don’t enjoy the sensation and look forward to lying down. I always liked to walk slowly anyway, to give people time to appreciate me. When my beauty was more widely appreciated, I was sought after all up the Côte d’Azur, from San Remo to Saint Tropez …
Now, if I raise my head from my pillow, I can see the family finishing their ice-creams and the mother wiping the face of the smallest girl. They are obscured for a moment by crowds and then they come past me, towards the point, which they will not enjoy. It is thick with dog shit, which the Antipodeans seem to dislike even more than the Americans do.
The little girl has come to stand beside me. She is perhaps four years old. In the high sun her fair hair flares in a nimbus around the dark shape of her head. I would squint up at her, but my face is both chemically paralysed and surgically tight, so I cannot. My poor eyes take the full brunt of the sun. What is she doing? I don’t trust her.
Head on one side, she puts her still-sticky hand deep into the pocket of her shorts and produces a glob of red sweets, jellies, all glued together. With the utmost concentration, ignoring her sister calling from a distance away, she detaches one moist oval pastille from the bunch and holds it out, briefly, over my stomach. After a moment she reconsiders and bends over me to gently insert the sweet between my lips. I can see her face now, the maternal tenderness in her blue eyes, the way her little mouth is pursed with concentration, the way she devotes herself to the impulse to sustain me. The sweet adheres to my teeth, it clamps my jaws shut. Then a second sweet is held to my mouth between the black-nailed thumb and forefinger, and the tiniest frown — or is it just the desire to frown? — shifts the pale skin of her brow. A moment passes before my little saint understandsthat I cannot accept another and so eats it herself, very quickly, chewing and swallowing so close to me that I can hear every pulse of liquid mastication.
‘Anna!’ The sister is calling again.
The child jumps up as quickly as a bird taking flight and I turn my head to watch her go in her little red sandals, her hurrying, plump legs still with a baby’s shape to them.
A drop of water, a tear — I suppose that’s what it is — rolls from the corner of my left eye, over the bridge of my nose and into my right. Through it the little girl blurs and jumps, taking her waiting sister’s hand and hurrying with her down the concrete path towards her mother, between the high fence of the Stade Rondelli and the smooth, sunbaked rocks above the sea.
In a Language All Lips
The window is jammed. It won’t open or shut, and the sun struggles to pierce the greasy glass.
As usual, when I wake she is still asleep. She sleeps through anything.
A fly rubs its paws on the bridge of her nose. One morning I entered her and she woke up only when I started moving. She is a stupid woman, but I like her red hair, white skin and lilting voice. She says she loves me.
There were tears last night. There will be tears again this morning when I wake her to ready her for her journey. I will prepare her in ways she will not know until it is too late.
She rolls over, her hair shifting on the pillow like weeds in the Sargasso Sea. Her violet eyes open and look at me. I bask in the purple light for a moment. I can’t help myself. A small white hand threads itself through my chest hair, she nuzzles hermoon face into my breast, and soon I feel the tears slip over my skin like silk. I turn her over, and we dampen the bed another way. Towards the end she smiles at me, fleetingly.
I smile at you because I love you. I smile at you because I don’t want you to know how heavy my heart is — how I’m dreading this separation even though it’s only for a few days.
But I will be home. Home in Ireland. And you will follow me there. If only it could happen as quickly and as fearlessly — this flight from living death to something I
Now, if I raise my head from my pillow, I can see the family finishing their ice-creams and the mother wiping the face of the smallest girl. They are obscured for a moment by crowds and then they come past me, towards the point, which they will not enjoy. It is thick with dog shit, which the Antipodeans seem to dislike even more than the Americans do.
The little girl has come to stand beside me. She is perhaps four years old. In the high sun her fair hair flares in a nimbus around the dark shape of her head. I would squint up at her, but my face is both chemically paralysed and surgically tight, so I cannot. My poor eyes take the full brunt of the sun. What is she doing? I don’t trust her.
Head on one side, she puts her still-sticky hand deep into the pocket of her shorts and produces a glob of red sweets, jellies, all glued together. With the utmost concentration, ignoring her sister calling from a distance away, she detaches one moist oval pastille from the bunch and holds it out, briefly, over my stomach. After a moment she reconsiders and bends over me to gently insert the sweet between my lips. I can see her face now, the maternal tenderness in her blue eyes, the way her little mouth is pursed with concentration, the way she devotes herself to the impulse to sustain me. The sweet adheres to my teeth, it clamps my jaws shut. Then a second sweet is held to my mouth between the black-nailed thumb and forefinger, and the tiniest frown — or is it just the desire to frown? — shifts the pale skin of her brow. A moment passes before my little saint understandsthat I cannot accept another and so eats it herself, very quickly, chewing and swallowing so close to me that I can hear every pulse of liquid mastication.
‘Anna!’ The sister is calling again.
The child jumps up as quickly as a bird taking flight and I turn my head to watch her go in her little red sandals, her hurrying, plump legs still with a baby’s shape to them.
A drop of water, a tear — I suppose that’s what it is — rolls from the corner of my left eye, over the bridge of my nose and into my right. Through it the little girl blurs and jumps, taking her waiting sister’s hand and hurrying with her down the concrete path towards her mother, between the high fence of the Stade Rondelli and the smooth, sunbaked rocks above the sea.
In a Language All Lips
The window is jammed. It won’t open or shut, and the sun struggles to pierce the greasy glass.
As usual, when I wake she is still asleep. She sleeps through anything.
A fly rubs its paws on the bridge of her nose. One morning I entered her and she woke up only when I started moving. She is a stupid woman, but I like her red hair, white skin and lilting voice. She says she loves me.
There were tears last night. There will be tears again this morning when I wake her to ready her for her journey. I will prepare her in ways she will not know until it is too late.
She rolls over, her hair shifting on the pillow like weeds in the Sargasso Sea. Her violet eyes open and look at me. I bask in the purple light for a moment. I can’t help myself. A small white hand threads itself through my chest hair, she nuzzles hermoon face into my breast, and soon I feel the tears slip over my skin like silk. I turn her over, and we dampen the bed another way. Towards the end she smiles at me, fleetingly.
I smile at you because I love you. I smile at you because I don’t want you to know how heavy my heart is — how I’m dreading this separation even though it’s only for a few days.
But I will be home. Home in Ireland. And you will follow me there. If only it could happen as quickly and as fearlessly — this flight from living death to something I
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