The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

There may be no reason for Melanie to have the mind of a poet, with her sink full of faded petals, and her inner ear enjoying the words ‘nice long time’, where other people would see used teabags and think ‘my life is turning to shit’.

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.

I thought that emotion is the bridge between people, sentiment crosses space, sympathy is a gas, exhaled by one, inhaled by the other. Empathy! It’s just like melting.

this point of happy separateness.

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

the great theft of our future by the planet-fuckers of the past

He was looking at the magazine rack, and this physical act of browsing seemed completely normal and then weird – who looks at real-life magazines?

supremely held by the spiritual precision of coffins received home from war.

A revelation is the way things make sense when we are wired for some kind of knowledge, but not yet switched on.

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.

It was one of those phrases that got harder to understand, the more you said it. You don’t know you were born.

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.

The joy of cotton lifting, the difficulty beneath.

She bent over their mother, and held out a china cup through which the light shone. Carmel would always remember the inside line of golden tea, and the white circle of the china rim. There was a vagueness of space above the cup and, above that again, a curling haze of steam.

Mostly, he was on his way out the door, patting his pockets and turning back for something left behind. He liked to walk out when the weather was good. He paused on the threshold to squint up at the sky, and he plucked a stolen buttonhole on his way to the bus stop, to drive the neighbours mad.

her cow-lashed eyes

there was a kind of hypocrisy to her sadness. She enjoyed it too much; the wailing and the tears,

The light from the street turned the wall beside her into a block of dull orange, the sky she saw through the window was a fathomless, electric ink. A passing car flicked a fan of white light across the ceiling, and after a while, another car did the same, surprising thing.

Turn skywards and let the earth fall?

Our household comprised seven children and two adults in a stone cabin, which was lime-washed white and slowly streaked red again on the north-facing gable wall. At night, Old Brock chirruped in the yard, the fox fought and screamed and the green, lacy creatures that lived in thatch turned eyes, in fiery pinpoints, on your sleeping. Dawn was preceded by the run and rustle of hunting birds, and it was not a house to me so much as a creaking ship, a groaning night creature, ploughing the dark waves.

the pale horizon.

It was a shining, shivering blackness.

I have body dysmorphia, I have panic, I have issues. But I also think that beauty is to blame, because without beauty there can be no fear.

How do I phrase this? The machine of the tower has tipped me into another place. The fear I have is the fear of angels. It is not terror, but awe.

couldn’t give a damn anymore. I have discovered the angelic.

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.

On the wall, Venus’s nipple is pale, and neat as those annoying buttons that are too little to keep your shirt closed. All the painted women in the Uffizi are whiter than any human flesh. Many of them look like Cate Blanchett, if Cate Blanchett could not act. This is especially the case in the early rooms. Here, groups of pale, serene people gaze off in different directions doing very bad acting indeed. Oh, I am being born from the waves. Oh, I am getting pregnant talking to an angel. Oh, I am dying in agony. Oh, I am sexually attractive. Further in, and historically later, the acting improves, then it goes madly over the top, Slaughter! Mayhem! What a nice party, let us all laugh!

You never see a penis in public. In real life. If you did, you would shriek, run, call the cops. You would not find it ‘sublime’. You would be ‘shocked’ you would be ‘frightened’ you might feel ‘disgusted’ or ‘soiled’. Someone, please, tell me why.

She went about her breakfast, screwing the coffee pot together with a metal shriek and putting it on the stove. It was too early for the radio and the silence made her actions seem very loud. The oats sighed as they left the paper bag, the frozen berries chinked against the dish.

She held an intact blackberry in her mouth a moment, before biting through to the pith.

At the far end of the room, the window blind dimmed and then pulsed to the clearance of a passing cloud.

According to their father, the Devil pissed on the berries at the end of September. It was just superstition – they believed it, even though they knew it was not true. Some insect bred in the fruit at the end of summer; it drooled saliva or squirted its eggs in between the bumps. Or a fungus maybe. He probably explained that to them, too. The Devil, who was actually a fungus, got into the berry to ooze and breed, and he softened the flesh from the inside.

Carmel remembered the squeak of her feet in the wet jelly sandals, the feel of cool rain on her scratched skin. She and Imelda carried their harvest in plump and bleeding white plastic bags and their fingerprints were dyed a livid purple, like nature’s own criminals. And she did not know if this was a happy memory, or just a landscape – the far hill gone tawny with bracken, the two girls in bright cones of yellow under a heavy sky. Somewhere over there, their father standing with his back to them, doing something.

As she washed out the porridge bowl, Carmel had an impulse to clean the fridge. The thing beeped at her as she wiped and went, top shelf to meat drawer, working the wet cloth until it chilled in her hand. She decided, while she was at it, to defrost the freezer drawers, to root out the last of her daughter’s l ong-abandoned bean burgers and Quorn. The boxes came out squeaking, ice against ice, and the cardboard went limp in the warm air. Carmel ran a cloth along the plastic pleat of the door seal, ro...

The sunlight washed a line of shops on the other si...

Now she was all about quinoa and silky tofu. Nell was twenty-seven, she had an MA in Social Media and Communications, she had a diploma in Digital Marketing, she earned like mad for three months at a time and then, by some gargantuan effort that Carmel could not understand, went off and did what she pleased. And what pleased her was a slightly irritating purity, yoga breaks, surfing weekends, teaching English to refugees. Constant uploads about all this, of course, Nell’s thumbs flying on her screen – as though late capitalism (as she liked to call it) could be defeated by hashtags and eating kimchi.

When she got home, the open, dead fridge made the place look derelict. Carmel pulled at the inner lining of her nostrils – the remembered smell of the butcher’s had caught in there. Pine dust laid over the sweetish rot of blood. Entirely real.

My life now,

an infinitely slow, vegetable turd.

this long-dead, not terribly famous man

‘Yes,’ said Carmel, feeling miserably trapped in her own selfishness. No, there was no point ringing Aedemar.

On the table, the silent computer stayed coyly closed, tight-lipped.

the white hiss of electronic decay,

beyond that again, the shadows of other voices, as though some older recording were breaking through. Or the tape had magnetised itself on the spool, somehow, and the men’s words were overlaid by their own future words, from further down the roll. This acoustic bleed was one indicator of the era, the other was the way her father smoked throughout; leaning forward to dab at a fat crystal ashtray, on a coffee table of glass and chrome. Phil’s tie was not straight, his jacket was the usual disgrace. He twisted forward, jerked back, he hunched over in the chair and pushed the tweed away to scratch at a spot on his ribs. There he was, eight long years after the whipped-off sheet and the broken chair.

When people told her she had no imagination she thought, Yes I do. I imagined all of that.

And when he went, Carmel thought, a room in her head filled with earth.

Now, she watched the televised black slit of her father’s mouth as language slipped out of it on curls of exhaled Lucky Strike. Phil’s hands shaped the air in front of his rotting chest as he talked of the little Irish wren, and there was just a whisper of alcohol in there, softening his tongue and wetting those mischievous, fond eyes. 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.

It was as if Carmel could remember the burr of his voice inside her body, humming along the bone.

Dark, rich, full of contraception, ‘The Heron’ he also called her. She was the woman as self-destruction and unimaginably filthy sexual positions. Bunty, that was her name. Carmel could hardly believe it now. Their father had left them for a woman called ‘Bunty’. She had also been at his funeral. She had walked up the aisle in a large brimmed black hat – who could forget it – a whore’s hat, drooping at the graveside in the Irish rain.

A neat Vassar student whose family finances were so quiet, they were like the air itself;