Читать книгу The Wig My Father Wore - Anne Enright - Страница 8

When I come in the door, Stephen smiles hard enough to frighten a horse.

‘Where were you?’ he says.

‘I should be in Crete,’ I say.

‘Where were you?’

‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It was just someone I know. Just someone I bump into from time to time.’

The place looks as if it died a week ago, the curtains are open to the dusk; the furniture slipping through the half-darkness. My hand sweeps past the light switch, which has drifted from its proper place. I flick it on and nothing happens. Stephen has taken the bulb out of its socket.

I walk through from room to room and my footsteps sound like they are coming from somewhere else. Every bulb is gone. The whole house is swimming, empty and electric, as the open sockets leak into the evening light.

So I sit down and try to cry and curse Stephen for it. Because we all have to get through, any way we can.

Stephen makes me a meal that is entirely white. At least it helps me see the plate. I eat by the light of the TV with the sound turned down. At the accustomed time, and by the usual miracle, the LoveQuiz flashes into the room, thin, silent and over-excited. Every time I look up, Marie from Donnycarney is watching her own legs, as if they belonged to someone else. In studio the day before, it had been a pretty randy show, but flickering on the box, lonely, with no applause, it looks vaguely obscene and inconsequential, like an old woman tap-dancing, or a dog humping a sofa during afternoon tea.

‘It’s on its way to God,’ I say — as I always say when the credits roll. Which is how, I suppose, I got into this mess in the first place.

I fall asleep on the sofa and dream about sleep. I dream about sleep so profound and dreamless it would change everything. Perhaps Stephen wakes me in the middle of the night. He is carrying a candle. Transmission has shut down and the test card shines out into the room.

In the morning I drive to Killarney and shoot Marie.

‘Pretend it’s nice and hot,’ I say. ‘Cheer up,’ I say. I tell her to push her date into the swimming pool. I tell her to show a bit of leg.

Because you can’t be a snob and work on the LoveQuiz. Which means that most people on the show are in the wrong place. They feel their work as a kind of stain. I have no time for that. As far as I’m concerned, if it’s not embarrassing, it’s not worth it. I am intimate with the subject of shame. I am the daughter of a man who used to wear a wig. After that, I said, television is easy.