The Wren, the Wren

by Anne Enright

Later again he would say – as though he could not hear his own words – that his wife got sick and the marriage did not survive. He said this as though everyone listening would know that, when a woman gets sick, the marriage deteriorates, clearly, the relationship cannot be sustained.

Their mother knew so little of the world.

In her first year at college, the rowing team carried her down Grafton Street in a real boat. A poet invited her for a walk, after which, a poem appeared in a literary journal, with her name right there. On Killiney Hill for Terry

He courted her for three months straight. Terry came from the merchant classes of South County Dublin and Phil, who hadn’t tuppence to his name, followed her declaiming, down one street and then down the next. The whole town was enthralled. One night she found a poem laid on her own pillow and, when she looked out, Phil was standing under the lamp post. She came out to kiss him in her nightie and never went back in, she said. He had won her with verse.

Terry had family money, but not enough of it, and when it ran out she just became confused. They had pork chops, they had no pork chops. There was nothing she could do. When she turned twenty-five, Terry came into an inheritance and they moved their young family into a house in Dun Laoghaire, a harbour town on Dublin Bay.

Mostly, he was on his way out the door, patting his pockets and turning back for something left behind.

You never saw him write. Carmel thought of his poetry as entirely private.

‘How are you, my old segocia?’ he liked to say, and someone – she could not remember who – said, ‘She’s your spit, Phil. It’s like looking at you twice.’

After that, Carmel covered her schoolbooks with brown paper. And it wasn’t long before she was tired of her mother and Imelda, they way they spent all their days mooning about. It also went without saying that, when Carmel had her own baby, many years later, she did not give it to any man.

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.

The Wren, The Wren for Carmel berry glance leaf twisting into bird high-tailed from hedge to hand she was mine the wren poked out from the cup of my fist and was still her eye, honour bright to my vast eye the whirr of her pulse ecstatic the wren the wren was a panic of feathered air in my opening hand so fierce and light I did not feel the push of her ascent away from me in a blur of love, to love indistinguishable my palm pin-pricked, my earthbound heart of her love’s weight relieved. And, oh, my life, my daughter, the far away sky is cold and very blue.

a man walked up the path one Saturday morning and knocked on the door.

The caller was a small poet, in a large overcoat. His pupils were so huge they consumed the iris. This poet had been delegated by other poets, in Ireland and in America; they had dispatched him to the house because he was the right poet for the job. Harvey, he was called

Carmel joined Imelda in the hall while Harvey introduced himself as a friend of their father’s and said, in a compelling soft voice, that he had come to speak to their mother, he had the saddest possible news. And indeed, there she was, standing in the kitchen doorway.

Many weeks later, after endless fuss and expensive phone calls, they drove to the mortuary chapel at Dublin airport to load up the coffin and follow it down to Tullamore.

Sex was not as interesting as the people who did it, she decided. It was almost the opposite of a relationship. It was certainly, often, the end of one.

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.

Imelda was finishing her doctorate out in UCD. She cycled in and was home by five, when she made a light tea. Neither of them ate very much, and the food they did eat was mysteriously bad – processed ham, sliced pan, tubs of coleslaw. All this was served by Imelda on white tablecloths, using china plates, as though it were something special.

Imelda tended to her mother as though she were already a memory, or some kind of work in preparation. When the cancer returned it became clear what they had been waiting for. It took their mother eighteen months to die, much of which was indescribable to Carmel, even as it happened. She had, by then, a job in a language school in the centre of Dublin.

Because birth was not the end of pregnancy, she thought, it was just pregnancy externalised.

The biggest bouquets came from people who had eyed her bump in silence, months before (because a pregnant woman is a shameful thing, but a baby is always a wonder).

Carmel set Nell down among the floral madness and took a roll of photographs because she thought she should. It was a solid five months before she could get to the chemist to get the prints developed, and another unknowable length of time before she escaped to pick them up again. Carmel flipped the photos quickly from the front of the stack. Nell, lying asleep among the wilting flowers, looked like a bundled little corpse in a funeral home, somewhere hot and tragic.

