by Anne Enright
‘Jesus God,’ said Hanna.
The wind was against them, and flecked with rain.
‘I told her,’ she said. ‘I told her Hugh was taking the baby for the day.’
‘I told her,’ said Emmet.
‘You think she’s losing her grip?’
‘What?’ said Emmet.
‘Just.’
‘She’s sharp as a tack,’ said Emmet, because he could not countenance it.
The eaves of the houses on Curtin Street were draped with icicles that rained blue light on them as they walked beneath and the decorations continued tastefully into the main street where Christmas Eve was in full swing. It was taking your life in your hands, said Emmet, but it was more like passing your life on the road; some drunken geezer slapping you on the shoulder only to find – my God – Seán O’Brien from national school, who Emmet ran with and loved with the frank and unrepeatable love you have for another boy, when you are eight years old.
‘Seán O’Brien, how are you?’
‘Emmet, you langer.’
His eyes as blue and ironic as ever, in a scalded, red face.
Hanna, meanwhile, crouched low and flung her arms out, as a woman stumbled towards her – on to her, indeed – wearing gold sandals on bare feet, a golden cardigan, her hair gold blonde and leaping, fountaining, out of her head.
‘Mairéad!’
‘How are you, you good thing? How are you, my darling? Hanna Madigan.’
‘My God, look at you. My God! Look at you!’
‘You think?’ She dabbed at the bright blonde hair.
‘I thought you were in Australia.’
‘We’re home! We’re up in Dublin. Home for good.’
Mackey’s was jammed. They passed friends and the brothers of friends. Everyone was dressed, clipped, groomed; no beards, no stubble, no naked nails, some naked thigh, cleavage, muffin top. A pub that, in their youth, smelt of wet wool and old men was now a gallery of scents, like walking through the perfume department in the Duty Free.
Hanna stuck close to Emmet as they forced their way through the crowd. How was she supposed to recognise anyone, she said, when everyone’s hair was dyed and all the same damn colour?
‘They’ve all taken to the bottle,’ she said.
Emmet caught his reflection in a bar divider and he saw another decade – not just the unkempt hair or the cheap shirt, but something about the ordinary, diffident look in his eye which made the others look a bit mad, he thought. He wondered how much cocaine was in the place. And then he wondered at the thought.
In Mackey’s. Cocaine.
‘How are you Emmet Madigan? I thought you were out on the missions. Will you have something, now, on me. A Christmas drink, on me.’
It was one of the McGraths, a nephew of Dessie’s – and of Constance, therefore, by marriage – son of the real estate McGrath who was minting it these days. Michael or Martin. He was, as far as Emmet knew, a young lawyer beyond in Limerick. Not the worst of them, with the stubby McGrath thing. Walk through a wall for you.
‘I will not, thanks.’
‘You will.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You’ll take something anyway, for the good work. Keep up the good work.’
The man had his wallet out, and was thumbing through notes, half bent over, as though in humility. He could hardly see the damn things. Purple ones – five hundreds he had in there. He took out a wedge of apricot-coloured fifties and pushed it at Emmet.
‘You will,’ he said.
‘I will not.’
‘You will. Humour me,’ and when Emmet backed away, there was a horrible pause. His hand pulsed mid-air, as though marking time with the money. Then he lifted his eyes slowly to say, ‘It’s for a special intention, all right?’
There must have been four hundred euros there. Emmet looked at the man and wondered if he had murdered someone. What shame or sorrow afflicted him so badly he had to get it off his conscience in this way? Nothing, perhaps. The shame of being rich. He couldn’t hold on to the stuff.
‘I’ll get you a receipt for that.’
‘Fuck the receipt,’ said the McGrath nephew, and he loomed up into Emmet’s face. ‘Do you get me? Fuck the fuckin’ receipt. All right?’
‘I get you,’ Emmet said. ‘I get you. Fair play to you.’ Thinking he’d never be able to get this through the system: they were a charity, not a money-laundering operation.
‘We do have to keep things straight.’
The McGrath man leaned back and gaped at him then, as though to start a real fight, but Hanna, who had gone looking for a place to sit, was back by his side.
‘It’s bedlam,’ she said. ‘I went double.’
She had two dirty pints for him, encircled by thumb and forefinger. The other fingers held symmetrical small bottles of white wine, and in her right pinky, the stem of a glass.
