The Green Road (21 page)

‘I see.’

Scatter cushions and oak dressers – in Toronto, Dan thought.
Here we go
.

The night before he left for Ireland, Dan told Ludo that he loved him. He told him because it was true and because he thought that, this time, the plane might fall out of the sky. Or he might get stuck in Ireland, somehow, he would get trapped in 1983, with a white sliced pan on the table and the Eurovision Song Contest on TV. He would never make it back to Rosedale, Toronto and to this man he had loved for some time.

This was why he had decided to go home, he said. Because he loved Ludo and Ludo was right, it was time to sort out his past, deal with himself. Time to become a fucking human being.

It was a mistake to tell Ludo all this, because Ludo immediately wanted to open the last bottle of Pommery and suck him off and get married. Dan had a flight the next day, but Ludo brought the champagne to bed and marriage would be a blast, he said. He found the sheer legality of it incredibly erotic. And very tax effective. If he worked it right, there was no telling how much they could save.

‘I don’t know,’ said Dan, ‘I don’t know.’

‘What?’ said Ludo.

‘I just.’ He was talking about Ludo’s money.

‘Oh toughen up,’ said Ludo. ‘Talk to a woman, they’ve been doing it for years.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Dan, who did nothing but talk to the wives of rich men. He talked to them about their husbands’ paintings and their husbands’ ghastly wallpaper. (
Take it down!
was his cry.
All of it. Down!
) Dan loved these women; their woundedness and their style; he admired the way they rose to their lives. But he did not want to be one. That would be a convergence too far.

‘Don’t be too proud for me,’ said Ludo. ‘Don’t be too proud, is all.’

‘Proud?’ said Dan.

‘Defensive,’ said Ludo. ‘OK?’

‘OK,’ said Dan. And he put his head on Ludo’s chest, where it met the ball of his shoulder; in that dent.

‘OK.’

‘All you ever do is take!’ This from his mother, some time, from the black and white movie of their relationship,
Whatever Happened to Baby Rosaleen
. ‘All you ever do is take!’

Isabelle sending him a postcard, the year she moved upstate: ‘I was going to send back all the presents you gave me over the years, then I realised – you didn’t.’

And it was true that Dan stalled in the shop if he was ever obliged to buy a gift. Stalled, refused, could not calculate, drew a blank, was a blank. Walked away, as though from something terrible and, by the skin of his teeth, survived.

Another postcard, the next summer, from Dublin, a vintage thing with green buses going down O’Connell Street. And on the back:

‘I am still alive.’

This was from an exhibition they saw together in Dublin, himself and Isabelle, when they were, maybe, eighteen. A book of telegrams by the Japanese conceptual artist, On Kawara, sent over the course of a decade to the same address and all saying the same thing: ‘I am still alive.’ The exhibition was a moment of complete excitement for Dan – it was a shaft of light that told him he had been living, all his life, underground. This was long before New York, long before he found conceptual work tiresome and even longer before he met the man, or thought he had, at a Starbucks around the corner from the Guggenheim, where the server called ‘Kawara!’ and Dan felt his knees weaken in his chinos.
I am still alive
.

Isabelle’s last card was from Barcelona.

‘Gaudete!’ it said, and on the front those curvy balconies by Gaudi.

And after that, none.

There were tears in his eyes. Dan never cried until he started with Scott; now he was weeping full time, he was leaking into the slackening skin of his lover’s arms.

‘There, there,’ said Ludo, who had a breakfast meeting at eight.

‘It’s not the money,’ Dan said. ‘I mean.’

‘Fuck the money,’ said Ludo.

‘It’s not the money,’ he said.

And it wasn’t. Dan thought of himself as more cat than dog. He did not need much, he could do as well without. So it was not the money that made Dan weep in the arms of Ludovic Linetsky, as he decided to marry him, for richer for poorer, all the days of his life. It was the sound of Ludo’s wonderful heart, deep in his chest. Because Dan might make a good cat but he was a raging blank of a human being and he knew he would fuck this good thing up, just like he fucked up all the rest of them. He would look at Ludo some day – he could do it now if he liked – and just not care.

And where would that leave Dan?

Alone.

Useless and alone.

Normal life was a problem for Dan. He was beginning to see that now. Small things upset him. He would have a petulant old age.