In the long months since she was born, they had burned through three au pairs and two office assistants, one of whom said that Carmel was a complete thug. Or, actually: ‘A complete fucking thug.’ And Carmel thought, I am not a thug, I am a woman in love.

By Mary’s Holy Well A ribcage on the dune at Carna yields to the sky, a sprung clasp grown through by marram, harebell, scented purple clover. Pink arrowhead of orchid trembles in the absent heart, the lungs, wind-ruffled campion. No difference between breeze and breath in this emptied fox, or sea-sucked lamb, a newborn dead, its hunger eaten by grass.

I remember the time he talked about his brother Cathal who did not get a honeymoon, he was so tied to working the herd, their father always on his case. You have no idea, he said, the shit-shovelling and the bills for the vet, the endless forms to fill. How hard it is even to get away on a date, even for an evening. He said the land was a hard thing to love and it never let you go.

She felt her father’s feet root in her shoes, and something else settle in her shoulders: the restless lope of him, the way he looked about, missed nothing, ate the scene. They had reached the shelter of the grey stone arch and Ronan turned to Carmel. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it?’ He did not mean the poem. He meant everything was nice.

Carmel took him by the lapels and shoved him towards the river. ‘Please shut up,’ she said. It was because he liked her. That was why he was talking so much. Because she had spent the night at his place and woken up in his bed and was now walking beside him in the rain. The feeling ran through Carmel swiftly, and it left her mortified. He liked her.

When he walked past Austin Clarke’s house – which was on the bridge in Templeogue – he threw a discus of dried cow manure at the front window, because of a review Clarke had given him in the Irish Times.

And Carmel was back in the house on a Saturday morning when she was a child: the whole terrible business of the newspaper, of hiding the paper, or delaying the paper, because their father would get up cranky and late, and if he had his breakfast before he got to the paper there was a chance he would not lose his temper over Austin Clarke at the top of the books page, handing down judgement on the poets of Ireland.

It would have been on such a Saturday that he lobbed cow shit at Austin Clarke’s window and bragged about it afterwards in every pub. Like Odysseus at the Phaeacian Games.

There was no badness in him, that is what their mother said. He was a big child.

She thought about Terry walking this path in her bluebell skirt that she never threw out, after. It hung in the wardrobe in Dun Laoghaire for years. The waist was tiny, it must have been about eighteen inches. They used to sneak in to try it on, but Terry was neater and more beautiful than either of her daughters.

‘You see that river?’ he said. ‘That is called the Dodder, and there is a kingfisher who lives somewhere along the water, I don’t know where, but if you are very quiet, you will see them, because there are two, and one is as bright as the other. They are a pair. Do you know how to spot a kingfisher?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘You have to pretend you are not looking, and if you are lucky, they come.’ ‘Right.’ ‘Don’t forget that now.’ ‘I won’t.’

Her name must be on the form. Carmel did not know what was written beside her name – partner, girlfriend – but it seemed that she was in charge of Ronan, now. Was it because they’d slept together? Was that enough? This did not seem like something she could ask the nurse, who was leafing, with efficient mournfulness, through a thick file. ‘You have my number?’ ‘It’s right here.’ ‘Great,’ she said.

Carmel couldn’t figure it out. How had she ended up with this job, for which she had never applied? Was it the sex – which got good for about two minutes and then wasn’t? Or staying over? Maybe that was where the spell got cast. Maybe, if you were a woman, the act of sleeping was enough. It could happen on a bus, you could do it on a plane. You could nod off, wake up beside some strange man who was now yours to mind for life.

