The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

There were things in her life, she thought, that were beyond the reach of her sister’s opinion.

AM CURRENTLY obsessed by light. It is hard to turn this into cash. An obsession with light does not commodify.

She isn't wrong

In the evening I work up a post about sperm, the way it is icky but not exactly cruel. Jizz doesn’t want to hurt you, it just wants you to clean up after it. You can’t be raped by a tadpole.

sons of the world coming downstairs to say, Mum, Dad, I’ve had my first ejaculation, the sheets hung out the window and everyone invited to the party, lots of champagne corks (of course) followed by much frothing champagne.

and if he knew them personally, and it’s like I am not on my knees I am a photograph of a woman on my knees, with a real dick sliding into my face and that’s so everything, it’s like this, and that, and yeah! Nasssty!

I am a mechanism between his hand and his pleasure. I am nothing and, as he pulses to the finish, I have an image of him smashing my face against the cheap bedside locker, the make-up scattering across the rug, the paperback book, the foolish feathered lampshade, a series of Polaroids shot like it’s the seventies, blood, bruises, runny mascara, me. Click click click.

He said the land was a hard thing to love and it never let you go. I remember him sitting in my

Save me. Love me. Fuck me. Only you.

God you’re obsessed, she said. I am not taking about sex I am talking about punctuality. Men turn up on time, because it’s not that complicated. Like fascism and trains.

just hate it. I hate the way you say, everyone is stupid and they only have themselves to blame. Especially women. When did I say that? Especially women. You’re always saying it. There is no such thing as always, Carmel says.

And there’s more to life than being sensible, I say, in a sensible voice, because Carmel has gone cold on me, and I feel it like a slap across the face, an actual blow. It is like we are in a different room, the colour of the walls has shifted a tone, the place is larger and more

This man was twice her size and he was her father, so the back of his hand was like the weather, you just kept out of the way. If you couldn’t do that much, you only had yourself to blame.

Love requires (he pauses, looking for the right term) two acts of submission, and sex (he pauses again) really doesn’t.

Just. You go in the door. And it is what it is. And then you leave.

I look up fear of angels and land in Christian Internet. This is a very scary place which tells me that the first words out of every angel’s mouth are, Do not be afraid. Every angel that ever appeared. Fear not, fear not.

From the train south, Mal and I continue our conversation about love. I know what I want to say now. – Love is not a higher function. It is the first function, it is the first thing we know.

For people who assume they are the problem. For those of us with bossy mothers, which is all of us. It is for people who look at the patterns their clock makes switching numbers, instead of recognising those numbers, instead of thinking, It is time to get up now. It is for me. Because my life fell apart and I called that Felim. Or I called it, Be mean to me. The name of the book is, The Beautiful Father And All The Father’s Beautiful Things. The name of the book is, Do not be afraid.

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. She wanted to tell her about the butcher with the blue eyes, about blackberries and the Devil’s spit, those plastic rain ponchos that made you damp underneath them

with your own sweat. Her father pissing high into the bracken, his yellow urine arcing through the silver rain. Which was the kind of detail a mother would leave out, of course, when speaking to her daughter. Carmel wanted to tell her about the wren – whatever that story was. Some kind of warning. About staying safe. About not hitting the light bulb with a broom, when you are waving a dead mouse around. She closed

It’s a rape, isn’t it? she said – by which she meant what we do to nature. Australia was not fitting into my unfinished guidebook for anxious travellers. No one I met seemed to be anxious in the way I understood the word. It certainly is, I said. And I thought, Carmel would love it here.

The way they ignored each other was more alert and intricate than another couple’s kissing. I looked

He only hurts people for their pleasure. Only ever sexually, which is completely

fine, because women really want that. I certainly did. He is only horrible when people beg him to be.

It is important to be careless, he says. I am a man walking the road – that is the meaning of the word ‘poet’, for me. A man walking the road.

And it just goes to show you that children are better than adults in many ways. You know when we say, That person is behaving like a child, maybe that person is being quite nice, really.

ONE DAY THE bubble burst for me, whatever the bubble is, that huge oily membrane shivering above my life, that sometimes I call love and sometimes dread.

And with that smart, held connection, the story I made up for him falls away. The bird is no one’s servant. He is not dapper. Words only obscure him: the lipstick, the coral, the chiffon, the glass of port, these are all impositions on his tiny, incontrovertible bullfinch self. Even the name, ‘bullfinch’, seems a form of littering, like a sticky label fixed to his feathers. One sunny Sunday in my mother’s garden, the bird looked at me and I saw the bird and I wanted to undo language and let him be. The bird just was. Long before any of us were here, and long after we are gone, he did and will exist. When our lipsticks, our servants, our bleached and

This elevation left his daughters with no proper means to hate him; it robbed them of their right to mourn. The character of Carmel

inheritance, of both trauma and of wonder. It seems to me that women switch from Marthas to Marys from generation to generation: some get to tend and others to believe.