‘Hanna Madigan,’ said the McGrath boy. ‘It’s well you’re looking.’
‘Ah, Michael,’ said Hanna, with blatant insincerity. ‘I didn’t see you there at all.’
He turned away and, ‘Why does everything feel so mad?’ she said to Emmet. ‘It’s like. I don’t know what it’s like. Everyone’s so.’
‘I know,’ said Emmet.
‘Showing off.’
‘It’s the money,’ said Emmet.
‘Like everyone’s a returned Yank, even if they’re living up the road. Hiya, Frank! home for the duration?’ She lifted a glass, then turned back to her brother.
‘That fecker. People you ran away from, years ago. Then back to the house, for more of it, I suppose. No wonder they’re fucking pissed.’
She was drunk herself, halfway down the glass. It happened all in one go, the shutters rolling up on a whole different woman. Emmet noted the transformation. Hanna’s eyes clouding with a kind of mid-distance indifference, a twitching lift of her chin, a tiny smile.
Here’s Johnny.
‘Fucking baby this, baby that. Who knew she was so keen on babies? Why don’t you have a baby? Take the onus off.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Emmet.
‘She’s very worried about you.’
‘You don’t say.’
It was what Rosaleen said: ‘I am very worried about Emmet.’
‘God, you’re cold,’ Hanna said. ‘You know that. You’re a cold bastard, really. Does that Dutch chick know how cold you are? Does she know?’
It was a good question. Emmet ignored it.
‘She always liked babies,’ he said. ‘It’s adults she can’t stand.’
‘Puberty,’ said Hanna.
‘At least you didn’t go bald,’ said Emmet. ‘She took that very personally. As I recall.’
‘Anyway, she’s very worried about you.’
It still got to them. Rosaleen never said it to your face, whatever it was. She moved instead around and behind her children, in some churning state of mild and constant distraction. ‘I am very worried about Hanna.’ It was her way of holding on to them, perhaps. Rosaleen was afraid they would leave her. She was afraid it was all her fault. ‘I’m really very worried about Constance, I think she might be depressed.’ All the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex, drink. ‘I am very worried about Hanna, she is looking very puffy about the face.’ And, for a while, to everyone’s great amusement: ‘I’m really worried about Dan, do you think he might be gay?’ to which Emmet had replied, ‘Don’t ask me, I’m only his brother.’
‘What about?’ said Emmet, despite himself.
Hanna’s face blanked and lifted.
‘Fuck her,’ she said. ‘She just said she was worried about you. That’s all.’
‘Well, she can relax.’
Hanna decided to leave it then, but it would not be left. As soon as she tried to change the subject, it came back, in a little surge of malice.
‘Just if there was some little problem there, is all.’
She was now actually and improbably drunk, and this distracted Emmet, for two sec
onds, from the fact that his sister was talking about his sexual functioning, which is to say, about his erection, first of all to his mother and then to his face.
‘What?’ said Emmet, suddenly angry. Terribly angry.
‘That’s what she said.’
‘What did she say? What, exactly?’
But Michael McGrath was back by Hanna’s side. ‘I hope that’s a Sauvignon Blanc,’ he said, handing her another little bottle of wine.
‘Ah now,’ said Emmet.
‘Not at all,’ said the McGrath boy, who had not, in fact, brought a drink for Emmet. He stood there and settled into his own pint, sank an inch or two off the top of it, feet planted.
‘How’s herself?’ he said.
‘Good,’ said Hanna.
‘She’s fierce fit. I do see her betimes on the road.’
‘Yes,’ said Emmet. The man tilted his head.
‘You’ll be sorry, I suppose, to see the old place go?’
‘Excuse me?’
The young McGrath clearly knew something they did not, and the intimacy of that was hard to handle. The glee.
‘Great time to do it. Great timing. I had a house, now, we were doing the conveyancing on a house outside Kilfenora, handsome looking thing all right, rotten inside to the rafters, and they pulled it off the market on the Friday, put it back on on the Monday fifty grand up, and it went for over that again. Well over.’
‘How much?’
‘Ah now!’ he said. He screwed up one side of his face, and bit off an imaginary large length of toffee. A wink. ‘That’d be telling.’
‘Right,’ said Emmet.
