The Green Road (24 page)

Co. Dublin

ON CHRISTMAS EVE
, Emmet rang his mother from his house in Verschoyle Gardens, Dublin 24, where she had never been. There was no reason for her to come here, any more than she might arrive in the door of a Dhaka high-rise or a crumbling colonial in the middle of Ségou. There was, in fact, considerably less reason. A three-bedroomed semi-detached house on a housing estate off the N7 that Emmet was renting by the month, for an absurd amount of money. The sofa under the front window was a puffy leather thing, half marshmallow, half mushroom – his mother would hate it, but Emmet was indifferent to the house, he was pleased to find. It was insulated, it was new. Any freedom from Rosaleen, small or large, continued to give him pleasure.

Down in Ardeevin, the phone rang on.

Emmet looked out the window at the identical house on the other side of the road, alive with fairy lights. Since the money came in, Ireland depressed Emmet in a whole new way. The house prices depressed him. And the handbag thing, the latte thing, the Aren’t We All Brilliant thing, they all depressed him too. But Verschoyle Gardens, in all fairness, did not depress him. Mateus, the little fella next door, would be out on his new bike tomorrow morning, his father holding the back of the saddle, running low and letting go.

A click. Silence at the other end. The electronic air of home.

She had a way with a receiver, picking it up as though it were a heavy object to be set with some precision against the human ear.

‘Hay-lo?’

His mother still answered a phone like it was 1953.

‘Mam,’ he said and then winced. She hated when he called her ‘Mam’.

‘Emmet,’ she said.

She would be sitting at the worn old table with the newspaper spread in front of her open to the easy crossword. She might turn to look out the window at the garden, or let her eyes settle on the easel she had in the corner, with a landscape she was painting, long unfinished. Or she would look at the old chair by the range where his father used to sleep after dinner and before the news. It was hard to say, when she looked at any of these things, what it was she saw.

‘I’m on my way,’ said Emmet.

‘You are?’

‘I’m waiting for Hanna and then.’

‘Oh good.’

There was a catch to her breathing; a difficulty or excitement. He could hear her rise out of her chair.

‘So it’ll be, three o’clock, maybe.’

Rosaleen was on the prowl.

‘I see,’ she said.

‘Or a bit after, maybe,’ he said, a little uncertain.

‘Any time is good,’ she said. ‘Just so long as it is the time you say.’

She’d got him.

‘Because that’s the annoyance, really,’ she said. ‘Either people coming early and you have nothing done, or they say a time and then leave you hanging. That’s what I hate. It’s not about being early or being late, it’s about telling the truth, really.’

‘I know.’ Emmet could not believe what he was hearing. ‘I’m waiting for Hanna,’ he said.

‘Hanna?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hanna?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hanna’s coming with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, well then, it’s anyone’s guess.’

It was true, Hanna was never on time. Emmet thought it was genetic.

‘What about?’

‘Hugh’s coming down on Stephenses Day,’ he said. ‘You’ll see him then.’

‘Right.’

‘Hugh and the baby. He’ll bring Hanna back up to Dublin with him.’

‘Oh the baby, what a pity. I suppose we don’t have the beds, really. So it’ll just be yourself? Lovely. And?’

‘Saar.’

His mother always paused after a name she considered unusual.

‘Yes. Saar is back in?’

‘Holland.’

‘Lovely. See you at three.’

‘Maybe closer to four,’ said Emmet.

‘Right. Well tell Constance what time, she’s the one with views on all that. Bye! Oh listen, are you bringing wine? I’m just saying don’t leave it Hanna’s end, unless you’re happy to see it go down the plughole. Of course you’re not the wine buff that . . .’

She paused.

‘Oh Emmet, it would be lovely, now that Dan is home, wouldn’t it be lovely to have something nice for once? I’d love – I don’t know – are you bringing wine?’

‘No.’ He looked out the window. There was no sign of Hanna.

‘It’s just when Dan is back for once. I don’t know. I just have this. You know. Champagne.’

‘He’s landed, then?’ Emmet’s picture of the kitchen reorganised around Dan; the sainted face, the slow-blinking eyes.

‘He’s asleep,’ Rosaleen said, sotto voce. ‘I must tell Constance to get champagne.’

‘What about Hanna?’

‘Oh stop it. We’ll use the little glasses. The ones we got in Rome.’

