never know if Ben Gazzara found his wife, or why she was gone. Nor will I ever remember, or remember that I forgot, Leo Genn or Brenda de Banzit, despite all the trouble they went to, making up those names. I worry about Brenda de Banzit. I worry about her as she sits in her trailer getting the character right, believing in the director, having doubts about the script. I think she may have only existed for those few minutes on the night of July 20th 1969 and that I missed her. I might have dreamt that night of Brenda finally walking on the moon, but I did not.

  Of course Marcus knows who Brenda de Banzit is. First off, I’ve got the name wrong—it is Brenda de Banzie. She was a respectable type with a soft, Fifties torso who appeared in British films like The Entertainer and A Kid For Two Farthings. Marcus invents his childhood by watching old movies. He remembers films that never made it to Bum-fuck, Co. Leitrim, which is his home town. Marcus is a hero. He has five hundred back issues of the NME in his bedroom, just in case anyone ever gets inside the door.

  I say ‘Brenda de Banzie … She rings a bell. I think she might have done one of the voices on The Herbs’, and I sing ‘I’m Dill the dog, I’m a dog called Dill. Although my tail I’d love to get, I’ve never caught it yet’, stick my tongue out at the end and pant ‘Ahah Ahah Ahah Ahah.’

  ‘I have to admire you,’ says Marcus, ‘you make yourself up as you go along.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How do you remember The Herbs?’ he says. ‘You didn’t even have a telly until 1969.’

  ‘We used to watch it over in the neighbours. “I’m a very friendly lion called Parsley.”’

  ‘Your mother went over to the neighbours to watch The Riordains on a Wednesday night. Your father went over to the neighbours to watch the GAA matches on a Saturday afternoon. You did not go over to the neighbours to watch The Herbs.’

  ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I was in the neighbours. They turned on the television set. The Herbs was on the television set. We watched The Herbs.’

  ‘What age were you?’

  ‘Five? Six?’

  ‘Grace,’ he says, ‘the neighbours only had RTE. It was 1971 before even suburban Dublin, that centre and flower of modern civilisation, went multi-channel.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘I hate to break it to you Grace, but The Herbs was BBC. You saw The Herbs for the first time in your trendy little adolescence, on the BBC.’

  ‘The Herbs was RTE.’

  ‘Murphy agaus a Cháirde was RTE, Dathaí Lacha was RTE. Of course you’re too posh for Wanderly Wagon. You have to invent some fucking Protestant childhood with Bill and Ben the fucking Flowerpot Men.’

  ‘They had an aerial.’

  ‘That’s not what I’m saying.’

  ‘There’s nothing intrinsically Protestant about Bill and Ben,’ I say. ‘You don’t start making chutney and knitting hot-water bottle covers just because the gardener is on his way. You don’t get more channels just by singing Nearer My God to Thee.’

  ‘So what’s your excuse?’

  Oh but Marcus knows what everyone’s game is. Marcus will be revenged on the whole pack of us—because Marcus did not escape from his family like anyone else, he escaped from history. He understands his country intimately and is hurt by the fact that it does not love him back.

  I say ‘You just think that “urban” means “privileged” and “inauthentic”, because where you come from, everyone went to Mass and lived in a cow’s arse and fucked their uncle on a Saturday night, while we sat around forgetting who we really were and trying to speak proper.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Marcus, ‘that’s exactly what I think.’

  Still, he dresses like a successful man. I imagine his body underneath it all, soft and underused. I want to sympathise with him, for all that intellectual effort. I want to sympathise with the fact that revenge will never be enough and success is a lie. I like the way he hates me, even if it is for the wrong reasons. When he says the word ‘suburban’ I feel arrogant and masochistic and a little bit horny. I want to open his wallet and smell it, but I am afraid it smells of shit.

  Don’t ever ask Marcus about his childhood, because he will tell you, because he will be right. You ask him about any day in the past, you say ‘What happened to you on the 19th July 1969?’ and he will say ‘That was the day that someone laughed at me.’ As for me, I don’t even have that much—not even a lie like that to call my own.

  I rang my mother and she said we were at the seaside in the summer of 1969 and weren’t anywhere near a television, so when it came to the moon-landing we listened to it on the radio and looked out the window at the moon. Thanks Ma.

  As for Brenda de Banzie, she thought she might be the old one with the crinkly smile and the breathing problems on Dallas. ‘That’s Barbara Bel Geddes,’ I said. So how was she expected to remember, when they were all of them the same and half of them dead?

  ‘And how’s your young man?’ she said.

  ‘He’s fine.’

  ‘I hope you’re being good to him.’

  ‘He has painted the kitchen,’ I said.

  ‘Well there you go.’

  ‘He has painted it white.’

  ‘White! That’s a terrible colour for a kitchen.’

  ‘Well there you go.’

  ‘How did you let him paint it white?’

  ‘He has a virginity complex,’ I said.

