The Green Road (30 page)

Rosaleen was tired of waiting. She had been waiting, all her life, for something that never happened and she could not bear the suspense any longer. Rosaleen was in a hurry, now. She thought she might find a cliff edge and throw herself down it from purest impatience. She might kill herself just to get something done.

But she was not going to kill herself. She had never been interested in that sort of palaver.
Where did it begin?
And where was the end of it. How long would she have to continue, being like this. Being herself.

O my Dark Rosaleen.

And why was there no one to love her?

She was a small thing under a big sky, and being tiny was not the same as being dead. It was quite the opposite. Rosaleen spread her arms wide and flung her face up.

‘Hah!’ she said.

In the middle of nowhere, on Christmas Day, when no one was out, not one person was walking the roads.

‘Hah!’

Old women were not given to shouting. Rosaleen did not know if she still could, or if your voice went slack like the rest of you, when you got old.

‘Oh, don’t mind me!’ she said. She roared it. She stuck her fists down straight by her sides. ‘Don’t mind me!’

There was no problem with her voice, that is what she discovered. Old women do not shout because they are not allowed to shout. Because if they shout and roar then there will be no dinner.

And let that be an end to it now.

‘Don’t you worry about me!’

The mountain took her on. Knockauns was to the right of her and it sent her voice back her way, and there was mist, she saw, coming down for her too. So she quickened her pace and stumbled on a rock, but she did not fall.

‘Hah,’ she said.

Rosaleen was on her own. And that was the way she wanted to be. That was just great. She got in her little car and she drove away from the lot of them. The big faces on them. She left them to it. Such selfish children she had reared. She left them to get on with it, whatever it was – their lives – and she came out to walk off her dinner and take the sharpness of the air inside herself. To get the sea air.

Rosaleen opened her lungs and filled herself up.

It hurt her chest. It hurt the inside of her. The air was cold and she was cold so Rosaleen thought hot thoughts – driving up over her own lawn. Yes! And out the gate. She was so cross, the car drove itself. They went for miles down familiar roads until they found her own stands of dark pine. They bumped past the house where Pat Madigan was born, the little door painted in flaking layers of green over red over blue. They drove right past all this, Rosaleen and her little car, through another stand of trees that were her trees, horrible and dark. On and on they went, until they came to the edge of things. Then the car stopped and Rosaleen got out.

The sea was huge for her. The light gentle and great. The fields indifferent, as she walked up the last of the hill. But she got a slightly sarcastic feel off the ditches, there was no other word for it – sprinkles of derision – like the countryside was laughing at her.

Presences.

At the gate beyond the last house, where the tarmac road turned into a green road and the sheepdog turned for home, she looked back on the valley of Oughtdarra. Solemn and dark now, with the Flaggy Shore at the sea edge of it, graves and dolmens there, and ancient roads and gateways to nothing, from nothing. A couple of houses were lit up for Christmas, the blink of the lights a glimmering from this distance. There was a little ruined church down in that place, with a curse in the name of the man who built it too terrible to speak aloud. This she knew from Pat Madigan who took her walking along these uplands with her little dog in the late summer of 1956. He talked more in those days and weeks than he ever did after, about curses and the like,
piseogs
, the fairies on the mound of Croghateehaun and the people lost in the scrubby, treacherous ground below it. He talked about the foxes behind Knockauns mountain, the seventeen ancient forts between here and Slieve Elva, and the goats that lived in the hazel scrub. He told her the depth and beauty of the cave called Polnagree, the two Englishmen who went down it with ropes and lamps. He pointed to the place where the three townlands met, Oughtdarra, Ballynahown and Crumlin, a gap in the cliff that belonged to none of them called Leaba na hAon Bhó, The Bed of the One Cow. There was a story, he said, about that cow and the end of the world.

Then he laughed, and told her about a heifer he had once, who came into heat with her head stuck in a big bucket – a tub almost, made out of blue metal – the handle was up over her poll, whatever way she managed it, and the bull was working her, the pair of them walking the field with the bucket swinging and banging until she came into a standing heat and he mounted her. ‘And the sound out of her then’, he said. ‘I am surprised she didn’t deafen herself, in the bucket.’

