The Green Road (34 page)

‘And what do you do with girls?’ said Hanna. ‘Drown them at birth?’

‘Yeah well,’ said Constance. ‘There’s a rain barrel round the back.’

They both glanced over to Rosaleen, but she had not heard, or pretended not to hear.

With all the running around supermarkets and cold mountainsides and overheated hospital corridors, Constance actually lost weight over the Christmas. When she looked at herself in the mirror, the ghost of a former self looked back at her and Constance thought it was trying to tell her something, even as she turned to the side and smoothed her stomach with a smile. Something terrible would happen, she was sure of it, because her mother had courted chaos and found it up on the green road. She had made some deal with death, and Constance did not yet know when it would fall due.

It was a good thing Hugh painted the place because half of County Clare trooped through the house on the first Saturday, it was busier than a wake. The house sold in three weeks, closed in eight. By the first of March the Madigans had shut the door for the last time. Whoever bought it did not move in – a developer, by all accounts – so the place stayed empty while Rosaleen’s bank account filled up with money. Pucks of it. No one took her Christmas promise all that seriously: she had always been very private in these matters and never exactly open-handed, so it was a great surprise to each of her children to find themselves so much the richer. They had money, a significant amount of money, and that felt fine.

Rosaleen did not bother going over to Ardeevin. ‘Oh I don’t think so,’ she said and Constance did not pressure her. It was an emotional time. They looked at smaller houses in the newspaper and Rosaleen said, ‘Lovely,’ but it was a bit of a reach after all she had been through. When they went to view, she drifted from living room to kitchen to bathroom.

‘Oh Mammy, look at the insulation on that hot water tank.’

The new houses in their neat estates seemed only to confuse her, and indeed it was difficult to imagine her there. Constance set her heart on a little gate lodge, a sweet house with high ceilings and big Georgian windows, but the garden was far too small and it was slap bang up against the main road.

‘What about this one, Mammy? You just need to put a kitchen in.’

‘A kitchen?’

Besides, the market was turning. According to Dessie, the market was in a massive state of denial. Better to wait than to buy.

But the price came plummeting down on a place in town; an old stone house covered in Virginia creeper, tucked in behind the church, refurbished inside, everything to hand.

‘Is that limestone or granite?’ said Rosaleen. ‘It’s a very dark grey.’

Then she saw something rustling through the foliage. A rat, she said later. Or she thought it was a rat. She fumbled her car keys and dropped them in a bed of hydrangeas, she pulled at the collar of her blouse, and took a turn. Constance got her checked out, over and back to the hospital again, it took three weeks for tests and waiting for tests, and by the time she was given the all-clear, the little house was gone.

Constance drove her home one last time from Limerick Regional and their path took them up over the humpy bridge, past Ardeevin. The front windows were boarded up and the gate hanging open, but Rosaleen did not seem to notice the house, it was as though the place had never been. That evening, Constance went to pick a few roses from the wreck of the garden and she came back hugely tired and alone.

There would be no perfect house, how could there be? Because Rosaleen was impossible to please. The world was queuing up to satisfy her, and the world always failed.

It was a trick she had learned early, in the front room of Ardeevin, perhaps, when one suitor or another would be sent off with a flea in his ear for thinking he might be good enough for the daughter of John Considine. Or earlier than that – it was hard to tell. Rosaleen was difficult to psychologise, a woman who never spoke of her childhood until she was in her sixties, and then in a way that made you wonder if she had ever been a child at all.

The remarkable thing was the way Rosaleen’s children spent such enormous amounts of energy getting themselves, in one way or another, turned down by her too. Even the money she gave them felt like a coldness, once the house was gone.

Emmet, who had seen so much injustice in the world, had to remind himself as he checked his bank account – and then pulled back from the screen to check it again – that his mother never killed anyone. And yet, her children thought she was ‘terrible’. Her eldest daughter, especially, felt, as she tended her, supplicatory, rejected.

‘Mammy would you like a biscuit with that?’

‘A biscuit? Oh no.’

Rosaleen, who was so needy, was always telling you to go away. So when she was, for those few wonderful months after the green road, easy to love, her children were utterly beguiled.