  ‘Grainne,’ she said, ‘he came to the wrong house.’ My mother knows how to swing a paradox. Grainne is my childhood name, if you can call children virgins. And I changed it to Grace because at school they called me Groin.

  ‘Grace,’ I said.
‘Just call me Grace.’

  ‘A nose by any other name’, she said, ‘would smell.’

  I went into the white kitchen and cut my hand on a can of chopped tomatoes, for which my mother is to blame. There may have been a lot of blood, there was certainly a lot of tomato. Half of it hit the white wall, like someone was shot and tried to get to the light switch in the dark. I shagged the rest of it into the bolognese, blood and all.

  It did not agree with Stephen. He ended up calling God on the big white telephone. ‘Gawhhd!’ he said. I slept well.

  Stephen has never seen God. This was part of the swiz of dying. Stephen is still working his way up—as far as he is concerned I am just one more rung on Jacob’s ladder. He doesn’t even know what is at the top. Dread, I suspect.

  I tell him he has a long way to go, choices to make. Will he be a Throne, a Power or a Prince? Will he shine red-gold or violet? The places of the seven who stand before God are already taken, so he won’t be blowing a trumpet on Judgement Day, but others have fallen and more may yet fall. In the meantime he should stop getting excited by the numbers on Sesame Street and take care of his diet, because the puke of angels smells like pestilence and despair.

  He blames the food. In the kitchen onions sprout through their net bags. He turns potatoes green just by looking at them. The water tastes sweeter and there are lilies in the sink. He has a way, I think, with light. There is the sound of bursting glass as herbs outgrow their jars and dough rises like an alien in the airing press. Nevertheless, his shit smells like shit and then some.

  He is getting thicker. The edges are flattening out of his face and the marks on his neck have faded to a porcelain blue. In a year’s time, he says, I will be naked and chubby and carrying garlands for you. I do not want a child, I tell him, let alone a cherub.

  He talks to the telly all the time now, just like the rest of us. He says ‘Go on, do it!’ he says ‘Well that’s a lie for a start!’ And he cries and he switches channels—I suspect without using the remote control. When I come in from work one evening the screen is blank and there is music coming out of the speakers. It looks like DeValera and Kennedy have died again and both on the same day, or the bomb has dropped silently somewhere and they are rootin’ and tootlin’ for the end of the world. Then a clatter of ads breaks through and I realise it is just the picture that’s gone.

  Sitting in the centre of the screen is a dot, like the old-fashioned nub of light that used to stick when you turned a set off. So I go over to the box to give it a good belt. Bang. The television gives a round of applause. Stephen laughs his laugh of celestial gaiety. He has painted the glass a strange and luminous black and in the centre is a small and remarkably detailed picture of the moon.

  Behind the black the pictures are jumping around, agitated and blind—contained, like a couple making love in their in-laws’ house or a hoe-down in a funeral parlour.

  But the moon is beautiful. Even on the television the moon looks beautiful. I wonder what is so sad about it. The Sea of Serenity, The Marsh of Sleep, The Sea of Plenty like plaster coming off a wall. My father’s voice telling them quietly, if my mother is right, under the huge sky and the black noise of the waves, The Alps of the Moon, The Lake of Dreams. And there they are, settled in Tranquillity, two men in a tin pot. You can see them if you look hard.

  ‘What a lark!’ I said. ‘What a jape! Now scrape that off before you come up to bed.’ So that I can feel like I am winning, though probably at the wrong game. The pictures are banging against the screen, the pictures are bursting out all over as Stephen turns to smile at me. His eyes still pull at some vital desire, making my innards and lights feel clotted and strung out. Even now the moist and newborn look is fading from his face. I pull the plug and go upstairs and watch the moon through the window and remember it clearly, pixel by pixel, the screen flickering, the golf ball, the flag.

  Daddy-Long-Legs

  ‘WHAT’S ALL THIS about the television anyway?’ I say when he comes upstairs.

  ‘I want to get into it.’

  ‘Don’t do it,’ I say. ‘They tell you to make shite and work you to the bone. Besides, that’s no place for an angel.’

  ‘It’s a good place for a dead man.’

  I told him that he wasn’t as dead as all that. So many of the men you meet are dead. Prick at the front, wallet at the back. So what if it makes them easy to seduce? It also makes them dangerous. They give you their white blindness. So we ended up shooting the breeze, chewing the cud, talking at the ceiling into the wee small hours. I told him about one man or another, the guy who wore two condoms, the guy with twine in his pocket, the one whose underarms smelt like barbed wire. I told him about looking back. How you lose what you look at. How you turn to salt.

  It is so sweet to understand at four in the morning, the hour when the world turns over, with the bed floating away into the darkness. So I was in love again and Stephen was sad again. He was saying ‘I do want to die. Just one more time. Just once for real’, and I listened to him and I held him in my arms to warm him up and soothe him down. He was light and buoyant, like a soft balloon.

