The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

  I nearly like my new girl’s body, whose sweat doesn’t smell anymore. I might as well use it. I take it with me into the LoveWagon’s office and sit it in a chair. I put my hands under my thighs to keep myself from fidgeting and I resist the urge to blow bubbles with my spittle, pull my skirt over my face or ask her for money. She is banging her remote control on the desk. If she turns it on me I might just disappear.

  The television breaks into life. She has been watching the audition tape. Stephen looks out of the screen at us, frozen. A frame bar scrolls upwards across his face, rewriting him each time.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ says the LoveWagon. It is a good question. What I am saying is as big as the room. What I am saying is all around me so I can only say it one piece at a time.

  ‘It’s not fair!’ That is what I am saying. She looks at me.

  ‘Fair,’ she says softly, nostalgic for the thing itself. ‘Fair’ as if it were a word she hadn’t heard in years like cack, or poo, though the people around her were always talking shite.

  ‘I’m saying that I can toe the line. All right?’ What did I say?

  ‘Nothing lasts for ever, Grace.’

  ‘Nothing lasts for ever, and when it comes to the crunch I can toe the line.’

  ‘By the time you see the crunch, it has usually come and gone.’

  Her hands are very mannered, very careful. She is presenting the news for the deaf in slow motion. Behind them, Stephen has, not inappropriately, started to laugh. ‘Huh’ he says.

  ‘You could have told me.’

  ‘I told you they were serious. I was blue in the face telling you.’

  ‘But not so I knew what you were talking about.’

  ‘Aw,’ says Stephen, stopping and lapsing again. ‘Aw. Aww. Awww. Hhwawh.’

  ‘I named this show,’ I say. ‘I made the difference. Tell me something on the show that I didn’t do, that Marcus did.’

  ‘No-one doubts you.’

  ‘Awh. Uh Hwuh.’ It is crawling out of his face like an exorcism.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she says. ‘What do you want?’

  How can I say what I want? I just don’t want to be left behind, while Marcus goes out to buy six new shirts or she floats upstairs like Mary Poppins on her non-stick backside.

  ‘Hujhhawarrrr,’ says Stephen.

  ‘It’s only a rumour anyway’, she says.

  ‘You told Marcus it was all decided.’

  ‘They have decided it may happen.’

  ‘Wuh. Huh,’ says Stephen on the screen.

  ‘It depends on us. It depends on you.’

  ‘Hwuawrghh. Huh.’

  ‘What do you want? You can get anything you like around here. If you don’t let the uncertainty get you down. Seriously. Work with the confusion. Not against it.’

  ‘Anything’, said her hands, ‘you want.’

  She does not know what I want. She does not know the meaning of the word ‘confusion’. With all her this-or-that, her either-or-and-both. When I was a child I wanted other girls’ bald-and-hairy fathers for my own. But I didn’t get them either.

  ‘I want the Dating Show.’

  ‘And? Any ideas?’

  Why should I give her my ideas? She knows better how to use them than to have them. Still, I lean over to the VCR and make it work with the touch of a few buttons, like a child.

  ‘Here’s my presenter, for a start.’

  ‘Oh,’ says the LoveWagon while Stephen, released, slips into his laugh of celestial gaiety.

  I leave her looking at the tape. Stopping it, rewinding, playing the laugh again. Stop. Rewind. Laugh. Stop. Rewind. Laugh. Stop.

  At the door I remind her that Marcus might know about humiliation but he can’t handle sex.

  ‘He’s very good at the games,’ I say and we both smile, though who is to say what she finds funny? I go to the toilet and piss her out. I piss out Stephen’s stop and start. I piss myself, with my new child’s bladder, urgently, easily, back into the flow of time.

  Half

  WHEN I GET back, Stephen is nicely insane. How can I tell you half the things he said?

  ‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen,’ he said that a few times.

  ‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen.’

  ‘Good evening Ladies and Gentlemen.’

