The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.

When I began thinking about all this I was interested in empathy, like it’s the solution (and it is! it is!) to pretty much everything.

These days, I think there is a real gap between me and the next person, there is a space between every human being. And it is not a frightening space. The empty air which exists between people might be crossed by emotion, but it might not. You need something else, or you need something first. This is the thing Russell T. Hurlburt was talking about when he discussed different kinds of mental experience. People are different and they think differently. Now, I think the word we need is ‘translation’.

And I think that is something pain does to you. The pain makes you feel accused of making the pain up.

Sex with a guy always felt a bit like fighting, you could get hurt, or realise that you had been hurt when the hangover hit. Hard to say what you felt at the time. (Am I a masochist? Oh, I can’t remember.) But actually, emotionally, it was the girls who could break me, especially if they did that chilly, disdainful thing, which was exactly what attracted me in the first place. But there you go.

My mother is a very practical person and – I don’t know how to describe it – for Carmel, there is either a problem or no problem. Anything else is, You’re making it up.

My mother is strongly of the opinion that, if you don’t think about yourself then you won’t have any problems. For Carmel, having a pain means you are s elf-obsessed, because being self-obsessed comes first and having a pain comes second – or an allergy, an intolerance, a sensitivity even.

Which makes me write down, with an actual pen: A revelation is the way things make sense when we are wired for some kind of knowledge, but not yet switched on.

Most of the time, I think, people aren’t listening to each other, they are just waiting their turn to speak. But

It happened as I turned the corner, out of view. Bam. I was in love. I stopped, stared at the path and then carried on, full of self-hugging, secret joy. Love! Bam. It kept happening on the bus, Bam! and getting off the bus, the after-scent released when I stood up to go, the pang, the hidden delight, the street becoming a meaningful street, BAM, it just kept happening and rising, the knowledge, the beauty, the hopefulness, my feet not touching the ground, my cheek not feeling the air, the love the swoop and swoon the blood mashing in my ears the any moment now the any second now he will call, the beauty of the day, the beauty of the sky, the jolt of missed time and had I missed it? Did he text? Is my battery dead? Did I pick up somebody else’s phone, now?

You can’t tell Carmel you have a problem or she’ll go out and beat someone up for you.

People die on airplanes all the time, the stewards lay them out along the back row and give the other passengers a free drink. People also die in car crashes, which happen, boringly, on the ground. People die and die. Every day, in any square mile of city streets, someone dies from homelessness or poverty or stupid blind fate. Journalists are so lazy – tragedy all around and they spend their time waiting for a few rich people to literally fall out of the sky.

Felim, that fucker, does not know my secret. My secret is I want something more incidental, unperformed. I want worse.

found it hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways. The thing that did not change, that never changed, was the waiting. That surge of expectation. Endlessly. And again.

Waiting for this man was better than being with him, it was certainly more intense, the way longing kept eating itself and giving birth to more longing. And nothing, but nothing was better than that first flash of arrival.

You never saw him write. Carmel thought of his poetry as entirely private. She opened her father’s slim books with the same furtive, blanked-out pleasure as she might pull open his sock drawer. This was the magic that made women kiss you, in their nighties, in the street.

was a very great betrayal – her mouth making noises that her mind did not condone – and the next morning she knew she would not speak of her father again. The world was full of people who did not know him, except in a public kind of way. And the people who did know him – herself and her sister, especially – could not agree.

It also went without saying that, when Carmel had her own baby, many years later, she did not give it to any man. That would be like holding it out at arm’s length and dropping it right there, on to the concrete. When Carmel had her baby, it came out of her silently, and it looked at her silently, and when they took it over to the other side of the room, she said, ‘Bring it back.’ She may have said this quite loudly. Because this baby was hers, and hers alone.

Migrations, his third, was an ode to the wandering human soul.’ He made it sound as though Phil had not left his family, so much as gone travelling for his work.

Carmel liked men – you might even say she preferred them – but she seemed to have trouble sleeping with them, and her emotional life was filled with women with whom she did not get along.

When Carmel was hungry for her child, it felt like murder, or religion, it was a fearsome thing.

It was so easy to hate this man – the facts spoke for themselves – but it was still hard to dislike him. And it was devastatingly easy to love him. To flock around and keen when he died, because all the words died with him.

She had not been not a good mother. Carmel knew that. All the love in the world would not make her a good mother. It was always such a wrangle. She could not hold her daughter, and she could not let her daughter go.

‘The way they ignored each other was more alert and intricate than another couple’s kissing. Theirs was a great passion, darkly ecstatic. They both knew it could not last.’

For a nice guy, he really knew what he wanted and this caused in me a thrill of lovely alarm. By the last button I wanted him right back, or I wanted his wanting, which rose in me too.

We who loved Phil knew, on some level, that we loved him not despite, but because of his ‘badness’ – in those days, that was quite the thing. It loosed something in our psyches, I think, which was not always a force for good.

I adored him – certainly for the first while – and this may have contributed to his slightly distorted sense of himself. I thought I had no choice but to adore him, but of course I did have a choice, that goes without saying.

Carmel might have felt jealous of the intimacy between the two young people, but she really didn’t. She felt that her daughter had come back to her true self. She was grown.

The idea comes to mind, because the sunshine is so warm on my belly, you might imagine yourself filled with it in some mythological way. I could have a sun baby, made of light. The garden dryad is mutely, sweetly convinced of this possibility, the bird is a sign that seems to agree.