Rome was 1962, an audience with the Pope, a man on a little Vespa, so handsome he would cut you, with a fat brown baby on his knee. Oh and Roma, Roma! The unexpected piazzas, the sprays of orange blossom, an old codger on the tram who stank of garlic so badly – Rosaleen should have realised that morning sickness was setting in. Dan was conceived in Rome. And Dan loved garlic! There was no end to the mysteries of Dan.

‘Listen, Ma, I’ll go.’

There was another small silence.
Ma
.

‘Off you go.’

‘See you soon.’

‘Goodbye now!’

Emmet put down the phone, exhausted. Saar had baked biscuits for him before she left and the kitchen still smelt of cinnamon. Saar was terrific. Dutch, pragmatic, team-spirited. He put her on a plane back up to Schiphol, knowing that, next Christmas, he would be going to Schiphol too.

‘I love you,’ he said.

And she said, ‘I love you.’

Then he faced back into the horrors of the Madigans – their small hearts (his own was not entirely huge) and the small lives they put themselves through. Emmet closed his eyes and tilted his face up, and there she was: his mother, closing her eyes and lifting her head, in just the same way, down in the kitchen in Ardeevin. Her shadow moving through him. He had to shake her out of himself like a wet dog.

Mother.

His stupid sister late, as ever. Over-packing, at a guess, busy forgetting things, locating her phone, losing her phone, shouting about her phone, messing, messing, messing.

Emmet climbed the stairs and tapped, as he passed it, on his housemate’s door.

‘All right?’

Denholm came out and followed him to his own bedroom, as Emmet pulled a bag out and set it on top of the bed.

‘Shipshape,’ said Denholm.

‘Just checking you were still there.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Denholm, who did not have the money to be anywhere else and was, besides, always at the little desk in his room. ‘How are you, Emmet?’

‘Very well,’ he said, turning to shake the man’s hand – African style – there in lovely, suburban Verschoyle Gardens, Dublin 24.

‘How are you?’ he said.

Denholm was commuting to Kimmage Manor every day for a course in International Development. His mother had died a month after his arrival from Kenya and his sister, also in rural Kenya, was HIV positive, a fact she only discovered in the maternity unit of the local clinic that was run by the same nuns who got Denholm all the way to a housing estate off the N7 and to Emmet’s spare room.

‘I am very well,’ said Denholm.

‘The Wi-Fi working?’ said Emmet.

‘A little slow,’ said Denholm. ‘But yes.’

He had been talking to his brother on Skype, he said, before his office shut down. It was a big holiday in Kenya. They were all heading out of Nairobi, the same way Emmet was heading out of Dublin. They would get back to the villages in time for Midnight Mass, then a big party – all night – more parties the next day, and then on St Stephen’s Day, which they called Boxing Day, a soup made out of the blood of the Christmas goat. Good soup, Denholm told him. Hangover soup.

Emmet went about the place, pulling open drawers, throwing some bits into a bag, which was a woven polyester conference bag with World Food Programme written on the flap. A couple of polo shirts, underwear and socks, a paperback from his bedside locker, his phone. He ducked into the en-suite bathroom to get his his toothbrush and deodorant.

‘Sounds like the business,’ Emmet said. He was slipping a hand under the mattress for his passport when he realised that he was just going down the road, in Ireland.

‘Yes,’ said Denholm, who could not keep the Christmas loneliness out of his voice.

And, ‘Wow,’ Emmet said, as he cast about him for nothing, trying to hide his sudden mortification at the fact that he was leaving Denholm alone. After all the hospitality he himself had been offered, in so many towns. Why did he not invite him home for his dinner? He just couldn’t.

It was not a question of colour (though it was also a question of colour), even Saar was out of the question – Saar with her Dutch domestic virtues, who would clear the dishes and wash the dishes, and sing as she swept the fallen tinsel off the floor. Christmas dinner, for Emmet’s family, was thicker than Kenyan blood soup, so none of the people that Emmet liked best could be there, nor even the people he might enjoy. The only route to the Madigans’ Christmas table was through some previously accredited womb. Married. Blessed.

I am sorry. I can not invite you home for Christmas because I am Irish and my family is mad.

Hanna wasn’t even bringing the father of her child.

High standards at the Madigans’ dining room table. Keep ’em high.

‘Is the tram running tomorrow?’

‘Don’t worry about me,’ said Denholm, who would be trapped for Christmas Day on a housing estate off the N7, and he went downstairs, offering tea.