Paying Attention

EMMET WALKED IN
to the house on Verschoyle Gardens one Saturday afternoon in November, to find his mother sitting in the kitchen with Denholm.

‘How are you, Emmet?’ said Denholm. ‘Your mother has arrived. I made a cup of tea.’

‘Mam,’ he said.

‘You wouldn’t believe the traffic on the N7,’ she said. ‘I thought I would run out of petrol.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘Evidently,’ she said. ‘Would you check the handbrake? I am always afraid that thing will roll away on me.’

‘You drove,’ he said. Her car was in the driveway. Emmet had seen it, he realised. He had noted it in passing:
There’s Rosaleen’s car.

‘Yes! My goodness. And the fields flooded everywhere. I saw two swans paddling into a barn outside Saggart. But the roads are all very different these days. You know I haven’t done that journey in so many years, I can’t think when I did it last.’

She laughed, towards Denholm, a light little trill of hilarity.

Emmet put his bags of shopping down on the counter and took his phone out of his pocket. Right enough, the thing was jammed with missed calls and text messages: Hanna, Dessie, Dessie, Dessie, Hanna.

Nothing from Constance.

‘I should have been up before, you know, I have been very remiss.’

‘Rosaleen,’ he said.

His mother turned to Denholm.

‘I never liked Dublin.’

‘Really?’

‘It was always so dirty. Dear dirty Dublin, that’s what we used to say. But Hanna too, you know,’ she said to Emmet. ‘I should have been up here, for the baby. I do love that baby.’

‘You are the grandmother,’ said Denholm.

‘Well indeed,’ she said. And the little laugh was back again, her body light and tiny in the chair as she rocked forward to touch Denholm on the forearm.

There was a pause then, as she considered what she had just done.

‘Your sister’s baby. How is your sister’s baby?’ she said.

‘The baby is very well, thank you.’

She’s here
, Emmet texted to them all, and could not think what else to say. His mother was exerting the full of her charm on a Kenyan, in his kitchen.

‘You’re here,’ he said.

‘Yes!’ she said, and there was a slight manic gleam to her eye. ‘I came to see you.’

She looked at her son, she looked him straight in the eye, and for a moment, Emmet felt himself to be known. Just a glimmer and then it was gone.

‘And it is such a nice house. Such a nice road. I didn’t realise there were houses like this, just off the motorway. You never know what is behind the trees.’

‘I am sorry we only have tea,’ said Denholm.

‘Oh. Sorry. Yes,’ said Emmet, turning to the shopping bags. ‘Biscuits! We’re not really a biscuit house except for Denholm, he is addicted to those Belgian things with the chocolate.’

‘Not for me! I never had a sweet tooth.’ She put her hand on Denholm’s forearm again and this time, as though surprised, she let it rest there. The veins of her old hand were purple under the thin white skin, and the surface of Denholm’s arm very opaque by comparison. Rosaleen reached for Denholm’s hand, quite slowly. She held it up off the table and ran a curious finger along the side of it, where the dark brown of his skin gave way, in a line, to the lighter shade of his palm.

Emmet nearly died, he said later.
I nearly died.

‘Oh,’ said Rosaleen.

Denholm pulled his hand gently away, and curled it into a loose fist on the tabletop.

‘Why have I not seen it before?’

‘Rosaleen,’ said Emmet.

‘Why have I not seen that before?’ she said. She was quite fretful now. ‘Why do you think that is?’

‘I have no idea,’ said Emmet.

And Denholm, in a rush of compassion, held both his hands out to her and turned them palm up and then palm down.

‘Please don’t listen to my mother,’ said Emmet.

Rosaleen gathered herself then and glanced down at her lap.

Her car keys were on the table in front of her and she picked them up, in a decisive way. Emmet thought she was about to leave again and he started forward from his place at the counter, but she just clicked the remote. An electronic squawk came from the car outside.

‘My bag is in the boot,’ she said.

Emmet stopped where he was.

‘Right,’ he said.

And his mother reached for her cup of tea.

‘Everyone is looking for you, Rosaleen. Constance is beside herself.’

