Q5

Text 5 — Prose fiction extract
Evaluate Anne Enright’s use of narrative voice in shaping the character of Katherine O’Dell.

Text 5 — Prose fiction extract
People ask me, ‘What was she like?’ and I try to figure out if they mean as a normal person: what was she like in her slippers, eating toast and marmalade, or what was she like as a mother, or what she was like as an actress – we did not use the word star. Mostly though, they mean what was she like before she went crazy, as though their own mother might turn overnight, like a bottle of milk left out of the fridge. Or they might, themselves, be secretly askew. Something happens as they talk to me. I am used to it now. It works in them slowly; a growing wonder, as though recognising an old flame after many years. ‘You have her eyes,’ they say. People loved her. Strangers, I mean. I saw them looking at her and nodding, though they failed to hear a single word she said. And, yes, I have her eyes. At least, I have the same colour eyes as my mother; a hazel that, in her case, people liked to call green . . . So all right. Here she is, Katherine O’Dell making her breakfast, requiring her breakfast from the fridge and the cupboards, some of which delight her and some of which let her down. Where is it, where is it, here it is! Yes! The marmalade. The sun is coming through the window, the smoke from her cigarette rises and twists in an elegant, double-strand. What can I say? When she ate toast and marmalade she was like anyone else eating toast and marmalade, though the line between lip and skin, whatever that is called, is very precise, even when you are not seeing it on a cinema screen, twelve feet long. So, here she is, eating toast. She works fast. She holds the slice of toast to her mouth, bites and chews, then bites again. Swallows. She does this maybe three or four times, sets the thing back on the plate. She takes it up for one more bite: leaves it down. After which, there is a little tug of love which the toast loses; a little wavy-over thing she does with her hand, a shimmy of rejection or desire. No, she will not have any more toast. She picks up the phone receiver and dials. Everything was ‘marvellous!’ when she was on this phone; a beige thing on the kitchen wall with a long clapped-out curly cord that you had to duck under as she paced and smoked, saying ‘marvellous!’ while giving me the wink, indicating her coffee, or a glass of wine that was out of reach, with a pointed finger and a rolling hand. ‘Just marvellous,’ she might say. Or she talks to me, a girl of eight or nine sitting at the table in a pink cotton dress brought back from America. She involves the dog who waits under the table, like a dog in the movies, for scraps and crumbs. Mostly she speaks to the ceiling, at the place where it meets the wall. Her eyes rove along this line as though looking for ideas up there, or for justice. Yes, that is what she wants. She tucks her face down quickly to light another cigarette. She exhales. The toast is now fully ignored. The toast is dead to her now. The chair is pushed back, the cigarette stubbed out on the actual plate. After which she gets up and walks away. Someone else will dispose of all that. Because I think I mentioned that my mother was a star. Not just on screen or on the stage, but at the breakfast table also, my mother Katherine O’Dell was a star. ANNE ENRIGHT Extract from Actress © Anne Enright 2020 Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited