The Green Road (33 page)

There was no problem getting a bed, she said. She wondered at that; the things you hear on the news about people on trolleys for days.

‘They’re all home for the Christmas,’ said the nurse, who was Tamil at a guess, with a name so long she had an extra inch on her plastic tag. Rosaleen looked closely at her face and eyes.

‘So pretty,’ she said.

The nurse took no offence.

‘I feel, I don’t know how to describe it, I feel much better.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I didn’t feel well at all,’ she said. ‘But now I feel much better.’

‘Yes.’

Emmet, who was sitting in his conscientious way at her bedside, saw all this and did not quite believe it.

‘You were up a mountain,’ he said.

Rosaleen turned her head and rested her gaze on him. She looked a little puzzled and then she smiled.

‘Yes.’

‘Do you remember?’

‘Oh, I remember the mountain, all right,’ as though this was not what she was talking about at all. ‘Oh yes, the mountain.’

She was looking at him very intently.

‘You rest now, Rosaleen,’ said the nurse.

‘I mean before the mountain.’

She nestled her cheek into the hospital pillow and looked at her son.

‘Oh darling,’ she said.

Emmet did not know how to reply to her, but she did not seem to want a reply.

‘Oh darling. I am sorry.’

‘No need,’ he said.

‘I put you through it.’

‘You’re all right.’

‘I put you through the wringer.’

She closed her eyes, slowly, gazing at him all the while, and when she was asleep Emmet went down to the metal clipboard at the end of the bed.

‘What’s she on?’ he said.

‘Drip,’ said the nurse. And then, after a moment’s thought, ‘She is happy.’

And indeed, Rosaleen was happy. She continued happy for some time. Not just happy at the fuss that was made of her – the visits, the journalist spurned at the door, the priest sounding his thanks for her deliverance at morning Mass,
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
– she was happy with other small things, the light as it thickened on the hospital floor, the clever controls for lifting the bed, the flowers Pat Doran the garageman brought in to her, though they were – to coin a phrase, she said –
petrol station flowers
.

‘What lovely colours, Pat. You shouldn’t have.’

Rosaleen was delighted to be alive. This is such an obvious thing to be, Hanna wondered why everyone was not delighted, all the time. She brought the baby in to see her, and they sat, her mother and Hugh and
the puddin
, as Rosaleen called him, ‘Oh the puddin!’ insisting they hoist the baby on the bed for her to hold. Rosaleen loved babies, she said, and it was, for a while, easy to believe her. She wanted to
eat him
, she said. Hugh took pictures on his phone and they admired them as they happened: Rosaleen thin and the baby fat in front of her, the baby putting his hand into Rosaleen’s mouth and pulling her jaw down.

‘Ya ya ya yah,’ said Rosaleen, and the baby laughed.

She was delighted. And the baby was delightful. Hanna tried to hold all that, so she could remember it the next time the baby screamed, the picture of her mother, handing the baby back to her saying, ‘Oh, how I envy you now.’

As if life was always worth having, worth reproducing, and everything always turned out well in the end.

Emmet saw what he had not seen in many years: his mother being wonderful. She regaled them all with descriptions of the ambulance, the doctor’s cold hands, the cow on the other side of the wall when she fell asleep on the mountain.

‘It was like a plane taking off in your ear,’ she said.

When Dan came in, the pair of them laughed at everything and Emmet was not jealous. He watched Rosaleen for deterioration of some kind but her brain was fine – or what the world called her brain: short term, long term, the current Pope, the days of the week. It was just her mood that changed. It was just her life that had changed.

She looked on her children as though we were a wonder to her, and indeed we were a bit of a wonder to ourselves. We had been, for those hours on the dark mountainside, a force. A family.

There followed a time of great kindness and generosity, not just from neighbours and from strangers, but among the Madigans. There was no talk of bringing Rosaleen home to Ardeevin, ‘That cold house,’ said Constance. She had the room all made up, she said, and Rosaleen’s things brought over, so she could stay as long as she needed to, out in Aughavanna.

