by Anne Enright
She might throw another cup, or upset the whole teapot, or fling the broken belt into the flowerbed through the open door.
‘There,’ she said.
‘Happy now?’
‘Two can play at that game,’ she said.
‘What do you think of that?’
She would stare for a moment, as though wondering who these strange children were. After which brief confusion, she would swivel and slam back up to bed. Ten minutes later, or twenty minutes, or half an hour, the door would creak open and her small voice come out of it saying, ‘Constance?’
There was something comical about these displays. Dan pulled a wry face as he went back to his book, Constance might make tea and Emmet would do something very noble and pure – a single flower brought from the garden, a serious kiss. Hanna would not know what to do except maybe go in and be loved.
‘My baby. How’s my little girl?’
Much later, when all this had been forgotten, with the TV on and cheese on toast made for tea, their father came back from the land at Boolavaun. Up the stairs he went, one stair at a time then, after knocking twice, into the room.
‘So?’ he might say, before the door closed on their talk.
After a long time, he came back down to the kitchen to ask for tea. He dozed in silence for an hour or so and woke with a start for the nine o’clock news. Then he switched off the telly and said, ‘Which one of you broke your mother’s belt? Tell me now,’ and Emmet said, ‘It was my fault, Daddy.’
He stood forward with his head down and his hands by his sides. Emmet would drive you mad for being good.
Their father pulled the ruler from under the TV set, and Emmet lifted his hand, and their father held the fingertips until the last millisecond, as he dealt the blow. Then he turned and sighed as he slid the ruler back home.
‘Up to bed,’ he said.
Emmet walked out with his cheeks flaring, and Hanna got her goodnight beardie, which was a scrape of the stubble from her father’s cheek, as he turned, for a joke, from her kiss. Her father smelt of the day’s work: fresh air, diesel, hay, with the memory of cattle in there somewhere, and beyond that again, the memory of milk. He took his dinner out in Boolavaun, where his own mother still lived.
‘Your granny says goodnight,’ he said, which was another kind of joke with him. And he tilted his head.
‘Will you come out with me, tomorrow? You will, so.’
The next day, which was Holy Thursday, he brought Hanna out in the orange Cortina, with the door that gave a great crack when you opened it. A few miles out, he started to hum, and you could feel the sky getting whiter as they travelled towards the sea.
Hanna loved the little house at Boolavaun: four rooms, a porch full of geraniums, a mountain out the back and, out the front, a sky full of weather. If you crossed the long meadow, you came to a boreen which brought you up over a small rise to a view of the Aran Islands out in Galway Bay, and the Cliffs of Moher, which were also famous, far away to the south. This road turned into the green road that went across the Burren, high above the beach at Fanore, and this was the most beautiful road in the world, bar none, her granny said – famed in song and story – the rocks gathering briefly into walls before lapsing back into field, the little stony pastures whose flowers were sweet and rare.
And if you lifted your eyes from the difficulties of the path, it was always different again, the islands sleeping out in the bay, the clouds running their shadows across the water, the Atlantic surging up the distant cliffs in a tranced, silent plume of spray.
Far below were the limestone flats they called the Flaggy Shore; grey rocks under a grey sky, and there were days when the sea was a glittering grey and your eyes could not tell if it was dusk or dawn, your eyes were always adjusting. It was like the rocks took the light and hid it away. And that was the thing about Boolavaun, it was a place that made itself hard to see.
And Hanna loved her Granny Madigan, a woman who looked like she had a lot to say, and wasn’t saying any of it.
But it was a long day out there when the rain came in: her granny always moving from place to place, clearing things, wiping them, and a lot of it useless pother; feeding cats that would not come to her call, or losing something she had just let out of her hand that very minute. There was nothing much to talk about.
‘How’s school?’
‘Good.’