  ‘Dia dhiobh a dhoine uaisile agus failte roimh.’

  The whole house smells of depilatory cream, the maddest smell I know. Stephen has acquired himself a tan and some more teeth.

  The washing machine has been going for a week and the place is full of sheets. Stephen cannot fold them on his own. I pick one up and am amazed. He has never folded a sheet with someone else. He has never stood at one end of the room, with two corners of a sheet in his outstretched arms, never brought the ends together, held one arm high and dropped the other to pick up the fold. He has never walked the length of the sheet and handed over to the person at the other end, stooped to pick up the new fold, walked half the length again, handed over again.

  We get tangled. He hands over the wrong face of the sheet to me, the left corner in his right hand and the right in his left. He doesn’t care that when he stoops, there is only a knot, swinging by the floor.

  There is nothing I can do. I am two years old again. I want to lie down on the clean sheets and show him my stomach. When he walks across the room I want to take his hands, walk up his legs and do a somersault.

  He takes me upstairs and shows me what he has written. He has made a list of errors.

  Errors:

  No. 1) That Isaac couldn’t tell his kid from a goat.

  No. 2) That the Isle of Man is bigger when you are on it.

  My mother rings. She asks to talk to me and I take my thumb out of my mouth.

  ‘Hullo?’ I say into the receiver as though there might be a big mystery in there.

  ‘So how’s Grace?’ she says.

  ‘Hullo?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, a little testily. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t leave your father,’ she says. ‘Put me on to Stephen’, as if he hadn’t started all of this in the first place.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you get some sleep?’ she says. ‘Are you sleeping?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Try and get some sleep.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘I said OK.’

  ‘How’s work?’ she says and then changes her mind. ‘Try and get a bit of sleep’, and I hear my father calling and a sigh as she puts the receiver down on the table. I hang up. But I don’t know when she does. I hang up but I suspect the line is open all night.

  I dream about wetting the bed and after the water goes cold I wake up and find myself in the dry.

  ‘There’s no point blaming me,’ says Stephen.

  So I blame my mother. I blame her because that is what mothers are for. I blame her for the wig and for middle age, for the small corpses she hid behind the sofa and in the wardrobes. Which is to exaggerate, of course. Which is to exaggerate. My mother loved children and welcomed each of us as we came in the door. Still there is something wrong with all this talk of swimming and of babes that strode in smiling through the wicket gate of her heart.

  I was a normal birth. Which means that blood and a hole torn out of your arse is normal. Peekaboo.

  No. I was not a normal birth. How could I be? Mine was a slow, angry delivery. My mother held on to me like a pervert. I know, because I was there.

  So there I was, three weeks overdue. And there was my mother, frightened of what might come out of her. I felt like I was smothering. I would have held my breath but there was no breath to hold in the little wet tea-bags of my lungs (little bags of desire). My hair was grown, my nails were grown, I scratched myself and graffitied her and it must have been the blood-smell
that triggered me to—there is no other way to put it—piss myself.

  And so I poisoned my mother, nearly killed my mother, who let me go, astonished, violated and clawing at the anaesthetist. I was shot out in a spasm of disbelief that any child could be so ungrateful. We had reached, you might say, a premature understanding.

  And holding on to my heel, says Stephen, as Esau held on to Jacob, was my twin brother, whom I dragged out behind me, dead.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Too easy,’ I say. ‘Too like original sin’, even though as a foetus, you would never call me polite.

  ‘So what am I doing here?’ says Stephen.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And what about your mother?’ he says. ‘Why you were never enough for her, with your seven hundred eyelashes, all your toes and too many teeth.’

  But I know my twin, who also had hair, who also had a tooth. I know how he stayed where he was, even as she let me go. I know how she hoarded him without knowing, how he grew in the dark until they dug him out and put him in a jar. The size of a heart.

  I feel my eyeballs start to swell, and it occurs to me, that maybe I cried instead. Maybe it was my tears that bucked her womb and let me go. Maybe I cried with my overdue, opaque child’s eyes, saddened her from the inside out, slid into the world oiled with regret. Because I am crying now.

