The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

THERE IS A psychologist in Nevada called Russell T. Hurlburt who is interested in the different ways people think. In 2009, he fitted a young woman called Melanie with a beeper that went off randomly during the day, prompting her to record everything in her awareness at that moment, and she later reconstructed these mental events for his research.

Dr Hurlburt says that there are great variations in the way our inner lives play themselves out in our heads. ‘My research says that there are a lot of people who don’t ever naturally form images, and then there are other people who form very florid, high-fidelity, Technicolor, moving images.’ Some people have inner lives dominated by speech, body sensations or emotions, and yet others by ‘unsymbolized thinking’ that can take the form of wordless questions like, ‘Should I have the ham sandwich or the roast beef?’

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.

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.

My mother is strongly of the opinion that, if you don’t think about yourself then you won’t have any problems.

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.

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.

He pulled my chin around and looked at me. Like you, he said. I’m lucky? You don’t know you were born.

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

Felim said he bumped into a friend and the guy told him their old teacher had hanged himself right there in the school. In the staff toilets. He went in on the weekend, he had a key.

I realised that every stupid, small thing I said that first night we got together had landed somewhere wrong in him, and it rose up now as a taunt. He wasn’t listening to me, he was storing it all up.

The harbour beach is home to seaweed farms and small boats whose fishermen will bring you out snorkelling the reef for a small fee. Surfers enjoy the permanent break with its own pontoon cafe out in the bay. Pretty beachfront restaurants serve fresh-caught fish and the evening is filled by chanting from the local temple. In the morning, you can swim with the manta rays.

I was stalking not just Meg my influencer, but also the supposed ex from Belfast. I clicked and checked, who knows how many hundred times a day.

I still have my lovely therapist from school. I could always go back to check in with Paschal, in his button-down shirts and corduroy bags, who picks a piece of lint from off his knee and says, Not cool, no?

Carmel got me Paschal, like you might get a child a pet for mental health reasons, and also because she thought I needed a male figure in my life. That is how careful, how abiding, my mother is for me.

My mother used to tell me not to dive head first into any stretch of water, until I knew what was down there. That is what happens to mothers, they lose their sense of adventure.

Felim did not call for three weeks and then, in late September, a text. – Sunday morning? Dress nice. He looked at me at the door and said, Heels? I went back up to find a pair and he seemed happy. He said, You scrub up nice, you know that? You’ve good teeth. He told me to get in the car we were going on a trip and I said, Where to? He did not reply.

He looked through the windscreen at autumn skies and gathering, wheeling rooks. I wondered when the mood would shift, when he would leave me on the hard shoulder, crying.

Tell me, are you anything to the poet? You are. You are. Felim said as much. I said, Yes. You’re the daughter. No. Oh he was a rare one. Ah, no. I am the granddaughter. Yes. That is right. That is what you are. Did you know him at all? He died before I was born, I said.

She lifted her face, which was, I saw, Felim’s long, narrow face and, through shifting dentures, said: Lay your head on my dark heart, your honey mouth with scent of thyme give me your hand before we part, oh love, sweet love of mine. The brother stood for this ghastly rendition with his head slightly bowed, and I said, Yes. That was him, yes. You have the look of him, alright. You think? You are very welcome here, she said. And I thought I would run screaming out of the house tearing my hair and ripping off my clothes.

I also felt as though I had come home. Thank you, I said.

As we met the motorway, he said, Are you happy now? Sorry? You’re happy now, are you? After that – I don’t know. I can’t remember what the fight was or how we got into the fight, because nothing made sense. There is a lot of it I can’t figure out.

After that, Felim might text and drop in, sometimes two days in a row, then not for ages. When he did, I found it hard to tell the difference between sex and getting hurt in other ways.

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.

It’s a Thursday night in Dublin town. I go out and fuck someone, a not very confident guy with super sweaty palms, I say, Oh yes yes do whatever you want, do whatever you want, though he is too drunk to do anything much, and I grind down on him a bit and slap the poor fucker, biff bash, left, right, and one more time for luck. I say, That’s one from all the girls. In the bathroom I scrabble through his cabinet and make a double slice along my forearm with his disposable razor.

On the shelf in the corridor, I pick out a collection of my grandfather’s poetry. I haven’t opened this book for more than a decade and it feels stolen from me now.

