Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

To which I reply, ‘Hve meeting. Walking into town.’

I can’t imagine how Evie is supposed to get out of Enniskerry, which must be snowed in. The schools are closed. I don’t see any cars on the road, and the television, when I turn it on, has pictures of frozen confusion, quiet chaos. Nothing is moving, except makeshift toboggans and snowballs.

You would think that on this day of all days, she would just stay at home. But I know nothing about these things – the reason Evie stays, or the reasons she goes – there are deep forces at work, great imperatives. We must inch forward massively, like rock along a fault line, for fear of the quake.

At ten thirty, another, somewhat redundant, text from Seán, ‘Hang on…’

‘Bated breath,’ I write – and then delete.

Since his daughter came into my house, life is one long wrangle about arrangements: times, places, pick-ups, drop-offs, handovers. And everything has to be done in person. For some reason, you can’t just ask someone – friend’s mother, drama teacher or whoever – to put the child in a taxi. I mean, how much is my time worth? How much is Seán’s time worth? Surely more than the tenner for the fare. But you can’t put daughters in taxis. Putting a daughter in a taxi is like asking a foreigner to molest her, on the meter .

‘Meet Ev 3.30ish Dawson St??’

‘ok. When home?’

‘145 bus stop.’

‘whn home?’

‘trying!!!!’

‘How Buda?’

He does not reply.

I have saved this man’s life, but there are things I am not allowed to – that I do not need to – know. The money thing, for example. I don’t know whether he can break even in Budapest, or what is happening to his house by the beach, which is now up for sale too. I think, to be fair, he doesn’t know either. I mean, it’s fine. Everything is fine, just so long as no one blinks, no one moves. Meanwhile, it is there on the web for everyone to click over and ignore – the shells on the windowsills in Ballymoney, and whether Clonskeagh has gone Sale Agreed. Myself and Seán have loved a whole litter of For Sale signs into being. And no one is about to buy anything. Not in this snow.

At eleven my meeting calls to cancel, as I knew she would. I hold my phone and look at it, wondering who to text about what. Then I just put it away.

The craziest thing, I think, is the way I can’t speak to them in person, to Aileen or to Evie. I am a grown woman with a job and a salary, and I am not allowed talk to the people who, at a whim, make or ruin my Saturdays. I can not even lift the phone.

As I say to Fiachra, it’s like I get all the stupid stuff and none of the cuddles. Not that I want the cuddles: Evie (am I the only one who notices this?) is no longer a child.

She is nearly twelve. Evie had a growth spurt last autumn and, though she measured herself against her father – chin! earlobe! forehead! – to her preening delight and his seeming pride, it has not yet translated into actual cubic centimetres: this of girl and this of air. She has not yet learned the extent of herself.

So she sits on her father’s knee, or rather plonks herself on to his lap, just as she always used to, ‘Oh God. Evie,’ while he pulls back to guard the family jewels and ducks to the side to keep her skull from breaking his nose. You can’t actually see him behind her large and white and radiant flesh. She is dressed like a girl you see throwing up into a litter bin on a Saturday night, in black ripped tights under denim shorts (Aileen looks in the cheap shops to see what she will wear and tries to match it in something a little more expensive), and she really is sitting on him as opposed to perching on his knee, and the two of them are entirely happy and natural with this, until they aren’t.

‘Off now, Evie.’

‘Aw-ww.’

‘Off!’

Sometimes he succeeds, and sometimes, he lets her stay. Her face in front of his is rounder, the lips softer, and her eyes, though the same shape and colour, are spookily not the same: there is an entirely different human being in there. She swings a leg and looks airily about, claiming her father against all comers, while I sit and smile.

The first time she stayed over I kept away, walking the streets of Galway in the rain, only driving home when I was sure she would be gone. It was September. The house had been on the market exactly a year. If you listened to the car radio, all the money in the country had just evaporated, you could almost see it, rising off the rooftops like steam. And there she was, this cuckoo, sitting in my kitchen; the price I had to pay for love.

The absurdity of it was lost on Seán, who was – who continues to be – completely helpless when it comes to Evie. He can see nothing but her.

So I did not ask his permission the next weekend, but walked in at two o’clock to find the two of them sitting down to lunch.

‘Hi!’ I said, brightly.

Evie ignored me, but it is possible she ignores everyone for the first while.

Her father said, ‘Evie,’ and she looked up with hurt eyes. ‘You remember Gina.’

‘Hm,’ she said.

And I moved quietly about as she picked through the home-made burger; removing lettuce and cucumber, complaining there was no ketchup, piling on the mayonnaise.

Since then, she comes quite often. We meet in passing. I dodge her rage. I am always brief. I am always nice. I sleep with her father, while she sleeps across the landing. All the doors are open in case she dies in her sleep, even though she is not going to die in her sleep. But I do not think we would make love if they were closed, not even silently.

I come out in the morning, to find her already occupying the bathroom, or she barges past, in some tatty flannelette of infant pink. Every time I see her, she has grown – but massively. It is like a different stranger to bump into every week.

At night, I hear them moving about the spare room, the curtains pulled, the quiet chat as she arranges fluffy toys and night lights and who knows what, until her father – Evie is nearly twelve, remember – lies down beside her and murmurs her to sleep. As often as not he falls asleep too, and I can not tap on the door, or put my head round it to rouse him: I can not risk it. So they lie, cocooned and hopeless and completely contented, while I sit and watch crap TV.

She started coming in September and they ran out of trips and excursions by the middle of October, so they linger in the house and fail to make decisions; Evie whining, I just want to hang out with my frie-ends .

For a man who is crazy about his daughter, Seán spends a lot of time telling her to go away. Maybe all parents do this.

‘Go and do something,’ he says, as she peers over his shoulder at his laptop screen, eating an apple beside his ear.

‘What are you standing there for?’ He sends her down to the shops for sweets, and then tells her she can’t have sweets. He sends her down to the shops for a smoothie, instead. He says, ‘Go and play,’ when there is no one for her to play with. He tells her to go and read a book, though he never reads books, himself; I have never seen him with a book in his hand. So she plays Nintendo, and then he tells her not to play so much Nintendo.

‘Stop touching things, Evie.’

There is no stilling her hands, always on the mooch.

I noticed this the first time we went outside the house together, and walked down to Bushy Park with Evie’s new dog (the dog is another story: let me not begin to discuss the dog). She followed each wall with the tips of her fingers, smooth or rough; let them drift through hedges and drag the leaves off bushes.

It was as though she was testing the edges of her world; finding the point where objects began and space stopped.