The Wig My Father Wore. Anne Enright

came in at seven in the morning to an empty house. I rang the neighbours and so broadcast the facts that I was a slut and that my father was in hospital, both at the same time. Since then, my father’s illness has not been made my concern.

      A few weeks later I did sleep with Brendan (large, rooted and sincere) for the first time. I mourned all right, but not for my virginity. I mourned for my mother in the kitchen and my father in the bed. I was astonished by sex. And I was astonished by the fact that the rhythm of love, when it happened, was the awful swing of my mother’s hall door, always opening, never shut.

      Brendan took it all very badly. We lay there in his dirty and tangled sheets. I said ‘That was my first time.’ I said ‘My father’s just had a stroke.’

      * *

      ‘Anyway,’ says Frank, ‘she can’t be a virgin. Not after Marcus gave her one that Friday night.’

      ‘It doesn’t matter’, says Marcus, who has an urgent mind and very little in his pants, ‘whether she was a virgin or not — because on the screen, for the duration of the show, for the punters at home, that young woman was as good as a virgin. And that is the lie we get paid to tell.’

      ‘She was as good as a ride,’ says Frank.

      ‘Whore,’ I said into my dinner.

      ‘All things to all men!’ said Marcus. ‘Which is why, when people criticise the programme — yes, it’s a trashy show, yes, it’s complicated — it’s as trashy and simple and complicated as a one-night-stand is, or as paying for a blow job is, or as falling in love. So when people criticise that experience, whatever it was that they saw on the screen, they are telling you more about themselves than they are about the show.’

      ‘Gosh!’ said Frank.

      ‘I know what I’m looking at,’ said Jo.

      ‘Exactly,’ said Marcus. ‘Just what I said.’

      Marcus always wins a) because he changes his mind all the time, which he is allowed to do because b) he read somewhere that truth is just a matter of building contradictions. So now he has his cake, he eats it and his shit comes out wedge-shaped with icing on the top.

      ‘Marcus,’ I said. ‘I was not calling Marie Keogh a whore, whether or not you slept with her. I don’t know how to break it to you, but she is just a distracted young woman we put on the telly the other night. I was calling you a whore. I could have called Frank a whore, but we all know that he’d get up on the crack of Dawn, so it’s not exactly hot news. I was calling you a whore because you get off on television and you love talking shite.’

      ‘And you are working for Mother Teresa,’ said Marcus. ‘As we well know.’

      ‘I know what I am,’ I said. ‘I know that I’m out on the streets with my high heels on, earning a crust. You just hang around because you love the smell of cock.’

      ‘Why do you talk like that?’ said Marcus.

      ‘I’m just talking. You’re the one who is waving it around.’

      ‘Oh. You think I slept with her.’

      ‘I think you don’t know the difference between fucking her on-screen and off.’

      ‘And what exactly is the difference?’ said Marcus, who wants to make Drama and doesn’t put out.

      ‘Are those shoes new?’ said Frank.

      He has just retrieved a fork from the floor. He ducks down again, followed by Marcus and Jo, their elbows cresting the air like whales going under, with the coffee cups sailing by. It was my shoes they were looking at, so I joined them.

      Under the table the world was huge. The sounds were old. Our childhoods were sitting there, with a finger to their lips.

      We looked at each others’ faces, small beside our thighs, which were broad and easy on the flat of the chairs, sitting any way, privately akimbo. There were our legs, frank and tender without their torsos, thinking about the possibilities of mix and match. They might for example, walk off in different couples, leaving our bollocks and bits abandoned mid-air.

      We laughed. I lifted my flanks to make them look thinner, then dropped them again and twisted my head back up, leaving them to talk in the secret way that legs might have. As I came to the lip I lost Marcus’s and Frank’s knees and crotches, and found their shoulders, shifting blindly along the line of the table top.

      Back in the open, the sounds of the restaurant collided like two trains slamming past each other. I was still laughing. Marcus, Frank and Jo surfaced and smiled.

      I knew that the trains had crashed and we had all died. It was just that no-one had noticed yet.

      ‘These old things?’ I said. ‘I’ve had them for years.’

      ‘Nice,’ said Jo.

      ‘Well I’ve met him,’ said Frank.

      ‘Met who?’

      ‘Your man. Stephen. Met him in the bookies.’

      ‘He is not my man.’

      ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Marcus. ‘I don’t care.’

      ‘Gave me a winner for the Gold Cup so I bought him a drink. And it so happens he knows my name from the credits. “Frank Fingal!” he says, “from the LoveQuiz?” “Is this fame at last?” I ask. “No,” he says, “I’ve just moved in with Grace.”’

      ‘He’s a flatmate.’