And not much Hanna was allowed to touch. A cabinet in the good room held a selection of china. Other surfaces were set with geraniums in various stages of blooming and decline: there was a whole shelf of amputees on a back sill, their truncated stems bulbous to the tips. The walls were bare, except for a picture of the Killarney Lakes in the good room, and a plain black crucifix over her granny’s bed. There was no Sacred Heart, or holy water, or little statue of the Virgin. Their Granny Madigan went to Mass with a neighbour, if she went to Mass at all, and she cycled in all weathers five miles to the nearest shop. If she got sick – and she was never sick – she was in trouble, because she never set foot inside Considine’s Medical Hall.
Never had and never would.
The reasons for this were of some interest to Hanna, because, as soon as her father was out with the cattle, her granny took her aside – as though there were crowds to observe them – and pressed a pound note into her hand.
‘Go in to your uncle’s for me,’ she said. ‘And ask for some of that last cream.’
The cream was for something old-lady and horrible.
‘What’ll I say?’ said Hanna.
‘Oh no need, no need,’ said her granny. ‘He’ll know.’
Constance used to be in charge of this, clearly, and now it was Hanna’s turn.
‘OK,’ said Hanna.
The pound note her granny pressed into her hand was folded in half and rolled up again. Hanna did not know where to put it so she stuck it down her sock for safe keeping, sliding it down along the ankle bone. She looked out one window at the hard sea light, and out the other at the road towards town.
They did not get along, the Considines and the Madigans.
When Hanna’s father came in the door for his cup of tea, he filled the doorframe so he had to stoop, and Hanna wished her granny could ask her own son for the cream, whatever it was, though she sensed it had something to do with the bright blood she saw in her granny’s commode, which was a chair with a hole cut into it, and the potty slotted in beneath.
There were four rooms in the house at Boolavaun. Hanna went into each of them and listened to the different sounds of the rain. She stood in the back bedroom her father used to share with his two younger brothers, who were in America now. She looked at the three beds where they once slept.
Out in the kitchen, her father sat over his tea, and her granny read the newspaper that he brought to her from town, each day. Bertie, the house cat, was straining against her granny’s old feet, and the radio wandered off-station. On the range, a big pot of water was coming, with epic slowness, to the boil.
After the rain, they went out to look for eggs. Her granny carried a white enamel bowl with a thin blue rim, that was chipped, here and there, to black. She walked in a quick crouch beyond the hen-house to the hedge that divided the yard from the haggart. She scrabbled along the bushes, peering down between the branches.
‘Oho,’ she said. ‘I have you now.’
Hanna crawled in by her granny’s bunioned feet to retrieve the egg that was laid under the hedge. The egg was brown and streaked with hen-do. Granny held it up to admire before putting it in the empty dish where it rolled about with a hollow, dangerous sound.
‘Get down there for me,’ she said to Hanna, ‘and check the holes in the wall.’
Hanna got right down. The walls, which were everywhere on the land, were forbidden to her and to Emmet for fear they’d knock the stones on top of themselves. The walls were older than the house, her granny said; thousands of years old, they were the oldest walls in Ireland. Up close, the stones were dappled with whit
e and scattered with coins of yellow lichen, like money in the sunlight. And there was a white egg, not even dirty, tucked into a crevice where the ragwort grew.
‘Aha,’ said her granny.
Hanna placed the egg in the bowl and her granny put her fingers in there to stop the two eggs banging off each other. Hanna dipped into the wooden hen-house to collect the rest of them, in the rancid smell of old straw and feathers, while her granny stood out in the doorway and lowered the bowl for each new egg she found. As they turned back to the house, the old woman reached down and lifted one of the scratching birds – so easily – she didn’t even set the eggs aside. If Hanna ever tried tried to catch a hen, they jinked away so fast she was afraid she might give them a heart attack, but her granny just picked one up, and there it was, tucked under the crook of her arm, its red-brown feathers shining in the sun. A young cock, by the stubby black in his tail that would be, when he was grown, a proud array, shimmering with green.
