The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

  There was also a broken-winged sparrow who shat all over our hands. We didn’t mind that either and put it in a cardboard box.

  ‘No,’ we said, ‘don’t you touch him’, as we picked him up, ‘he’s sick.’ Then the sparrow died.

  Some of the hamsters started going insane, just like people might. We put sherry in their drinking water to calm them down, but they just kept on mounting and biting their brothers and sisters, their daughters, nephews, grannies, cousins, their own front legs—and the drink had nothing to do with it. I didn’t know that sex had anything to do with it either. I dropped the small ones down my shirt for fun. They ran around in there like my breasts might, or like the hands that would feel them. I didn’t know they were mad. A few more corpses every morning and then the whole lot disappeared. We were used to it, in a way.

  Then my mother went into hospital, just like having a baby. Who looked after us? I cannot remember. It must have been my father, tying shoelaces, combing hair, buying things with instructions on the packet. He might have bought us lemonade. Surely I should remember fish fingers and lemonade and wearing the same clothes all week? Surely I should remember him dumping us in the bath, three at a time and drying us with the wrong towel, how many children at a time, rasping us with the biggest roughest towel until we shrieked.

  It was not a baby. It was benign.

  My mother did not believe in frightening girls, she thought it would give them menstrual cramps when their own time came. Still, we knew about the wrong thing in her tummy. It must have been the neighbours whispering over cups of tea with the door shut. The size of a ping pong ball. The size of an apple. The size of a fist. There was a whole shop in there, the size of a piece of fruit. There was a whole cathedral in there, the size of your head. Wide shot, close up, wide shot, close.

  What I remember is not so much the size but the hair. That is what they whispered. It sweated as it grew and put out hairs. Those are the easy ones to catch. You know they are harmless if they grow hair and maybe a tooth (maybe a smile). Of course it made sense.

  I knew where she got it. I knew what had put the hairy thing in her tummy. It was not my father at all, but the thing on his head. This was why it hurt her. Why it was not a baby. We were right to be afraid.

  Stephen says ‘Tell me something good for a change. I am tired of all this.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Something to rest my mind on.’

  ‘Give me my body back. You can rest on that.’

  ‘I am tired of all this,’ he says. ‘I didn’t exactly ask for this.’

  It seems that I am set to lose him, one way or the other. I am filled with the shame that happens with strangers, as if I had shown him something, but he had not noticed. As if I had shown him something and he did not care. What sort of an angel was he anyhow?

  ‘Am I so bad?’ I say.

  ‘Am I so bad?’ he says.

  ‘Stop that,’ I say.

  ‘Stop that’, and he turns his back to me, hefting the sheet over with him and bringing it too far, so that a line of piqued flesh lies exposed, sunk into the mattress.

  I sit there as the sun sets. It moves through a tear in the cloud and shadows lash out from the roots of the furniture, making things look old and tenacious. Stephen’s hair flares gold in the light and sets a faint hum of colour around his shadow on the pillow. I do not mind him having a halo. I just hate the way it comes and goes.

  Tell me something good, he says. And because I am helpless I tell him of the day I learnt about clouds, sitting with my father on a hill in the woods where you could see out and not be seen, watching the light and dark chase each other across the countryside. My father looked at the sky and I looked up with him and saw how high the clouds were off the ground and how much higher the sun. I looked at the ground and back at the clouds and realised all at once about angles and light, about wind and distance. I realised that things did not have to touch the ground in order to throw a shadow.

  I pointed at the dark patches running across the ground, said ‘Look, it’s the clouds’, and laughed. I remember my father looking back at me in the sad, amazed way parents have when they realise the distance between the world and their child.

  ‘Did you never see that before?’ he said. As though my seeing it made all the difference.

  ‘Hunph,’ says Stephen.

  ‘Not good enough?’

  ‘Fine,’ he says.

  Stephen’s wings shift under the sheet like stumps. I am so distressed I cannot speak or move away. I sit by the bed as the dusk closes in, then clears again into night. And when the moon comes to the window, I watch the reflection of the glass on the wall, until it goes.

  Seeing Yourself

  I KNOW HER as soon as I walk into the room, this girl who might claim my angel, this girl who might, on a whim, turn into me. She is sitting quietly and smiling. Her eyes are bright and her legs are crossed. She looks like someone I know, but that doesn’t worry me. We choose them for it. We say ‘I have a Julia Roberts type, except for the mouth’. She looks like the girl-next-door because she is supposed to look like the girl-next-door. She looks like everyone else we’ve ever had on the show, but this time, it doesn’t calm me down.

  They go through their camera tests while I work on a new game for the biggest, the best, the last show of all, looking up now and then so they will think I am paying attention. People do not watch the television, they fight, feed the baby, read the paper, until something catches their eye.

  She catches my eye all right. Warm voice—lower middle—receptionist—basketball—nightclubbing—anecdote—left job to travel—funny anecdote—wants to work with relief agency. Damien: ‘What kind of relief are you talking about?’ Doesn’t walk out. Laughs ‘naughty boy’ laugh with a bit of ‘would you ever cop on to yourself’ on the side. Perfect. Eyes a bit too glittery.