  *

  ‘It’s not my fault,’ she says. ‘You only remember the bad things.’

  I look at the photograph. My mother is beautiful. She is in love. She looks like the sort of mother you are supposed to remember. It looks like the picture you grow up with. My mother was beautiful and laughing and kind. I cannot fit it inside my head.

  I do not remember my mother, how beautiful she was, or how plain. None of us do. She is not that kind of woman. We are not that kind of family. The photo is a lie.

  Downstairs, she slices and splits an avocado, squeezes one half to loosen the stone, then slides the skin off intact, with the back of a spoon. She is easy with food, as a mother should be, but the mad-looking green of the avocado makes her hands look old. The other half comes away with a surprising, gritty sound and my mother leaves the empty skin on the table, rocking slightly, like a little coracle holding the stone.

  ‘You sound a little better,’ she says.

  It is difficult to be angry with an avocado, but I make the effort. It is fairly annoying, sitting there, with the easy significance my mother gives to things, that I cannot figure out—whether it is the way it lies in two halves, or the hole in the middle. Maybe it is the emptiness of the skin or the smooth size of the stone, or the way one sits inside the other, both tear-shaped, both opposite and the same. Or maybe it is that my mother does not care. She has always had this ability just to be.

  ‘He is sleeping a lot,’ she says. ‘He seems to be sleeping all the time.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘He is making it up the stairs again.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  I go up for a bath though I don’t trust the water here either. I pass the pictures on the way and nod at us when we were young. My father must have seen them by now. I feel sorry for him. Maybe he has forgotten himself and thinks it is someone else, up there on the wall.

  In the bath I look at the ceiling and at the thin crack in the plaster that has opened its way through successive layers of paint. Its shape, every known wander and divide is known to a part of me that I myself have forgotten. My body changed and grew in this bath. I feel hopeful again and when I get out to dry myself I am too big for the room.

  The water runs out quite slowly. There are hairs in the plug hole. Even though they are family hairs, I do not take them out. They are long and grey.

  My mother dyes her hair a polite sandy colour that is kind to her face. The colour is real enough. It may not be the colour of real hair, but it is the colour of a real woman’s hair, once she has reached a certain age. My mother also keeps a clean house. These are my father’s hairs in the plug hole and she has let them be.

  I realise that I never really thought about what was under my father’s wig. His head, for all I knew, might have been bright green.

  Perhaps I thought his baldness was unhealthy, that the hair was just giving up and jumping in patches off his scalp. I was wrong. His hair hung on and grew, helplessly over the years. He must have cut it himself, badly, by touch. He must have swept up after himself, taken strands out of the bath, burnt them perhaps. Now he is sick, my mother pretends that they are not there.

  Under his wig, my father is grey. It is a moving colour. I thought these hidden hairs might be the same vicious brown as the ones he wore on the outside; but they grew in the dark, turned silver in the dark. I lift one out to have a look and it curls as it hits the air. It is fine and wet and clings to my finger. I shake my hand and it sticks to my leg. I shake my leg. I hit my thigh. The hair sticks to the base of my thumb before, mercifully, falling to the ground.

  As it falls I remember my father with his head jammed in under the sink, newspaper on the lino and the U-bend on the floor. He was probing the pipe, vigorously and precisely, with a wire clothes hanger. There was the sound of ripping from the pipe, a dreadful sound. It reminded me of fake violence on the television, how tough the body really is, how hard to tear. Out of the pipe came a clot of hair which he wiped off on to a piece of newspaper folded around the tip of the hanger. The smell was the only smell that my childhood revolted against. Most other smells, I quite enjoyed.

  Like the First Time, Every Time

  ON THE NIGHT before the show Stephen is in the final, incandescent stages of paranoia. Everything circles around him before disappearing into his head. His eyes are unbearably bright. I am afraid they will implode.

