by Anne Enright
‘Sorry?’
‘Today?’
‘Why?’ She kept her voice careful, just to be sure.
‘No reason. I’m away to Aughavanna, is all, to check things over this afternoon, so I might be back a bit late, if that’s OK.’
‘Off you go,’ she said, and he kissed her, and goosed her, and was out the door.
A couple of years ago, Constance got her wisdom teeth out, and she must have said it a hundred times, she needed a lift home because they wouldn’t let you drive after the sedation. When the day came Dessie said, ‘What?’ He said he would rearrange everything, he would do it right away, and he started panicking and going through bits of paper until Constance told him not to bother. She just drove herself over there, and got the teeth out without the drugs. It was painful all right, but not exactly a disaster.
‘I like to know where I am,’ she said to the dentist, who promised to stuff her with local anaesthetic. Then she got up out of the chair, her jaw banging like a gong, and she got into the car, and drove back home.
Her mother was outraged.
‘You should have called me,’ she said. But Rosaleen liked to say things like that, when the opportunity to help was gone.
‘He cares too much,’ Constance said. ‘That’s the problem. He loves me too much,’ listening to her mother’s silence on the other end of the phone.
There was, of course, a fair amount of boasting in the complaints she made to her mother. Dessie’s caring was legendary, and Constance herself was indestructible: those two things were well known.
‘God you are indestructible,’ said Rosaleen. She made it sound like an insult.
Because Rosaleen was actually depressed, Constance thought, there was no other word for it. She was two years a widow and Constance felt her mother leaving, now, all the time.
‘So smug,’ she said, when Constance rattled on about the kids – which admittedly, she did non-stop.
‘So smug.’
Her own grandchildren.
Oh all your geese are swans.
And why not? Why not have children who were wonderful?
Everyone was so disappointed, these days, Constance thought, it was like an epidemic. Lauren was clearly disappointed with her life in Strasbourg, her Prada trousers notwithstanding. And Dessie viewed his fortieth birthday as a personal insult, he couldn’t understand it was happening to him – never mind the trips to New York and the Galway Races, and the house he was finishing now, out in Aughavanna with more space than Constance wanted or could fill. He had one of those little cherry blossoms already planted; big, solid pink pompoms on this little sapling in the middle of the lawn. Horrible. Her mother clearly thought it was all vulgarity rampant.
‘How lovely,’ she said to Dessie. Driving him up the wall.
When Constance told her mother she was getting married, Rosaleen said Dessie was ‘an eccentric choice’, which was an odd thing to say, because Dessie was just the opposite, really. Twelve years on, they were very thick.
‘Have you had enough, Desmond?’
Sometimes Constance felt she was actually in the way.
‘Cut him another slice of that cake, Constance. Will you have another slice of cake?’
Her mother would put her hand lightly to Dessie’s forearm, she would glance over her shoulder at him, with some backward-flung piece of charm. It was a hoot to watch the pair of them. Two drinks and they’d be off laughing in a corner: Dessie buttered up, plumped up, lifting the jacket on to her shoulders from the back of the chair, ‘You have to hand it to her’, as though Rosaleen was an opponent worth considering, for a man like Dessie. Then, as soon as he was through his own front door, saying, ‘That woman’, because she had played him, yet again.
Though she managed it less and less, it had to be said, since her own husband died.
Constance was very worried about Rosaleen. She was still out in the old house in Ardeevin and it was still letting in the rain, she had a hundred small things wrong with her, none of which you could name. This had always been the way with Rosaleen, but she went to some new quack in Ennis who told her not to eat broccoli, or to eat lots of broccoli, Constance could never remember which. The GP, meanwhile, said her bloods were coming back fine, so Rosaleen was fighting with the GP whom she had never liked – nor his father before him, she said. Everything was off. She was tired all the time.
The stupid thing was that if you agreed that there was, clearly, something wrong with her, Rosaleen would snap that she was perfectly fine. Or if, in the middle of some intense medical discussion, you suggested she get a scan of the offending organ, whichever one it was, then Rosaleen would look quietly affronted, because of course the thing that was wrong with her was not the sort of thing you could just see with a machine.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she would say, turning to look out the window, and a small smile would come, as though she enjoyed being so misunderstood.
Constance did not think there was a cure for grief, but she did think an anti-depressant might cut the worst of it. She was on a little Seroxat herself, since her father got sick and she wouldn’t be without it, but it was not something you could ever suggest to your mother.
Daddy said he felt fine.
‘I feel absolutely fine,’ he had said. Twelve months and two courses of chemo later, he was dead. So a healthy man was in the ground, and a woman who felt mysteriously unwell was driving about the countryside, switching on the windscreen wipers every time she wanted to turn left. Coming home, then, to a house that was falling down around her ears.
Dessie wanted to develop a site out at Boolavaun, that was one of the things Rosaleen teased him about, he had some scheme. He would get the cash to her, and Rosaleen would sign the land over – he would buy it, in effect – and the money would plug the holes in her roof and keep her in nice skin cream. But Rosaleen seemed to like the holes in her roof. She seemed to like saying, ‘What will I do? I don’t know what to do.’ She liked panicking with pots and buckets and having them all run around for her, calling Constance every time it rained. Calling Constance when the mousetrap went off, saying, ‘I think it’s a rat.’
