The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

  Oh I wanted him all right; his troubled heart, his ribs like knives, his eyelids leaking a flash of blue. I wanted him so much I thought it would never happen, never end, this love you could hear, like a song in the room. So I was quite surprised to find that my body had deserted me in its finest hour, that it had slammed the door and pissed off home. What had been a space was now a rope, twisted through my guts and moored to my heart, which would not let it go. I was spitting out even the thought of him—so hard I was afraid I might turn inside out, there on the candlewick bedspread, in a little corner of a foreign hotel that was forever Ireland.

  So after this dry birth, my cells taught me how to forget him, one day at a time, and my eyes would not cry for me and my womb remained tactful and serene. ‘Bitch,’ I said, and gave up politics with the memory of his voice and of his absolute and irreducible rightness, that didn’t really need me.

  * *

  Frank has gone quiet. No jokes Frank? No jokes.

  So we talk about the movies we are going to make. Marcus is going to make a comedy about Northern Ireland, because that is the only real way to approach it or a fake snuff movie with one real bit left in, just to get back at the snobs. I’m going to make a Country and Irish thriller that is about love. Love? ‘A gay country and western road movie. Set in Kinnegad.’

  ‘Not a lot of gay in Kinnegad.’

  ‘Not a lot of road in Kinnegad.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. So it starts with a body in the boot of a car.’

  ‘Love?’ says Frank.

  ‘If you insist. It starts with a body in the boot of the car. Credits. No, flashback. This country and western singer he picks up a young fella in a bar, a gurrier, ordinary looking, dangerous. Loads of sex. Insane sex. And he sets him up in his flat in Dublin, with the white piano and the white ten-gallon hat, and the white bedroom with the shag carpet, and one day he comes home, comes home hot and worried and kind of poignant and horny, and there’s a body on the bed. Not just any body, a dead body. So he sits on the bed, doesn’t move. And then he reaches over, undoes the dead guy’s shoelace, while the young fella sits in the next room and picks out a tune on the white piano.’

  ‘Stand by your man.’

  ‘Cut to the road. White Beamer. No, a red Thunderbird. No, it has to be white, and they’re driving along with a song on the radio.’

  ‘Stand by your man.’

  ‘So cut to the back of the car, and there’s something dripping out of the boot. There’s blood dripping out of the boot, because the body is in the boot, and it is bleeding in the boot.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And they have this body in the boot.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well they don’t know what to do. They’re just driving along, music on the radio. The boot is leaking.’

  ‘Come on,’ says Marcus.

  ‘Well you tell me,’ I say. And I mean it.

  ‘OK,’ says Marcus. ‘They stop for lunch.’

  ‘They stop for lunch?’

  ‘It’s a movie. They stop for lunch.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes,’ says Marcus. ‘They stop for lunch. In one of these hotels on the main street that’s just a house smelling of cabbage and a broken down woman serving dinner who looks like his mother.’

  ‘And outside’, I say, ‘the blood is still dripping out of the boot. Dripping on to a styrofoam cup in the gutter.’

  We think about this for a while.

  ‘A young girl,’ says Frank, ‘the waitress, with her hair not washed, kind of … underused and country-sexy …’

  ‘Don’t tell me. A young girl.’

  ‘No really. She arrives with the chips and she recognises the singer. She looks at him, and he looks at her and she knows.’

  We stop. Too many things are wrong. So Marcus says ‘He runs out through the door.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Frank, ‘and when he looks back through the window, the psycho is still in there, peeling notes off his wad, like a cowboy, having a joke with the girl. Only it’s the dead man’s money.’

  ‘I don’t know about this,’ I say.

  ‘Whatever,’ says Frank. ‘The car roars off low angle and we see the styrofoam cup in the gutter. Cut to the girl waving tragic pathetic and then she looks down and sees the cup.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It’s not my movie.’

  ‘Oh come on Frank,’ I say. ‘There’s a body in the boot of this car.’

  ‘The girl sees the cup.’