Hanna drank with some intensity, looking directly at Michael McGrath, while Emmet thought about the hungry and the dead and about the man who stood in front of him now.
He should go back to counselling, Ireland was wrecking his head. He could feel a child’s back under his hand; the amazing small bones, the acetone smell of his dying. Where was that? What day was that?
And, as though she knew what he was thinking, Hanna said, ‘Would you jump into my grave as quick?’
‘Drink up,’ said Emmet. ‘Let’s go.’
‘You go,’ said Hanna. ‘You fucking go.’
She blinked back some tears, gave Michael McGrath a gammy, wet smile. An offer of some kind. It did not bear thinking about. As if servicing Stubby McGrath would make things better. His own sister.
‘Come on,’ said Emmet.
‘I’m very worried about me, actually.’
‘Oh for feck’s sake,’ said Emmet.
But he felt sorry for her, too, and did not object when she stopped off in the garage shop for a couple of bottles of Oxford Landing, the place jammed with people buying batteries, chocolates, alcohol.
The Hungry Grass
ROSALEEN TOLD CONSTANCE she did not want a present this year. She said it in a faint voice, meaning she would be dead soon so what was the point? What was an object – when you would not have it for long? Too much? Not enough? It was hard to say.
Constance thought she was immune to this sort of guff, but she also needed to tell her mother that she was not about to die so she went up to Galway and trawled through every last thing in the shops, until she found a thick silk scarf that was the same price as a new microwave and so beautiful you could not say what colour it was, except there was lilac in there and also pearl, all of which would be perfect for her mother’s complexion and for her silver-white hair.
‘Oh I can’t remember,’ she would say when her mother asked the price, or complained about the price. Times were good. Constance bought a wheel of Camembert, various boxes of chocolates, Parma ham and beautiful, small grapes that were more yellow than green. She got her hair done in a place so posh it didn’t look done at all. Then she drove back home through the winter darkness in the smell of PVC and ripening cheese, happy in her car. Constance loved to drive. It was the perfect excuse. For what, she did not know. But there was such simplicity to it: crossing great distances to stop an inch away from the kerb, opening the door.
The next morning she was back behind the wheel, picking Dan up from the airport, depositing him in her mother’s, back in to the butcher’s and a few things around town, a poinsettia for the cleaner, a trio of hyacinths for the cleaner’s mother who was in hospital in Limerick and could not understand a thing the doctors told her. The cleaner was from Mongolia, a fact that made Constance slightly dizzy. But it was just true. Her cleaner – good hearted, a little bit vague with a duster – was from Ulan Bator. Constance left the presents with her money on the kitchen table, then back out to Ardeevin with the turkey and a quick tidy up while she was there: checking supplies, running a Hoover, though her mother hated the sound of the Hoover. After which, home to drive Shauna to a pal’s house, her fake tan leaving a shadow on the cream upholstery of the Lexus.
‘Ooofff,’ said Constance, when she saw it and then chastised her temper. That all her problems should be so small.
The next morning, she went early into Ennis. It was 10 a.m. on Christmas Eve and the supermarket was like the Apocalypse, people grabbing without looking, and things fallen in the aisles. But there was no good time to do this, you just had to get through it. Constance pushed her trolley to the vegetable section: celery, carrots, parsnips for Dessie, who liked them. Sausage and sage for the stuffing, an experimental bag of chestnuts, vacuum packed. Constance bought a case of Prosecco on special offer to wrap and leave on various doorsteps and threw in eight frozen pizzas in case the kids rolled up with friends. Frozen berries. Different ice cream. She got wine, sherry, whiskey, fresh nuts, salted nuts, crisps, bags and bags of apples, two mangoes, a melon, dark cherries for the fruit salad, root ginger, fresh mint, a wooden crate of satsumas, the fruit cold and promising sweet, each one with its own sprig of green, dark leaves. She got wrapping paper, red paper napkins, Sellotape, and – more out of habit, now the children were grown – packs and packs of batteries, triple A, double A, a few Cs. She took five squat candles in cream-coloured beeswax to fill the cracked hearth in the good room at Ardeevin, where no fire was lit this ten years past, and two long rolls of simple red baubles to fill the gaps on her mother’s tree. She went back for more sausages because she had forgotten about breakfast. Tomatoes. Bacon. Eggs. She went back to the dairy section for more cheese. Back to the fruit aisle for seedless grapes. Back to the biscuit aisle for water biscuits. She searched high and low for string to keep the cloth on the pudding, stopped at the delicatessen counter for pesto, chicken liver pâté, tubs of olives. She got some ready-cooked drumsticks to keep people going. At every corner, she met a neighbour, an old friend, they rolled their eyes and threw Christmas greetings, and no one thought her rude for not stopping to converse. She smiled at a baby in the queue for the till.