‘I’m not. I’m not,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I’m not.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Ludo. ‘You’re straight.’

He was out of the bed and rummaging in a drawer now and he came back with a small hinged box of brown lizard skin and, inside, a pair of cufflinks: silver, inset with a fat little piece of amber. Dan took them out. They were lovely, and worth very little; the amber worn small and smooth as a butterscotch sweet in your mouth.

‘Marry me,’ said Ludo.

The cufflinks were his great-grandfather’s, he said, all the way from Odessa. Dan rose to his knees on the bed and held the little box in his hand. He had no shirt to try them against. He was naked and shivering. He was getting married.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘For what?’ said Ludo. ‘For nothing.’

They made love all night – two men, no longer young – and they talked it all out. He would grow old with Ludo, in a big house on the wrong side of a leafy street in Rosedale, Toronto. Dan stuck the tip of his tongue into Ludo’s mouth, all night, into the chaos and mass of him. He took the malty sweetness of Ludo’s body as a memory and a talisman, to keep him company on the journey home.

Dublin

IF ONLY SHE
could keep it in a box, Hanna thought, or a jug, or a thermos, something sealed, to stop it crusting over where the liquid met the air. A Tupperware box might do. What she really needed was one of those plastic bags that they used in hospitals, vacuum sealed, the ones they hung from a drip stand. A bag of blood. She could put it in her new fridge – God knows, it looked like something you would find in a morgue – she could put her blood in a bag, any sort of bag, and squeeze down until the air was out of it and then just tie a knot in the top. Hang it from the wine rack. Close the door.

Hanna tried to lift her head, but her cheek was stuck to the floor. The blood was eye level, it was spreading and congealing at the same time. It was a race to standstill. But even though it stopped as it went, Hanna could not see the extent of it, because her eye was flush with the ground. The edges turned hazy as the blood oozed away from her, across the white floor tiles.

There were plastic bags in the high cupboard – which wasn’t much use to her, down here. Hanna had put the bags up high so the baby couldn’t smother himself. And there were safety catches on all the bottom presses, which is why she would not be able to kick one open, so there you go – sometimes safety was not what you needed most. Sometimes what you needed was a little plastic bag to put the blood in, so when the men came they would be able to put it back into you again. Or see, at least, that you had not meant to die.

She had slipped.

Hanna thought she had slipped on the blood, but actually the blood had come after. And she was still holding something in her right hand. A bottle. Or the neck of a bottle. The body of the bottle was no longer there.

Hanna didn’t know how anyone could break a bottle and fall on it at the same time, unless they were very fucking drunk. Maybe she had been hit from behind. Maybe the attacker was going up now to the room where the baby slept, and he would do things to the baby. Nameless things. He would steal the baby or damage the baby and leave no mark, so no one could tell that he had been and gone.

The bottle broke, and then she sat down on the bottle and, after that, she was lying on the floor, looking at the spreading blood. Which must be coming from her leg. In which case, she was going to die.

The blood was dark, which was possibly a good thing. It was getting darker. It came quietly and then it stopped.

It was probably time to call Hugh though she did not want to call Hugh, she did not think she could. So unless the baby cried and woke him, he would not notice she was gone. And the baby was not crying, for once. They never did what you wanted them to. A little opposite thing, that is what came out of her. A fight they wrapped in a cloth. Push it, grab it, knock it away: she was feeding him once, and the spoon skittered away so she had to duck to retrieve it and the look he gave as she rose from the floor was one of pure contempt. It was as though he had been possessed – possibly by himself, by the man he would some day become – looking at her as if to say,
Who the fuck are you, with your pathetic fucking spoon?

Good question.

Oh the baby. The baby. Hanna loved the baby and did not want to doubt him even now, drunk as she was and dying on the kitchen floor. But she did sort of think that, if she did die, it would be the baby who had killed her. It would be that fat, strong boy, with his father’s ears and his father’s smile, and nothing of Hanna in him that she or anybody else could see.

Hanna rested her head, and did not try to move it again. She was happy enough where she was. There was no need to get up, just yet. She would stay, for just a few minutes more, between things.

There was a tickling in her hair, a cooling unpleasantness at the back of her neck. The blood was coming from her head.