  I go over to her and introduce myself. She thinks that she hasn’t got the gig because Damien is on the other side of the room. I tell her that I am in charge. She smiles and adjusts, taking comfort in the state of my clothes.

  ‘A bit nerve wracking,’ I say and she glances down at her legs, at the line where they are bisected by her skirt. There is something a little too orange about her tights, or too orange, perhaps, about her legs. A dodgy fake tan slapped on in a panic, because the camera never lies.

  ‘You could say,’ she says.

  ‘You did well.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Now tell me, what do you like about the show?’

  So she did, and it all seemed very reasonable, if this weren’t the woman who was going to steal my angel away from me. So I ask the question that we never ask, though we do give them all a little speech about good fun and goodwill. I say ‘You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?’ and she says ‘No’ in a way that tells me she is lying, though it takes more than one lie to describe most of the relationships I know. Whatever the story, one lie is enough for me.

  ‘Well Edel,’ I say, ‘you’ve got the gig’, and she is thrilled.

  I stay to fix a wardrobe call. ‘Bring in some clothes and we’ll have a look.’

  ‘You want me to wear my own clothes?’ she says and there is more than the usual panic in her voice, more than the usual coy ‘Oh I couldn’t possibly’, that you leave outside the door if you want to be on TV.

  She looks up at me and I do not know what she sees. Nothing is my own anymore. She might see herself. She might see the pity I feel, for no reason at all. It is when I remember my own body, sad, sweet and blank, that I know what I wanted to say to her.

  ‘Have you …? You haven’t been on the show before?’

  ‘Sorry?’ she says.

  ‘I’m sure I’ve seen you on the show before.’

  ‘In the audience?’

  ‘No.’ It was a bare moment.

  ‘On the show?’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Oh good. You’re not called Marie Keogh, are you?
’ I was not being polite. But although I had gone too far I never expected her to say:

  ‘Is that her name?’

  So I wasn’t the only one. She herself was sitting watching the telly one night when she saw someone who looked just like her in the audience of The Late Late Show.

  ‘It must be somebody else so.’

  But that was only the start of it. She also saw herself answering a question about European union in a vox pop in Henry Street.

  ‘Maybe it’s someone who looks just like you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Or what …?’

  ‘She is wearing my clothes.’

  ‘She is wearing your clothes,’ I say.

  ‘But different.’

  ‘Different.’

  ‘Different combinations.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘It’s not me,’ she says. ‘Really. Ask my boyfriend. He saw me on Questions and Answers when I was away in Spain for two weeks. Talking about the Beef Tribunal. What do I know about the Beef Tribunal? I didn’t even have a tan.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t have a boyfriend?’

  ‘Well not any more,’ she says. ‘Obviously.’

  Then she saw herself on the LoveQuiz. What really annoyed her was that this woman dressed better, even though they wore the same clothes. She accessorised.

  ‘I keep buying scarves,’ she says. ‘But I can never wear them right.’

  So she cut her hair short and dyed it blonde and sat down to write to us personally. And here she was. She produces a driver’s licence. ‘Edel Lamb’ it says.

  ‘Fair enough,’ I say, because you cannot fold a flood, and put it in a drawer. Besides she doesn’t look pregnant—and my mother is always right about these things.

  Getting Notions

  ‘GROW, GROW, GROW, your goat, gently down in Sneem.’ My father is singing when I come home. I never knew he could sing.

  ‘Of course he can sing,’ says my mother.

  ‘Well there’s a turnip for the books,’ I say and she says, ‘Grainne, one of you is bad enough.’

  ‘When did he stop singing?’

  ‘What do you mean stop?’

  ‘Well I never heard him before.’

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ she says, ‘you forget all the good things.’ And from the front room comes a plangent baritone that I can’t even imagine coming out of my father’s face.

  ‘He sounds in great form.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, a little warily (‘Warily, warily, warily, warily, siphon off the cream’).

  ‘So what’s the latest?’

  ‘Oh nothing new here.’

  ‘Well he’s singing at least.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Anything strange or startling?’

  ‘No. Grainne. Nothing strange’, and she laughs, as well she might.

  ‘Any improvement?’

  ‘Well, he reminds me more of himself. I suppose.’

  ‘That’s good.’ And this sudden breach of the privacy that surrounds marriages and sickbeds makes me familiar.

  ‘In what way. What way do you mean?’

  I look in to the sitting room to say hello. My father is sitting in the wing-chair in the space between the door and the window. He is wearing a coat and hat, with one of my mother’s silk scarves around his neck and another around his wrist.

  ‘There’s something different about him.’

  ‘Would you say?’ says my mother, making me feel like I am six years old again, trying to fix the difference between her words and the smile on her face.

  When my brother Phil arrives we all sit in the sitting room and talk over the sound of the television, the way we did as children, except that when we were children my father did not sit in the corner and croon, I don’t care what anyone says.

  We grew up a few years ago and started to look at each other when we spoke, which was always somehow surprising. It was Phil who started it. After he got a job and a flat Phil would walk across the carpet and turn the television off—a self important gesture, we thought. Tonight however, Phil seems as keen as anyone to sit and hoot at the ads, shout at the news and tell me the graphics are wrong again. All of which I find reassuring. It means that I am not the only one who has noticed.

