Actress by Anne Enright

Author:Anne Enright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2020-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

EXACTLY ONE WEEK after I had sex for the first time, my mother went a bit crazy. I crawled out of bed on Saturday afternoon.

‘What time do you call this?’ she said and there was a sudden fight, as sometimes happened in my teenage years. Most of these spats ended in tears and reconciliation; this one ended, less typically, with my mother clearing my wardrobe in one frantic armload, which she brought over to the bedroom window, poking herself in the face, as she did so, with the wire hangers. She was trying to throw the clothes down into the garden.

‘Do you want a hand with that?’

The window had been painted shut for years.

‘Get out if you want to talk to me like that. If that’s how you want to conduct yourself, you can get out of here, you can find yourself a different hotel.’

She had caught the jauntiness of my tone, not to mention the swagger in my step as I sashayed down the stairs.

The clothes came flying down after me and snarled into a heap which she then had to kick and stumble through in order to give my face a wallop. And this was considerably less than wonderful, it was a ringing blow and I felt the world expand in the echo of it. I stood a moment, then turned and walked straight out of the house. Of course, as soon as I hit cold air, I realised I had no coat and nowhere to go, so I went over to the little park and sat on a bench, appealing skywards to stop the tears.

I had spent an amount of time under these trees as a child, playing my chatty, solitary games. This is where I arranged my toys and told everyone to behave themselves; the dolly and the fluffy rabbit, the teapot and the fossil stone.

‘Now be nice!’

I bashed them together and separated them briskly, and gave them what for.

And here I was again, sorting it out, alone. My mother felt threatened by the change in me, I knew that. She felt abandoned or outdone. She felt old.

And I was perfectly happy, that was the joke of it, because I had a secret life now and it was none of her concern. This new delight dragged something monstrous in its shadow, that loomed and was gone.

The day was very still. The winter grass was sharp in each blade, and the surrounding windows pewter with the reflection of a grey sky. I waited for the world to settle down, then I got up and walked back over to the house. It was silent, now, with no sign of Kitty, though lamps had been switched on in the empty rooms, waiting for night to fall.

My mother was up in her room with the curtains closed and, after an hour or so, I tapped on the door and went in. It was dark. She reached up her arms when she knew it was me, and I leaned down to gather her close, tucking in beside her to sit on the bed.

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