A Face in the Crowd

DAN FLEW BACK
to Toronto and found that Ludo had posted an alert for Rosaleen on his social media page, saying, ‘If anyone has anybody in Ireland, especially on the west coast, then please spread the word about this missing woman.’

‘That was a bit previous,’ he said, scrolling through the responses and best wishes, including one from a psychic in Leitrim offering his dowsing skills. He paused at a line from a guy called Gregory Savalas and clicked through to his homepage, which showed mountains and lemon groves. Dan thought it must be in California, but his address was listed as Deya, Mallorca, and there were pictures of a dog, another guy, a small pool, and ‘Greg’ himself in a faded denim baseball cap and cutoff jeans, a blue neckerchief, boots, his face sticking a little strangely on to his bones. He also had a little paunch and a glitter in his eye, to tell you he was not clear – how could he be clear – but he was damn well alive, he was inhaling, exhaling, swimming, drinking Rioja and looking at the lemon grove, enjoying the lemon grove. He was inhabiting a life and he was living the hell out of it, because it was his life to enjoy.

Greg.

Dan checked the photograph again. There he was: that sardonic, slow-moving, slightly fey guy who had died, Dan was sure of it, in the mid nineties. Greg who was once dead, and was now alive.

The page was quite the lifestyle statement. There was very little you might call ‘real’ – a slight intensity to his expression perhaps, in a world of aged stonework, bowls of lemons, stunned blue skies. But there, under a photograph of an under-lit palm tree, with a comet streaking across the Milky Way were the lines: ‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths/Enwrought with golden and silver light,’ which was Dan’s party piece, all those years ago when he played at being ‘Irish’ for them all.

Dan checked the friends list: some of them were linked to Ludo but there were none that he recognised from the old days, not even Arthur who seemed destined not to die. He searched and searched, remembering Billy, remembering Massimo and Alex, the loft on Broome Street. His heart was busy with the cohort of the dead: men he should have loved and had not loved. Men he had hated for being sexy, beautiful, out, dying, free. It was not his fault. He had forgiven himself, as he told Scott-in-his-head, or he had tried to forgive himself, years before. But now – look – Gregory Savalas.

The relief he felt was close to love. The fact that this human being, among so many human beings, should have survived.

The Eyes of the Buddha

EMMET WAS EXHAUSTED
when he got back to Verschoyle Gardens. Again. He was not burnt out, he just needed to talk to someone. He needed to read. He meditated for an hour each morning and, when he was done, stretched his hands out, giving thanks for the people sleeping in the rooms on either side of him, Saar on one hand and Denholm on the other. This was the way relationships went for him now. The sex with Saar was important, of course it was, the sex with Saar was an intimate thing. But he also knew it was something other than sex that moved him along his life’s course. It was a kind of tension and it was here, in this configuration.

Emmet would never fall in love. He would ‘love’, he would, that is to say ‘tend’. He would cure and guide, but he did not have the helplessness in him that love required.

Denholm slapped his shoulder and said he should have children. Every man should have children.

‘You think?’ said Emmet.

‘No question,’ said Denholm. This was a guy who had been educated in a mud room to speak convent English, write in Victorian copperplate: Denholm could, at eight, recite the Kings and Queens of England and the life cycle of the tsetse fly. Back in Kenya, he would often hold hands with his male friends, and here in Ireland he did so too, once, walking home with Emmet after a few drinks in Saggart. He had forgotten where he was and who he was with, and Emmet went to sleep that night, smiling like a fool.

One evening in February, he got an email from Alice in Sri Lanka:

You know when they are making a new statue of the Buddha, they do the eyes last. They use a mirror to paint by, and afterwards the artist is blindfolded and led outside where he washes his face in milk. They call it Opening the Eyes of the Buddha – wood into flesh, or at least, presence. I go every morning to the Temple of the Tooth and then work until dusk, living by the light, have not woken in proper darkness for months. From here back to the UK in March and then, who knows. If you hear of anything coming up, let me know.