  ‘So they’re driving along the road,’ says Marcus. ‘And something stops them. They get stuck in a herd of cows. All right?’

  ‘No, not all right,’ says Frank.

  ‘Seriously, the cows smell the blood and panic. And they’re climbing on to the bonnet and there’s a dog barking at the boot. And there’s a farmer.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Frank.

  ‘The psycho loses it,’ says Marcus, ‘and reverses over the dog? Yes?’

  ‘No!’ says Frank. ‘The girl sees the cup.’

  Which is when we realise. Frank has fallen in love. How can he put an end on things?

  ‘I interviewed a man once’, says Marcus, ‘who nearly drowned under a herd of cows. They stampeded off the back end of a ferry’

  But Frank is in love and will have none of it. Marcus looks at me over the top of the table. This is serious. Who is it? He always got away with it before.

  Because Frank likes women. He likes their hair and their hands and the fact that they are more interesting than men, when they talk. He likes the way they tell him to fuck off. He likes their breasts when they are young and their jewellery when they age. He is happy to find them complicated, or even false-hearted. So women like Frank. They like him in bed because he delays penetration in the recommended way, though for some this is too long and too late. Then of course, there is always his wife.

  But Frank was careful. He always said that women’s bodies are treacherous, and full of holes. When you can’t put it off any longer they take you in and hold you, so when you flup your dick back out on the sheet, you have left yourself and all of you inside. In there. I told him that a woman’s body provokes a lot more anxiety if you happen to have one yourself. He didn’t believe me. Now everything is upside-down, all his careful sanity.

  * *

  My father claimed to know the secret of happiness. He said that we’re better off without it. How would he know? There is only a scrap of him left in the room, the rest of him is dead or elsewhere.

  The piece of my father that sits downstairs is cunning as hell. His working eye is hooded and his dead eye is fierce. He knows how to survive, knows all about revenge. He says ‘The teacher who twisted my ear is dead and my ear is dead.’ He says ‘I bought this house for twenty-five years. The banker is dead and the money withered and the house is half dead and so am I. But only half.’

  My mother too has her little ferocities. She makes him cups of tea, she leaves the television on full blast. Sometimes she catches him trying to poke at the buttons with his stick. She takes the stick away from him and says, ‘If you crack that tube, the whole thing will explode.’

  It would be wrong to say that my mother does not love my father. It is with love and patience that she tends to his wig. She might have thrown it out long ago, but instead she pinched up her face, put on her rubber gloves, plucked it free and flung it in the washing machine. I like to think of it spinning around with her knickers and her bras like a rat on holiday, but my mother is much too nice for that. The wig was washed alone. She put disinfectant in the prewash to kill it stone dead. The main wash was both concentrated and biological and she put hair conditioner instead of fabric softener in the rinse, because she is thoughtful and good.

  The wig went out on the line where it soaked up the smell of the sun and tortured the cat. By the end of the day it was a new thing. It had, it was true, shrunk slightly, but then, fortunately, so had my father’s head.

  Now she dresses the wig in the morn
ing with her back to my father’s skull. She uses a bristle brush and vigorous strokes, then she turns and crowns him, with one light gesture. She gives the wig a tug at the back and a double, symmetrical tug at the sides. It is done in silence. They both look elsewhere; though sometimes my father cannot shift his dead eye away from her. She never says the forbidden words (bald, cradle cap, wig). At their age it must be better than sex.

  All the same, I fight with my mother. Upstairs, like an open window, she has hung the three secret photographs of my father in his own hair: the picture of their wedding day; the picture of my mother on their honeymoon, sitting on a rug with me in her belly; and the picture of my father on the same rug, standing on his head. It is a pornographic display.

  My father is not able to climb the stairs, so he will never see the three bald photographs hanging on the wall. My mother thinks she hung them out of sight because she loves him. She says she wants to remember things as they really were. As if she didn’t know, that seeing things as they really were is the greatest possible revenge.