  Because if it comes to a choice between watching the television and watching my father’s wig, the television wins hands down. The choice is made easier for us by the fact that the wig has grown since the last time we saw it and we don’t want to mention this fact to each other, no matter how loud or entertaining the programme might be. We don’t want to look at my father’s wig long enough to see if it is still growing; say a half an hour, plus commercial break. We don’t want to find out whether the wig has just started to grow, or just stopped growing. Which is to say, we want to find this out urgently and with every straining optic nerve; with every orbital muscle and cord of tissue that keep the eyeballs, as we have discovered, so tenuously in our heads.

  We watch the news and I tell my mother that the reporter once threw a typewriter out of a first-floor window at her lover who was leaving the building. Then we watch the ads and my mother says ‘How much would he get for that now?’ and I say ‘I dunno. Loads.’

  Then we watch a chat show and Phil says he saw the host going into Brown Thomas’s last Christmas which is my cue to talk about his sex life and my mother’s to say ‘I don’t think he would sleep around, he’s far too clean’, and mine to say ‘Maybe he does it in the shower.’

  These are old conversations, but it is difficult to be original when there’s a wig growing in the corner of the room and the man under it is laughing his head off.

  ‘Why do you not do any good programmes?’ says Phil as the chat show switches from amputees to disco dancing champions. ‘Hot on the heels’, says the presenter, ‘of their recent success.’

  ‘WAVE!’ shouts my father. ‘Do you remember Josie?’

  ‘This is an excellent programme,’ I say.

  ‘It’s awful,’ says Phil.

  ‘Married that guy in Jordan before he left her,’ says my father.

  ‘Awful,’ says Phil. ‘Look at that woman’s backside. Who was responsible for that? Who was responsible for letting that backside on, in pink lycra?’

  ‘You want beautiful?’ I said. ‘Look in the mirror. You want good telly? It’s the woman down the road making a show of herself.’

  ‘Poor Josie,’ says my father. ‘Cad a dheanfaimid feasta gan Ahmed?’ My mother starts to laugh. She says ‘Yes I remember Josie.’

  ‘Well there you have it,’ says my father and she laughs again.

  Phil and I start to panic. We turn up the volume.

  ‘Tatty,’ says Phil. ‘Condescending. Self important.’

  ‘You want self important? Look at you. In your Armani knickers because you can’t afford the suit.’

  ‘Under where?’ says my father.

  ‘Here it is,’ says my mother, for no apparent reason and puts her hand on his arm.

  ‘People don’t want the telly getting notions,’ I say. ‘They just want some company out of it, a bit of gossip, a bit of drama, a sing-song around the piano.’ In the corner of my eye, I see my father’s wig creeping imperceptibly down his neck.

  ‘You don’t even believe that. Look at that nonsense,’ says Phil, who sees where my eyes have strayed and wants to fix them back on the set.

  ‘So? It’s my job to believe it,’ I say.

  ‘You wish.’

  Upstairs my mother finds me looking at a new picture on the wall. It is a picture of her, with a baby in her arms. The baby is me. She sits in the grass and holds me up for the camera, mother-love in her face and love for the person taking the picture in her eyes.

  ‘Why did you put that up?’ I say to her.

  ‘Grow up, Grainne,’ she says, on her way to the bathroom.

  ‘I’m in that picture.’

  ‘I would have thought’, she says, ‘that was the point.’

  ‘Who took it?’ I sa
y. ‘Did Da take that?’

  ‘Who do you think?’ she says as she closes the door.

  She stays in the bathroom too long, while my father sings downstairs and Phil sits in silence. My mother cries privately but with no shame. She cries easily, because it is her right to cry, in her own bathroom, in her own life. She cries quietly, and with abandon, because her tears, like her children, are her own.

  Downstairs the chat show has shifted to a half hour about the Shannon. Local people stand up in the audience to be on the television and to be counted.

  ‘Hydroelectric Scheme,’ says the television. My father starts to croon.

  ‘Airport,’ says the television. He breaks into song.

  ‘Satellite link,’ says the television, a dream my father had, hanging in space while the earth rolled under it.

  ‘The pale moon was rising,’ sings my father. ‘Above the cream fountain.’

  And suddenly there is a choir of girls singing with him in three-part harmony: the serious altos in their velvet dresses, the gamey mezzos with their air-hostess eyes and the poor, glorious soprano, her lips grasping the high notes like a horse picking up a polo mint. They sing to break your heart, the Flower of Irish Womanhood, their eyes true, their hands sweaty, their virginity as real as Irish Coffee. (Why not?)

  In the corner of my eye I see that I was mistaken. The wig has stopped growing. The wig is not growing anymore. With a bit more effort we might realise that it was always that length, ever since we were children. Then the wig starts growing again.

  And all the time, stretching and twisting between myself and Phil on the sofa, is our childhood, in three-ply.

  Revenge

  THE BEGINNING OF revenge is the childhood body, its milk white parting. Marcus and I sit at either end of the office, with one childhood each. It seems a fair distribution.