Читать книгу The Wig My Father Wore - Anne Enright - Страница 9

It was a tough, wiry wig with plenty of personality. It rode around on his head like an animal. It was a vigorous brown. I was very fond of it as a child. I thought that it liked me back.

I don’t know when he started to lose his hair, my mother never discussed it. Unlike her children, my mother was well brought up. As far as she was concerned, the wig might as well have grown there. I do not believe her. All children are raised on these simple lies. Your granny is in heaven. You came out of God’s pocket. Daddy was always bald. Daddy was never bald.

My mother and father met in a ballroom in the Fifties, where the lights never dimmed. He was twenty-seven years old. The smell from the wig, if he was wearing the wig, would have been already high. Perhaps he kept his hat on when he asked her to dance, because men are brutish that way. Perhaps my mother saw the crippled look on his face. What more could any woman want, than a rude, wounded man?

Those were the days when a man was allowed to be stupid. He could eat with his knife, or not wash his underwear; he could do the wrong thing to get the girl and then find that it was the right thing after all. He might be lured into the discreet back room of a hat shop as easily as he would be lured up the aisle. He did not expect his children to tug at his hair, or his wife, in the dark. Those were the days when a wig made no difference in a marriage. (’What are you looking at woman, have you never seen a bald head before?’)

So they danced in the Ierne ballroom, a man with his hat on and a woman who would not let her hands stray. And they were grateful for it.

We grew up with a secret that everyone knew. Even the cat knew and stalked it. For years my father’s wig felt like an answer. I could say ‘I am the way I am because my father wears a wig.’ I could say ‘I am in love with you because I have told you, and no-one else, about my father’s shameful wig.’ This is not true. I have told strangers about my father’s wig in discos. I have discovered that it is not a good way to score.

We lived in a house that did not believe in the past, the place where people’s hair fell out. My mother kept three photographs hidden in a drawer, which we didn’t need to see, in order to know. The first is a picture of my parents’ wedding day. They look noble, and sweetly sad. My father is holding his little hair down in the wind. The other two were taken on their honeymoon. My mother is sitting on a rug in a bathing suit. I am already in her tummy. Then my father is on the same rug. He is standing on his head.

We do not need these pictures. My brother remembers pulling at my father’s hair as a small child. He says he remembers a tuft coming away in his hand. He is still waiting to be forgiven. I remember being carried on my father’s shoulders and a light sweat breaking on his scalp. My sister remembers his hairbrush, a sacred, filthy thing.

These are late memories. They came when he was sick. We thought the wig would beat us to the grave. We looked at him in his hospital bed and the dead thing on his head looked more alive than he did.

So we betrayed him. We laughed. We called it by name. ‘Wig,’ I said. My brother Phil said ‘Toupee’, because his own hair was getting thin. Brenda, the youngest, said ‘Rat’, which is also a word for penis.

Because the truth is that my father walked into a hair clinic in Dublin in 1967 and pushed his money over the counter, which in 1967 was a modern, Formica counter, to a woman, who in 1967 was wearing a beehive, at least half of which was fake. And in return he got a wig full of straight, stiff, dead hair, half-oriental, half-horse, that was dyed a youthful orange-brown. He had finished reproducing. I was nearing the age of reason. My mother’s gratitude was wearing thin. He came home with the thing on his head. He went into work the next day. No-one said a word.

I was five at the time and in love with his forearms, which were smooth and hairy and smelt of the sun. I knew him.

Besides, I thought the wig was part of the television set he brought home with him the same evening. I thought it was an aerial of sorts, a decoder, or an audience response.

My father still has beautiful hands, with big knuckles that his grandchildren, if he had any grandchildren, would pick up one by one and splay out on the arm of his chair. But I did not recognise the white slabs flattened against the glass when he kicked the bottom of the hall door one night, a big brown box in his arms. We stood and looked.

‘Stop kicking that door!’ said my mother.

‘There’s a man outside.’ So she stepped into the hall with her own hands wet. They were cold by the time she reached the latch. The man pushed past her and set the box on the floor. It was our father. He said that there was a surprise inside, but we had to eat our tea first.

When we were called into the sitting room, a smaller, inside box was balanced on a chair in the corner by the curtains. My father (who had something strange on his head), sat us in a row on the sofa and turned the box on. Nothing happened. Then it warmed up like the radio and glowed with sound. A sheet of light fused between the glass and the thick grey of the tube. It was thinner than the film of oil on a puddle in the road and much harder. And it was dancing.

Phil asked what it was, which I thought was silly because I knew it was the television, but my father received the question solemnly, took the RTE Guide out of his raincoat pocket and said, ‘7.25: Steady as She Go-Goes with Maxi, Dick and Twink.’ He walked over to his seat and assumed a viewing position.

There were people jumping around. Then you saw their faces. And there was my father, with his coat still on and his face made elastic, slight and old, by the aerial sitting on his head.

Now when my granny got her false teeth a few years later, she sat us up on her knee one by one. ‘Do you want to know a secret?’ she said and amazed us by pulling the teeth out an inch or two before snapping them back for a kiss. My father, on the other hand, just stopped moving his head. His neck got stiff and angry. The wig slept on top of him with one eye open, watching us. My parents’ bedroom became even more secret, as if the wig were a dog at the door.

As I say, I liked the thing well enough, although I never gave it a chance. I was always one step ahead of it and my father seemed to be on my side. He was gracious and private and rarely walked down the street with us. In fact, as a family, we were quite proud of my father, of the way he held himself separate. The wig was his way of showing his anger, of being polite.

Anyway, I loved him so much that it was difficult to see him. Even now I cannot remember his laugh or his face.

It is too easy to say that my father bought the television as a decoy. I prefer to think of it as another leap of faith. Certainly, he was excited by the moon and the possibility of putting men on it. It was important that we should know about the world. And the first week of the television was also the week of the moon orbit by Apollo 8, whose pictures I did understand, because I had seen the moon and because there was no-one singing and dancing on it for no good reason, like Maxi, Dick or Twink.

My father watched the LoveQuiz once, just to be polite. He said he preferred programmes that weren’t so ‘set up’. I tried to tell him that all programmes are ‘set up’ but his wig shouted me down. I always knew the little bastard would get me in the end.