There was no stopping him.

He pointed to a house where a man killed himself by hanging and a rock overlooking the sea where the ghost of a hungry man was said to sit, turning to stare at passers-by. He talked of a place – miles away – where a woman kept her daughter chained in the hen-house, and a woman whose house was full of money sent by her sons in America. He said there were babies born in one house that never saw the light of day. He said that the women of one family in particular took their babies back into themselves like cats did their kittens, and it was important always to marry out, in a place like this, if you got the chance. And she was his chance. He did not say that he loved her. He said that if she would have him, a fine woman like her, unencumbered and free, with her own money and no one to stop her, if she would make her choice and choose him, that he would worship her with his body, and with his entire soul, until the day he died.

Foolish but true.

That is what he said.

And that is the way he saw the land, with no difference between the different kinds of yesterday. No difference between a man and his ghost, between a real heifer and a cow that was waiting for the end of the world. It was all just a way of talking. It was the rise and fall in the telling, a rounding out before the finish. A flourish. A shiver. And it was for her. He had saved every detail up for her alone, as though every rock and tree awaited her coming for its explication.

And when she laughed at him, he only agreed with her.

‘If I am a fool,’ he said. ‘Then let me be a great fool and not a small one.’

There was no turning him down. And when he entered her – that first time and every time subsequent – it was a sacred kind of pleasure he took. She was sure of it.

My own Rosaleen!

Pat Madigan worshipped her. And he did not tell a lie. He wanted her for the money she had, for the fine house and the children he could get out of her. He laughed at her talk and then he ignored her talk. But there were times, even in his last days, even at the very end, when he looked at her with a pride so keen it was sinful.

My virgin flower, my flower of flowers
,

Somewhere along here, that is where the first kiss happened between them, her little dog sitting down for them to finish, looking out to sea. She had married beneath her. Even the dog seemed to indicate it, by the indifferent set of her head.

My life of life, my saint of saints
,

my Dark Rosaleen!

And, ‘Hah!’ she said, because she’d had the pleasure of Pat Madigan for forty years, and ‘Hah’ because he was dead and she was still alive, up here on the green road. Years since she had been kissed on the mouth. Years.

Rosaleen missed her little dog, a little grey pompom of a terrier cross, with a red tartan bow between her ears. Milly. She could feel her almost running along beside her, could feel her brush against her shins. Rosaleen lifted her foot not to tread on her and saw the blackness of the road underneath. If it was the road – it might as well be a river. Whatever it was, she was sitting in it. And there was no dog, of course there wasn’t. She was plonked like a fool on her wet backside, and it was time to get up and sort herself out. It was time to get on with it. Her walk on this road which was the road of her youth.

There was no rain, but everything was wet. Sopping. A deep liquid sound in the ditch on her left, there was a cave somewhere near and Rosaleen was afraid of caves. She was afraid of heights, too. She did not know what she was doing up here – when she thought about it she was afraid of the dark and it was getting dark now, though the afterglow lingered over the western Atlantic; a sky too big for the sun to leave.

It was old age, of course – the fear. Passing cars, children on bicycles, plugs and sockets, escalators: she was afraid of things that beeped, or hummed, she was afraid of looking like a fool, of wearing the wrong stockings, wearing the wrong clothes. She put something on because she liked it and then a while later she realised it was all terrible. Rosaleen was terrified of losing her mind, of saying things or snapping in public – if she hit at a stranger, if she said something rude or obscene, that would be unbearable. She took the precaution of saying very little, any more. Even here on the mountain she kept her own counsel. But she was afraid the stone wall would fall on her and her leg would get trapped, she was afraid of getting raped, and what were the chances of that? On Christmas Day of all days. Who would even rob you up here on the green road?

‘Hah!’

