by Anne Enright
‘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.
‘This guy’s in Ennis. He says it’s the third missing person this evening, Christmas is a busy time. He says to ring everyone, check the outhouses. He says we need a bunch of people to drive around and look for the car. He told me to check the graveyard. He asked about her mental state.’
‘The graveyard?’ said Constance.
‘I said it was fine?’
All of this came out of Dan with a rising inflection at the end of each sentence, as though he was in an American movie, with a camera in front of him, and a future audience of millions. His siblings watched him. They waited for the moment the drama of his life became his actual life – for that shock.
‘She never goes to the graveyard,’ said Constance. ‘She doesn’t do the grave.’
Dessie said he could get twenty men with cars in half an hour through the local hurling team, and Constance said on a day like today it’s not hurlers you need but alcoholics, by which she meant the dry variety, because they were the best bet, also women like herself, maybe, the ones who were too busy doing the dinner to bother with wine. There was a world of blame in this sentence, if anyone chose to hear it, but what she said was also true. Dessie was already walking out in the hall and talking quietly into his phone.
‘I have that sorted for you now,’ he said, and twenty minutes later half the membership of the local AA meeting (or so they were to assume) was convened in the dining room, Ferdy McGrath chief among them. Six men and one woman, they introduced themselves to Emmet and to Dan, and then generally, as though innocent of each other’s sorrows and abjections. A mixed bunch, Hanna thought, eyeing them with careful contempt. None of them carried a sign.
Constance went out to the pantry with some empty bottles, trying to make the place look decent, and she knew this was a bit mad but it was also allowed. Constance was allowed. She felt almost light-hearted.
The passageway beyond the kitchen was very cold. There was a cardboard box against the wall and Constance put the bottles into it. The place smelt the way it always had: musty, with some creosote in there, and the sweetness of old apples. As she straightened up, she remembered her mother standing at the back door, looking out at the summer rain. It must have been when Constance was a child.
She could see it still: her mother’s silhouette in the doorway; beyond her, the red of poppies, the green of the garden, the air golden with shining rain. Rosaleen standing, looking out at it all, waiting to leave.
It was nearly ten o’clock on the evening of Christmas Day; a still enough night, with no rain. Emmet had a map spread out on the table and he marked out sections and roads with bold arrows and circles. He took mobile numbers, checked for torches; he was on the brink of doling out malaria pills.
Three cars to the cliffs, one to the car park at Lahinch, another along the coast roads between Doolin and Liscannor, a phone call to a guy in Doolin to check the harbour car park, another car along the coast from Doolin to Fanore, the last to the high road from Ballinalackin to Ballynahown.
The house was filling up with people from the town. Dan saw men he had not seen since school. They eyed him carefully and then they touched him, a deliberate hand on his arm or shoulder, saying, ‘All right,
Dan? Anything I can do?’ Down in the kitchen, four women were wiping the kitchen table, setting out bowls and plates of food covered in cling film. Dessie’s sister Imelda brought, among other things, two bags of coffee, and Constance had a weakness, she had to be helped to a chair.
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ she said as her legs gave way from under her, and she sat with her feet planted and a bag of Colombian grounds in her lap.
‘Oh,’ she said again, taking the blame for it all, the forgotten coffee, the hissy fit, her mother now wandering the night. ‘Oh.’
‘Oh, yeah what,’ said Hanna, who was leaning against the range with her arms crossed, and there was nothing to be done with her except put her in one of the cars, she was no use to anyone at home.
‘Go,’ said Dan, so she stumbled out with Ferdy McGrath, a twist in his eye that said he would be able for her.
‘God, Ferdy, remember you used to coach me at camogie?’
‘I do,’ he said. ‘You had a great burst of speed.’
‘I had,’ she said. ‘That’s true. I did.’
And he put her in the passenger seat of his drinker’s jalopy and closed the door.
The cars put on their indicators and left, one after the other, heading west. Dan followed the sound of them out to the gate, and then went along the deserted road, looking for a phone signal. As soon as he got one, he rang home to Toronto, and when Ludo picked up he said, ‘My mother’s gone. She drove off. She could be anywhere.’
It was pitch black. Dan had walked away from the house and when the light went out on his phone, the night blinked and swallowed him. The darkness shifted, not to a place five feet away, but right up to his face. It stole his breath. He turned one way and then the other, and was not sure of his direction. Twenty yards away from the house and he did not know where he was, or how to return. He found the grass verge and shied away from the ditch beyond it, felt his way back by the sense of vegetation against his shoe and by the promise of a distant street light around a curve in the road. It took an unconscionably long time. He felt, at every step, as though he was walking into something, and he flinched away, taunted by the black air.
ROSALEEN STOPPED WHERE she was. Head low, swaying from side to side. She could not feel where the ground began and the flesh stopped, it was all one pain.
She had lost her glove. And that was a nuisance.
Rosaleen was a nuisance. Her children thought she was a nuisance because it was true. She was. A nuisance.
Rosaleen was a nightmare. She was very difficult. She was increasingly difficult. She made her children cry.
They’d be sorry, to find her gone. They would be very sorry. These people, who spent their entire time leaving her. Not ringing, not writing. They told her nothing, spent their lives getting out of there. Get out and keep going! that was the cry. Don’t turn back! If you turn back you will see your mother turned into a pillar of salt.
Well two could play at that game.
Rosaleen had two feet, she had a car. Rosaleen could also walk out that door and not come back. And how did that feel? How did it feel when your mother left you?
Hah!
The same, the same. It felt the same.
