We split up in the nightclub. I see a man I slept with once or twice. I roar at him over the music. I say ‘You think I’m a woman. You think I’m a woman. Don’t you? You think I’m a woman.’ So he takes me home. As we leave I can see Marie from Donnycarney trying and failing with Marcus. Her LoveDate is moping in the corner. They should both be tucked up in their beds, but I can’t work all the time. I hope that Marcus will sleep with her so I can fry his ass next Monday, but I doubt it. He was never that kind.
The next day is Saturday — the morning after the night before, swimming through the show that is still swimming through me, waiting to be ambushed as I turn a corner by a little piece of dead adrenalin floating through my heart.
I am late. Jo is sitting quietly at her desk staring at the phone. The crew is at the airport waiting for Marie who is nowhere to be found.
Jo chases flights, while I chase Marie, who has not booked out of the hotel. When I arrive, her clothes are still scattered across the empty room. The phone rings. It is Jo with three near options — not near enough. We decide to go to Killarney instead. I consider calling the LoveWagon, decide against it, consider resigning, wash my face and sit down to wait.
There is a pair of shoes on the bed. There is a pair of tights abandoned on the ground. I want to switch them around. I want the shoes to be on the floor. I want the tights to be on the bed. Still, I can’t touch them. They belong to someone else and they are used.
I am sweating. If Stephen were here he would pick up the tights and fold them. If Frank were here, he would put his arm around me and tell me about the sins of a married man. Marcus would ignore them, lie down on the bed and ask me what it was all about. Small mercies.
I catch the smell of last night’s man. It is light and warm and I smile. I have been trying to track it down all morning. Then I find it. It is the smell of a baby’s hair. The hangover hits.
Marie walks into the room. She bends down, picks the tights off the floor, then turns to me without surprise.
‘Seven pounds fifty they cost me,’ she says, ‘and they laddered the minute I put them on.’ She sits down on the bed and switches on the television with the remote control.
‘Hotel bedrooms,’ she says, ‘aren’t they a laugh?’ Oprah is on, talking to people who have been struck by lightning.
‘Now I heard that somewhere,’ says Oprah. ‘Is that your experience? Is it your experience that when somebody is struck by lightning, that person is thirsty for the rest of his, or her life?’
‘They’ll have to do,’ says Marie. ‘Sorry I’m late.’ And she starts putting on the tights, ladder and all.
The Wrong Place
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.
Aerial
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