  ‘All set?’ I say.

  ‘Set?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ I say. ‘What are you scared of?’

  He shows me the list.

  ballistophobia BULLETS

  eisoptrophobia MIRRORS

  chrometophobia MONEY

  dermatosiophobia SKIN

  pteronophobia FEATHERS

  gephyrophobia BRIDGES

  barophobia GRAVITY

  onomatophobia NAMES

  uranophobia HEAVEN

  phagophobia SWALLOWING

  hamartophobia SIN

  sophobia YOU

  I go around the house and in an old and final gesture take all the mirrors off the walls. There is however little I can do about gravity.

  I can only get him to bed by bringing the television upstairs. He stops singing to watch but when I turn the sound off he starts to hum along with the pictures. He hums, not easily in the back of his throat where a hum usually sits, but at the front of his mouth, like a sound trying to climb out of his face.

  ‘So tell me something,’ I say, wishing instead to touch him as a friend might, a difficult thing to do in a bed.

  ‘Like what?’ he says.

  ‘Something you know.’

  ‘Tum Tum,’ he says, ‘is the talmudic word for an angel whose sex cannot be easily determined.’

  ‘That’s a good word.’ I thought he might be trying to tell me something. ‘Tum Tum.’

  ‘How can they tell?’ he says. ‘They only knew about two sexes. And women can’t be angels.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it doesn’t matter what you know.’

  The news is finishing up on the television. I try to figure out the weather for tomorrow. I cannot go to sleep.

  The copulating angels are back, all two hundred of them. The air is full, as they say, with the beating of wings. Mayflies are crawling out of a hole by the tap of the radiator, wet and mutilated. Their wings dry in the heat and make a fierce, inorganic clatter as they take off around the room. Horseflies with florescent eyes for heads extract themselves from the wet tea-leaves in the bottom of a cup. ‘Tinkerbell it ain’t,’ I say and know by my tone of voice that this is a dream, as the maggots do their thing.

>   Then the birds, all in a flap. Birds with human heads or birds with fat legs and coy little toes. Some of the thrushes have bollocks for their undercarriage and a finch is circling on the concrete, flapping two thin white arms.

  A heron stands on the table, stretches like a dinosaur and weeps. On the naked underside of its wings the feathers have rooted up under the transparent skin, like a shoal of sharp-nosed fish, suiciding into a swimmer.

  Then the roof clears to sky.

  I am woken by his hand leaving my stomach. His hair and his breath are touching my shoulder. His instep pushes quietly up into the arch of my foot.

  I feel like someone had told me a joke two months ago and only just remembered the punchline.

  The light from the television is shifting and changing at the end of the bed. His body is curved, like the arc of a D against my quiet I. Other than that, the only thing I can think about is the gap between us and about the tip of his tongue, through his open teeth, touching the air of the room.

  My body seems to have forgotten what to do with it all, has forgotten how to cross space, how to complete the surprise. My body is still all in bits, and all different ages, so his breath smells like the air outside a dance-hall when you are fourteen years of age, the sheet between us is aching like sixteen, the place where his fingers left my stomach feels hot and twenty-two, and his foot feels old.

  He knows I am awake. The distance between us is so simple and white, that I can feel the slither of the sheets as his hand slips through them, stumbles at my hip bone, gathers blindly to find my belly again, where it rests, without moving. We lie there for a while, a difficult H. Waiting.

  His tongue tasted so sweet I nearly did not know what it was. The alphabet abandons me as his hand reaches the top of my legs, which quite simply separate as I change from I to Y, though upside down. The words garble in my head, though what followed was not the liquid amnesia of the movies, but fierce and easy and tasting of several different types of skin. The cool baby skin that fitted at the back of his ear, the hot plump skin of his earlobe, the thick but hairless skin of his throat, then the startling velum of his glans, too fine to be called skin at all, the friendly hide of his belly and the complicated and salty crease of his eye, tasting of sleep.