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.

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.

Being unattractive, being alone, these were the disasters that plagued me.

Carmel likes to be asked about herself. She doesn’t really answer – her life is just a life, it’s a kind of annoyance to her. But in the bad old days, when I was a teenager and we were hammer and tongs, she would sit and stare for about an hour and then she might say, very quietly: I exist too, you know.

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

That is what happens to mothers, they lose their sense of adventure. Carmel had me on her own, and that can’t have been easy. She gave me her whole life, she told me once, her whole life, and I said, Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.

I look at the photograph many, many times. I think, I am his leavings. I am the thing he can not finish or throw away.

Sometimes, I look at my mother and wonder where all that went, how the family declined, father to daughter – from subtle to stupid in a single generation. Phil’s work is, above all, tactful. A girl needs tact – this was not, from Carmel, what a girl was ever going to get. When things were bad, I would curl up with Phil and sweeten the hurt.

At one in the morning, Carmel was messy with drink, and there was a kind of hypocrisy to her sadness. She enjoyed it too much; the wailing and the tears, as she slopped about in the arms of the friend who was trying to lift her back on to the sofa from which she had slid, saying, ‘My Daddo. My Dad.’ It 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.

The world was very beautiful. It was far too beautiful to abandon. Or was it too beautiful to live in?