  ‘My blow-up man,’ I said, because nothing felt stupid in the dark, ‘My wonderful inflatable angel’, and Stephen was mildly, even humanly amused.

  I told him that I was in love with him and that having sex was the only way to get rid of it. He disagreed, but the nostalgia for his body became so fierce that he told me about himself, before the bridge.

  He met a girl in Regina when it was still a question of wearing white gloves and doing it in the hedges, because there was nowhere else to go. Not that there were a lot of hedges in Regina. So she was wearing white gloves and the sky was flat and the land was flat. They walked along the horizon because it was all horizon and where they walked the land and the sky peeled back from one another like a zip.

  Stephen said that she was only a child, that the white gloves and the smell of her summer dress were like a dirty front parlour where her aunt sat knitting. The load in his trousers was as heavy and wrong as a turd on the way home from school. He felt like he was carrying a bag of something that he couldn’t put down or open and when they sat under the hedge he did not know where to put his hands, never mind the rest of him, as she sat and talked about her aunt and smoothed the white of her gloves, up and down, over and over.

  He wanted to marry her. He felt that she was pure and good and soiled by life. He wanted to peel and discard her, peel and discard her. He could feel her growing in the sun, there at his side. If it weren’t for the gloves, she might split at the seams. Her name was Lynn.

  She was talking about justice. She was saying that her life was not fair. He stretched himself out in the sun and said ‘Well what did you expect?’

  ‘Oh just the usual things,’ she said and he began to despise her. Her voice was whining and small. She was swelling like a plant. He could not kiss her.

  He felt the flat of his back against the ground and remembered a waltz from the week before. He looked at her white gloves, that were loose on her hands like a bad skin. They made her fingers look squat and small.

  ‘You’re too good for me,’ he said—and meant it.

  ‘What’s too good? I’m not good,’ she said.

  She was pretty. He rolled on to his front and laid his head in her lap. She let the cloth of her white gloves stroke his hair. He said ‘I’m going to go north in a while, make a lot of money’ There would be a cottage with roses at the door.

  He twisted around to face the sun. The sky was hot and flat and very near. There was a piece of her dress, a bright mountain, in the corner of his eye. She lifted her arm and caught a Daddy-Long-Legs in the white bandage of her gloved hand. Raising it between his face and the sky she picked off two of its legs and then she let it go.

  He remembered what his cock was for, and his mouth. He remembered that they were two people sitting under a hedge. And while they were making love, she pulled his buttocks apart with two white-gloved hands.
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  This was how Stephen lost his virginity, he says, not because it was his first time, but because it was a lie. She was not pretty There would be no cottage and no roses.

  I said men are so squeamish when it comes to matters of the heart. They worry about sincerity. They think Sincerity is the last little town on the railroad track, with a freshly painted sign.

  There was nothing for it but to fall asleep. I dreamed that Stephen was hovering as usual over the bed and that his tears were penetrating me, in the way of dreamlike penetrations, and that it was rape in the way that rape is not a shock but an erosion, in the way that it makes you feel older than the mountains and worn down, or so a woman told me once.

  In the morning I find his tears of celestial sadness have left a spattering of faint brown marks on the sheet. I said ‘What has happened to your tears Stephen? They used to be better than Ariel. They used to be liquid light.’

  Love

  IT SEEMS TO be a cause for celebration. We have done one hundred and fifty of the fuckers and are obliged to eat dinner and consume wine, which isn’t so bad now that we are grown up. We have a dispensation from the LoveWagon to like each other, without her paranoia getting in the way. Apart from which she knows her limits, drinks herself into silence and not into speeches about how we couldn’t have done it without Gary in Sound.

  I sit beside Jo who has an instinct for order, and across from Marcus and Frank because you need a good fight when things start to get sentimental.

  Frank says we’ve never had a virgin on the show, that he can smell one from five hundred paces.

  ‘What about Marie from Donnycarney,’ I say with one eye checking Marcus, ‘convent bred, the flower of Irish womanhood?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ says Frank. ‘Convent girls go like bunnies.’

  Frank likes little girls, but he is too sophisticated to like virgins. Frank wants a little girl that knows all the tricks. He’s like most men I know, except he’s not afraid to admit it.

  ‘I never was a virgin,’ I say. Which Frank ignores because he is perfectly sane. Frank has worked for his sanity. He has a wife and a house and he talks too much. He used to tell me how Sheilagh won’t have sex at home anymore but drags him into the bathroom by the belt every time they have dinner with friends. Now he is talking about younger ass. I don’t want to know. Married people should not tell tales. Being miserable in silence is the price they pay for being happy. They bought it. I did not. I am stuck with a couple of one-night-stands and an angel in the kitchen who breaks my appliances and won’t put out. I understand the difference between sex and love, between love and the rest of your life. So don’t let any married man tell me that he has problems with his dick. And keep their wives away from me too, at parties.