Emmet sat and meditated, but it did not help. He shifted on his sit bones, and did not know what to do with this holy hard-on he had for a woman he had failed to love some years before. He let all the psychic rubbish of sex clatter through his mind, to enter and leave at its own chosen speed – which was pretty fast, as it happened: flashes of breast and cock, the movement of pink tongue behind (a surprise this) Denholm’s (but that’s all right, that’s fine) white teeth. He let it all barge through him and when it was gone, there he was, back with Alice.

Dear Alice
Lovely to hear from you. I was thinking of you just recently, at the malaria forum we are setting up here, and actually that’s not a bad place to consider if we ever get to the stage of looking for applications. Hopefully in the next three months. Rainy Ireland, eh? But you’d be in the field a fair amount. Malawi, mostly. I’ll let you know, if you like. Don’t want to blather on. Hope you and Sven (??) are thriving. Lots of love, xEmmet.

He sent this and regretted it. Wrote another one, that was also, in its way, a bit of an untruth.

I think about you all the time.

He sent this too, and listened to his life opening.

Property

HUGH WAS BETWEEN
jobs and he came back with Hanna in the New Year to help sort and pack and get Ardeevin on the market. He brought an old Polaroid camera and some last rolls of film and Hanna heard him about the place the first day they were there, silently looking, then the click-whirr-click as the photograph was extruded, another silence as he shook the thing dry and a little piece of her childhood rose to view. She looked through them later: the spiral at the bottom of the bannister, the squat taps in the upstairs bathroom, the vivid ghost, on the wallpaper, where a wardrobe had shielded its own shape from the sun.

‘Research,’ he said.

When the baby took a nap, they went upstairs and made love in her childhood bed, releasing all her scattered selves into the room: Hanna at twelve, at twenty, Hanna here, now.

The baby was walking, and into everything, Hanna followed him around that afternoon and it was all murderous: the broken greenhouse, the stream at the side of the garden, where he might drown. But it was simple too: the pleasure of the door knocker she hoisted him up to lift and drop, the textured granite stoop and the door that gave under his pushing hands to expose the vastness of the hall.

They ordered a skip, bought paint. In the evening, she washed and went over to Aughavanna with the baby, leaving Hugh in his painter’s overalls, blanking out the bamboo grove on the dining room wall.

Hanna thought that once the house was gone her thirst might go too, but the house was not gone yet. And neither was her mother, who made such a fuss of the baby –
Hello, you. Yes. Hello!
– from a slight distance, of course, because of the baby’s sticky hands but loving him, nonetheless, and getting all his smiles.

It was a long day. Back in Ardeevin, Hanna succumbed to a bottle or two of white from the garage shop, and there was such a bad fight, Hugh threw her out of the house. Physically. He pushed her into the garden and closed the door. Hanna bashed the knocker and yowled. She stumbled back and around to the kitchen window where she saw Hugh pouring the last of the wine down the sink. He went from room to room, turning out the lights and he left her there for a very long time, looking up at the blank house, weeping in the cold.

The next morning, after they had kissed, made up and all the rest of it, Hanna lay and looked at the ceiling and remembered looking at the same ceiling, as a child. She wondered what it was she had wanted, before she wanted a drink.

A life. She had wanted a life. She lay in this bed as a child and she thirsted after the great unknown.

The baby slept and woke and rolled off the mattress they had set for him on the floor. Then he was off again, pulling books on top of himself from off the shelves and laughing.

‘Ben, stop it, Ben, no!’ But she did not really mind. He could break the Belleek for all she cared, in a couple of weeks it would all be gone.

Over in Aughavanna she said to Constance that maybe Dublin was the problem, the baby was in much better form.

‘Boys!’ Constance said.

Her own screamed for the first year, there was no consoling them. Then once they got on their feet, that was it, they never cried again.

‘Run them and feed them,’ she said. ‘That’s all you have to do with boys.’