Anne Enright - The Forgotten Waltz

‘What are you doing Evie?’

‘I was just looking.’

It was, up to a point, just the way she was. Stop dawdling, Evie . From the time she was three years old, Evie could never get out of a car without pausing endlessly before the jump. Thresholds made her stall. All journeys were difficult, not for her, but for the people around her, who could never quite figure out just how she managed to slow everything down.

Come along, Evie . So this was nothing more than another failure, on her part, to grow up. Then, one day, she wandered from her mother in the Dundrum Shopping Centre and when Aileen, frantic, found her outside by the fountains, she could not say where she had been.

‘I was just,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’

Seán was in no position to believe that there was a problem. His life with me had taken on some importance, by then; he was a man trying to keep his balance. He was, besides, ‘Just not going to do it, this time round.’ And though he discussed Evie with me over the phone in those long drifting days after Joan died, he didn’t – he just couldn’t – listen to Aileen, when the panic machine ground into gear again.

‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘She’s just growing. It’s fine.’

Then, one Saturday after the summer holidays, Evie did not come out of her drama class. Seán who was doing the pick-up waited, and checked his watch. He went inside where the teacher was packing up and discovered that Evie, though dropped at the door, had not showed up in class that day. They started to ransack the building, the two of them – then Seán decided to try outside. He ran into the street and up the hill, past buildings and doors and girls smoking at the bus stop, into the shopping centre, where he went down the first escalator he came to and stood in the middle of the atrium, and he looked up at a changed world, one full of angles, doors and possibilities that he had never seen before.

He wanted to shout her name and then did not shout. He found a security guard, who muttered into his walkie-talkie, then wrote out a phone number and advised him to ring the local police. Which Seán did, standing on the street, watching buses and cars, and old ladies with stand-up trolleys, going about their usual business. The man who answered asked him to hold the line. Then a woman’s voice. I must sound bad, he thought, if they are handing me to a girl.

‘Can you describe your daughter?’

Just the word ‘daughter’, the way she said it, made him feel like a liar. He felt like someone who was about to be found out.

‘She has big eyes,’ he said.

There was a silence at the other end of the line.

‘Take your time, sir. Can you tell me the colour of her eyes?’ At which point he did that thing; he turned himself into a person who can describe his daughter in words you might hear on the evening news: age, height, hair colour.

‘What was she wearing?’

‘I’ll have to ring her mother,’ he said. And as soon as he cut the connection, Aileen was on the line.

For a few moments, he failed to understand, not just the words she was saying, but her voice itself – she might have been talking Danish – then he somehow figured out that Evie had rung Aileen, or Aileen had rung Evie, and she was in the theatre, where she was supposed to have been all along.

‘You spent the class in the toilet?’ To which Evie replied, ‘No!’ And then, ‘I must have done.’

There was nothing for it, but to go back to the doctors – the same round of referrals and endless waiting lists, the same watchfulness and morning anxiety, Aileen on the internet every night, googling ‘absences’, ‘lesions’, ‘puberty’; inviting it all in.

When they finally found themselves back with Dr Prentice – it was with difficulty, Aileen said, that she did not ‘fall on the woman’s neck’ – Evie had very little to say.

She answered all the questions and gave no clues.

‘And what do you think is going on, Evie?’ the doctor finally said, to which Evie offered the idea that her brain might be funny.

‘In what way funny?’

Evie, who by this time knew more than most children about the human brain, said, ‘The two halves – the hemispheres, you know? – it is like they don’t join up properly.’

Dr Prentice pursed her mouth and looked into her lap, then she lifted her head and with great clarity and tactfulness, discussed the anomalies of Evie’s case, and suggested – strongly suggested – that alongside her medical tests and enquiries, they should bring Evie for ‘psychiatric assessment’.

This was what was going on, the Christmas I wandered the deserted city streets. They gave her a computer, and told her not to spend so much time on the computer, and they pulled crackers, and hugged her, taking careful turns.

It is my suspicion that, after this, Aileen finally confronted Seán with all the things she had known – but not let herself know – for years. I suspect that she kicked him out. Because she realised the lies they told each other were wrecking Evie’s head.

Or perhaps he kicked himself out, for much the same reason.

It is hard to pin down. Seán tells the story differently every time, and he believes it differently each time. But the fact seems to be that, at a time when it seemed most important, for Evie’s sake, that they should stay together, it was also vital, for Evie’s sake, that they should part.

In the last days of March, they sat in a room full of ghastly china figurines and discussed their daughter with a lemur of a woman – all eyes, and quick little hands – who had been seeing Evie, at great expense, for the previous two months. She looked at them and twitched her head sideways.

‘Now. Let’s talk about you guys, OK?’ Not OK.

And sometime in the next week, Seán Vallely walked out of his house with nothing, not even a jacket, and he drove, in the middle of the night, to my door.

It was a weeknight: some normal night without him. It might have been two in the morning. I woke to the sound of the bell and the rattle of the letter box. Seán was crouched down, saying my name, trying not to wake the neighbours.

I was not quite awake, myself. I thought someone had died. Then I remembered that Joan was already dead: I had no one left, now, except Fiona. So it was my sister, then – though it seemed so unlikely; Fiona was not, somehow, the dying type. I pulled the door open and he was standing outside in the weather. And the first thing I said was, ‘Is she dead?’

‘Let me in, will you?’

‘Oh, sorry.’

He came inside the door – not very far – he crossed the threshold and then he leaned back against the wall. Every bit of his face was wet, and when I kissed him, he tasted of rain.

I said it to Seán once – I said, if it had not been for Evie, we would not be together – and he looked at me as though I had just blasphemed.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said.

As far as he is concerned, there is no cause: he arrived in my life as though lifted and pushed by a swell of the sea.

In which case, Evie’s room is like something after the tide went out: dirty feathers, scraps of paper, endless bits of cheap, non-specific plastic, and some that are quite expensive:

‘Do you know how much those fucking things cost?’ says Seán, going through the compacted filth of the Hoover bag, looking for a game from her Nintendo.

My stuff, on the other hand, does not matter. A Chanel compact, skittering across the floor, my phone pushed off the arm of the sofa, the battery forever after temperamental.

‘Gawd,’ says Evie.

She does not say ‘sorry’, that would be too personal.

Evie was always a bit of a barreller, a lurcher; her elbows are very close to her unconscious. At one stage they were going to have her checked for dyspraxia, by which they just meant ‘clumsiness’, but I guarantee you I have seen her move with great finesse. In this house, she is only clumsy around things that belong to me.