This is why Rosaleen had come up here, to this wild place. She had come to cleanse herself of forgetfulness and of fury. To shout it loud and leave it behind. To fling it away from herself.

‘You see!’ She wanted to roar it out, but her throat didn’t like her mouth opening and the rasp of the cold.

Rosaleen could not see the top of Knockauns or the walls on either side of her. It was truly dark now. There was no moon. The sea was glittering under a black sky and Rosaleen could not tell black from black, except for the sense of motion from the distant water and even that was going dark and still.

She might as well be dead. She might as well be underground.

Except for the movement of her legs, one in front of the other, and the sense under her cold feet, of the rocks and earth and tussocks of grass on the green road.

It was here she walked with her lovely dog, Milly, and with Pat Madigan when they were courting. She cycled out to him, with her little dog in the front basket, and they left the bike against a ditch. It was here they kissed, and more.

Pat Madigan grew silent with the years. After that first rush of talk he said less and less. Towards the end of his life, he said little or nothing.

And that was her fault too.

What did it mean, when the man you loved was gone? A part of his body inside your own body and his arms wrapped about you. What happened when all of that was in the earth, deep down in the cemetery clay?

Nothing happened. That is what happened.

Rosaleen held her hand up to verify it in the black air. She pulled off her glove to see the living whiteness of it, but there was something around her legs – the dog, perhaps – and she was crawling, she was on her knees, with one gloved hand and one hand naked. The cold was in her hand now.

Each breath hurt. She pulled the air into the tiny parts of her lungs. Her flesh was pierced in microscopic places by the air of the vast world as it pushed its way into her blood.

Rosaleen’s head was hanging low like an old horse, she was on all fours and the stones hurt her knees. She wanted to go back and find that glove, but she couldn’t turn back, she had no confidence in the road, she thought it might be disappearing behind her. Because there were gaps between things, and this frightened her. This is where Rosaleen was now. She had fallen into the gap.

BART RANG FROM
Florida at seven o’clock.

They sat another half an hour. Dan flicked channels. Emmet read an old newspaper. But they must have been thinking about her, because they each said, when the time came to go out and look for her, that none of them were sober enough to drive.

At half past seven, Emmet walked into town to check with the old ladies above the Medical Hall while Dan went through the phone numbers she had at the front of the phone book, but most of the people listed there were either in the kitchen, or dead. No one wanted to tell Constance, but she had to be told, so when Emmet came back they made the call and, seven minutes later, they heard her car sweep through the gate.

Constance was frantic. And it was all their fault. She was crying and blaming and fretting, she did not know where to sit herself down. She took out her mobile and scrolled through the numbers, despairing at each one. She rang a neighbour, asked them to ring another neighbour. She left the house, still talking, to drive around and look for her mother. Half an hour later she was back with her husband in tow, and he said, ‘Have you contacted the Guards?’

The Madigans looked at him.

Dessie had been drinking. Of course he had – it was Christmas Day.

‘Let’s not panic,’ said Emmet.

The men sat in silence, in the stillness of Rosaleen’s stopped kitchen clock and the sound of Constance making instant coffee through her tears.

It was the nine o’clock news stirred them, the thought that Rosaleen might be a news item herself, by the morning. Or some memory of their fathers, perhaps, saying, ‘Shush, now,’ their mothers saying, ‘Turn on the news for your father,’ the ritual observance of an outside world that had entered the kitchen and filled it, silently, on this night. It was already here.

‘We have to call the Guards,’ said Constance.

Dessie waved his mobile.

‘I’ll try Maguire,’ he said and made a call. He listened a moment and said, ‘Christmas.’

‘Oh for goodness sake,’ said Dan, who picked up the house phone and just dialled 999.

Hanna sat with her hands over her face, for all that followed, pressing down on her eyelids, feeling the flick of her pupils beneath her fingertips as her eyes moved from side to side. She thought about the cliffs. She saw, in her mind’s eye, her mother’s face washed over and again by dark water, her limp body bending with the curve of the waves; the cold, unfeasible weight of her, pulled on to dry land.