The Wig My Father Wore

by Anne Enright

  At home the rooms are empty and white. Upstairs the bedroom is adrift with feathers that look physical, look like they should smell of chicken-shit, like there should be bits of flesh moored to their tips. They lift and settle as I move through the room. One spirals upwards in the eddying draught to brush my face. My nose is filled with a smell like a opening door. I sneeze.

  Above the bed, a cobweb hangs in a string through the hole in the ceiling, all the way from the attic roof. I would brush it away, but I am afraid of it. I think of Stephen hovering over the bed, I think of the copulating angels sliding down with all their wings and eyes on fire. The cobweb is coated with dust like an old rope and I know that Stephen is gone.

  On the table is his pile of lists, yellowing even as I look at them.

  amaxomania WAGONS

  coprolalomania FOUL SPEECH

  drapetomania RUNNING AWAY

  empleomania PUBLIC EMPLOYMENT

  erythromania BLUSHING

  hypnomania SLEEP

  kainomania NOVELTY

  menrulomania THE PENIS

  necromania THE DEAD

  nephelomania CLOUDS

  nostomania RETURNING HOME

  noctimania NIGHT

  pseudomania FALSITIES

  trichomania HAIR

  I tear it up and go to sleep, feeling everything give way.

  Milk

  THE NEXT MORNING I do not go to work. I lie there and think about ringing old friends, if I have any left. It appears that I do not. So I go in to the station instead. Besides I have to shoot the last date of all, though Stephen is not the only one who has disappeared.

  The LoveWagon calls me in and she says what she always says. She says it was a brilliant show. She says it was a disaster. I cannot disagree. There is nothing wrong with this woman after all.

  She laughs. At what? All the time her fingers are delicately poised between her lip and her nose, like a smoker sniffing out the nicotine, like a gambler smelling lost or future coins. It makes me wonder where her hand has been.

  I remember the first time I met her. She was at a viewing machine, reversing a tape repeatedly against a wall. I stepped up behind her and frightened her half to death.

  ‘Oh my heart!’ she said and laughed.

  So who knows what the joke is? She was working on a programme about battered wives. Now she works with love and mudwrestling. Sometimes she tries to make a connection. It doesn’t bother me. Connections don’t matter when you hit air.

  I go home and talk to my father. Because my father always knew the proper way to name things, which is quietly. He kept facts like sweets in his pocket that he could pull out, surprised that there was still one left.

  Last night I dreamed that Stephen was dead, but I know that he is not. I know that he is out there somewhere, floating on the airwaves, taking his time.

  This morning I went for a swim. I swim every morning in the sea, in the sun and in the rain and I say to God that this is my prayer for our child, whoever it is, whoever it might turn out to be. I swim on my back and look at the sky, which reminds me of the sky when I was a child, the sky when I asked my father ‘Why is the sky blue?’ realising as I said it that it wasn’t really blue at all. And my father gave an answer as mixed as the weather.

  Marcus came to visit. He drove all this way because he is worried about me being pregnant and on my own in the country. We talked about Frank who is back with his wife. We talked about the movies we are going to make, but he stopped when he saw that I meant it. So we talked about old times instead and had a laugh.

  I sleep again and dream of the sea. Stephen makes love to me in my dream and the calm overflowing as he touches a place that I had forgotten, will swell until it drowns me.

  * *

  I know that this is when he will fall in love with me. Cycling along a bog road with the brown of the bog and the blue of the sky and the groceries on the carrier. Cycling along between the sky and the bog, when the map grows under you, up and down, a long time up or a freewheel down, where the wind is part of the map, is soaked into the line between land and sky, is pulling it apart. The wind is the skin of it. Cycling along, and the map feels loose, not tight, with short miles or long miles, while the landscape changes or stays the same. This is the day that he falls in love with me.

  The box of milk on my back carrier is punctured by the mudguard wire and milk starts to drip from the bike on to the road. The milk is very white. The milk on the road is whiter than milk is in a glass. The milk is as white as milk sluiced into a yard, spoilt milk filling gaps between the stones. It drips beside the wheel that is leaving it behind, along the short miles and the long. When I turn around I will see it on the road. I will see the trail of milk all the way up the hill and I will see Stephen at the top of the hill with the clouds behind him, looking at the milk or looking at me and he will be in love with me.

  Because nothing died when we made love. Apparently that is what it is like for a woman. For a woman, nothing has to die. This makes sense. As much sense as milk staining the road between Furnace and Lettermaghera.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, and to Peter Sirr of the Writers’ Centre Dublin. Special thanks to Mary and Bernard Loughlin for their hospitality at Ferrera de Sobrar.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Version 1.0

  Epub ISBN 9781446484999

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Vintage 2007

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  Copyright © Anne Enright 2007

  Anne Enright has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1995

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  ISBN 9780749397159