‘Oh Constance,’ she said, in a tone of great exasperation.

And it occurred to Emmet that Constance had not, in fact, phoned.

‘What do you mean,
Constance
?’

His mother looked terrible, suddenly. There were shadows like bruises under her eyes, and the eyes themselves all pupil; black as black glass. Tears came. She leaned in to Denholm.

‘Constance threw me out,’ she said.

And Denholm said, ‘Your daughter? Oh no. Oh no. That is pretty bad.’

For a long and amazing moment, Emmet thought it was true.

Later, he rang his sister’s phone in Aughavanna, and Dessie picked up. She could not be disturbed, he said. She was in bed.

‘OK,’ said Emmet, moving into the living room, pacing about.

Constance wasn’t well.

‘Right.’

Dessie’s voice trembled a little. She’s
had a diagnosis
, he said. They would operate pretty much immediately and get the lot of it in one go, but it was major – Dessie paused at the word –
major
surgery, and when she told Rosaleen this morning, Rosaleen took it all the wrong way. She lit out the road and Constance was frantic, she was more concerned about her mother than she was for herself. She was under the doctor now, pumped full of Ativan. And it was typical of Rosaleen, Emmet could hear a slur in his voice, whiskey perhaps –
chypical
– to cause the maximum bother at just the wrong time.

‘It’s all about her,’ he said, as though he had a right to say such a thing. ‘It’s all about her.’

Emmet had a sharp urge to defend his mother.

Dessie fucking McGrath.

‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh, Constance. Oh, no.’

‘Can you hang on to her?’ said Dessie. As if Emmet had an option.

‘Of course. Of course,’ as he rolled his eyes and walked the living room, wondering what he had to cancel at work – the hundred thousand people on the side of a road in Aceh, perhaps – and if there was a set of clean sheets to be had. His mother sleeping in his bed. It was an odd thought.

But please come down, Dessie went on. Please come. When Constance is up and about again. There were plenty of beds in the house God knows, they were coming down with bedrooms. Stay a while, when you bring her back home.

But that was yet to come. For the moment, Emmet looked at his mother sitting in his pathetic, chipboard kitchen and he was strangely pleased to see her there.

‘I don’t know where I am to sleep tonight,’ she told Denholm. ‘Though I don’t sleep much, you know. Not any more.’

‘No.’

She sat there, very small.

‘I am sorry I touched your hand.’

‘Oh. Please,’ said Denholm.

‘No really,’ she said.

And, in all fairness, Emmet thought, she looked pretty bad.

‘I have paid too little attention,’ she said. ‘I think that’s the problem. I should have paid more attention to things.’

Ballynahown – Bray – Sandycove

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THANKS FOR INFORMATION
used and cheerfully misused in this book are due to: Seamas Collins, Mary Healy, Barbara O’Shea and Catherine Ginty of Trócaire; Rohan Spong and Trent Duffy; Fintan O’Toole, Tom Conway and Gary Hynes of Druid Theatre Company; Sinead Dunwoody, Paul Gallagher, Louise Canavan and Tom McGuinn of the Pharmaceutical Society Ireland, and Alan Carr, Leader of the Galway Mountain Rescue Team. Thanks also to Declan Meade, Fawad Qurashi, John Stack – and to Siddharth Shanghvi, for afterwards.

A NOTE ABOUT PLACE-NAMES

The green road of the title is a real road that runs through the Burren in County Clare. I have used some of the actual place-names along that beautiful coastline and these are spelt according to various maps, old and new. I have also made some names up or stolen them from other townlands – especially for places associated with the Madigans, the Considines and the McGraths. The town where they live is not named. This is to underline the fact that this is a work of fiction, populated by fictional characters. Any resemblance to the good people of West Clare, or to anyone else for that matter, is entirely coincidental.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

FICTION

The Portable Virgin

The Wig My Father Wore

What Are You Like?

The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch

The Gathering

Taking Pictures

Yesterday’s Weather

The Forgotten Waltz

NON-FICTION

Making Babies

Copyright © 2015 by greengirl limited

All rights reserved

First Edition

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