Emmet blamed his mother. You could tell Rosaleen about disease, war and mudslides and she would look faintly puzzled, because there were, clearly, much more interesting things happening in the County Clare. Even though nothing happened – she saw to that too. Nothing was discussed. The news was boring or it was alarming, facts were always irrelevant, politics rude. Local gossip, that is what his mother allowed, and only of a particular kind. Marriages, deaths, accidents: she lived for a head-on collision, a bad bend in the road. Her own ailments of course, other people’s diseases. Mrs Finnerty’s cousin’s tumour that turned out to be just a cyst. Her back, her hip, her headaches, and the occasional flashing light when she closed her eyes – ailments that were ever more vague, until, one day, they would not be vague at all. They would be, at the last, entirely clear.

‘I was going to bring my housemate,’ said Emmet in the kitchen, a couple of hours later. ‘He’s having a rough time.’

‘Oh?’ said Rosaleen.

‘His mother just died.’

‘Oh no!’ Rosaleen loved a good tragedy. Tears – actual tears – came to her eyes.

‘And his sister and her baby are HIV positive.’

‘Oh.’

Though perhaps this was not the right kind of tragedy, after all.

‘I see.’

His mother seemed smaller than he remembered. Her skin was so thin, Emmet was afraid to touch in case she bruised. Not that anyone ever touched her – except Constance perhaps. Rosaleen did not like to be touched. She liked the thing Dan did, which was to conjure the air around her, somehow, making it special. When Hanna went to greet her, there was a big mistimed clash of cheekbones.

‘Oh.’

‘Ow.’

This was before they were over the threshold. Rosaleen opened the front door looking terrific. She had a crisp white shirt on, with a neat collar and her mid-length string of pearls. A slightly rakish pair of argyle socks showed between black trousers and tasselled loafers, her hair was a shining platinum from her special shampoo. And when Hanna reached up to kiss all this, their faces clashed at the bone.

‘Are you all right?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

Rosaleen’s precision turning, as ever, into a kind of general difficulty for them all.

‘Yes I am fine,’ and then, ‘Where’s the baby?’

Even though Emmet had told her there would be no baby.

‘He’s with Hugh,’ said Hanna, after a pause.

‘What a pity,’ said their mother. ‘Oh well.’

And she looked at her daughter as though she, alone, would have to do.

Hanna had slept the whole way down in the car. The baby had kept her awake all night, she said – a little petulantly – and though his little sister annoyed him, Emmet felt sorry for her, freshly woken and bedraggled as she was, on their mother’s doorstep.

‘I told you,’ he said to Rosaleen.

‘Did you? Maybe you did.’ And then, a little sharply, ‘It doesn’t
matter
, does it?’

She was an impossible woman. Emmet did not know why it was his job to keep his mother in line – he just couldn’t help it. He could not bear the unreality she fomented about her. Emmet could not understand why the truth was such a problem to Rosaleen, why facts were an irrelevance, or an accusation. He did not know what she was skittering away from, all the time.

‘A baby can’t have AIDS,’ she said, with some finality.

‘They did the test at the maternity clinic – an Irish nun, actually.’

‘A nun?’ she said.

‘Yes, in Kenya,’ said Emmet.

‘Oh.’

Rosaleen considered all this for a moment.

‘And is he from Kenya?’ she said.

‘Who?’

‘Your housemate?’

‘He is. Yes, he is Kenyan.’

‘I see,’ she said and shifted her hips to one side on the chair.

‘Are you making that cup of tea?’ she said, suddenly, looking over her shoulder at Hanna. And Hanna, who was, in fact, spooning the leaves into the pot, paused for a micro rage with the caddy in her hand.

‘There is a child,’ Rosaleen said, turning carefully back to the table. ‘On the autistic spectrum. He was born to one of the people who run the Spar.’ And then, as a concession. ‘She is an Estonian, would you believe. And the husband is very nice. From Kiev.’

But Emmet was already bored by the game. He was a grown man. He was trying to expose the foolishness of a woman who was seventy-six years old. A woman who was, besides, his mother.

‘It’s a long way,’ he said. ‘From Kiev to County Clare.’

He could see the next couple of days stretch out in front of them. There would be much talk about house prices, how well Dessie McGrath was doing, what everything was worth these days – more expensive than Toronto, Dan, yes, that cowshed down the road. Emmet would start an argument with Constance about the Catholic Church – because Constance, who believed nothing, would not admit as much in front of her children who were expected to believe everything or at least pretend they believed it, just like their mother. Hanna would have a rant about some newspaper critic, their mother would opine that these people sometimes knew what they were talking about, and on they all would go. It was, Emmet thought, like living in a hole in the ground.