  My mother sits on a rug. My father stands on his head. His genitals are quietly upside-down, having a good time with gravity Nothing sums up love better for me, its weight and weightlessness, its tender and inverted freefall, than the picture of my Da giving his bollocks a rest, on a Foxford rug, in the sunshine, in the first hours of my life.

  * *

  Marcus is dug into a conversation with Jo about how wonderful she is. Keep digging, says her face. It will all be one in the morning.

  Frank has taken off his wedding ring and put it in his mouth. He flips it out and holds it like a monocle between his bottom lip and the base of his nose. Then he flips it back in again, holds it between his lips and teeth and sticks his tongue out through it. Is he drunk? I don’t want to watch. I don’t want to see the wet and remarkable red of his tongue. I don’t want to see how it fills the gold of the ring. I am afraid that he will swallow the ring, that it will lodge in his gullet or in the sphincter at the top of his stomach, or in his pyloric sphincter or in, God knows, any other sphincter I could name.

  Never mind Frank, I think I’m drunk myself. I imagine his alimentary tract lined and jointed with gold rings, like the neck of a Masai woman, only on the inside.

  I say ‘Take that out of your mouth before you choke on it’, and Frank laughs like this is a really good joke. Love does not suit men.

  I say, ‘So will it pass?’

  ‘Not this time,’ says Frank.

  ‘Shit Frank. You fucking eejit. Just hang on. Just hang on and keep your mouth shut and you’ll be fine.’ Frank laughs again.

  ‘She knows,’ he says. ‘I told her last week.’

  ‘Well take it back. Don’t do it Frank. Don’t even think about doing it. Don’t break my heart.’ I sound sincere. I must be drunk. I am drunk.

  So I cannot claim to remember all the revelations that followed after Frank laughed too much and hedged a bit and drank some more and finally blurted that he has fallen stupidly, horribly, in love with his own wife. And she doesn’t want to know. Why should she, fifteen years on?

  I do remember the appalling detail of her childbirth scar, like an impossibly beautiful child whose harelip makes you love it, because it has a flaw.

  ‘Of course you love your wife, you pillock,’ I said, feeling abused.

  ‘You love your wife like a wife,’ he said. ‘You don’t love her like a fucking car crash.’

  Frank was worried he might have a cardiac arrest. He got a hard-on half a mile from the house, and if he didn’t plan it right he would still have it leaving for work the next morning. If he kissed her too fast when she said ‘Is that you?’ if he pulled her gently by the hips, with the flat of his hands wrapped around the bone and his fingers pressed into the dent on the north side of her iliac crests. If he did this at the wrong time, when she was at the cooker with a pot in her hand for example or talking on the phone, or wiping a child’s nose, or any of the hundred moments where she forgot herself, and he wanted to love her into further loss, when he wanted to worry the nub of her cervix like a boy playing with the knot at the base of a balloon. If he mistook or mistimed and she pushed him away, like a wife might, instead of like the woman he loved so hard it hurt.

  ‘Well that must be nice,’ I said. ‘After all these years.’ Fuck you Frank.

  ‘I can’t touch her,’ he said. ‘She thinks I’ve picked up some nineteen-year-old and the guilt is making me horny. She went through my dirty shirts with a nose like a Hoover and then smashed up the kitchen because there was nothing there to smell. She says this is the last time. She says she’s looking for someplace else to go’, which is the funniest thing I’ve heard in a long time, so I laugh until I feel good.

  Frank smiles. He is in love, and ordinary things are unbearable, changed and sweet. Even I am beautiful, here on the other side of the table—though who can say if it is really me. Frank’s eyes make me sad for Stephen and then the penny drops.

  ‘How long has this been going on?’

  ‘I don’t know. Forever. A couple of weeks.’

  ‘After you went to the bookies?’

  ‘I’m always going to the bookies.’

  ‘After the Gold Cup?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Oh just men,’ I lied. ‘How everything changes when they feel they’re winning.’

  On the other side, Marcus is telling Jo how much he would like to be in love with her. Jo’s face is smiling. She knows it’s just his way of complimenting people and insulting them at the same time.