Constance who had cancer. Or who did not have cancer.
What was the word she was looking for?
‘No.’
What do you mean, ‘No’?
‘No, I am busy. No, I have more important things on. No, I will not do this for you now. No.’
‘Margaret Dolan!’
The woman beside Constance lunged towards the floor to gather her basket and her bag and her empty water bottle, and her gown opened to show her back, which was creamy and huge. Constance had the urge to touch it. She wanted to lay her head on the expanse of it, say, ‘Stop. Hush.’ And when Margaret Dolan paused, she would reach down to take her scarred and pudgy hand, and feel her own hand squeezed in return.
‘OK,’ said Margaret Dolan and she heaved herself, with some difficulty, up off the seat.
‘Well,’ she said, turning slightly to Constance. ‘Here goes nothin’!’
‘Take it easy now,’ said Constance.
The empty space she left behind was still occupied by the sharp, peculiar smell of her sweat.
‘Keep drinking the water!’ said Constance, at the last minute, just before the door closed, and the woman from Adare shot a small glance her way.
It was true.
All Constance wanted to do was to make people happy. Why was it her job to fix them? Not one of the people she cared so much about knew where she was, right now. There wasn’t a sinner to remember that she had a mammogram today, or enquire how it had gone, and a terrible sharp desire came over Constance to be told the lump was malignant, so she could say to Dessie, ‘You know where I was this morning?’ and tell her mother, ‘Yes Mammy, cancer, they saw it on the scan’, then wait for the news to filter, finally, through to Lauren, Eileen, Martha Hingerty: who would then be obliged to call, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? I just heard.’
There it was.
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She was in the room and there it was: a picture of her breast was pinned on to a light-box on the wall and, on her breast, which was a network of white lines and intersections, was a lump: it looked like a knot, a snarl of light. And everything around it – the exterior line of the breast, the map of ducts, or veins, perhaps – was very beautiful, like a landscape seen from space, one of those pictures of the earth taken at night.
But there might have been an arrow pointing to the thing. There might as well have been a big stick-on piece of cardboard with the word CANCER written on it in red marker, because even Constance could see it, there was no doubt it was there. It was a while before she could look away from it and listen to what the doctor was saying.
‘You’re a bit old for one and a bit young for the other, if you know what I mean.’
Was that good?
Constance was lying on the couch. The doctor, who was a woman, had the sonic pen Constance remembered from her pregnancies, and she thought she heard the liquid boom of a baby’s heart through the Doppler machine. Then she realised it was the sound of her own blood, rushing in the flesh of her ears.
The doctor looked to the picture on the light-box, and felt – unerring – for the lump. She moved her index finger around it, while her other hand brought the pen into play and the screen beside Constance jumped into life. The picture was in black and white, and this time the inside of her breast looked like marble, it was mottled in exactly the same way. It was marbled the way a steak was marbled, she thought, because what she was looking at was fat. Before she knew what was happening, the woman had a needle in there – too fine, almost, to hurt, she could see it on the screen reaching into a blob of darkness, and she looked down in real life as it was taken out, and she realised a nurse was holding her by the shoulders so she would not make any sudden movement. As soon as the needle was gone she wanted to sit up and take a breath, and this is what she did. She was wiping the jelly off her skin with some rough green paper towel, she was reaching for the basket of clothes as the doctor said, ‘Hang on.’ Then the doctor repeated what she had just said. Some word like ‘adenoids’ or ‘carcinoma’ and then: ‘I think – hang on – So I am ninety-five per cent – OK? – ninety-five per cent sure this is what it is. And you are a bit old for it, but you’re a bit young for the other, all right? With your history, and what I am seeing here on the screen.’
Constance still couldn’t understand a word of it. This is why everyone took so long in this room. It was because everyone was stupid, like her.
But the doctor didn’t say the word ‘stupid’. She rubbed her hand along Constance’s arm.
‘All right?’
The arm thing was a gesture she had decided on; she did it a hundred times a day. But it felt nice, all the same.
‘All right,’ said Constance, and she shuffled out of the room: her gown flapping open at the back and the plastic grocery basket that held her clothes clutched in both hands.
She was guided up a set of back stairs into a proper hospital ward.
‘Mr Murtagh will be along to you soon.’
This time, the women waited on beds, and each bed was surrounded by curtains, so Constance could not tell where Margaret Dolan was, or if she had already left. Some time later, she heard the woman from Adare go to another stall – she could tell who it was by the sound of her shoes. And while she waited – it must have been the stress – she drifted against the softness of Rory’s skin and the thickness of his unwashed curls. She was like some sea creature among the kelp, grazing the side of her face against his older brother, the moving, small bones of his white shoulder, the sweaty insides of his hands paddling against her as she turned and passed, and pulled herself down into the perfumed depths of Shauna’s red hair. When she woke – minutes later, or half an hour – she was panicking about the salmon in the freezer, thinking, What will I buy for the dinner, if I have cancer?, and then, Fuck. Fuck. Fuck it. How am I even going to drive myself home?