When he was in hospital, he said, he thought about her all the time. ‘All the time,’ he repeated and he looked right at her. This, Carmel realised, was her cue to walk towards him and kiss his mouth, that looked redder now because of the beard. Later, he asked her to bring the rubbish downstairs with her when she left, and she obliged, wondering as she went why she was doing all this for a sexual relationship that had no sex in it, trying to put a shape on a man who was in love with his own disappointment, who nursed it and sought it out. She did not call again. He did not call.

And Carmel knew. ‘Did you do that?’ she said. ‘What?’ ‘Did you do that to the light?’ ‘What?’ ‘Did you break the light?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you throw the orange up at the light?’ ‘Did I throw it?’ This repetition, in Nell’s parlance, was the word for ‘yes’. ‘Yes throw it. Yes, throw.’

Carmel’s grammar dissolved as she took the child by her spindly upper arm, slapping at her legs as she circled around – swiping at them and missing, for the most part. So Carmel reached into the bowl and threw one after the other orange at Nell’s legs, and that seemed to work, after which they were gone and Carmel threw the empty bowl which bounced off Nell’s back and hit the floor, smashing there, so that Nell was stepping and dancing in the shards, which certainly did not bother her mother, who had been through a lot worse, a hell of a lot worse, than a stupid broken bowl.

She dealt Nell a crack across the temple with her knuckled fist and, when she fell on the ground, stooped to deliver an open-handed whack on the girl’s narrow, bare thigh, which lifted an immediate echo of itself in a flush of red, while liquid blood came from somewhere else, blood that was outside Nell’s skin streaked across the floor.

Carmel had hit Nell a concussive blow. Nell, who had been howling as the oranges flew, was now silent and panting, twisted away from her on the floor, her limbs at an angle, her cheek to the smeared parquet, her knickers – at ten years old – on show, and the five-fingered ruin of Carmel’s hand curled up, held high. The hand that hit Nell.

Nell gave her mother a big look, which slowly became a hurt stare. Some satisfaction rising up through it. You lost. You lost your temper. Carmel sat on a chair with her back straight and her hands balanced on either leg. The hand she had used to thump her child was still clenched and she pressed the heel of it down into her thigh.

She was not a person anymore, she was not something else either. She was just not. The feeling was worse than horror, because she could not gather the horror in. She was a painting by a man whose name she could not remember, a thing with the head of a cat. And her father, her father. He was. Her father was. Right there. Her father was bigger than the world and a lot less wonderful. He was vast, like a wall.

What would you have to do, Carmel wondered, to actually land a child in hospital? Her wonderful daughter, her heart’s delight and only joy. Nell. It did not seem possible: they had broken the entire world and there was nothing to show for the crime. Or she had broken it – she had to correct herself – it was Carmel alone who had done this thing.

My close association with the church brought other blessings, and it seemed the fortunes of our small household were finally on the turn. A place was found for my mother doing substitute teaching in a schoolroom in town, and this later became a secured post. She was soon cycling off to work, her cheeks rosy and her arms grown lean in the beating of children that were not her own.

I wrote poems of love unrequited. (To this day, I am not sure there is any other kind of poem.)

In truth, he hated the work of farming and would thrive in town, where he took up, full-time, his occupation of blaggard-at-large. My father, Damien McDaragh, was a small, fiercely beautiful man, a great dancer in his youth. Sometime before I was born, the socket of his right eye had been caught on the horn of a strawberry cow and, though he kept the eye, he could not keep it from drifting towards the wall. This cast gave him an untrustworthy air, and he did his best to live up to it. He had a great hunger for gambling.

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

I am sitting on a slim, trendy, egg-type chair: a long scoop of orange leather on a swivel podium. An object beyond the dreams of any Irish landlord. And I see a future for Mal, because it is a bit like his past. But I do not see a future for me.

Back in college Mal used to say the golden rule was never shag someone who has more problems than you, but he spent six months with a guy who was so fucked up you couldn’t be near it for too long. This guy, Paul, was lit up by damage, super-skinny, lip-chewing, the lot. And anytime you saw them together, they bickered and bitched like something out of the 1990s.

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.