Hanna didn’t sit down on the breaking bottle so much as crack her skull off something – the door of the press, perhaps – then break the bottle as she fell. If she put a hand to her head, she would feel an opening in her scalp, and inside it, her skull. The raw bone.

Hanna closed her eyes.

The kitchen floor tiles were new and she said to Hugh they were too shiny and too hard so everything would smash as soon as touch them, but Hugh wanted a kitchen that looked like an operating theatre or like a butcher’s shop, with steel and concrete and metal hooks hanging off metal bars. In a tiny little semi-detached. Hugh wanted a man kitchen. A serial murderer’s kitchen, with a row of knives pinned to a magnetic strip along the wall. Hugh cooked twice a year, that was the height of it. Every bowl and dish dragged out, the place covered in flour. The rest of the time he heated something up in the microwave or got in takeaway. Hugh was annoying and Hanna could not leave him. Not after she had died in the new kitchen, with the baby asleep upstairs.

But she was so cold, now, she got up to put something around her shoulders and she saw, as she rose, her body lying behind her on the floor, with blood browning on the tiles and then loosening around the broken bottle, where it was diluted with wine.

She would have to change her life. Again.

Hanna put her hand to her temple and felt the wound crusting under her hair. So much fucking blood. It did not seem possible. She felt light – gone, almost. She pawed her way along the counter, and lobbed the dishcloth on to the floor, then shoved the cloth about with her toe. Her life would have to change. Again.

Her life. Her life.

Upstairs the baby gave a strange, waking shout and Hanna stopped, waiting for the wails. But the baby didn’t cry. The dishcloth made a streak like a brushstroke across the floor: it looked like she was cleaning up blood. Then she remembered that it was blood. It was her blood. She looked over and Hugh was there, standing in the doorway, holding the baby.

‘What time is it?’ she said.

‘Sorry?’ said Hugh.

‘What’s the time?’

And the nice thing – she could not forget it. The nice thing, or the horrible thing, was the way the baby took one look at her and struggled to be in her arms.

She would not go to Casualty, Hanna said, and she would not go to bed, she would sleep sitting upright in an armchair, she would get the blood off her face, and it would be fine. This is what she told Hugh. She headed out past her boyfriend and her baby, and sat down on the stairs.

‘I am just going to the bathroom,’ she said, and she leaned her head against the bannister.

There were coloured lights outside the door, and before she knew it, the place was full of men. Ambulance men, huge and bizarrely light on their feet.

‘Jesus,’ she said.

The paramedic was pretty relaxed. He crouched below her on the stair.

‘What have we here,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Hanna.

‘Scalp,’ he said. ‘Oh, the scalp’s a fright.’

‘You are such a dick,’ Hanna said over his shoulder, to Hugh. ‘Why do you have to be such a fucking dick?’

‘Look at yourself,’ said Hugh, and he meant it literally. So Hanna looked down. She saw her T-shirt slicked on to her torso, the outline of her left breast perfectly stiff, like a sculpture of herself in dried blood.

The baby smiled.

And before she could refuse, they had her sitting up on a gurney, belted in. Before she could say, ‘Where’s my baby?’ the guy said, ‘He’ll be in first thing,’ and Hanna felt herself loosen and be relieved. Happiness slipped into her as she was pulled backwards up the ramp, and happiness tugged at her insides as the ambulance pulled silently away. All she lacked was a siren, to shout it. She was happy.

‘It’s a bit late for that, sweetheart,’ said the paramedic. ‘They’re all asleep in their beds.’

In Casualty, they cleaned her up and put her in a gown, and though they snipped and shaved her hair back from the wound, Hanna did not even need stitches in the end. She was left on the trolley to sleep and woke with a filthy headache, and no offer of pain relief. The trolley was in a corridor. The woman who came along to check and discharge her did not ask about post-natal depression and this was almost disappointing. (‘No, I’ve always had it,’ Hanna wanted to say, ‘I had it pre-natally. I think I had it in the womb.’) All the woman wanted to talk about was drinking – which Hanna thought was a bit obvious, given the circumstances. She was also quite condescending. But Hugh was calm by the time he arrived in with clean clothes and the baby, who had stopped smiling now and defaulted to his usual screams.