‘I know!’ she said. ‘Yes I know!’ The baby considered her fully. The baby gave her a look that was complete.
‘Yes!’ she said again, and got the curl of a sweet, thoughtful smile.
All this kept Constance occupied until the time came to unload the contents of her trolley on to the conveyor. The baby held itself so proudly erect, the young mother underneath it looked like a prop. She looked like some kind of clapped-out baby stand.
‘You’re doing great,’ Constance told her. ‘You’re doing a great job.’
The bill came to four hundred and ten euros, a new record. She thought she should keep the receipt for posterity. Dessie would be almost proud.
Constance pushed her trolley on to the walkway and the wheels locked cleverly on to the metal beneath them, and she was happy happy happy, as she sank towards the car park. She thanked God from the burning, rising depth of herself for this unexpected life – a man who loved her, two sons taller than their father, and a daughter who kissed her still when no one was there to see. She could not believe this was the way things had turned out.
Her feet were swollen already; she could feel them throb, hot in the wrong shoes. Constance bumped the trolley off the walkwa
y, set her trotters thumping across the concrete of the car park. It was half past eleven on Christmas Eve. In the pocket of her coat, her phone started to ring and, by the telepathy of the timing, Constance knew it was her mother.
‘What is it, darling,’ she said, remembering, as she did so, that she had forgotten the Brussels sprouts.
‘He’s still asleep,’ said Rosaleen. For a moment Constance thought she was talking about her father, a man who was not asleep, but dead.
‘Well don’t wake him,’ she said.
Dan. Of course, she meant Dan, who was jet lagged.
‘Should I?’
‘Or maybe do. Yeah. Get him straightened out.’
There was a pause from Rosaleen. Straightened out.
‘You think?’
‘Have you everything?’ said Constance.
‘I don’t know,’ said her mother.
‘Don’t worry.’
‘It’s a lot of work,’ Rosaleen said, with a real despair in her voice; you would think she had just spent an hour in the insanity of the supermarket, not Constance.
‘But I suppose it’s worth it to have you all here.’
‘I suppose.’
‘I’ll be sorry to see it go.’ She was talking about the house again. Any time she felt needy, now, or lost or uncertain, she talked about the house.
‘Right,’ said Constance. ‘Listen, Mammy.’
‘Mammy,’ said Rosaleen.
‘Listen –’
‘Oh, don’t bother. I’ll let you go.’ And she was gone.
It was Rosaleen, of course, who wanted Brussels sprouts, no one else ate them. Constance stood for a moment, blank behind the crammed boot of the Lexus. You can’t have Christmas without Brussels sprouts.
Sometimes even Rosaleen left them on her plate. Something to do with cruciferous vegetables, or nightshades, because even vegetables were poison to her when the wind was from the north-east.
‘Oh what the hell,’ said Constance. She slammed the boot shut and turned her sore feet back to the walkway and the horrors of the vegetable section. Then over to the spices to get nutmeg, which was the way Rosaleen liked her Brussels, with unsalted butter. And it was a good thing she went back up, because she had no cranberry sauce either – unbelievably – no brandy for the brandy butter, no honey to glaze the ham. It was as though she had thrown the whole shop in the trolley and bought nothing. She had no big foil for the turkey. Constance grabbed some potato salad, coleslaw, smoked salmon, mayonnaise, more tomatoes, litre bottles of fizzy drinks for the kids, kitchen roll, cling film, extra toilet paper, extra bin bags. She didn’t even look at the bill after another fifteen minutes in the queue behind some woman who had forgotten flowers – as she announced – and abandoned her groceries to get them, after which Constance did exactly the same thing, fetching two bouquets of strong pink lilies because they had no white left. She was on the road home before she remembered potatoes, thought about pulling over to the side of the road and digging some out of a field, imagined herself with her hands in the earth, scrabbling around for a few spuds.