Rosaleen put the old head down, one knee in front of the other. She was on all fours and the stones were very sore under her. There was a shooting pain also in the flesh of her palm, a nerve thing. She took it up and shook it, but she could feel nothing of the hand itself, just the shooting pain, and a burning in her fingertips. She wanted to go back and find her glove, but she could not go back into all that – the pursuing darkness and the night.
She took the glove off her right hand and squeezed the cold hand into it, with the thumb twisted around the wrong way. There was a little ruin of a house up here, and she would be safe inside it. A little famine cottage she had passed many times, but whether it was near or far she could not tell. Everything was taking such a long time. Rosaleen did not think she would make it. She would die on the side of Knockauns mountain, they would find her cold and still in the morning light, and then they would be sorry.
And she was sorry too.
Her lovely children.
Why she could not be nice to them, she did not know. She loved them so much. Sometimes she looked at them and she was so flooded with love, she just had to go and spoil it. It made her angry in the after-wash. They were so beautiful. They used to be so beautiful. They were so trusting and good. It made her feel not good. Unappreciated. It made her feel irrelevant. That was it.
What about me? she said.
But Rosaleen did not exist. Oh no. Rosaleen did not matter.
Hah!
Rosaleen wanted to say it out loud but she couldn’t. She was stuck in the sound of her own breathing, dragging and rough, an immense clattering in her teeth when she pulled the air into her.
Fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh
The cold was inside her. It was in her bones, making its way into her flesh, it was wrapped around her innards, seeping into her stomach, her body tried to shake it out again. A deep trembling took hold and her arms and legs grew comical and stiff, she had to swing them high and down. After an endless long time of this, she realised the person beside her was Pat Madigan, it was his was the voice urging her on. And a great sense of peace spread through her then, followed by a jag of irritation.
Where have you been, all this time?
A MAN CALLED John Fairleigh walked in to the dining room in waterproofs and hiking boots. Young, black haired, weatherbeaten; he introduced himself and went straight to the map on the table, pushed away the silver and white baubles – but carefully – and said there were more on the way, the team would be here soon.
‘Any word?’ he said. And Dan looked at him.
‘No.’
‘Is this where she liked to go?’
Emmet looked at the map.
‘Somewhere on the coast. Somewhere. Walking in circles.’
John Fairleigh said he did not think so. Their mother was not walking in circles.
‘A woman of that age, she will be moving in a linear way. She will be near the car, definitely within a kilometre of the car, probably within a hundred metres. So the first job is to find the car. And when we find the car, it’s a hundred metres, a kilometre max.’
‘Right.’
‘Not that easy, not necessarily,’ he said. ‘It’s dark. Your mother may be cold. She’s looking for shelter. A building, a barn. That’s the only thing she is thinking about now, is where to hide herself away from the cold, which means she could end up hiding from us too – behind a wall, under a bush, an old fertiliser bag. She could make herself hard to find.’
Constance was weeping.
‘But we will find her,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘No, no,’ she said, waving him on.
‘How was she in herself?’
‘Sorry?’ said Emmet.
Constance flicked a glance at her brother.
‘Hard to tell,’ he said.
‘She went for her walk. Our mother is absolutely fine,’ Constance said. ‘She went out for her walk.’
‘She’s just a wonderful person,’ Dan intervened, in a pathetic, upbeat kind of way.
‘Wonderful,’ said Emmet.
‘It’s a word,’ said Dan.
‘Yeah well,’ said Emmet. ‘Wonderful in your prime is a bit mad when you’re older, is bipolar in your fifties, maybe, and by the time you are – what age is she? – seventy-six, well by then it’s more your brain, isn’t it? It’s plaques or what have you. It’s hard to tell.’
‘She was never bipolar,’ said Constance, utterly shocked.
‘No?’ he said.
‘Not even close.’
‘Well,’ said John Fairleigh. ‘It’s hard. Old age is hard, emotionally. It just is.’
‘I don’t know how you can say she was bipolar,’ said Constance.
‘I suppose what I am trying to ask is,’ said John Fairleigh. ‘Was she in any way despondent?’
Constance gave a small cry.
‘Please don’t take my brother’s word about this,’ she said. ‘Please don’t.’
But John Fairleigh ignored them. Dan had the brief idea he was some kind of impostor.
‘Don’t worry. We had an elderly woman out for two nights running, September two years ago. And she wasn’t fantastic, in all fairness, but she was absolutely fine.’
The siblings were quiet then.
‘It’s a good clear night,’ he said, and looked at the map again. ‘Talk about Christmas.’
ROSALEEN WAS BY the little house, that was tucked into the side of the mountain. A famine cottage of tumbling-down stone, with one door one window, no roof. She could see it by starlight. She was surprised how much she could see. She could go into the little famine house and look up at the stars, there were so many of them, but first she had to cross the hungry grass in front of the doorway. There wasn’t much, just a few blades of it, and once she was across the hungry grass she would be safe from the weather. Of course, after she crossed the hungry grass then she would be hungry for ever. That was the curse of it.
Sometimes the grass was on a grave where no priest came to say prayers, because the priest was too busy, or the priest was fled. Sometimes the grass was on the threshold of a house where all the people died, with no one left to bury them, and the house fell into ruin after.
But it did not matter if she crossed the hungry grass, because she, too, was going to die. This she knew because her dead husband Pat Madigan was beside her on the road. He went so quiet when he was alive. He stopped talking. He stopped liking her. But he always loved her. And when he was young he walked that road like it belonged to him. He was king of everything green about him, king of the hedgerows, king of the sky. He picked up a stone and he flung it into the broad heavens. He flung it into the sea, where it grew into an island. Grew and grew.