Out on the other side of the screen, Margaret Dolan was saying, ‘I can’t do it next week, I have a wedding,’ and a man’s voice said, ‘Who’s getting married?’
‘My daughter. I have a daughter.’
‘A daughter?’ The man was a fool. There was no need to sound so surprised.
‘Adopted,’ said Margaret, by way of apology, then rallied with, ‘She found me. She was adopted and she found me last year.’
‘Right,’ and his voice had an extra ‘oh shit’ in there. ‘OK. And when is the wedding again?’
‘It’s in Birmingham.’
‘OK.’
‘Doctor, do I not have it in my womb?’
And Constance started to cry for Margaret Dolan, quietly, in her cubicle: the tears ran down. Crying too for her own selfishness – how utterly, utterly selfish she was. Constance McGrath sat on the bed where the starched sheet was folded over, feeling abandoned and small. Because she had everything, more than everything, her life was overflowing and Margaret Dolan had so little to call her own. Constance wanted to put her head through the curtain and look her in the eye – to say what? ‘I’m so sorry for your trouble. Would you like a lift home?’
But the nurse was already leading her to another room.
‘Now Margaret,’ she was saying. ‘Good woman. You’re all right. Good woman.’
They arrived through the curtains in a team: the folder nurse and the ultrasound woman and two children in white coats who must be students, all of them following a small man with very piercing eyes. This was Mr Murtagh.
Mr Murtagh placed his hand on her breast briefly, but he wasn’t much interested. He sort of shoved it away. The way his eyes scanned her, Constance had a sudden panic that she had not shaved under her arms.
‘We are very happy with you,’ said Mr Murtagh.
He did not seem happy, he seemed a bit impatient but, That is because I am well, Constance thought, I have been wasting his time with my robust good health, I have been wasting everyone’s time! Her clever body had been doing a great job. Complex. Microscopic. Quiet. The map of light that was her left breast was not frightful but beautiful, and the marbled black and white of its sonic depths was lovely too.
‘I’m clear,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
Clear.
‘You can slip your clothes back on for me now,’ said the nurse, as though Constance might run out to the car park in her gown, jumping up and banging her heels together in the rain. Constance dressed to her overcoat and pushed the curtain back, exposing the bed to an empty ward.
‘Thank you for everything,’ Constance said to the nurse who liked glitter nail polish but was not allowed to wear it. She was finishing Constance’s notes on a steel clipboard at the end of the bed.
‘Now you heard what Mr Murtagh said. You know where we are. Any worry at all.’
‘Thank you so much.’
‘Safe home, now.’
The air outside the hospital doors was amazing, so packed full of oxygen and weather. Constance could not remember where she had parked the car but she did not mind walking through the spottings of rain, pulling the sky into her lungs. Sipping at the world.
Constance put on the windscreen wipers as the rain set in. She held and turned the wheel with care and the darkness under her left arm flowered and began to fade. A few miles from home, the sun came out. She passed the latest McGrath house – Dessie’s brother the auctioneer, who had built a bungalow, high off the road. The slope of raw clay had been ablaze, when her father’s hearse passed along that way, with red poppies and with those yellow flowers that love broken ground. Less of them came the next year, and this year fewer again, as grass took over and the cut land healed.
She remembered Emmet, helping him down the stairs in Ardeevin. He wasn’t in great shape himself, Emmet. He was back from Africa, or wherever, with a scraggy beard and a hundred yard stare. But he kept his father company through his last months and they were silent and easy with each other, as though dying was like havi
ng a glass of stout or watching the news on telly. It was a funny romance, Constance thought – father and son. The chat about politics or scientific advances, because women were fine but prone to foolishness, and why fuss when you could sit on a spring evening and solve the problems of the whole, wide world? Before you die.
The same way her own boys chatted to Dessie, coming up the path, back from hurling on a Saturday. The light clear voice of Donal, who was the spit of his father, he was his father all over again:
‘What happens to gravity in the middle of the earth, Daddy?’
‘Good question.’
‘I mean, if you went through the earth, and you were in the middle of the earth, you wouldn’t weigh anything.’
‘I don’t know. You might weigh even more.’
‘Or you might just get very small.’
‘Certainly. Certainly. That too.’
It was June. In a few weeks’ time she would bring the children down to the sea when the turf at Fanore was fragrant with clover. She could lie down on it – the low aromatic carpet of green that covered the land behind the dunes – and this year she would learn all the names. Sand pansies she knew and, further inland, the meadowsweet and woodbine, but there was a tiny yellow thing like broom that was also scented, and even the tough little succulents behind the marram called the bees through the salt air by their surprising, sweet perfume. This year she would bring a book of names and instead of sitting on the sand while the children played she would walk the turf with her head bowed. That is what she would do.
‘How did it go?’ said Dessie.
‘How did what go?’
‘The thingy.’