As they walked across the back yard, Hanna’s father came out of the car house, which was an open-sided outhouse between the cowshed and the little alcove for turf. Her granny stood on tiptoe to shrug the bird over to him and it swung down from her father’s hand as he turned away. He was holding the bird by the feet and in his other hand was a hatchet, held close to the blade. He got the heft of this as he went to a broken bench Hanna had never noticed, which lived under the shelter of the car house roof. He slung the bird’s head on to the wood, so the beak strained forwards, and he chopped it off.
It was done as easy as her granny picking the bird up off the ground, it was done all in one go. He held the slaughtered thing up and away from him as the blood pumped and dribbled on to the cobblestones.
‘Oh.’ Her granny gave a little cry, as though some goodness had been lost, and the cats were suddenly there, lifting up on to their hind feet, under the bird’s open neck.
‘Go ’way,’ said her father, shoving one aside with his boot, then he handed the bird, still flapping, over to Hanna to hold.
Hanna was surprised by the warmth of the chicken’s feet, that were scaly and bony and should not be warm at all. She could feel her father laughing at her, as he left her to it and went into the house. Hanna held the chicken away from herself with both hands and tried not to drop the thing as it flapped and twisted over the space where its head used to be. One of the cats already had the fleshy cockscomb in its little cat’s teeth, and was running away with the head bobbing under its little white chin. Hanna might have screamed at all that – at the dangling, ragged neck and the cock’s outraged eye – but she was too busy keeping the corpse from jerking out of her hands. The wings were agape, the russet feathers all ruffled back and showing their yellow under-down, and the body was shitting out from under the black tail feathers, in squirts that mimicked the squirting blood.
Her father came out of the kitchen with the big pot of water, which he set on the cobbles.
‘Still going,’ he said.
‘Dada!’ said Hanna.
‘It’s just reflexes,’ he said. But Hanna knew he was laughing at her, because as soon as it was all over, the thing gave another jerk and her granny gave a sound Hanna had not heard before, a delighted crowing she felt on the skin of her neck. The old woman turned back into the kitchen to leave the eggs on the dresser, and came out fumbling a piece of twine out of her apron pocket as Hanna’s father took the chicken from her, finally, and dunked the thing in the vat of steaming water.
Even then, the body twitched, and the wings banged strongly, twice, against the sides of the pot.
In and out the carcass went. And then it was still.
‘That’s you now,’ he said to his mother, as he held a leg out for her to tie with her piece of twine.
After this, Hanna watched her granny string the chicken up by one leg on to a hook in the car house and pull the feathers off the bird with a loud ripping sound. The wet feathers stuck to her fingers in clumps: she had to slap her hands together and wipe them on the apron.
‘Come here now and I’ll show you how it’s done,’ she said.
‘No,’ said Hanna, who was standing in the kitchen doorway.
‘Ah now,’ said her granny.
‘I will not,’ said Hanna, who was crying.
‘Ah darling.’
And Hanna turned her face away in shame.
Hanna was always crying – that was the thing about Hanna. She was always ‘snottering’, as Emmet put it. Oh, your bladder’s very close to your eyes, her mother used to say, or Your waterworks, Constance called it, and that was another phrase they all used, Here come the waterworks, even though it was her brothers and sister who made her cry. Emmet especially, who won her tears from her, pulled them out of her face, hot and sore, and ran off with them, exulting.
‘Hanna’s crying!’
But Emmet wasn’t even here now. And Hanna was crying over a chicken. Because that’s what was under the dirty feathers: goose-bumped, white, calling out for roast potatoes.
A Sunday chicken.
And her granny was hugging her now, from the side. She squeezed Hanna’s upper arm.
‘Ah now,’ she said.
While Hanna’s father came across from the cowshed with a can of milk to be taken back home.
‘Will you live?’ he said.
When she got into the car, her father set the milk can between Hanna’s feet to keep it safe. The chicken was on the back seat, wrapped in newspaper and tied with string, its insides empty, and the giblets beside it in a plastic bag. Her father shut the car door and Hanna sat in silence while he walked around to the driver’s side.