  ‘You’re real,’ he is saying. ‘You’re the real thing. You’re everything I admire.’

  ‘Well fall for me so,’ says Jo. ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘I admire you too much,’ says Marcus.

  Down the table even the LoveWagon is getting misty-eyed, she is playing with the knife in her hand like each man kills the thing he loves.

  ‘The thing about you is, you’re not ambitious,’ says Marcus to Jo. ‘Even though you’re better than the rest of us all put together. You put up with a load of wankers. You hold the gig together, and you never complain.’

  ‘That’s my job,’ says Jo.

  The LoveWagon is touching the lip of her glass with the knife. If I don’t start a fight, she’ll start a speech.

  ‘Why are we talking about work?’ says Jo.

  ‘I was talking about you,’ says Marcus.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I was saying how great you are, but you don’t want to hear.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘You’re too calm, Jo. It’s more than you’re paid for.’

  ‘Looks like I’m into overtime so,’ she says and looks at her watch.

  ‘Don’t worry Jo,’ I say loudly. ‘Marcus never falls for real, even when he wants to. Marcus falls for expensive-looking women that make him think he’s in the movies.’

  ‘You know fuck all,’ said Marcus.

  ‘Then he tells them they’re not real enough. He has a poor man’s heart.’

  ‘At least I have one.’

  ‘Yeah yeah.’

  ‘Don’t you two start,’ says Jo. ‘Or I will lose it.’

  I look at him and he looks at me and both of us wish that we could stop using the wrong organs, heart and mouth, both of them liars and nothing more appropriate down Mexico way. Poor Marcus, says the drink, poor Grace. No love lost, no love to lose—two of a kind. Which is why I say, ‘You think. You think … well fuck you.’

  * *

  My father worked for the electricity supply board. He put on his hat and walked out the door and switched the nation on. He put up pylons single handed, knotted the cables, flung them over the country like a net. He set the turbines spinning, saved old ladies from the dark. Everyone’s father is a hero. Everyone’s father is loved. They have it easy, in a way.

  But my father did not have it easy. This is a man who had to teach his children how to swim, without getting his head wet. This was a man who could
not suffer a breeze, but put us on our bikes and let the saddles go, each at the right time. This was a man who could not bear history, but bought a television set so we could look at the moon.

  My father treated facts like sweets in his pocket that he could take out, surprised that there was one left. He took a personal interest in low wattage bulbs. Traffic lights made him sentimental. His children broke his heart just to look at them.

  There are many other fathers I could have had. I could have had a bus-kicker for a father, who walked along the street, said ‘Gyoarraughhdah’ to the double-deckers, who got on at the corner and fought his way off before the next lights. I could have had a soldier for a father, who gave me fifty pence to shine his buttons and told me that men are animals. I could have had Marcus’s father, coming up the stairs in his long-johns, with the soft rain streaming down and the mastitis on the heifer in the haggart. I could have had the LoveWagon’s father, a cut-glass drunk, nearly a Protestant, who came home from the hospital on a Thursday evening, rattled his paper and said ‘I should get a job in England. You can say what you like about English women, but they know how to wash.’

  Instead I had a suburban father, an ordinary man, who bought his new house for his new children and built a better life. Why should I blame him, that he kept a little over for himself?

  * *

  Jo bangs on the table with her fork again. She hits her own chin by accident and doesn’t seem to notice. Apart from that she looks entirely sober.

  Marcus says, ‘You’re the one who should be calling the shots Jo.’

  ‘I don’t want to call the shots.’

  ‘You should want to call the shots. You’re better than her. You’re better than …’ The LoveWagon has laid her knife on the table. She looks ready. When Jo pushes her plate away like a bad memory, she takes it as a signal to stand.

  ‘Why should I want?’ says Jo.

  ‘Don’t do it!’ shouts Frank and the LoveWagon smiles.

  ‘Because you’re good, that’s why You’re real.’

  ‘What’s real?’ says Jo. ‘I couldn’t be bothered.’

  ‘Look at you. You’re bothered.’