I used to read these every night, almost. The poems were so gentle and clear, I could hear his voice speaking, just to me.

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.

When things were bad, I would curl up with Phil and sweeten the hurt.

I remember the image of escape so well, Persephone as a white egret, bashing her way out of a dark cave: like a bird in the mouth, hell yawns her free

Felim rocks up in a Santa hat. He is really pissed. He says, The way you look at me it’s like fucking a retard, I want you to say it, go on say it. Say, Give it to me. Do you like that? Say you like it, say, Thank you, Felim. You ungrateful bitch. Go on, say it. Give it to me, Felim. You want me to hurt you? I can’t hear you, Nell.

Felim does not need my sincerity. He needs chaos. His dick is softened by alcohol and this makes him frightening, the idea that he will try to hurt me in some other way.

Another time, he loves me. He controls the thing he loves. He is precise, I am the chaos.

A Scent of Thyme (translated from ‘Ceann Dubh Dílis’, anonymous, eighteenth century) Lay your dark head upon my breast, your honey mouth with scent of thyme what man could not love you – so blest and sweet, oh love, sweet love of mine. The girls are on the march; they free their hair and mourn their laddio, the best in five parishes, but I deny them all my love, sweet love, for you.

IT WAS NOT that he left when she was sick, it was the way he came back and ransacked the place looking, he said, for his watch which was lost or mislaid, or perhaps their mother had hidden it to annoy him; she had held on to it as some kind of keepsake.

‘Did you take it?’ And the thing was, her father could never find anything – he could be looking right at it.

When something was lost in that house, she would sing out a location, ‘It’s on the landing, it’s on the bookshelf,’ because their mother was the keeper of objects. She held everything in mind. But she did not say where the watch was, and this annoyed their father.

Her father was then forty-seven years old. He wore a tweed jacket of greenish brown, the pockets dragged out of shape by little books and cigarette packs, cotton hankies and keys. His hair was shiny on his pink scalp. The chewed plastic of his glasses stuck out over one ear and the back of his neck was a deep, fat red. This was the summer her mother had her breast cut off for a reason that could never be named.

He pulled the little drawer of her bedside locker so hard it came all the way out and the contents emptied on to the floor.

Their mother was in bed reclining against some pillows. She was propped up to facilitate drainage.

Her father noticed the uselessness of the empty wooden drawer in his hand and he let it drop behind him as he leaned forward and took her by the shoulders. ‘Where is it?’ he said.

her father groaned as he whipped this sheet high. It floated there; a rising cloth roof under which her mother’s body was open to view. Carmel could not see her mother’s obscured face, but the nightdress was ruched up and there was a little bare leg coming out of it, that twitched in the unexpected light. Her father let the sheet drop in a puddle and Imelda darted forwards, in order to pull the nightdress down.

They heard him go down the stairs, and clatter through the hall. The front door opened and it did not close. A breeze from the garden found its way up to them, and they knew he was gone. This was the last time they saw their father in the bedroom, or in that mood. The next time he arrived at the house, everything had already changed.

The drifting cloth was beautiful, and the bare leg so pathetic. There was a snap of pain in there too – in the snap of the sheet. Her father stood with his arms wide and Carmel knew, of course, that he was in the wrong, that his anger about the watch was misplaced. But the insult to her mother’s breast was very confusing.

She was such a gentle person. Their mother, Terry, read books all day, even when she was well. She lay in bed in the morning, she came down and propped the book against the teapot, she moved to a deckchair in the garden with her feet akimbo, and one arm flung high. If you spoke to her while she was reading she would look at you from a lovely distance. And though you might imagine she was busy with two daughters and a husband to manage, she really wasn’t that busy. She was never interested in cooking, for example, and often didn’t.

‘Blessed are the Peacemakers’ said the prayer on a decorative plate that she hung on her kitchen wall. Her daughters, when she was bed-bound, fought over the right to brush her hair.

After their father left that day, Imelda went downstairs to shut the front door and she came back up with tea. 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.

Their father had broken a chair on his way out the door. He gave it a big kick. This chair had belonged to their mother’s dead aunt, whose house it used to be. A decorative little thing, the aunt had stitched a needlepoint seat for it, in a design of flowers on a crimson ground. Phil had often scorned its delicacy. ‘Who could sit on that?’ he used to say.