Hanna was mad about her father’s hands, they were huge, and the sight of them on the steering wheel made the car seem like a toy car, and her own feelings like baby feelings she could grow out of some day. The milk sloshing in the can was still warm. She could feel the pound note down there too, snug against her ankle bone.
‘I have to go to the chemist’s for Granny,’ she said.
But her father made no answer to this. Hanna wondered, briefly, if he had heard the words, or if she had not uttered them out loud at all.
Her grandfather, John Considine, shouted at a woman once because she came into the Medical Hall and asked for something unmentionable. Hanna never knew what it was – you could die of the shame – it was said he manhandled the woman out into the street. Though other people said he was a saint – a saint, they said – to the townspeople who knocked him up at all hours for a child with whooping cough or an old lady crazed by the pain of her kidney stones. There were men from Gort to Lahinch who would talk to no one else if their hens were gaping or the sheep had scour. They brought their dogs in to him on a length of baling twine – wild men from the back of beyond – and he went into the dispensary to mix and hum; with camphor and peppermint oil, with tincture of opium and extract of male fern. As far as Hanna could tell, old John Considine was a saint to everyone except the people who did not like him, which was half the town – the other half – the ones who went to Moore’s, the chemist’s on the other side of the river, instead.
And she did not know why that might be.
Pat Doran, the garageman, said Moore’s was much more understanding of matters ‘under the bonnet’, but Considine’s was a superior proposition altogether when it came to the boot. So maybe that was the reason.
Or it might be something else, altogether.
Her mother saying: They never liked us.
Her mother pulling her past a couple of old sisters on the street, with her ‘keep walking’ smile.
Emmet said their Grandfather Madigan was shot during the Civil War and their Grandfather Considine refused to help. The men ran to the Medical Hall looking for ointment and bandages and he just pulled down the blind, he said. But nobody believed Emmet. Their Grandfather Madigan died of diabetes years ago, they had to take off his foot.
Whatever the story, Hanna walked down to the Medical Hall that evening feeling marked, singled out by d
estiny to be the purveyor of old lady’s bottom cream, while Emmet was not to know their granny had a bottom, because Emmet was a boy. Emmet was interested in things and he was interested in facts and none of these facts were small and stupid, they were all about Ireland, and people getting shot.
Hanna walked down Curtin Street, past the window with its horn-sailed boat, past the cream tureen and the pink, felted cat. It was dusk and the lights of the Medical Hall shone yellow into the blue of the street. She went down on one knee in front of the counter, to get the pound note out of her sock.
‘It’s for my Granny Madigan,’ she said to Bart. ‘She says you’ll know what.’
Bart flapped a quick eyelid down and up again, then started to wrap a small box in brown paper. There was a shriek of Sellotape from the dispenser as he stuck the paper down.
‘How is she anyway?’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Hanna.
‘Same as ever?’
Some part of Hanna had hoped she would be allowed to keep the pound note but Bart put out his hand and she was obliged to hand the money over, pathetic as it looked, and soft with much handling.
‘I suppose,’ she said.
Bart straightened the note out, saying, ‘It’s beautiful out there all right. The little gentians in flower, maybe already. A little bright blue thing, you know it? A little star, blooming among the rocks?’
He put the old note on top of the pile of one pound notes stacked up in his till, and he let the clip slap down.
‘Yeah,’ said Hanna. Who was fed up of people talking about some tiny flower like it was amazing. And fed up of people talking about the view of the Aran Islands and the Flaggy fucking Shore. She looked at the soiled little note on top of the pile of crisp new notes, and she thought about her granny’s handbag, with nothing inside it.
‘All right?’ said Bart, because Hanna was stuck there for a moment, her skin was alive with the shame of it. Her father came from poor people. Handsome he might be and tall, but the bit of land he had was only rock and he did his business behind a hedge, like the rest of the Madigans before him.
